The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [4881]
The sense of companionship warmed him. Although neither of them realized it, their mutual loneliness and dissatisfaction had brought them together, and mentally at least they were clinging, each desperately to the other. But their talk was disjointed:
"I'll return that hundred soon. I've sold the house."
"I wish you wouldn't worry about it. It's ridiculous, Audrey."
And, a hundred yards or so further on, "They wouldn't have Chris in Canada. His heart. He's going into the French Ambulance service."
"Good for Chris."
But she came out very frankly, when they started back to the clubhouse.
"It's done me a lot of good, meeting you, Clay. There's something so big and solid and dependable about you. I wonder - I suppose you don't mind my using you as a sort of anchor to windward?"
"Good heavens, Audrey! If I could only do something."
"You don't have to do a thing." She smiled up at him, and her old audacity was quite gone. "You've just got to be. And - you don't have to send me flowers, you know. I mean, I understand that you're sorry for me, without that. You're the only person in the world I'd allow to be sorry for me."
He was touched. There was no coquetry in her manner. She paid her little tribute quite sincerely and frankly.
"I've been taking stock to-day," she went on, "and I put you among my assets. One reliable gentleman, six feet tall, weight about a hundred and seventy, in good condition. Heavens, what a lot of liabilities you had to off-set!"
He stopped and looked down at her.
"Audrey dear," he said, "what am I to say to all that? What can I do? How can I help?"
"You might tell me - No, that's silly."
"V/hat is silly?"
But she did not answer. She called "Joey!" and gave him her clubs.
"Joey wants to be a soldier," she observed.
"So he says."
"I want to be a soldier, too, Clay. A good soldier."
He suspected that she was rather close to unusual tears.
As they approached the clubhouse they saw Graham and Marion Hayden standing outside. Graham was absently dropping balls and swinging at them. It was too late when Clayton saw the danger and shouted sharply.
A ball caught the caddie on the side of the head and he dropped like a shot.
All through that night Clayton and Audrey Valentine sat by the boy's white bed in the hospital. Clayton knew Graham was waiting outside, but he did not go out to speak to him. He was afraid of himself, afraid in his anger that he would widen the breach between them.
Early in the evening Natalie had come, in a great evening-coat that looked queerly out of place, but she had come, he knew, not through sympathy for the thin little figure on the bed, but as he had known she would come, to plead for Graham. And her cry of joy when the surgeons had said the boy would live was again for Graham.
She had been too engrossed to comment on Audrey's presence there, and Audrey had gone out immediately and left them together. Clayton was forced, that night, to an unwilling comparison of Natalie with another woman. On the surface of their lives, where only they met, Natalie had always borne comparison well. But here was a new standard to measure by, and another woman, a woman with hands to serve and watchful, intelligent eyes, outmeasured her.
Not that Clayton knew all this. He felt, in a vague way, that Natalie was out of place there, and he felt, even more strongly, that she had not the faintest interest in the still figure on its white bed - save as it touched Graham and herself.
He was resentful, too, that she felt it necessary to plead with him for his own boy. Good God, if she felt that way about him, no wonder Graham -
She had placed a hand on Clayton's arm, as he sat in that endless vigil, and bent down to whisper, although no sound would have penetrated that death-like stupor.
"It was an accident, Clay," she pled. "You know Graham's the kindest soul in the world. You know that, Clay."
"He had been drinking." His voice sounded cold and strained to his own ears.
"Not much. Almost nothing, Toots says positively."
"Then I'd rather he