In the Avenue Marigny dining-room the Brants and George were still sitting together about the delicate silver and porcelain. There were no flowers: Julia, always correct, had long since banished them as a superfluity. But there was champagne for George’s farewell, and a glimpse of rich fare being removed.
Mr. Brant rose to greet Campton. His concise features were drawn with anxiety, and with the effort to hide it; but his wife appeared to Campton curiously unperturbed, and the leave-taking was less painful and uselessly drawn out than he had expected.
George and his father were to be sent to the station in Mr. Brant’s motor. Campton, as he got in, remembered with a shiver the grey morning, before daylight, when the same motor had stood at the studio door, waiting to carry him to Doullens; between himself and his son he seemed to see Mr. Brant’s small suffering profile.
To shake off the memory he said: “Your mother’s in wonderfully good form. I was glad to see she wasn’t nervous.”
George laughed. “No. Madge met her this morning at the new _clairvoyante’s_.—It does them all a lot of good,” he added, with his all-embracing tolerance.
Campton shivered again. That universal smiling comprehension of George’s always made him seem remoter than ever. “It makes him seem so old—a thousand years older than I am.” But he forced an acquiescent laugh, and presently George went on: “About Madge—you’ll be awfully good to her, won’t you, if I get smashed?”
There was another pause, and then Campton risked a question. “Just how do things stand? I know so little, after all.”
For a moment George seemed to hesitate: his thick fair eyebrows were drawn into a puzzled frown. “I know—I’ve never explained it to you properly. I’ve tried to; but I was never sure that I could make you see.” He paused and added quietly: “I know now that she’ll never divorce Talkett.”
“You know——?” Campton exclaimed with a great surge of relief.
“She thinks she will; but I see that the idea still frightens her. And I’ve kept on using the divorce argument only as a pretext.”
The words thrust Campton back into new depths of perplexity. “A pretext?” he echoed.
“My dear old Dad—don’t you guess? She’s come to care for me awfully; if we’d gone all the lengths she wanted, and then I’d got killed, there would have been nothing on earth left for her. I hadn’t the right, don’t you see? We chaps haven’t any futures to dispose of till this job we’re in is finished. Of course, if I come back, and she can make up her mind to break with everything she’s used to, we shall marry; but if things go wrong I’d rather leave her as she is, safe in her little old rut. So many people can’t live out of one—and she’s one of them, poor child, though she’s so positive she isn’t.”