But the one word, Lanstron, had been enough to thrill all the officers into silence and ramrod salutes. Marta noted the deference of their glances as they covertly looked him over. On what meat had our Cæsar fed that he had grown so great? This was the man who had pleaded with her to allow a spy in her garden; for whom she herself had turned spy. To-morrow his name would be in the head-lines of every newspaper in the world. His portrait would become as familiar to the eyes of the world as that of the best-advertised of kings. He was the conqueror whose commonplace sayings would be the sparks of genius because the gamble of war had gone his way. He had grown so great by sending shells into the stricken eddy at the foot of the garden and driving punishing columns against the retreating masses in the defile. The god in the car and of the machine, with his quiet manner, his intellectual features; this one-time friend, more subtle in pursuit of the same ambitions than the blind egoism of Westerling! These officers and men and all officers and men and herself were pawns of his plans and his will. Yes, even herself. Had he stopped with the repulse of the enemy? No. Would he stop now? No. Her disillusion was complete. She knew the truth; she felt it as steel stiffening against him and against every softer impulse of her own.
"I wanted a glimpse of the front as well as the rear," Lanstron remarked in explanation of his presence to the general of brigade as he passed on toward Marta, who was thinking that she, at least, was not in awe of him; she, at least, saw clearly and truly his part.
"Marta! Marta!"
Lanstron's voice was tremulous, as if he were in awe of her, while he drank in the fact that she was there before him at arms' length, safe, alive. She did not offer her hand in greeting. She was incapable of any movement, such was her emotion; and he, too, was held in a spell, as the reality of her, after all that had passed, filled his eyes. He waited for her to speak, but she was silent.
"Marta—that bandage! You have been hurt?" he exclaimed.
Unlike Feller, he had not been so obsessed with a purpose as to be blind to externals. Her hostile mood was quick to recall that no smallest detail of anything under his sight ever escaped him. This was his kind of strength—the strength that had wrecked Westerling as a fine, intellectual process. He could act, too. In the tone of the question, "You've been hurt?" without tragic emphasis, was a twitching, throbbing undercurrent of horror, which set the hand hidden in the pocket of his blouse quivering. Why care if she were hurt? Why not think about the hundreds of thousands of others who were wounded. Why not care for that poor fellow whose ghastly wound kept staring at her as he wrote "Kill me!" on the wagon body?
"It's the fashion to be wounded," she said, eyebrows lifted and lashes lowered, with a nervous smile. "I played Florence Nightingale, the natural woman's part, I believe. We should never protest; only nurse the victims of war. After helping to send men to death I went under fire myself, and—and that helped."
She could be kind to Feller but not to Lanstron. He was not a child. He was Lanny, who, as she thought of him now, did nothing except by calculation.
"Yes, that would help," he agreed, wincing as from a knife thrust.
Her old taunt: sending men to death and taking no risk himself! She saw that he winced; she realized that she had stayed words that were about to come in a flood. Then she seemed to see him through new lenses. He appeared drawn and pale and old, as if he, too, had become ashes; anything but the conqueror. Her feelings grew contradictory. Why all this fencing? How weak, how silly! She had much to say to him—a last appeal to make. Her throat held a dry lump. She was marshalling her thoughts to begin when the brittle silence was broken by a rumbling of voices, a stirring of feet, and a cheer.