the_love_affairs_of_pixie.txt Part 19

"Except Stanor! Be kind to Stanor. He's always liked you, Honor, and he knows no one in America. Promise me to be kind to Stanor, and see him as often as you can!"

Honor's brown eyes searched Pixie's face with a curious glance. Then, rising from her chair, she crossed the room and kissed her warmly upon the cheek.

"Yes, I'll look after him. I'll do anything you want, and nothing you _don't_ want. You can trust me, my dear. Remember that, won't you?

You're a real sweet thing, Patricia!"

Pixie laughed with characteristic complacence.

"Yes; but why especially at this moment? I always _am_, aren't I? And how superfluous, me dear, to talk of trust? What have I got to trust?"

A fortnight later Geoffrey and Joan Hilliard, Stephen Glynn, and Pixie journeyed to Liverpool to see the last of the travellers. The little party stood together on the deck of the great vessel, surrounded on every side by surge and bustle, but silent themselves with the silence which falls when the heart is full. Travelling down to Liverpool they had been quite a merry party, and there had been no effort in keeping the conversation afloat; but the last moments sealed their lips. Honor drew a few yards apart with the elderly, kindly-faced maid who was her faithful attendant; Stephen Glynn and the Hilliards strolled away in an opposite direction. Pixie and her lover stood alone.

"Well, little girl... this is good-bye! Don't forget me, darling..."

Pixie gulped.

"Take care of yourself, Stanor. Be happy! ... I want you to be happy."

"I shall be wretched!" said Stanor hotly. "I'm leaving you. Oh!

Pixie--" He broke off suddenly as the last bell sounded its warning note, and bent to kiss her lips; "Good-bye, my little love!"

The tears poured down Pixie's face as she turned aside, and Geoffrey Hilliard led her tenderly down the gangway on to the landing-stage, where they stood together, tightly jammed in the crowd which watched the great steamer slowly move into the stream. Stanor and Honor were standing together leaning over the towering hull; their faces were pale, but they were smiling bravely, and Pixie wiped away her own tears and waved an answering hand. Esmeralda was holding her hand in a tender pressure; Geoffrey on one side, and Stephen Glynn on the other were regarding her with anxious solicitude. She smiled back with tremulous grat.i.tude and gripped Esmeralda's hand. Though Stanor was going, there was still much left, so many people to care and be kind.

The great vessel quivered and moved slowly forward. Honor drew a little white handkerchief from her bag and waved it in the air; on all sides the action was repeated, accompanied by cries of farewell mingled with sounds of distress. Pixie caught the sound of a sob, and craned forward to look in the face of a girl about her own age who stood on the other side of Stephen Glynn. She wore a small, close-fitting cap, which left her face fully exposed as it strained towards that moving deck, and on the small white features was printed a very extremity of anguish. She was not crying; her glazed eyes showed no trace of tears, she seemed unconscious of the deep sobs which issued from her lips; every nerve, every power was concentrated in the one effort to behold to the last possible moment one beloved face. Instinctively Pixie's eyes followed those of the girl's, and beheld a man's face gazing back, haggard, a-quiver, almost contorted with suffering. The story was plain to read.

They also were lovers--this man and this girl. They also were facing years of separation, and the moment of parting held for them the bitterness of death. Pixie O'Shaughnessy glanced from one to the other, and then thoughtfully, deliberately along the deck to the spot where stood her own lover, handsome Stanor, bending his head to overhear a remark from Honor, stroking his blonde moustache. He looked dejected, depressed; but compared with the depth of emotion on the other man's face, such meagre expressions faded into nothingness. The moment during which she gazed at his face held for Pixie the significance of years; then once more her eyes returned to the girl by her side...

With every minute now the great vessel was slipping farther and farther from the stage; the faces of her pa.s.sengers would soon cease to be distinguishable; in a few minutes they would be lost to sight, yet Pixie's gaze remained riveted on the girl by her side, and on her own face was printed a mute dismay which one onlooker at least was quick to read.

"_She understands_!" Stephen Glynn said to himself. "That girl's face has been an object lesson stronger than any words. She understands the difference."

A moment later he met Pixie's eyes, and realised afresh the truth of his diagnosis; but she drew herself up with a sort of defiance, and turned sharply aside.

In the train returning to town Pixie sat mute and pallid, and was waited upon a.s.siduously by her sister and brother. To them it seemed natural enough that the poor child should collapse after the strain of parting.

Only one person understood the deepest reason of her distress. He offered none of the conventional words of sympathy, and forebore to echo Esmeralda's rosy pictures of the future. It brought another pang to Pixie's sore heart to realise that he _understood_. "But I will be true," she repeated to herself with insistent energy; "I will be true.

I have given my word." She felt very tired and spent as she lay back in the corner of her cus.h.i.+oned seat. On heart and brain was an unaccustomed weight; her very limbs felt heavy and inert, as if the motive power had failed. Virtue had gone out of her. At the sight of that anguished face, the years of Pixie's untroubled girlhood had come to an end. Henceforth she was a woman, carrying her own burden. "But I will be true," she repeated gallantly; "I will be true!"

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

PIXIE SEEKS ADVICE.

A tall young man lay stretched upon a narrow bed which filled an entire wall of the one and only sitting-room in a diminutive London flat. On the wall opposite was a fireplace and a small sideboard; against the third wall stood a couple of upright chairs. In the centre of the room stood a table. A wicker arm-chair did duty for an invalid tray, and held a selection of pipes, books, and writing materials, also a bottle of medicine, and a plate of unappetising biscuits.

The young man took up one of the biscuits, nibbled a crumb from the edge, and aimed the remainder violently at a picture at the other end of the room. It hit, and the biscuit broke into pieces, but the gla.s.s remained intact, a result which seemed far from satisfactory to the onlooker. He fumbled impatiently for matches with which to light his pipe, touched the box with the tips of his outstretched fingers, and jerked it impatiently, whereupon it rolled on to the floor to a spot just a couple of inches beyond the utmost stretch of his arm. There it lay--obvious and aggravating, tempting, baffling, inaccessible. Pipe and tobacco lay at hand to supply the soothing which he so sorely needed at the end of a lonely, suffering day, and for the want of that box they might as well have been a mile away! A bell was within reach, but what use to ring that when no one was near to hear? The slovenly woman who called herself a working housekeeper found it necessary to sally forth each afternoon on long shopping expeditions, and during her absence her master had to fend for himself as best he might.

Dislocation of the knee was the young man's malady, just a sharp, swift rush at cricket, a slip on the dry gra.s.s, and Pat O'Shaughnessy shuddered every time he thought of the hours and days which followed that fall. He had asked to be taken home, for the tiny flat was a new possession, and as such dear to his heart. And to his home they carried him, and there he had lain already for longer than he cared to think.

He had progressed to the point when he had been able to dismiss an excellent but uncongenial nurse, and manage with an hour's a.s.sistance morning and night; and what with reading the newspapers, smoking his pipe, and writing an occasional letter the first part of the day pa.s.sed quickly enough.

Lunch was served at one o'clock on a papier-mache tray spread with a crumpled tray cloth. It was a tepid, tasteless, unappetising meal, for the working housekeeper knew neither how to work nor to cook, and Pat invariably sent it away almost untasted; yet every day he looked forward afresh to the advent of one o'clock and the appearance of the tray. It was something to happen, something to do, a change from the reading, of which he was already getting tired. But, after lunch, after he had wakened from the short siesta; and realised that it was not yet three o'clock, and that six, seven hours still remained to be lived through before he could reasonably hope to settle for the night--that was a dreary time indeed, and Pat, whose interests lay all outdoors, knew no means of lightening it.

For the first week of his confinement Pat had had a string of visitors.

The members of his cricket team had appeared to express sympathy and encouragement; some of the men against whom he had been playing had also put in an appearance; "fellows" had come up from "the office," but in the busy life of London a man who goes _on_ being ill is apt to find himself left alone before many weeks have pa.s.sed. There was only one man who never failed to put in an appearance at some hour of the day, and on that man's coming Pat O'Shaughnessy this afternoon concentrated every power in his possession.

"They say if you wish hard enough you can make a fellow do what you like. If there's any truth in it, Glynn ought to come along pretty soon. How am I going to lie here all afternoon and stare at those miserable matches? That wretched woman might be buying the town ...

wish to goodness she'd fetch something fit to eat. If that doctor fellow won't tell me to-morrow how much longer I have to lie here, I'll--I'll get up and walk, just to spite him!" Pat jerked defiantly and immediately gave a groan of pain. Not much chance of walking yet awhile!

He wriggled to the edge of the sofa, and made another unsuccessful stretch for the matchbox, but those baffling two inches refused to be mastered. Pat looked around in a desperate search for help, seized a biscuit, and aimed it carefully for the farther edge of the box, which, hit at the right angle, might perhaps have been twitched nearer to the sofa, but though Pat had considerable skill in the art of throwing, he had no luck this afternoon. Biscuit after biscuit was hurled with increasing violence, as temper suffered from the strain of failure, and each time the matchbox jumped still farther _away_, while another shower of biscuit crumbs bespattered the carpet. Then at last when the plate was emptied, and the last hope gone, deliverance came at the sound of the opening of the front door, and a quick, well-known whistle. Glynn!

No one else knew the secret of the hidden key. Pat halloed loudly in response, and the next moment Stephen stood in the doorway, looking with bewildered eyes at the bespattered carpet.

"What's this? Playing Aunt Sally? Rather a wanton waste of biscuits, isn't it?"

"Try 'em, and see! Soft as dough. Give me that matchbox, Glynn, like a good soul. It fell off my chair, and I've been lying here pining for a smoke, and making pot shots of it, till I felt half mad.--If you only knew--"

Stephen Glynn _did_ know. It was that knowledge which brought him regularly day by day to the little flat at the top of eighty odd stairs.

He walked across the room, his limp decidedly less in evidence through the pa.s.sage of the years, reclaimed the matchbox, and seated himself on the edge of the couch.

"Light up, old fellow! It will do you good."

Pat struck the match and sucked luxuriously. There was no need to make conversation to Glynn. He was a comfortable fellow who always understood. It was good to see him sitting there, to look at his fine, grave face, and realise that boredom was over, and the happiest hour of the day begun.

"I say, Glynn, I _made_ you, come! Mesmerised you. It drives a fellow crazy to be done by a couple of inches. They say if you concentrate your thoughts--"

"I arranged this morning to call at five o'clock. I should say by the look of things you had concentrated on biscuits. ... Where's that old woman?" Glynn inquired.

"Shopping. Always is. And never buys anything by the taste of the food. You should have seen my lunch! I'll be a living skeleton at this rate."

Pat spoke laughingly, but the hearer frowned, and looked quickly at the sharpened face, on which weeks of solitary confinement had left their mark.

"Why don't you round into her?"

"Daren't! Might make off and leave me in the lurch. They do, you know.

Fellows have told me. Any one is better than no one at all when you are minus a leg."

"And about that letter? The time limit runs out to-morrow. You know what I threatened?"

Pat shrugged impatiently.

"You and your threats! What's the sense in worrying when it's got to _end_ in worrying, and can do no good? I've told you till I'm tired-- the Hilliards are abroad, d.i.c.k Victor is down with rheumatism, and Bridgie makes sure he's going to die every time his finger aches. She'd leave him if I died first, I suppose, but I wouldn't make too sure even of that. 'Twould have finished her altogether to know that I was lying here all these weeks. However!" Pat shrugged again, "you've got your way, bad luck to you! Bridgie wrote to ask me to run down over a Sunday, to cheer Victor, so there was nothing for it but to own up.

She'll write me reams of advice and send embrocations. Serve you jolly well right if I rubbed them on _you_ instead!"

"Fire away, I don't mind! Your muscles would be the better for a little exercise."