Part 47 (1/2)

”Oh, no, no!” he protested laughingly, and found her glance flas.h.i.+ng through her brows holding him fast in an indefinable challenge.

”I shall pour when you do us the honor to come to tea at the gardener's quarters in the tower,” she said.

”No, no!” he objected. ”The tea conditions are the same as before.”

He was earnest for his point. It would please his masculine fancy to watch those firm, small fingers pausing over the cup before the plunge of a lump of sugar stirred the miniature ocean in waves; to watch the firm little hand in its grip of the handle of the pot.

”Conditions the same as before?” She laughed softly. ”How can they be in my thoughts or yours?” she asked with a sudden show of seriousness.

”We did turn you out of house and home--I understand!” he exclaimed apologetically. ”And that is the symbol of it to you!” He indicated the coat of arms.

”The symbol of the conqueror, isn't it?” he asked playfully, for in the company of women it pleased him to be playful.

”Conqueror? It's a big word!” she mused. ”I hadn't thought of it in connection with pouring tea”--which might be another way of saying that she had just been thinking of it very hard and might be trying to find whether it had a pleasant or an unpleasant side. Clearly, here was a Marta different from any yet precipitated by the alchemy of war.

The resourceful variety of her! Oh, it was like the old days! It made him feel young, as young as when he had been a colonel commanding the garrison on the other side of the white posts. She had intelligence, yet was at the same time distinctly feminine, with the gift of as much talk about who should pour tea as about how to storm a redoubt. She did not carry her mental wares on her sleeve. She flashed them in a way that prompted curiosity as to the next exhibit. He had sought primarily, selfishly, to be entertained at tea, and he was being entertained. To want to win was his nature. He understood, too, that she wanted to win.

He liked that quality in her the more because it heightened the valve of victory for him.

”Then, if you don't think of it in connection with pouring tea, let me tell you what I think of when I sit on this veranda. I think of you as hostess. You refuse to play the part!” he exclaimed with that persistence, softened a little, perhaps, yet suggestive of the quality characterized by the firm jaw and still eyes, which won his point at staff councils. Again he was conscious of one of her sweeping glances of appraisal, with just a glint of admiration and even approval tucked away in the recesses of her smile.

”Suppose we compromise,” she suggested thoughtfully, with the gravity of one making a great concession. ”Suppose you do the heavy work, and pour, and I drop the sugar in the cups.”

But Westerling always used a half concession as a lever to gain a full concession.

”I'd really better do it all--act out the host and the conqueror!” he declared. ”One can't compromise principles.”

”Oh! Why?” She was distinctly interested, leaning nearer to him and playing a tattoo with one set of fingers on the back of the other hand.

”Anything except your doing all the honors leaves me in the same invidious position,” he answered. ”It compounds my felony. It shows that you do think that we failed by our conduct to show respect for your property. It leaves me feeling that you think that I do not regard this as your veranda, your garden, your home, sacred by more than the laws of war--by an old friends.h.i.+p!”

He made his appeal finely, as he well knew how to do. A certain magnetic eloquence that went well with his handsome face and st.u.r.dy bearing had been his most successful a.s.set in making him chief of staff.

The tattoo of her fingers died down while she listened to his final, serious reasons about a subject that became peculiarly significant; and her brows lifted, her eyes opened in the surprise of one who gets a sudden new angle of light.

”You put it very well. In that case--” she said, and his glance and hers dropped, his to the capable hand on the handle of the teapot, hers into the cup. ”With the honors of war and officers permitted to retain their side-arms?” she asked.

”Yes; oh, yes!” he answered happily.

She smiled her acknowledgment with just that self-respect of capitulation which flatters the victor with the thought that he has overcome no mean opponent--the highest form of compliment known to the guild of courtiers.

He was susceptible to it and, in turn, to the curiosity about her that had remained unsatisfied at the end of their talk in the hotel. Her own veranda was the natural, familiar place to judge the work of time in those character-forming years from seventeen to twenty-seven. She was not like what she had been in the artificial surroundings of a fortnight ago. She filled the eye and the mind now in the well-knit suppleness of figure and the finished maturity of features which bore the mark of inner growth of knowledge of life. She was not a species of intellectual exotic, as he had feared, too baffling to allow the male intellect to feel comfortable, but very much, as he noted discriminatingly, a woman in all the physical freshness of a woman in her prime.

”Just like the old days, isn't it?” he exclaimed with his first sip, convinced that the officers' commissary supplied excellent tea in the field.

”Yes, for the moment--if we forget the war!” she replied, and looked away, preoccupied, toward the landscape.

If we forget the war! She bore on the words rather grimly. The change that he had noted between the Marta of the hotel reception-room and the Marta of the moment was not altogether the work of ten years. It had developed since she was in the capital. In these three weeks war had been brought to her door. She had been under heavy fire. Yet this subject of the war was the one which he, as an invader, considered himself bound to avoid.

”We do forget it at tea, don't we?” he asked.