Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (35 page)

 
          
“Perhaps,
after all, it’s only a flirtation—a mere sentimental friendship,” he hazarded.

 
          
“A flirtation?”
Mrs. Brant’s Mater Dolorosa face suddenly
sharpened to worldly astuteness.
“A sentimental friendship?
Have you ever heard George mention her name—or make any sort of allusion to
such a friendship?”

 
          
Campton
considered. “No. I don’t remember his ever speaking of her.”

 
          
“Well,
then” Her eyes had the irritated look he had seen on the far-off day when he
had thrown Beausite’s dinner invitation into the fire. Once more, they seemed
to say, she had taken the measure of his worldly wisdom.

 
          
George’s
silence—his care not even to mention that the Talketts were so much as known to
him—certainly made it look as though the matter went deep with him. Campton,
recalling the tone of the Talkett drawing-room and its familiars, had an even
stronger recoil of indignation than Julia’s; but he was silenced by a dread of
tampering with his son’s privacy, a sense of the sacredness of everything
pertaining to that still-mysterious figure in the white bed upstairs.

 
          
Mrs.
Brant’s face had clouded again. “It’s all so dreadful—and this Extreme Unction
too! What is it exactly, do you know?
A sort of baptism?
Will the Roman Church try to get hold of him on the strength of it?”

 
          
Campton
remembered with a faint inward amusement that, in spite of her foreign
bringing-up, and all her continental affinities, Julia had remained as
implacably and incuriously Protestant as if all her life she had heard the
Scarlet Woman denounced from Presbyterian pulpits. At another time it would
have amused him to ponder on this one streak in her of the ancestral iron; but
now he wanted only to console her.

 
          
“Oh,
no—it was just the accident of the priest’s being there. One of our chaplains
would have done the same kind of thing.”

 
          
She
looked at him mistrustfully.
“The same kind of thing?
It’s never the same with them! Whatever they do reaches ahead. I’ve seen such
advantage taken of the wounded when they were too weak to resist … didn’t know
what they were saying or doing…” Her eyes filled with tears. “A priest and a
woman—I feel as if I’d lost my boy!”

 
          
The
words went through Campton like a sword, and he sprang to his feet. “Oh, for
God’s sake be quiet—don’t say it! What does anything matter but that he’s
alive?”

 
          
“Of
course, of course… I didn’t mean … But that he should have deceived us … about
everything … everything…”

 
          
“Ah,
don’t say that either! Don’t tempt
Providence
! If he deceived us, as you call it, we’ve
no one but ourselves to blame; you and I, and—well, and Brant. Didn’t we all do
our best to make him deceive us—with our intriguing and our wire-pulling and
our cowardice? How he despised us for it—yes, thank God, how he despised us
from the first! He didn’t hide the truth from Boylston or Adele, because they
were the only two on a level with him. And they knew why he’d deceived us; they
understood him, they abetted him from the first.” He stopped, checked by Mrs.
Brant’s pale bewildered face, and the eyes imploringly lifted, as if to ward
off unintelligible words.

 
          
“Ah,
well, all this is no use,” he said; “we’ve got him safe, and it’s more than we
deserve.” He laid his hand on her shoulder. “Go to bed; you’re dead-beat. Only
don’t say things—things that might wake up the Furies…”

 
          
He
pocketed the letter and went out in search of Mr. Brant, followed by her gaze of
perplexity.

 
          
The
latter was smoking a last cigar as he paced up and down the cloister with
upturned coat-collar. Silence lay on the carefully darkened building, crouching
low under an icy sea-fog; at intervals, through the hush, the waves continued
to mimic the booming of the guns.

 
          
Campton
drew out the orderly’s letter. “I hear you’re leaving tomorrow early, and I
suppose I’d better give this back,” he said.

 
          
Mr.
Brant had evidently expected him. “Oh, thanks. But Mrs. Talkett says she has no
right to it.”

 
          
“No
right to it? That’s a queer thing to say.”

 
          
“So
I thought. I suppose she meant, till you’d seen it. She was dreadfully upset…
till she saw me she’d supposed he was dead.”

 
          
Campton
shivered. “She sent this to your house?”

 
          
“Yes;
the moment she got it. It was waiting there when my—when Julia arrived.”

 
          
“And
you went to thank her?”

 
          
“Yes.”
Mr. Brant hesitated. “Julia disliked
to keep
the
letter. And I thought it only proper to take it back myself.”

 
          
“Certainly.
And—what was your impression?”

 
          
Mr.
Brant hesitated again. He had already, Campton felt, reached the utmost limit
of his power of communicativeness. It was against all his habits to “commit
himself.” Finally he said, in an unsteady voice: “It was impossible not to feel
sorry for her.”

 
          
“Did
she say—er—anything special? Anything about herself and”

 
          
“No; not a word.
She was—well, all broken up, as they say.”

 
          
“Poor thing!”
Campton murmured.

 
          
“Yes—oh,
yes!” Mr. Brant held the letter, turning it thoughtfully about. “It’s a great
thing,” he began abruptly, as if the words were beyond his control, “to have
such a beautiful account of the affair. George himself, of course, would never”

 
          
“No, never.”
Campton considered. “You must take it back to
her, naturally. But I should like to have a copy first.”

 
          
Mr.
Brant put a hand in his pocket. “I supposed you would. And I took the liberty
of making two—oh, privately, of course. I hope you’ll find my writing fairly
legible.” He drew two folded sheets from his note-case, and offered one to
Campton.

 
          
“Oh,
thank you.” The two men grasped hands through the fog.

 
          
Mr.
Brant turned to continue his round, and Campton went up to the white-washed
cell in which he was lodged. Screening his candle to keep the least light from
leaking through the shutters, he re-read the story of George’s wounding, copied
out in the cramped tremulous writing of a man who never took pen in hand but to
sign a daily batch of typed letters. The “hand-made” copy of a letter by Mr.
Brant represented something like the pious toil expended by a monkish scribe on
the page of a missal; and Campton was moved by the little man’s devotion.

 
          
As
for the letter, Campton had no sooner begun to re-read it than he entirely
forgot that it was a message of love, addressed at George’s request to Mrs.
Talkett, and saw in it only the record of his son’s bravery. And for the first
time he understood that from the moment of George’s wounding until now he had
never really thought of him in relation to the war, never thought of his
judgment on the war, of all the unknown emotions, resolves and actions which
had drawn him so many months ago from his safe shelter in the
Argonne
.

 
          
These
things Campton, unconsciously, had put out of his mind, or rather had lost out
of his mind, from the moment when he had heard of George’s bodily presence,
with the physical signs of him, his weakness, his temperature, the pain in his
arm, the oppression on his lung, all the daily insistent details involved in
coaxing him slowly back to life.

 
          
The
father could bear no more; he put the letter away, as a man might put away
something of which his heart was too full to measure it. Later—yes; now, all he
knew was that his son was alive.

 
          
But
the hour of Campton’s entering into glory came when, two or three days later,
George asked with sudden smile: “When I exchanged regiments I did what you’d
always hoped I would, eh, Dad?”

 
          
It
was the first allusion, on the part of either, to the mystery of George’s
transit from the
Argonne
to the front. At Doullens he had been too
weak to be questioned, and as he grew stronger, and entered upon the successive
stages of his convalescence, he gave the impression of having travelled far
beyond such matters, and of living his real life in some inconceivable region
from which, with that new smile of his, he continued to look down unseeingly on
his parents. “It’s exactly as if he were dead,” the father thought. “And if he
were, he might go on watching us with just such a smile.”

 
          
And
then one morning as they were taking a few steps on a sunny terrace, Campton
had felt the pressure of the boy’s sound arm, and caught the old George in his
look.

 
          
“I…
good Lord … at any rate I’m glad you felt sure of me,” Campton could only
stammer in reply.

 
          
George
laughed. “Well—rather!”

 
          
There
was a long silence full of sea-murmurs, too drowsy and indolent, for once, to
simulate the horror of the guns.

 
          
“I—I
only wish you’d felt you could trust me about it from the first, as you did
Adele and Boylston,” the father continued.

 
          
“But,
my dear fellow, I did feel it! I swear I did! Only, you see, there was mother.
I thought it all over, and decided it would be easier for you both if I said
nothing. And, after all, I’m glad now that I didn’t—that is, if you really do
understand.”

 
          
“Yes;
I understand.”

 
          
“That’s
jolly.” George’s eyes turned from his and rested with a joyful gravity on the
little round-faced Sister who hurried up to say that he’d been out long enough.
Campton often caught him fixing this look of serene benevolence on the people
who were gradually repeopling his world, a look which seemed to say that they
were new to him, yet dimly familiar. He was like a traveller returning after
incommunicable adventures to the place where he had lived as a child; and, as
happens with such wanderers, the trivial and insignificant things, the things a
newcomer would not have noticed, seemed often to interest him most of all.

 
          
He
said nothing more about
himself
, but with the look of
recovered humanness which made him more lovable if less remotely beautiful,
began to question his father.

 
          
“Boylston
wrote that you’d begun to paint again. I’m glad.”

 
          
“Oh,
I only took it up for a while last spring.”

 
          
“Portraits?”

 
          
“A few.
But I chucked it. I couldn’t stand the atmosphere.”

 
          
“What
atmosphere?”

 
          
“Of people who could want to be painted at such a time.
People who wanted to ‘secure a Campton.’
Oh, and then the
dealers—God!”

 
          
George
seemed unimpressed. “After all, life’s got to go on.”

 
          
“Yes—that’s
what they say! And the only result is to make me doubt if theirs has.”

 
          
His
son laughed, and then threw off: ‘You did Mrs. Talkett?”

 
          
‘Yes,”
Campton snapped, off his guard.