“No, Monsieur. But the little girl—he’s had news——”
She waited to steady her voice, and then fishing in another slit of her multiple skirts, pulled out a letter. “I got that at midday. I hurried to St. Cloud—but he left yesterday.”
The letter was grim reading. The poor father had accidentally run across an escaped prisoner who had regained the French lines near the village where Mme. Jules and the child were staying. The man, who knew the wife’s family, had been charged by them with a message to the effect that Mme. Jules, who was a proud woman, had got into trouble with the authorities, and been sent off to a German prison on the charge of spying. The poor little girl had cried and clung to her mother, and had been so savagely pushed aside by the officer who made the arrest that she had fallen on the stone steps of the “Kommandantur” and fractured her skull. The fugitive reported her as still alive, but unconscious, and dying.
Jules Lebel had received this news the previous day; and within twenty-four hours he was at the front. Guard a bridge at St. Cloud after that? All he asked was to kill and be killed. He knew the name and the regiment of the officer who had denounced his wife. “If I live long enough I shall run the swine down,” he wrote. “If not, I’ll kill as many of his kind as God lets me.”
Mme. Lebel sat silent, her head bowed on her hands; and Campton stood and watched her. Presently she got up, passed the back of her hand across her eyes, and said: “The room is cold. I’ll fetch some coal.”
Campton protested. “No, no, Mme. Lebel. Don’t worry about me. Make yourself something warm to drink, and try to sleep——”
“Oh, Monsieur, thank God for the work! If it were not for that——” she said, in the same words as the physician.
She hobbled away, and presently he heard her bumping up again with the coal.
When his fire was started, and the curtains drawn, and she had left him, the painter sat down and looked about the studio. Bare and untidy as it was, he did not find the sight unpleasant: he was used to it, and being used to things seemed to him the first requisite of comfort. But to-night his thoughts were elsewhere: he saw neither the tattered tapestries with their huge heroes and kings, nor the blotched walls hung with pictures, nor the canvases stacked against the chair-legs, nor the long littered table at which he wrote and ate and mixed his colours. At one moment he was with Fortin-Lescluze, speeding through the night toward fresh scenes of death; at another, in the loge downstairs, where Mme. Lebel, her day’s work done, would no doubt sit down as usual by her smoky lamp and go on with her sewing. “Thank God for the work——” they had both said.
And here Campton sat with idle hands, and did nothing——