“Like mine. That’s a point of union between us. My uncle has played the part of your Bridgie.”
“He has; I know it. He’s lame,” answered Pixie swiftly, and was amazed at the heat with which the young fellow replied—
“Lame? Who said so? Who told you? What does it matter if he is lame?”
“Not one bit. I was only—sorry. I didn’t mean to be unkind or to repeat anything I shouldn’t. Why are you vexed?”
He shrugged his shoulders, and snapped the scissors over a coil of string.
“Oh, nothing. Gets on one’s nerves a bit that’s all. He’s such a fine fellow, he would have been such a brick, but that wretched lameness has spoiled it all. Till he was eighteen he was as strong as a horse—a fine, upstanding young giant he must have been. Then came the accident—pitched from his horse against a stone wall—and for twelve solid years he lay on his back. That made him only thirty, but you would never have believed it to see him. He was a lot more like a man of fifty.”
Pixie laid her pen on the table, and rested her chin in the clasped hands. Her eyes looked very large and wistful.
“Twelve years on one’s back would be pretty long. One would live so fast inside all the while one’s body was idle. ’Twould age you. If it had happened when he was fifty, ’twould have been easier, but at eighteen one feels so lively and awake. Anything, anything would seem better than to do just nothing! To wake each morning and know there was nothing before one all the long hours, but to lie still! Other people would get accustomed to it for you—that would be one of the bits which would hurt the most—for you’d never be accustomed yourself. And which would be worst, do you think—the days when it was dull and the room was dark, or the days when the sun blazed, begging him to come out?”
Stanor shook himself with an involuntary shiver.
“Don’t!” he cried sharply. “Don’t talk like that! What an imagination you have! I’ve been enough cut up about it, goodness knows, but I never realised all that it meant. ... Well! He is better now, so we needn’t grouse about it any more. It’s only that’s it’s left a mark! He was turned in a moment from a boy into an old man—his youth was killed, and he can’t get it back! That’s one reason why he’s so jolly anxious about me. Like most fellows he sets an exaggerated value on the things he has missed himself, and it’s a craze with him to—as he calls it—‘safeguard my youth.’ He is trying to live his own lost days again through me, poor fellow, and it’s a poor game. Outsiders take for granted that I’m his heir, but that’s bosh. Fellows of thirty-five don’t worry about heirs. He has never mentioned the subject; all he has done is to give me every chance in the way of education, and to promise me a good ‘start off.’ I’d have been ready to tackle serious work at once, but he is against a fellow having real responsibility until he’s had time to feel his feet. I’ve had to work, of course—he’s keen on that; but he’s keen on recreation, too, and freedom from responsibility. He believes, poor chap, that if a fellow has freedom between twenty and thirty, he is better fitted to take up responsi—” Stanor stopped short suddenly, and the blood rushed to his cheeks. “I wonder!” he repeated blankly; “I wonder!”