II
THE nice young nurse came in. She closed the door gently, and, with her smile, calm before accustomed death, and always, as it were, a little proud of him,—that was because they were both English,—she took his wrist and felt his pulse, holding her watch in the other hand, and asked him, presently, how he felt. Only after that did she say, contemplating him for a moment,—Marmaduke wondered how many hours—or was it perhaps days?—she was giving him to live,—
“A gentleman has come to see you. You may see him if you like. But I’ve told him that he is only to stay for half an hour.”
The blood flowed up to Marmaduke’s forehead. He felt it beating hard in his neck and behind his ears, and his heart thumped down there under the neatly drawn bed-clothes.
“A gentleman? What’s his name?”
Was it Robert?
“Here is his card,” said the nurse.
She drew it from her pocket and gave it to him. It couldn’t have been Robert, of course. Robert would only have had to come up. Yet he was dizzy with the disappointment. It was as if he saw Robert strolling away for the last time. He would never see Robert again.
Mr. Guy Thorpe was the name. The address was a London club that Marmaduke placed at once as second-rate, and “The Beeches, Arlington Road,” in a London suburb. On the card was written in a neat scholarly hand: “May I see you? We are friends.”
It was difficult for a moment to feel anything but the receding tide of his hope. The next thing that came was a sense of dislike for Mr. Guy Thorpe and for the words that he had written. Friends? By what right since he did not know his name?
“Is he a soldier?” he asked. “How did he come? I don’t know him.”
“You needn’t see him unless you want to,” said the nurse. “No; he’s not a soldier. An elderly man. He’s driving a motor for the French Wounded Emergency Fund, and came on from the Alliance because he heard that you were here. Perhaps he’s some old family friend. He spoke as if he were.”
Marmaduke smiled a little. “That’s hardly likely. But I’ll see him, yes; since he came for that.”
When she had gone, he lay looking again at the blue bands across the window. A flock of sea-gulls flew past—proud, swift, and leisurely, glittering in the sun. They seemed to embody the splendour and exultation of his thoughts, and, when they had disappeared, he was sorry, almost desolate.
Mr. Guy Thorpe. He took up the card again in his feeble hand and looked at it. And now, dimly, it seemed to remind him of something.
Steps approached along the passage, the nurse’s light footfall and the heavier, careful tread of a man. An oddly polite, almost a deprecating tread. He had gone about a great many hospitals and was cautious not to disturb wounded men. Yet Marmaduke felt again that he did not like Mr. Guy Thorpe, and, as they came in, he was conscious of feeling a little frightened.
There was nothing to frighten one in Mr. Thorpe’s appearance. He was a tall, thin, ageing man, travel-worn, in civilian clothes, with a dingy Red-Cross badge on the sleeve of his waterproof overcoat. Baldish and apparently near-sighted, he seemed to blink towards the bed, and, as if with motoring in the wind, his eyelids were moist and reddened. He sat down, murmuring some words of thanks to the nurse.
A very insignificant man, for all his height and his big forehead. Altogether of The Beeches, Arlington Road. Had he turned grey, he might have looked less shabby, but dark thin locks still clustered above his high crown and behind his long-lobed ears. His eyes were dark, his moustache drooped, and he had a small, straight nose. Marmaduke saw that he was the sort of man who, in youth, might have been considered very handsome. He looked like a seedy poet and some sort of minor civil servant mingled, the civil servant having got the better of the poet. Marmaduke also imagined that he would have a large family and a harassed but ambitious wife, with a genteel accent—a wife a little below himself. His tie was of a dull red silk. Marmaduke did not like him.
Mr. Thorpe glanced round, as if cautiously, to see if the nurse had closed the door, and then, it was really as if more cautiously still, looked at Marmaduke, slightly moving back his chair.
“I’m very grateful to you, very grateful indeed,” he said in a low voice, “for seeing me.”
“You’ve come a long way,” said Marmaduke.
“Yes. A long way. I had heard of your being here. I hoped to get here. I felt that I must see you. We are all proud of you; more proud than I can say.”
He looked down now at the motoring-cap he held, and Marmaduke became aware that the reddened eyes were still more suffused and that the mouth under the drooping moustache twitched and trembled. He could think of nothing to say, except to murmur something about being very glad—though he didn’t want to say that; and he supposed, to account for Mr. Thorpe’s emotion, that he must be a moving sight, lying there, wasted, bandaged, and dying.
“You don’t remember my name, I suppose,” said Mr. Thorpe after a moment, in which he frankly got out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” said Marmaduke very politely. He was glad to say this. It was the sort of thing he did want to say.
“Yet I know yours very, very well,” said Mr. Thorpe, with a curious watery smile. “I lived at Channerley once. I was tutor there for some time—to Robert, your brother, and Griselda. Yes,” Mr. Thorpe nodded, “I know the Folletts well; and Channerley, the dear old place.”
Now the dim something in memory pressed forward, almost with a physical advance, and revealed itself as sundry words scratched on the schoolroom window-panes and sundry succinct drawings in battered old Greek and Latin grammars. Robert had always been very clever at drawing, catching with equal facility and accuracy the swiftness of a galloping horse and the absurdities of a human profile. What returned to Marmaduke now, and as clearly as if he had the fly-leaf before him, was a tiny thumb-nail sketch of such a galloping horse unseating a lank, crouching figure, of whom the main indications were the angles of acute uncertainty taken by the knees and elbows; and a more elaborate portrait, dashed and dotted as if with a ruthless boyish grin—such an erect and melancholy head it was, so dark the tossed-back locks, so classical the nose and unclassical the moustache, and a brooding eye indicated in a triangular sweep of shadow. Beneath was written in Robert’s clear, boyish hand, “Mr. Guy Thorpe, Poet, Philosopher, and Friend. Vale.” Even the date flashed before him, 1880; and with it—strange, inappropriate association—the daffodils running out upon the lawn, as no doubt he had seen them as he leaned from the schoolroom window, with the Greek grammar under his elbow on the sill.
So that was it. Mr. Guy Thorpe, placed, explained, disposed of—poor dear! He felt suddenly quite kindly towards him, quite touched by his act of loyalty to the old allegiance in coming; and flattered, too,—yes, even by Mr. Thorpe,—that he should be recognized as a Follett who had done something for the name; and smiling very benevolently upon him, he said:—
“Oh, of course; I remember perfectly now—your name, and drawings of you in old schoolbooks, you know. All tutors and governesses get those tributes from their pupils, don’t they? But I myself couldn’t remember, could I? for it was before I was born that you were at Channerley.”
There was a moment of silence after this, and in it Marmaduke felt that Mr. Thorpe did not like being so placed. He had no doubt imagined that there would be less ambiguous tributes, and that his old pupils would have talked of him to the younger generation.
And something of this chagrin certainly came out in his next words as, nodding and looking round at the daffodils, he said:—
"Yes, yes. Quite true. No, of course you couldn’t yourself remember. I was more though, I think I may fairly say, than the usual tutor or governess. I came, rather, at Sir Robert’s instance."—Sir Robert was Marmaduke’s father.—“We had met, made friends, at Oxford; his former tutor there was an uncle of mine, and Sir Robert, in my undergraduate days, used to visit him sometimes. He was very keen on getting me to come. Young Robert wanted something of a firm hand. I was the friend rather than the mere man of books in the family.”
"Poet, Philosopher and Friend"—Marmaduke had it almost on his lips, and almost with a laugh, his benevolence deepened for poor Mr. Thorpe, so self-revealed, so entirely Robert’s portrait of him. Amusing to think that even the quite immature first-rate can so relegate the third. But perhaps it was a little unfair to call poor Mr. Thorpe third. The Folletts would not be likely to choose a third-rate man for a tutor; second was kinder, and truer. He had, obviously, come down in the world.
“I see. It’s natural I never heard, though: there’s such a chasm between the elders and the youngers in a big family, isn’t there?” he said. “Griselda is twelve years older than I am, and Robert ten, you remember. She was married by the time I began my Greek. You never came back to Channerley, did you? I hope things have gone well with you since those days?”
He questioned, wanting to be very kind; wanting to give something of the genial impression of his father smiling, with his “And how goes the world with you to-day?” But he saw that, while Mr. Thorpe’s evident emotion deepened, it was with a sense of present grief as well as of retrospective pathos.
“No; I never came,—that is—. No; I passed by: I never came to stay. I went abroad; I travelled, with a pupil, for some years before my marriage.” Grief and confusion were oddly mingled in his drooping face. “And after that—life had changed too much. My dear old friend Sir Robert had died. I could not have faced it all. No, no; when some chapters are read, it is better to close the book; better to close the book. But I have never forgotten Channerley, nor the Folletts of Channerley; that will always remain for me the golden page; the page,” said Mr. Thorpe, glancing round again at the daffodils, “of friendship, of youth, of daffodils in springtime. I saw you there,” he added suddenly, “once, when you were a very little lad. I saw you. I was passing by; bicycling; no time to stop. You remember the high road skirts the woods to the north. I came and looked over the wall; and there you were—in your holland pinafore and white socks—digging up the daffodils and putting them into your little red-and-yellow cart. A beautiful spring morning. The woods full of sunshine. You wouldn’t remember.”
But he did remember—perfectly. Not having been seen; but the day; the woods; the daffodils. He had dug them up to plant in his own little garden, down below. He had always been stupid with his garden; had always failed where the other succeeded. And he had wanted to be sure of daffodils. And they had all laughed at him for wanting the wild daffodils like that for himself, and for going to get them in the wood. And why had Mr. Thorpe looked over the wall and not come in? He hated to think that he had been watched on that spring morning—hated it. And, curiously, that sense of fear with which he had heard the approaching footsteps returned to him. It frightened him that Mr. Thorpe had watched him over the wall.
His distaste and shrinking were perhaps apparent in his face, for it was with a change of tone and hastiness of utterance, as though hurrying away from something, that Mr. Thorpe went on:— “You see,—it’s been my romance, always, Channerley—and all of you. I’ve always followed your lives—always—from a distance—known what you were up to. I’ve made excuses to myself—in the days when I used to go a good deal about the country—to pass by Channerley and just have a glimpse of you. And when I heard that you had done this noble deed,—when I heard what you had done for England, for Channerley, for us all,—I felt I had to come and see you. You must forgive me if I seem a mere intruder. I can’t seem that to myself. I’ve cared too much. And what I came for, really, was to thank you,—to thank you, my dear boy,—and to tell you that because of you, life must be nobler, always, for all of us.”
His words had effaced the silly, groping fear. It was indeed, since his colonel’s visit, the first congratulation he had had from the outer world. The nurses, of course, had congratulated him, and the surgeons; but no one who knew him outside; the kindly telegrams from Robert and Sylvia did not count as congratulations. And in a way poor Mr. Thorpe did know him, and though it was only from him, it had its sweetness. He felt himself flush as he answered, “That’s very kind of you.”
“Oh, no!” said Mr. Thorpe, shaking his head and swinging his foot—Marmaduke knew that from the queer movement of his body as he sat with very tightly folded arms. “Not kind! That’s not the word—from us to you! Not the word at all!”
“I’m very happy, as you may imagine,” said Marmaduke. And he was happy again, and glad to share his happiness with poor Mr. Thorpe. “It makes everything worth while, doesn’t it, to have brought it off at all?”
“Everything, everything—it would; it would, to you. So heroes feel,” said Mr. Thorpe. “To give your life for England. I know it all—in every detail. Yes, you are happy in dying that England may live. Brave boy! Splendid boy!”
Now he was weeping. He had out his handkerchief and his shoulders shook. It made Marmaduke want to cry, too, and he wondered confusedly if the nurse would soon come back. Had not the half hour passed?
“Really—it’s too good of you. You mustn’t, you know; you mustn’t,” he murmured, while the word, “boy—boy,” repeated, made tangled images in his mind, and he saw himself in the white socks and with the little red-and-yellow cart, and then as he had been the other day, leading his men, his revolver in his hand and the bullets flying about him. “And I’m not a boy,” he said; "I’m thirty-four; absurdly old to be only a second lieutenant. And there are so many of us. Why,"—the thought came fantastically, but he seized it, because Mr. Thorpe was crying so and he must seize something,—“we’re as common as daffodils!”
“Ah! not for me! not for me!” Mr. Thorpe gulped quickly. Something had given way in him—as if the word “daffodils” had pressed a spring. He was sobbing aloud, and he had fallen on his knees by the bed and put up his hand for Marmaduke’s. “I cannot keep it from you! Not at this last hour! Not when you are leaving me forever!—My son! My brave son! I am your father, Marmaduke! I am your father, my dear, dear boy!”