The Last Shot Part 76

She smiled faintly, bitterly, while he burst into a flood of talk.

"I was back with the guns you had given me when I heard that you were taking my place. Then I thought, can I be worthy of this--of what you have done for me, giving me back my own world, your world? I vowed I would be worthy--worthy of you. Heavens! How I made the guns play--bang-bang-bang!" He cupped his bands over his eyes as an imaginary range-finder, sweeping the field. "Oh, they are beautiful guns, these new models! With a battalion I won a regiment. I asked Lanny to tell you; did he?"

"Yes, and also of the iron cross."

"A fine bit of metal, the cross, and they have not been giving them too promiscuously, either," said Feller. "But they're not gun-metal! That is the real metal. It was my guns that closed the gate to the pa.s.s," he went on, swept by the flood of enthusiasm. "I didn't open fire till I could concentrate so as to make a solidly locked gate. I tell you, the guns are the thing! You ought to have seen that retreat curl up on itself. And where the sh.e.l.ls struck on the hard road--phew! They lifted the Grays upward to meet shrapnel pounding them from the sky! We could have torn the whole Column to pieces if they hadn't surrendered. What a bag of rifles and guns and stores is going to our capital! Oh, our friends the Grays were a little too fast! They didn't know what the guns meant in defence. The guns--they are back to their old place of glory!

They rule!"

"Was it your guns that fired into the melee there by the gate?" Marta asked.

"Yes. I saw that soft target early. They put up a Red Cross flag at first, but I soon realized that it wasn't any dressing station; only stragglers; only the kind that run away without orders. So I let them have it, for that's the law of war, and the way they would give it to us and did, more than once. But I took care that no shots were fired at the house, though if it had not been your house I'd have sent a sh.e.l.l or two on the chance that some of the Gray staff might still be there. Then, after the surrender, I kept spanking that lot with intermittent sh.e.l.ls till I was sure the Red Cross flag was justified."

"The fire was very accurate, as I happen to know, for it wounded me,"

said Marta.

So intent had he been in talking to his audience, to her eyes, that now for the first time he noticed the bandage on her forearm. His impressionable features were as struck with alarm and horror at sight of the tiny red spot as if she had been in danger of immediate death.

"You--you were down by the road?" he gasped. "My guns were firing at you? Why--how?"

"Helping with the wounded."

"The Gray wounded?"

"Yes."

"Of course, you would--with any wounded!" he cried. "Splendid! Like you!

It is not bad? It does not pain you?"

He bent over the red spot, his lips very near it and twitching, all his volatile force melting into solicitude and his voice taut, as if he himself were suffering the anguish of a dozen wounds.

"Only a scratch. Don't worry about it!" she a.s.sured him soothingly, with a peculiar smile.

Now he made a gesture of amazement, catching at another thought that darted as a shooting star across his mind.

"Wonderful--wounded! Wonderful! Was there ever such a woman?" he cried.

"No, I knew from the first there never was. The minute the way was clear and I could be spared from my guns I came to you--to you! This time I come not as a deaf, cringing, watery-eyed old gardener"--for an instant he was the gardener--"but as one of your world, to which I was bred,"

and his shoulders, rising, filled out his uniform in the grace of the commander of men in action. "Destiny has played with us. It sent a spy to your garden. It put you in my place. A strange service, ours--yes, destiny is in it!"

"Yes," she breathed painfully, his suggestion striking deep.

She was staring at the ground, her face very still. Yes, it was he who had started the train of circ.u.mstances that had left her with a memory more tragic than the one that had whitened his hair. His memory was already erased. What could ever erase hers? He had begun anew. How could she ever begin anew? The fact of this man talking of everything as destiny--of the slaughter, the misery, as destiny--was the worst mockery of all. Yet he was true to himself. His enjoyed facility of fervid expression, his boyishness, his gift of making the lived moment the greatest of his life, was the very gift she had craved to make her forget her yesterdays. Only faintly did she hear his next outburst, until he came to the end.

"I come with the question which I had sealed in my lonely heart," he was saying, "while I lived a lie and trimmed rose-bushes and hung on your words. You saved me. I fought for you. You were in my eyes, in my angers, in my brain as I directed the fire of my guns. 'She will be pleased to hear that I am a colonel!' I kept thinking. I love you! I love you!"

Marta started up from her chair, her eyes moist and open wide, amazed, but growing kind and troubled. Had she been guilty of giving him hope?

Was there something in her that had led him on, a shame that came natural to her since she had let Westerling proceed with his love? Her guilt in Feller's case was worse than in Westerling's. A thousand Westerlings were not worth one Feller. And he had been near her, near as a comrade, in imagination, with his ready suggestions of how to play her part in its most exacting moments! While he stood, the picture of the eager, impatient lover trembling for an answer that seemed to mean heaven or perdition for him, the kindness that went with the trouble in her eyes warmed to fondness, as she laid her fingers on his shoulder.

"You would want me to love you, wouldn't you?" she asked gently. "And if I cannot? Yes, if I can neither act nor play at love, so real must love be to me?"

He turned miserable, with eyes seeming to sink into his head, and body to wilt in the dejection of that pitiful, hopeless att.i.tude when his secret had been discovered in the tower sitting-room.

"Act! Act!" he murmured.

"Yes." Her fingers exercised the faintest pressure on his shoulder.

"Your true love, your one enduring love, is the guns. All other loves come and go. To-morrow, if not, next day, in this big, throbbing world, with your future a.s.sured, as you lived other great moments you would look back on this moment as another part that you had acted--and so beautifully acted."

"Act! Act!" he repeated, like one who is coming to grip with facts.

For a period he stared at the ground before he reached for the hand on his shoulder, which he pressed in both of his, looking soberly into her eyes. He smiled; smiled apparently at a memory, let her hand drop, and raised his own hands, palms out, in a gesture of good-humored comprehension.

"You know me!" he exclaimed. "But I did it well, didn't I?" he asked, after a pause.

"Beautifully. I repeat, it was convincingly real," she replied, laughing in relief.

"If I hadn't, it would have been most disappointing after all my rehearsals," he went on. "Yes, you know me! Why, I might have been wanting to break the engagement in a week because I was beginning other rehearsals!" He laughed, too, as if relis.h.i.+ng the prospect. "Yes, I act--act always, except with the guns. They alone are real!" he burst out in joyous fury. "We are going on, I and my guns, on to the best yet--on in the pursuit! Nothing can stop us! We shall hit the Grays so fast and hard that they can never get their machine in order again. G.o.d bless you! Everything that is fine in me will always think finely of you! You and Lanny--two fixed stars for me!"

"Truly!" She was radiant. "Truly?" she asked wistfully.

"Yes, yes--a yes as real as the guns!"

"Then it helps! Oh, how it helps!" she murmured almost inaudibly.

"Good-by! G.o.d bless you!" he cried as he started to go, adding over his shoulder merrily: "I'll send you a picture post-card from the Grays'

capital of my guns parked in the palace square."

She watched him leap the garden wall as lightly as he had come and gallop away, an impersonation of the gay, adventurous spirit of war, counting death and wounds and hards.h.i.+p as the delights of the gamble.

Yes, he would follow the Grays, throwing sh.e.l.ls in the irresponsible joy of tossing confetti in a carnival. Pursuit! Was Feller's the sentiment of the army? Were the Browns not to stop at the frontier? Were they to change their song to, "Now we have ours we shall take some of theirs"?

The thought was fresh fuel to the live coals that still remained under the ashes.

A brigade commander and some of his staff-officers near by formed a group with faces intent around an operator who was attaching his instrument to a field-wire that had just been reeled over the hedge.

Marta moved toward them, but paused on hearing an outburst of jubilant exclamations:

"A hundred thousand prisoners!"

"And five hundred guns!"

"We're closing in on their frontier all along the line!"

"It's incredible!"

"But the word is official--it's right!"

From mouth to mouth--a hundred thousand prisoners, five hundred guns--the news was pa.s.sed in the garden. Eyes dull with fatigue began flas.h.i.+ng as the soldiers broke into a cheer that was not led, a cheer unlike any Marta had heard before. It had the high notes of men who were weary, of a terrible exultation, of spirit stronger than tired legs and as yet unsatisfied. Other exclamations from both officers and men expressed a hunger whetted by the taste of one day's victory.

"We'll go on!"

"We'll make peace in their capital!"

"And with an indemnity that will stagger the world!"