"Very well. I am not condemning my father. He was without conscious malice, and he did his best, poor man. I dare say, after all, that he was like most of us: so thoroughly pleased with his own life that he couldn't imagine doing any better for the world than giving it another life of precisely the same kind. Anyhow, I never was intended by nature for a doctor, still less for a surgeon, as you will see. The truth is, I was afraid."
"Afraid? You!" Holt laughed at the idea. "I don't believe it," he said.
"I was. I was afraid of two things: old age and death. They were the twin horrors of my boyhood. They are still my twin horrors."
"Then, considering how you have run after death and sidestepped old age, it looks to me as if——"
"Thank you, George; but, if you will only listen a little longer, I think you will understand. While I was still very small, my father—he drove about on his professional calls in a buggy: the old-fashioned way—was kicked in the head by his horse. He never really recovered, and yet, for a long time, he was not in a condition that peremptorily demanded treatment. What actually resulted was a disease rare enough, I dare say, but quite well known: he developed premature and rapid senility. It all happened, once it got under way, in six months. In that time I saw him—I, a mere boy—become, day by day, a doting idiot.
"Young as I was, I called in, of my own initiative, a Boston specialist.
"'There is nothing to do, my boy,' he told me, 'except wait for the end. Meanwhile make your father as comfortable as you can. What you see going on in him is just what begins to go on in every human being from the moment of birth: Old Age. Here, of course, it is specialised and malignantly accelerated. It is senility; that is to say, it is, though here abnormally magnified, an essentially normal phenomenon. Old age, my boy; old age.'"
Stainton wet his lips with wine.
"I can see the specialist yet as he said it," he presently went on, "and I am not likely to forget what it made me feel. There must have been some neighbour about at the time, or the housekeeper, but it remains in my memory as an interview between him and me alone. I did the only thing to be done: I bore it. I hated to have my father sent to an institution—which shows that I was very young indeed,—and so I simply nursed him along, the housekeeper and I doing the best we could.
"It was ugly, and it got worse every day. We could see it get worse. It was—it was Hell. There are things, lots of them, about it that I just couldn't tell you. I lived in a fascinated terror, and all the time I kept saying to myself: