"You have been in the tunnel again!" said Mrs. Galland with an emphasis
on "again," when Marta came up the stairs, lantern in hand, after
telling Lanstron of her interview with Westerling.
"Again--yes!" Marta replied mechanically. Her mind was empty, burned
out. She had thought herself through with deceit for the day.
"What interests you so much down there?" Mrs. Galland pursued softly.
Marta realized that she had to deal with a fresh dilemma. She could not
be making frequent visits to the telephone without her mother's
knowledge; and, as yet, Mrs. Galland knew nothing of the part originally
planned for Feller, let alone any inkling of her daughter's part.
"I didn't know but it would be a good place to hide our plate and other
treasures," said Marta, offering rather methodically the first invention
that came to mind as she threw open-the reflector of the lantern and
turned down the wick. She was ashamed of the excuse. It warned her how
easy it was becoming for her to lie--yes, lie was the word.
"Don't blow out the light, please," said Mrs. Galland. "I should like to
see for myself if the tunnel is a good hiding-place for the plate."
"It's too damp for you down there--it's--" Marta blew out the flame with
a sudden gust of breath and bolted across the room and into her chamber,
closing the door and taking the lantern with her. In utter fatigue she
dropped on the bed. Then came a gentle, prolonged knocking on the door.
"You forgot to leave the lantern," called Mrs. Galland. "I have come to
get it, if you please."
Marta did not answer. Her head had sunk forward; her hands, bearing the
weight of her body, were resting on her knees. All she could think was
that one more lie would break the camel's back.
"Marta, please mayn't I come in?" rose the gentle voice on the other
side of the door. "Marta, don't you hear me? I asked if I might come
in."
"It's too childish and silly to remain silent any longer," thought
Marta. Tired nerves revived spasmodically under another call to action.
"Yes, certainly, mother--yes, do!" she said in a forced, metallic tone.
Mrs. Galland entered to find her daughter before the mirror brushing her
hair with hectic vigor. She did not take up the lantern, which Marta had
left in the middle of the floor, but seated herself. Her nice
deliberation in smoothing out a wrinkle of her skirt over her knees
indicated that she meant to stay a while. She folded her plump, white
hands; a faint touch of color came into her round, pink cheeks; a trace
of a smile knitted itself into the corners of her mouth. She was as she
had been--_J'y suis! J'y reste_!--when the captain of engineers had
pleaded with her at the outset of the war to leave the house. In the
reflection of the mirror Marta's glance caught hers, which was without
reproach or complaint, but very resolute.
"Do you like best to keep it all to yourself, Marta?" Mrs. Galland
inquired solicitously.
"What? Keep what?" asked Marta crossly.
"Even if you have been all the way around the world, it might be easier
if you allowed me to help you a little," pursued Mrs. Galland.
"Help! Help about what?" said Marta.
That reply, as Marta knew now as an expert in deceit, was a mistake. She
was hedging and petulant when she ought to have whirled around gayly and
kissed her mother on the cheek, while laughing at such solemnity over a
trip of exploration through the tunnel. Mrs. Galland had caught her
prevaricating. Not since Marta was a little girl of seven had she
"fibbed" to her mother; and on that memorable and ethically instructive
occasion her mother had regarded her in this same calm fashion.
"At all events," said Mrs. Galland, "I could help you a little if you
would let me comb your hair. You are combing in a most unsystematic way,
I must say. Systematic, gentle combing is very good for headaches and--"
There was a twinkle in Mrs. Galland's eye that was not exactly humor; a
persistent twinkle that seemed to shine out of every part of the mirror.
Her curiosity had come to stay; there was no escaping it. Marta brought
her brush down with a bang on the bureau, only to be disgusted with this
show of temper which the persistent twinkle had not missed. Her next
impulse, unanalyzed because it was one of the oldest and simplest of
impulses, made her spin round and drop on her knees at her mother's
feet, which was just what had happened when she had started to brave out
the last lie--the childhood lie.
Her head buried in her mother's lap, she was sobbing. It was many years
since Mrs. Galland had known Marta to sob and she was glad that Marta
had not forgotten how. She believed in the value of the law of overflow.
When Marta looked up with eyes still moist, it was with the joyous
satisfaction that begins a confession. Not once during the recital did
the smile fade from Mrs. Galland's lips. She was too well fortified for
any kind of a shock to exhibit surprise.
"You see, I could not tell you--I--" Marta concluded, still uncertain
what conclusion lay behind her mother's attitude.
"Of course you could not," said Mrs. Galland. "As grandfather--my
father, the premier--said; a man action cannot stop to explain
everything he does. He must strike while the iron is hot. If you had
stopped to discuss every step you would not have gone far--Yes, I should
have argued and protested. It was best that I, being as I am--that I
should not have been told--not until now."
"And I must go on!" added Marta.
"Of course you must!" replied Mrs. Galland. "You must for the sake of
the Browns--the flag your father and grandfather served. They would not
have approved of petty deceit, but anything for the cause, any
sacrifices, any immolation of self and personal sensibilities. Yes, your
father would have been happy, though he had no son, to know that his
daughter might do such a service. And we must tell Minna," she added.
"Minna! You think so? Every added link may mean weakness."
"But Minna will see you going and coming from the tunnel, too. She is
for the Browns with all her heart. They are her people and, besides,"
Mrs. Galland smiled rather broadly, "that giant Stransky is with the
Browns!" So Minna was told.
"I'd like to kiss your skirt, Miss Galland!" exclaimed Minna in
admiration.
"Better kiss me!" said Marta, throwing her arms around the girl. "We
must stand together and think together in any emergency."
Soon after dark the attack began. Flashes of bursting shells and flashes
from gun mouths and glowing sheets of flame from rifles made ugly
revelry, while the beams of search-lights swept hither and thither. This
kept up till shortly after midnight, when it died down and, where hell's
concert had raged, silent darkness shrouded the hills. Marta knew that
Bordir was taken without having to ask Lanstron or wait for confirmation
from Westerling.
She was seated in the recess of the arbor the next morning, when she
heard the approach of those regular, powerful steps whose character had
become as distinct to her as those of a member of her own family. Five
Against three! five against three! they were saying to her; while down
the pass road and the castle road ran the stream of wounded from last
night's slaughter.
Posted in the drawing-room of the Galland house were the congratulations
of the premier to Westerling, who had come from the atmosphere of a
staff that accorded to him a military insight far above the analysis of
ordinary standards. But he was too clever a man to vaunt his triumph. He
knew how to carry his honors. He accepted success as his due, in a
matter-of-course manner that must inspire confidence in further success.
"You were right," he said to Marta easily, pleasantly. "We did it--we
did it--we took Bordir with a loss of only twenty thousand men!"
_Only_ twenty thousand! Her revulsion at the bald statement was relieved
by the memory of Lanny's word over the telephone after breakfast that
the Browns had lost only five thousand. Four to one was a wide ratio,
she was thinking.
"Then the end--then peace is so much the nearer?" she asked.
"Very much nearer!" he answered earnestly, as he dropped on the bench
beside her.
He stretched his arms out on the back of the seat and the relaxed
attitude, unusual with him, brought into relief a new trait of which she
had been hitherto oblivious. The conqueror had become simply a
companionable man. Though he was not sitting close to her, yet, as his
eyes met hers, she had a desire to move away which she knew would be
unwise to gratify. She was conscious of a certain softening charm, a
magnetism that she had sometimes felt in the days when she first knew
him. She realized, too, that then the charm had not been mixed with the
indescribable, intimate quality that it held now.
"In the midst of congratulations after the position was taken last
night," he declared, "I confess that I was thinking less of success
than of its source." He bent on her a look that was warm with gratitude.
She lowered her lashes before it; before gratitude that made her part
appear in a fresh angle of misery.
"There seems to be a kind of fatality about our relations," he went on.
"I lay awake pondering it last night." His tone held more than
gratitude. It had the elation of discovery.
"Look out! Look out, now!" Not only the voices of Lanny and Feller and
Hugo warned her, but also those of her mother and Minna.
"He is going to make it harder than I ever guessed!" echoed her own
thought, in a flutter of confusion.
"Yes, it was strange our meeting on the frontier in peace and then in
war!" she exclaimed at random. The sound of the remark struck her as too
subdued; as expectant, when her purpose was one of careless deprecation.
"I have met a great many women, as you may have imagined," he proceeded.
"They passed in review. They were simply women, witty and frail or dull
and beautiful, and one meant no more to me than another. Nothing meant
anything to me except my profession. But I never forgot you. You planted
something in mind: a memory of real companionship."
"Yes, I made the prophecy that came true!" she put in. This ought to
bring him back to himself and his ambitions, she thought.
"Yes!" he exclaimed, his body stiffening free of the back of the seat.
"You realized what was in me. You foresaw the power which was to be
mine. The fate that first brought us together made me look you up in the
capital. Now it brings us together here on this bench after all that has
passed in the last twenty-four hours."
She realized that he had drawn perceptibly nearer. She wanted to rise
and cry out: "Don't do this! Be the chief of staff, the conqueror,
crushing the earth with the tread of five against three!" It was the
conqueror whom she wanted to trick, not a man whose earnestness was
painting her deceit blacker. Far from rising, she made no movement at
all; only looked at her hands and allowed him to go on, conscious of the
force of a personality that mastered men and armies now warm and
appealing in the full tide of another purpose.
"The victory that I was thinking of last night was not the taking of
Bordir. It was finer than any victory in war. It was selfish--not for
army and country, but born of a human weakness triumphant; a human
weakness of which my career had robbed me," he continued. "It gave me a
joy that even the occupation of the Browns' capital could not give. I
had come as an invader and I had won your confidence."
"In a cause!" she interrupted hurriedly, wildly, to stop him from going
further, only to find that her intonation was such that it was drawing
him on.
"That fatality seemed to be working itself out to the soldier so much
older than yourself in renewed youth, in another form of ambition. I
hoped that there was more than the cause that led you to trust me. I
hoped--"
Was he testing her? Was he playing a part of his own to make certain
that she was not playing one? She looked up swiftly for answer. There
was no gainsaying what she saw in his eyes. It was beating into hers
with the power of an overwhelming masculine passion and a maturity of
intellect as his egoism admitted a comrade to its throne. Such is ever
the way of the man in the forties when the clock strikes for him. But
who could know better the craft of courtship than one of Westerling's
experience? He was fighting for victory; to gratify a desire.
"I did not expect this--I--" The words escaped tumultuously and
chokingly.
She heard all the voices in chorus: "Look out! Look out!" And then the
voice of Feller alone, insinuating, with a sinister mischievousness:
"What more could you ask? Now that you have him, hold him! For God and
country--for our dear Brown land!"
Hold a man who was making love to her by the tricks of the courtesan!
But what kind of love? He was bending so close to her that she felt his
breath on her cheek burning hot, and she was sickeningly conscious that
he was looking her over in that point-by-point manner which she had felt
across the tea-table at the hotel. This horrible thing in his glance she
had sometimes seen in strangers on her travels, and it had made her
think that she was wise to carry a little revolver. She wanted to strike
him.
"Confess! Confess!" called all her own self-respect. "Make an end to
your abasement!"
"Confession, after the Browns have given up Bordir! Confession that
makes Lanny, not Westerling, your dupe!" came the reply, which might
have been telegraphed into her mind from the high, white forehead of
Partow bending over his maps. "Confession, betraying the cause of the
right against the wrong; the three to the conquering five! No! You are
in the things. You may not retreat now."
For a few seconds only the duel of argument thundered in her
temples--seconds in which her lips were parted and quivering and her
eyes dilated with an agitation which the man at her side could interpret
as he pleased. A prompting devil--a devil roused by that thing in his
eyes--urging a finesse in double-dealing which only devils understand,
made her lips hypnotically turn in a smile, her eyes soften, and sent
her hand out to Westerling in a trance-like gesture. For an instant it
rested on his arm with telling pressure, though she felt it burn with
shame at the point of contact.
"We must not think of that now," she said. "We must think of nothing
personal; of nothing but your work until your work is done!"
The prompting devil had not permitted a false note in her voice. Her
very pallor, in fixity of idea, served her purpose. Westerling drew a
deep breath that seemed to expand his whole being with greater
appreciation of her. Yet that harried hunger, the hunger of a beast, was
still in his glance.
"This is like you--like what I want you to be!" he said. "You are
right." He caught her hand, enclosing it entirely in his grip, and she
was sensible, in a kind of dazed horror, of the thrill of his strength.
"Nothing can stop us! Numbers will win! Hard fighting in the mercy of a
quick end!" he declared with his old rigidity of five against three
which was welcome to her. "Then," he added--"and then--"
"Then!" she repeated, averting her glance. "Then--" There the devil
ended the sentence and she withdrew her hand and felt the relief of one
escaping suffocation, to find that he had realized that anything further
during that interview would be banality and was rising to go.
"I don't feel decent!" she thought. "Society turned on Minna for a human
weakness--but I--I'm not a human being! I am one of the pawns of the
machine of war!"
Walking slowly with lowered head as she left the arbor, she almost ran
into Bouchard, who apologized with the single word "Pardon!" as he
lifted his cap in overdone courtesy, which his stolid brevity made the
more conspicuous.
"Miss Galland, you seem lost in abstraction," he said in sudden
loquacity. "I am almost on the point of accusing you of being a poet."
"Accusing!" she replied. "Then you must think that I would write bad
poetry."
"On the contrary, I should say excellent--using the sonnet form," he
returned.
"I might make a counter accusation, only that yours would be the epic
form," answered Marta. "For you, too, seem fond of rambling."
There was a veiled challenge in the hawk eyes, which she met with
commonplace politeness in hers, before he again lifted his cap and
proceeded on his way.