The Last Shot | Page 4

humanly real to her, and as such she liked and understood them. If the first Galland were half a robber, to disguise the fact because he was her ancestor was not playing fair. It made him only a lay figure of romance.
One or two afternoons a week Colonel Hedworth Westerling, commander of the regimental post of the Grays on the other side of the white posts, stretched his privilege of crossing the frontier and appeared for tea at the Gallands'. It meant a pleasant half-hour breaking a long walk, a relief from garrison surroundings. Favored in mind and person, favored in high places, he had become a colonel at thirty-two. People with fixed ideas as to the appearance of a soldier said that he looked every inch the commander. He was tall, strong-built, his deep, broad chest suggesting powerful energy. Conscious of his abilities, it was not without reason that he thought well of himself, in view of the order, received that morning, which was to make this a farewell call.
He had found Mrs. Galland an agreeable reflection of an aristocratic past. The daughter had what he defined vaguely as girlish piquancy. He found it amusing to try to answer her unusual questions; he liked the variety of her inventive mind, with its flashes of downright matter-of-factness.
Ascending the steps with his firm, regular tread, he suggested poise and confidence and, perhaps, vanity also in his fastidious dress. As Marta's slight, immature figure came to the edge of the veranda, he wondered what she would be like five years later, when she would be twenty-two and a woman. It was unlikely that he would ever know, or that in a month he would care to know. He would pass on; his rank would keep him from returning to South La Tir, which was a colonel's billet except in time of war.
Not until tea was served did he mention his new assignment; he was going to the general staff at the capital. Mrs. Galland murmured her congratulations in conventional fashion.
"Into the very holy of holies of the great war machine, isn't it?" Marta asked.
"Yes--yes, exactly!" he replied.
Her chair was drawn back from the table. She leaned forward in a favorite position of hers when she was intensely interested, with hands clasped over her knee, which her mother always found aggravatingly tomboyish. She had a mass of lustrous black hair and a mouth rather large in repose, but capable of changing curves of emotion. Her large, dark eyes, luminously deep under long lashes, if not the rest of her face, had beauty. Her head was bent, the lashes forming a line with her brow now, and her eyes had the still flame of wonder that they had when she was looking all around a thing and through it to find what it meant. Westerling knew by the signs that she was going to break out with one of her visions, rather than one of her whimsical ideas. She was seeing the Roman general, the baron, the first Galland, and the fat, pompous little man, no less in the life than Hedworth Westerling. She had fused them into one.
"Some day you will be chief of staff, the head of the Gray army!" she suddenly exclaimed.
Westerling started as if he had been surprised in a secret. Then he flushed slightly.
"Why?" he asked with forced carelessness. "Your reasons? They're more interesting than your prophecy."
"Because you have the will to be," she said without emphasis, in the impersonal revelations of thought. "You want power. You have ambition."
He looked the picture of it, with his square jaw, his well-moulded head set close to the shoulders on a sturdy neck, his even teeth showing as his lips parted in an unconscious smile.
"Marta, Marta! She is--is so explosive," Mrs. Galland remarked apologetically to the colonel.
"I asked for her reasons. I brought it on myself--and it is not a bad compliment," he replied. Indeed, he had never received one so thrilling.
His smile, a smile well pleased with itself, remained as Mrs. Galland began to talk of other things, and its lingering satisfaction disappeared only with Marta's cry at sight of the speck in the sky over the Brown range. She was out on the lawn before the others had risen from their seats.
"An aeroplane! Hurry!" she called.
This was a summons that aroused even Mrs. Galland's serenity to haste. For the first time they were seeing the new wonder in all the fascination of novelty to us moderns, who soon make our new wonders commonplace and clamor impatiently for others.
"He flies! A man flies!" Marta exclaimed. "Look at that--coming straight for your tower, baron! You'd better pull up the drawbridge and go on your knees in the chapel, for devils are abroad!"
How fast the speck grew! How it spread to the entranced