“Nothing but regret that it——”
“I don’t mean that stuff. Regret, indeed! regret won’t undo it. I mean as to my getting about again. Will it be ages first?”
“We don’t hear a word.”
“If they were to keep me here a month, Ludlow, I should go mad. Rampant. You shut up, old woman.”
For the nurse had interfered, telling him he must not excite himself.
“My ankle’s hurt; but I believe it is not half as bad as a regular fracture: and my back’s bruised. Well, what’s a bruise? Nothing. Of course there’s pain and stiffness, and all that; but so there is after a bad fight, or a thrashing. And they talk about my lying here for three or four weeks! Catch me.”
One thing was evident: they had not allowed Wolfe to suspect the gravity of the case. Downstairs we had an inkling, I don’t remember whence gathered, that it might possibly end in death. There was a suspicion of some internal injury that we could not get to know of; and it is said that even Mr. Carden, with all his surgical skill, could not get at it, either. Any way, the prospect of recovery for Barrington was supposed to be of the scantiest; and it threw a gloom over us.
A sad mishap was to occur. Of course no one in their senses would have let Barrington learn the danger he was in; especially while there was just a chance that the peril would be surmounted. I read a book lately—I, Johnny Ludlow—where a little child met with an accident; and the first thing the people around him did, father, doctors, nurses, was to inform him that he would be a cripple for the rest of his days. That was common sense with a vengeance: and about as likely to occur in real life as that I could turn myself into a Dutchman. However, something of the kind did happen in Barrington’s case, but through inadvertence. Another uncle came over from Ireland; an old man; and in talking with Featherstone he spoke out too freely. They were outside Barrington’s door, and besides that, supposed that he was asleep. But he had awakened then; and heard more than he ought. The blue-room always seemed to have an echo in it.
“So it’s all up with me, Ludlow?”
I was by his bedside when he suddenly said this, in the twilight of the summer evening. He had been lying quite silent since I entered, and his face had a white, still look on it, never before noticed there.