The door burst open again, and Boylston dashed in beaming. He waved aloft a handful of morning papers.
“America! You’ve seen? They’ve sacked Bernstorff! Broken off diplomatic——”
His face turned white, and he stood staring incredulously from one of the two bowed men to the other.
Campton once more stood leaning in the window of a Paris hospital.
Before him, but viewed at another angle, was spread that same great spectacle of the Place de la Concorde that he had looked down at from the Crillon on the eve of mobilisation; behind him, in a fresh white bed, George lay in the same attitude as when his father had stood in the door of his room and sketched him while he slept.
All day there had run through Campton’s mind the _clairvoyante’s_ promise to Julia: “Your son will come back soon, and will never be sent to the front again.”
Ah, this time it was true—never, never would he be sent to the front again! They had him fast now, had him safe. That was the one certainty. Fast how, safe how?—the answer to that had long hung in the balance. For two weeks or more after his return the surgeons had hesitated. Then youth had seemed to conquer, and the parents had been told to hope that after a long period of immobility George’s shattered frame would slowly re-knit, and he would walk again—or at least hobble. A month had gone by since then; and Campton could at last trust himself to cast his mind back over the intervening days, so like in their anguish to those at Doullens, yet so different in all that material aid and organization could give.
Evacuation from the base, now so systematically and promptly effected, had become a matter of course in all but the gravest cases; and even the delicate undertaking of deflecting George’s course from the hospital near the front to which he had been destined, and bringing him to Paris, had been accomplished by a word in the right quarter from Mr. Brant.
Campton, from the first, had been opposed to the attempt to bring George to Paris; partly perhaps because he felt that in the quiet provincial hospital near the front he would be able to have his son to himself. At any rate, the journey would have been shorter; though, as against that, Paris offered more possibilities of surgical aid. His opposition had been violent enough to check his growing friendliness with the Brants; and at the hours when they came to see George, Campton now most often contrived to be absent. Well, at any rate, George was alive, he was there under his father’s eye, he was going to live: there seemed to be no doubt about it now. Campton could think it all over slowly and even calmly, marvelling at the miracle and taking it in.... So at least he had imagined till he first made the attempt; then the old sense of unreality enveloped him again, and he struggled vainly to clutch at something tangible amid the swimming mists. “George—George—George——” He used to say the name over and over below his breath, as he sat and watched at his son’s bedside; but it sounded far off and hollow, like the voice of a ghost calling to another.