“Gentlemen,” he said, leaning forward with his hands folded on the cloth in front of him, “since I was here last I have had a very great sorrow. I have lost my son.”
Then he fell silent again, and apparently not hearing any of the things that were said to him.
“He was killed,” he began a second time, just as he had begun the first, “in Flanders, six weeks ago. He was twenty-two years and four months old. Before he died they pinned this on him.” He fumbled in his waistcoat, and picking out something threw it across the cloth over in front of Savelle. It was a little bronze cross known the world over, with two words on it, “For valor”. “I sent them my son and they sent me back that,” said Philbin.
It was the old Philbin voice—the same that had in turn galled each one of them.
“He went out in the night,” he went on, “and pulled back to life two London fishmongers. Then he died—going back for a third fishmonger. There is some six inches in a London newspaper telling about it. That same paper gave a column and a half last week to a story I wrote. And they gave six inches to my son. That’s queer, too, isn’t it?”
Nobody answered him. They were all afraid to—his tone was too bitter. No one was quite sure what he would say.
“We used to talk here years ago,” he went on presently, “about curious things. I think this curious enough to talk about. They gave a ‘stick’ to the death of my son and a column to the birth of my book. Savelle, you are a newspaper man, tell us about it?”
Savelle was looking at him with his eyes blazing, and he answered not a word.
“I suppose it’s logical,” said Philbin. “Any man may have a son. But I have written twenty books and had only one son.”
The only answer came from quite an unexpected quarter. It was little Norvel, who was sitting at Philbin’s elbow.