"Not your parents?"
"No; my father died when I was away at school, and my mother during my first trip abroad."
"Well," continued Stainton, "it is not pretty. We hear a lot of talk about the dignity and serenity and nobility of death. Nothing to that. Absolutely nothing. Every doctor and nurse I've ever questioned agrees: it is always a horrible wrench accompanied by details that are disgusting. There are subsidiary manifestations.—There is no dignity in terror; there is no serenity in pain. My father——I was looking towards him through the garden window. The window was open. He had found a razor. A dull razor. He may have had some idea that he was shaving. He cut his throat from ear to ear. Jugular; carotid; pneumogastric nerve. I remember the queer gurgle and the——
"Do you wonder that I came to be as much afraid of death as I was of old age? I lay awake nights, I tell you—nights and nights—interminable nights, thinking, shaking.
"It all ended only after years of fighting and one horrid failure. There was a girl—it was a good many years ago, and I had just graduated from Harvard. I fell in love with her. Her people wanted her to marry a cousin, but I think she really wanted to marry me. At any rate, one day, when we were skating together, the ice broke beneath her feet, and into the cold black water we both went.
"It seemed to me that I was hours going down—down, and that I was still longer coming up. The old fears got me. I went through all the agonies of realisation. When my head rose above water I grabbed at the ice, and it cracked to little bits between my fingers. I felt myself sinking again, and just then she—the girl I was in love with—flung an arm toward me. I shoved her away.
"We were both rescued. There were lots of people about, the water wasn't very deep, and there had been only a small percentage of risk. It would have been, had I not known what death really meant, the chance of a lifetime for a rogue to play the hero. But, you see, I was too much afraid of death. I had flung her off to save my own skin, and she neither forgot nor forgave.
"She wouldn't, of course, have anything more to do with me. She threw me over, as she had every good reason to. I cleared out and went West. She married the cousin and eighteen years ago—so I heard long after her marriage—she died as my mother had died—in childbirth."
Stainton slowly refilled his glass.
Holt shook from him the gloom of the earlier portion of Stainton's narrative. He became once more interested in the manner in which he was accustomed to be interested.