“I know it’s difficult——” he began; but Mr. Mayhew laughed. “I am here to surmount difficulties—after what I’ve been through!”
It was not until then that Mr. Mayhew found time to answer an enquiry about his nephew.
“Benny Upsher ? Ha—I’m proud of Benny! He’s a hero, that nephew of mine—he was always my favourite.”
He went on to say that the youth, having failed to enlist in the French army, had managed to get back to England, and there, passing himself off as a Canadian (“Born at Murray Bay, sir—wasn’t it lucky?”) had joined an English regiment, and, after three months’ training, was now on his way to the front. His parents had made a great outcry—moved heaven and earth for news of him—but the boy had covered up his tracks so cleverly that they had had no word till he was starting for Boulogne with his draft. Rather high-handed—and poor Madeline had nearly gone out of her mind; but Mr. Mayhew confessed he had no patience with such feminine weakness. “Benny’s a man, and must act as a man. That boy, Campton, saw things as they were from the first.”
Campton took leave, dazed and crushed by the conversation. It was all one to him if Harvey Mayhew chose to call on America to avenge his wrongs; Campton himself was beginning to wish that his country would wake up to what was going on in the world; but that he, Campton, should be drawn into the affair, should have to write letters, accompany the ex-Delegate to Embassies and Red Crosses, languish with him in ministerial antechambers, and be deafened with appeals to his own celebrity and efficiency; that he should have ascribed to himself that mysterious gift of “knowing the ropes” in which his whole blundering career had proved him to be cruelly lacking: this was so dreadful to him as to obscure every other question.
“Thank the Lord,” he muttered, “I haven’t got the telephone anyhow!”
He glanced cautiously down the wide stairs of the hotel to assure himself of a safe retreat; but in the hall an appealing voice detained him.
“Dear Master! Dear great Master! I’ve been lying in wait for you!”
A Red Cross nurse advanced: not the majestic figure of the Crimean legend, but the new version evolved in the rue de la Paix: short skirts, long ankles, pearls and curls. The face under the coif was young, wistful, haggard with the perpetual hurry of the aimless. Where had he seen those tragic eyes, so full of questions and so invariably uninterested in the answers?
“I’m Madge Talkett—I saw you at—I saw you the day war was declared,” the young lady corrected herself. Campton remembered their meeting at Mrs. Brant’s, and was grateful for her evident embarrassment. So few of the new generation seemed aware that there were any privacies left to respect! He looked at Mrs. Talkett more kindly.