The skirmishers having halted beyond the linden stumps, the reserves were stacking their rifles and dropping to rest in the garden. The sight of the uniforms of the deliverers, of her own people, stirred Mrs. Galland to unwonted activity. She moved here and there among them with smiles of mothering pride. She told them how brave they were; how her husband had been a colonel of Hussars in the last war. They must be tired and hungry. She hurried in to Minna, and together they emptied the larder of everything, even to the lumps of sugar, which were impartially bestowed.
But Marta remained in the chair by the doorway of the tower, weak and listless. She was weary of the sight of uniforms and bayonets. In the dreary opaqueness of her mind flickered one tiny, bright light as through a blanket; that she herself had been in danger. She had been under fire. She had not merely sent men to death; she had been in death's company.
Now her lashes were closed; again they opened slightly as her gaze roved the semicircle of the horizon. A mounted officer and his orderly galloping across the fields to the pass road caught her desultory attention and held it, for they formed the most impetuous object on the landscape. When the officer alighted at the foot of the garden and tossed his reins to the orderly, she detected something familiar about him. He leaped the garden wall at a bound and, half running, came toward the tower. Not until he lifted his cap and waved it did she associate this lithe, dapper artillerist with a stooped old gardener in blue blouse and torn straw hat who had once shuffled among the flowers at her service.
"Hello! Hello!" he shouted in clarion greeting at sight of her. "Hello, my successor!"
Only in the whiteness of his hair was he like the old Feller. His tone, the boyish sparkle of his black eyes, those full, expressive lips playing over the brilliant teeth, his easy grace, his quick and telling gestures—they were of the Feller of cadet days. Something in his look as he stopped in front of her startled Marta. Suddenly he bent over and drew down his face, with dropping underlip.
"I'm deaf—stone deaf, if you please!" he wheezed in senile fashion.
She had to laugh and he laughed, too, with the ringing tone of youth that made him seem younger than his years.
"Not a gardener—a colonel of artillery, in the uniform, under the flag again, thanks to you!" he cried. "An officer once more!"
"I'm glad!" she exclaimed. Here was one thing more to the credit of war.
"Thanks to you, instead of being shot as a spy—thanks to you!" More than the emotion of the brimming gratitude of his heart shone through his mobile features.