“Yes; to join my husband.”
He continued to consider her in silence, and she frowned in her perplexed and fretful way. “He’s at Plattsburg, you know.” Her eyes wandered unseeingly about the studio. “There’s nothing else to do, is there—now—here or anywhere? So I sail to-morrow; I mean to take a house somewhere near him. He’s not well, and he writes that he misses me. The life in camp is so unsuited to him——”
Campton still listened absently. “Oh, you’re right to go,” he agreed at length, supposing it was what she expected of him.
“Am I?” She half-smiled. “What’s right and what’s wrong? I don’t know any longer. I’m only trying to do what I suppose George would have wanted.” She stood uncertainly in front of Campton. “All I do know,” she cried, with a sharp break in her voice, “is that I’ve never in my life been happy enough to be so unhappy!” And she threw herself down on the divan in a storm of desolate sobbing.
After he had comforted her as best he could, and she had gone away, Campton continued to wander up and down the studio forlornly. That cry of hers kept on echoing in his ears: “I’ve never in my life been happy enough to be so unhappy!” It associated itself suddenly with a phrase of Boylston’s that he had brushed away unheeding: “You’ve had your son—you have him still; but those others have never had anything.”
Yes; Campton saw now that it was true of poor Madge Talkett, as it was of Adele Anthony and Mr. Brant, and even in a measure of Julia. They had never—no, not even George’s mother—had anything, in the close inextricable sense in which Campton had had his son. And it was only now, in his own hour of destitution, that he understood how much greater the depth of their poverty had been. He recalled the frightened embarrassed look of the young lieutenant whom he had discountenanced by his tears; and he said to himself: “The only thing that helps is to be able to do things for people. I suppose that’s why Brant’s always trying——”
Julia too: it was strange that his thoughts should turn to her with such peculiar pity. It was not because the boy had been born of her body: Campton did not see her now, as he once had in a brief moment of compassion, as the young mother bending illumined above her baby. He saw her as an old empty-hearted woman, and asked himself how such an unmanageable monster as grief was to fill the room up of her absent son.
What did such people as Julia do with grief, he wondered, how did they make room for it in their lives, get up and lie down every day with its taste on their lips? Its elemental quality, that awful sense it communicated of a whirling earth, a crumbling Time, and all the cold stellar spaces yawning to receive us—these feelings which he was beginning to discern and to come to terms with in his own way (and with the sense that it would have been George’s way too), these feelings could never give their stern appeasement to Julia.... Her religion? Yes, such as it was no doubt it would help; talking with the Rector would help; giving more time to her church-charities, her wounded soldiers, imagining that she was paying some kind of tax on her affliction. But the vacant evenings, at home, face to face with Brant! Campton had long since seen that the one thing which had held the two together was their shared love of George; and if Julia discovered, as she could hardly fail to do, how much more deeply Brant had loved her son than she had, and how much more inconsolably he mourned him, that would only increase her sense of isolation. And so, in sheer self-defence, she would gradually, stealthily, fill up the void with the old occupations, with bridge and visits and secret consultations at the dressmaker’s about the width of crape on her dresses; and all the while the object of life would be gone for her. Yes; he pitied Julia most of all.
But Mr. Brant too—perhaps in a different way it was he who suffered most. For the stellar spaces were not exactly Mr. Brant’s native climate, and yet voices would call to him from them, and he would not know....
There were moments when Campton looked about him with astonishment at the richness of his own denuded life; when George was in the sunset, in the voices of young people, or in any trivial joke that father and son would have shared; and other moments when he was nowhere, utterly lost, extinct and irrecoverable; and others again when the one thing which could have vitalized the dead business of living would have been to see him shove open the studio door, stalk in, pour out some coffee for himself in his father’s cup, and diffuse through the air the warm sense of his bodily presence, the fresh smell of his clothes and his flesh and his hair. But through all these moods, Campton began to see, there ran the life-giving power of a reality embraced and accepted. George had been; George was; as long as his father’s consciousness lasted, George would be as much a part of it as the closest, most actual of his immediate sensations. He had missed nothing of George, and here was his harvest, his golden harvest.