"Only a scratch. Don't worry about it!" she assured him soothingly, with a peculiar smile.
Now he made a gesture of amazement, catching at another thought that darted as a shooting star across his mind.
"Wonderful—wounded! Wonderful! Was there ever such a woman?" he cried. "No, I knew from the first there never was. The minute the way was clear and I could be spared from my guns I came to you—to you! This time I come not as a deaf, cringing, watery-eyed old gardener"—for an instant he was the gardener—"but as one of your world, to which I was bred," and his shoulders, rising, filled out his uniform in the grace of the commander of men in action. "Destiny has played with us. It sent a spy to your garden. It put you in my place. A strange service, ours—yes, destiny is in it!"
"Yes," she breathed painfully, his suggestion striking deep.
She was staring at the ground, her face very still. Yes, it was he who had started the train of circumstances that had left her with a memory more tragic than the one that had whitened his hair. His memory was already erased. What could ever erase hers? He had begun anew. How could she ever begin anew? The fact of this man talking of everything as destiny—of the slaughter, the misery, as destiny—was the worst mockery of all. Yet he was true to himself. His enjoyed facility of fervid expression, his boyishness, his gift of making the lived moment the greatest of his life, was the very gift she had craved to make her forget her yesterdays. Only faintly did she hear his next outburst, until he came to the end.
"I come with the question which I had sealed in my lonely heart," he was saying, "while I lived a lie and trimmed rose-bushes and hung on your words. You saved me. I fought for you. You were in my eyes, in my angers, in my brain as I directed the fire of my guns. 'She will be pleased to hear that I am a colonel!' I kept thinking. I love you! I love you!"
Marta started up from her chair, her eyes moist and open wide, amazed, but growing kind and troubled. Had she been guilty of giving him hope? Was there something in her that had led him on, a shame that came natural to her since she had let Westerling proceed with his love? Her guilt in Feller's case was worse than in Westerling's. A thousand Westerlings were not worth one Feller. And he had been near her, near as a comrade, in imagination, with his ready suggestions of how to play her part in its most exacting moments! While he stood, the picture of the eager, impatient lover trembling for an answer that seemed to mean heaven or perdition for him, the kindness that went with the trouble in her eyes warmed to fondness, as she laid her fingers on his shoulder.
"You would want me to love you, wouldn't you?" she asked gently. "And if I cannot? Yes, if I can neither act nor play at love, so real must love be to me?"
He turned miserable, with eyes seeming to sink into his head, and body to wilt in the dejection of that pitiful, hopeless attitude when his secret had been discovered in the tower sitting-room.
"Act! Act!" he murmured.