Part 29 (2/2)
”Miss Galland, it was you--your influence I was counting on to--” The captain turned to Marta in a final appeal.
Mrs. Galland was watching her daughter's face intently.
”We stay!” replied Marta, and the captain saw in the depths of her eyes, a cold blue-black, that further argument was useless.
With a shrug of his shoulders he was turning to go when his lieutenant, hurrying up and pointing to the row of lindens at the edge of the estate, exclaimed:
”If we only had those trees out of the way! They cut the line of our fire! They form cover and protection for the enemy.”
”The orders are against it,” replied the captain.
”Lanstron may be a great soldier, but--” declared the lieutenant petulantly.
”Cut the lindens if it will help the Browns!” called Mrs. Galland.
”Cut the lindens, mother! Is everything to be destroyed--everything to satisfy the appet.i.te of savagery?” exclaimed Marta. Then, in an abrupt change of mood, inexplicable to the captain and even to herself, she added: ”My mother says to cut the lindens. And you will tell us when to go into the house?” Marta asked the captain.
”Yes. There is no danger yet--none until we see the 53d falling back.”
What mockery, what uncanny staginess for either her mother or herself to be so calm! Yet, what else were they to do? Were they to scream? Or fall into each other's arms and sob? Marta found a strange pleasure in looking at her garden before it was spattered with blood, as it had been in the last war. It had never seemed more beautiful. There was a sublimity in nature's obliviousness to the thras.h.i.+ng of the air with sh.e.l.ls in a gentle breeze that fluttered the petals of the hydrangeas.
The sight of Feller coming along the path of the second terrace brought in sudden vividness to her mind that question which must soon be decided: whether or not she would allow him to remain to carry out his plan. He still had the garden-shears in hand. He was walking with the slow and soft step which was in keeping with the serenity of his occupation. Pausing before the chrysanthemum bed, he touched his hat, and as he awaited her approach he lifted one of the largest blooms that was drooping from its weight on the slender stem.
”They look well, don't you think?” he asked cautiously; and he was very cool, while his eyes had a singular limpidity, speaking better than any words the sadness of his story and the dependence of his hope of regeneration upon her.
”Yes, quite the best they ever have,” she replied, inclined to look away from him, conscious of her sensitiveness to his appeal, and yet still looking at him, while she marvelled at him, at herself, at everything.
”Thank you,” he said. ”You don't know how much that means, how pleased I am.”
Now came the sweep of a rising roar from the sky with the command to attention of the rush of a fast express-train past a country railway station. Two Gray dirigibles with their escort of aeroplanes--in formation like that which Mrs. Galland and Feller had seen race along the frontier--were bearing toward the pa.s.s over the pa.s.s road. One glimpse of the squadron was as a match to Feller's military pa.s.sion. He swept off his old straw hat and with it all of the gardener's chrysalis.
Feller the artillerist gazed aloft in feverish excitement.
”Lanny has them guessing! They're bound to know his plans if it takes all the air craft in the shop!” he exclaimed. ”And what are we doing?
Yes, what are we doing?” he cried in alarm as his glance swept the sky in front of the squadron, already even with the terrace in its terrific speed.
The automatic and the riflemen in the tower banged away to no purpose, for the aerostatic officers of the Grays had been apprised of the danger in that direction.
”Minutes, seconds count! Where are our high-angle guns?” Feller went on.
He was unconsciously gesticulating with all the fervor of hurrying a battery into place to cover an infantry retreat in a crisis. ”And they're turning! What's the matter? What are high-angle guns for, anyway, with such targets naked over our lines? Ah-h! Beautiful!”
The central sections of the envelope of the rear dirigible had been torn in shreds; it was buckling. Clouds of blue shrapnel smoke broke around its gondola. A number of field-guns joined forces with a battery of high-angle guns in a havoc that left a drifting derelict that had ceased to exist to Feller's mind immediately it was out of action; for he saw that the remainder of the squadron had completed its loop and was pointing toward the plain.
”And they were low enough to see all they want to know and rising now--evidently already out of reach of our guns--and nothing against them!” he groaned as he saw a clear sky ahead of the big disk and its attending wings, while clenched fists pumping up and down with the movement of his forearms shook his whole body in a palpitation of angry disgust. ”Lanny, what's the matter! Lanny, they've beaten you! Eh? What?
What--” A long whistle broke from his lips. His body still, transfixed, he cupped his hands over his eyes. ”So, that is it! That is your plan, Lanny, old boy!” he shouted. ”But if one of their confounded little aviators gets back, he has the story!”
From a great alt.i.tude, literally out of the blue of heaven, high over the Gray lines, Marta made out a Brown squadron of dirigibles and planes descending across the track of the Grays.
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