Читать книгу The Last Shot - Frederick Palmer - Страница 17

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"Has he changed much?" Mrs. Galland asked, when she learned that Marta had seen Westerling.

"Jove has reached his own—the very top of Olympus, and he likes the prospect," Marta replied.

The only home news of importance that her mother had to impart related to a tiny strip of paper with the greeting, "Hello, Marta!" that had been dropped from the pilot aeroplane as the Brown aerial squadron flew over the garden after its race with the Gray. She noted Marta's customary quickening interest at mention of Lanstron's name. It had become the talisman of a hope whose fulfilment was always being deferred.

"How different Lanny and Westerling are!" Marta exclaimed, the picture of the two men rising before her vision. "Lanny trying so hard under the pressure of his responsibility not to be human and unable to forget himself, and Westerling trying, really trying, to be human at times, but unable to forget that he is Jove! Did you wave your acknowledgments to Lanny,'?"

"Why, no! How could I?" asked Mrs. Galland. "He went over so fast I didn't know it was he—a little figure so far overhead."

"It's odd, but I think I'd know Lanny a mile away by a sort of instinct," said Marta. "You know I'd like a gun that would fire a bomb and drop a message of 'Hello, yourself!' right on his knee. Wouldn't that give him a surprise?"

"You and he are so full of nonsense that you—" But Mrs. Galland desisted. What was the use?

Sometimes she wished that Colonel Lanstron would stay away altogether and leave a free field for a newcomer. Yet if two or three weeks passed without a call from him she was apprehensive. Besides being one of the Thorbourg Lanstrons, he was a most charming, capable man, who had risen very rapidly in his profession. It had been only six months after he had bolted up from the wreck of his plane by way of self-introduction to Marta before he alighted in the field across the road from the garden to report a promise kept.

Once she knew that he was a Lanstron of Thorbourg, a fact of hardly passing interest to Marta, Mrs. Galland made him intimately welcome. By the time he had paid his third call he was Lanny to Marta and she was Marta to him, quite as if they had known each other from childhood. She had a gift for unaffected comradeship. He was the kind of man with whom she could be a comrade. There was always something to say the moment they met and they were never through talking when he had to go. They disagreed so often that Mrs. Galland thought they made a business of it. She wondered how real friendship could exist between two such controversialists. They could be seriously disputatious to the point of quarrelling; they could be light-heartedly disputatious to the bantering point, where either was uncertain which side of the argument he had originally espoused.

"The gardener did not cut the chrysanthemums," Mrs. Galland said. "That is why we had asters in the bowl at luncheon. His deafness is really a cross, I never realized before what a companion one naturally makes of a gardener."

"No, there's no purpose in having a deaf gardener," said Marta. "Nature distributes her defects unintelligently. Now, if we had dumb demagogues, deaf gossips, and steel that when it was being formed into a sword-blade or a gun would turn to putty, we should be much better off. But we couldn't let Feller go, could we? He's already made himself a fixture. So few people would put up with his deafness! He's so desirous of pleasing and he loves flowers."

"And Colonel Lanstron recommended him. Except for his deafness he is a perfect gardener. Of course he had to have some drawback, for complete perfection is impossible," Mrs. Galland agreed.

The old straw hat that shaded the fringe of white hair had been hovering within easy approaching distance of the chrysanthemum bed ever since the whistle of the train that brought Marta home had been heard from the station. Feller was watching Marta when she paused for a moment on the second terrace steps, enjoying the sweep of landscape anew with the freshness of a first glimpse and the intimacy of every familiar detail cut in the memory. It was her landscape, famed in history, where history might yet be made.

His greeting was picturesque and effective. With white head bared, he looked up from the chrysanthemums to her and back at them and up at her again, with a sort of covert comradeship in his eyes which were young, very young for such white hair, and held out his little pad and pencil. She smiled approval and slowly worked out a "perfect" in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet before she took the proffered pencil and wrote:

"I practised the deaf-and-dumb alphabet on the train. I'm learning fast. We've never had such chrysanthemums before. Next year we shall have some irises—just a few—as fine as they have in Japan. How's your rheumatism?"

He had replaced the broad-brimmed hat over his brow and his lips were visible in a lingering smile as he read the message.

"Thank you, Miss Galland," he said in his even monotone. "You are very kind and I am very fortunate to find a place like this. I already knew something about irises and I've been reading up on the subject. We'll try to hold our own with those little Japanese. As for the rheumatism, since you are good enough to inquire, Miss Galland, it's about the same. My legs are getting old. There are bound to be some kinks in them."

"You select those to cut—a great armful!" she slowly spelled out on her fingers, clapping her hands with a triumphant cry of "How's that?" at the finish.

"Your time has come! To the sacrifice!" he exclaimed to the flowers.

Very tenderly, as if he were an executioner considerate of the victims of an inexorable law, he was snipping the stems, his head bent close to the blooms, when a bumblebee appeared among the salvias a few feet away. Perhaps army staffs who neglect no detail have made a mistake in overlooking the whirring of bumblebees' wings in affecting the fate of nations. These plunderers are not dangerous from their size, but they have not yet been organized to the hep-hep-hep of partisanship. They would as soon live in a Gray as a Brown garden, as soon probe for an atom of honey on one side of the white posts as the other. This one as it drew nearer was well to one side over Feller's shoulders. With eyes and mind intent on his work, Feller turned his head absently, as one will at an interruption.

"There you are again, my dear!" he said. "You must think you're a battery of automatics."

He went on cutting chrysanthemums, apparently unconscious that he had spoken.

"Bring them up on the veranda, please," Marta wrote on the pad, her fingers moving with unusual nervous rapidity, the only sign of her inward excitement.

Coming to the head of the steps of the terrace above, she looked back. Feller's face was quite hidden under his hat and suddenly she seemed to stub her toe and fall, while she uttered a low cry of pain. The hat rose like a jack-in-the-box with the cover released. Feller bounded toward her, taking two of steps at a time. She scrambled to her feet hastily, laughed, and gestured to show that she was not hurt. He drew his shoulders together and bent over spasmodically, gripping his knee.

"I can run off if something starts me just as spry as if I were twenty," he said. "But after I've done it and the kinks come, I realize I've got old legs."

"Now I know he's not deaf!" Marta murmured, as he returned to his work. She frowned. She was angry. "Lanny, you have something to explain," she thought.

But when Feller brought his armful of chrysanthemums to her on the veranda, there was no trace in her expression of the discovery she had made, and she wrote a direction on his pad in the usual fashion.