“Dad, I’m off,” he said; and sitting down at the table, he unceremoniously poured himself some coffee into his father’s empty cup.
“The battalion’s been ordered back. I leave to-night. Let’s lunch together somewhere presently, shall we?”
His eye was clear, his smile confident: a great weight seemed to have fallen from him, and he looked like the little boy sitting up in bed with his Lavengro. “After ten months of Paris——” he added, stretching his arms over his head with a great yawn.
“Yes—the routine——” stammered Campton, not knowing what he said. Yet he was glad too; yes, in his heart of hearts he knew he was glad; though, as always happened, his emotion took him by the throat and silenced him. But it did not matter, for George was talking.
“I shall have leave a good deal oftener nowadays,” he said with animation. “And everything is ever so much better organized—letters and all that. I shan’t seem so awfully far away. You’ll see.”
Campton still gazed at him, struggling for expression. Their hands met. Campton said—or imagined he said: “I see—I do see, already——” though afterward he was not even sure that he had spoken.
What he saw, with an almost blinding distinctness, was the extent to which his own feeling, during the long months, had imperceptibly changed, and how his inmost impulse, now that the blow had fallen, was not of resistance to it, but of acquiescence, since it made him once more one with his son.
He would have liked to tell that to George; but speech was impossible. And perhaps, after all, it didn’t matter; it didn’t matter, because George understood. Their hand-clasp had made that clear, and an hour or two later they were lunching together almost gaily.
Boylston joined them, and the three went on together to say goodbye to Adele Anthony. Adele, for once, was unprepared: it was almost a relief to Campton, who had winced in advance at the thought of her warlike attitude. The poor thing was far from warlike: her pale eyes clung to George’s in a frightened stare, while her lips, a little stiffly, repeated the stock phrases of good cheer. “Such a relief.... I congratulate you ... getting out of all this paperasserie and red tape.... If I’d been you I couldn’t have stood Paris another minute.... The only hopeful people left are at the front....” It was the formula that sped every departing soldier.
The day wore on. To Campton its hours seemed as interminable yet as rapid as those before his son’s first departure, nearly two years earlier. George had begged his father to come in the evening to the Avenue Marigny, where he was dining with the Brants. It was easier for Campton nowadays to fall in with such requests: during the months of George’s sojourn in Paris a good many angles had had their edges rubbed off.