“Anderson hasn’t spoken to you, then—spoken about Mrs. Talkett?” she asked suddenly.
“About Mrs. Talkett? Why should he? What on earth has happened?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t see her myself ... I couldn’t ... so he had to. She had to be thanked, of course ... but it seems to me so dreadful, so very dreadful ... our boy ... that woman....”
Campton did not press her further. He sat dumbfounded, trying to take in what she was so obviously trying to communicate, and yet instinctively resisting the approach of the revelation he foresaw.
“George—Mrs. Talkett?” He forced himself to couple the two names, unnatural as their union seemed.
“I supposed you knew. Isn’t it dreadful? A woman old enough——” She drew a letter from her bag.
He interrupted her. “Is that letter what you want to show me?”
“Yes. She insisted on Anderson’s keeping it—for you. She said it belonged to us, I believe.... It seems there was a promise—made the night before he was mobilised—that if anything happened he would get word to her.... No thought of us!” She began to whimper.
Campton reached out for the letter. Mrs. Talkett—Madge Talkett and George! That was where the boy had gone then, that last night when his father, left alone at the Crillon, had been so hurt by his desertion! That was the name which, in his hours of vigil in the little white room, Campton had watched for on his son’s lips, the name which, one day, sooner or later, he would have to hear them pronounce.... How little he had thought, as he sat studying the mysterious beauty of George’s face, what a commonplace secret it concealed!
The writing was not George’s, but that of an unlettered French soldier. Campton, glancing at the signature, recalled it as that of his son’s orderly, who had been slightly wounded in the same attack as George, and sent for twenty-four hours to the same hospital at Doullens. He had been at George’s side when he fell, and with the simple directness often natural to his class in France he told the tale of his lieutenant’s wounding, in circumstances which appeared to have given George great glory in the eyes of his men. They thought the wound mortal; but the orderly and a stretcher-bearer had managed to get the young man into the shelter of a little wood. The stretcher-bearer, it turned out, was a priest. He had at once applied the consecrated oil, and George, still conscious, had received it “with a beautiful smile”; then the orderly, thinking all was over, had hurried back to the fighting, and been wounded. The next day he too had been carried to Doullens; and there, after many enquiries, he had found his lieutenant in the same hospital, alive, but too ill to see him.