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.