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 think only of her, and not of us ... 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.