The bell rang, but he did not move. It rang again; then the door was pushed timidly open, and Mrs. Talkett came in. He had not seen her since the day of George’s funeral, when he had fancied he detected her in a shrunken black-veiled figure hurrying past in the meaningless line of mourners.
In her usual abrupt fashion she began, without a greeting: “I’ve come to say goodbye; I’m going to America.”
He looked at her remotely, hardly hearing what she said. “To America?”
He continued to consider her in silence, and she frowned in her perplexed and fretful way. “He’s at Plattsburg, you know.” Her eyes wandered unseeingly about the studio. “There’s nothing else to do, is there—now—here or anywhere? So I sail to-morrow; I mean to take a house somewhere near him. He’s not well, and he writes that he misses me. The life in camp is so unsuited to him——”
Campton still listened absently. “Oh, you’re right to go,” he agreed at length, supposing it was what she expected of him.
“Am I?” She half-smiled. “What’s right and what’s wrong? I don’t know any longer. I’m only trying to do what I suppose George would have wanted.” She stood uncertainly in front of Campton. “All I _do_ know,” she cried, with a sharp break in her voice, “is that I’ve never in my life been happy enough to be so unhappy!” And she threw herself down on the divan in a storm of desolate sobbing.
After he had comforted her as best he could, and she had gone away, Campton continued to wander up and down the studio forlornly. That cry of hers kept on echoing in his ears: “I’ve never in my life been happy enough to be so unhappy!” It associated itself suddenly with a phrase of Boylston’s that he had brushed away unheeding: “You’ve had your son—you have him still; but those others have never had anything.”
Yes; Campton saw now that it was true of poor Madge Talkett, as it was of Adele Anthony and Mr. Brant, and even in a measure of Julia. They had never—no, not even George’s mother—had anything, in the close inextricable sense in which Campton had had his son. And it was only now, in his own hour of destitution, that he understood how much greater the depth of their poverty had been. He recalled the frightened embarrassed look of the young lieutenant whom he had discountenanced by his tears; and he said to himself: “The only thing that helps is to be able to do things for people. I suppose that’s why Brant’s always trying——”