“We shall be glad to help you.”
“Much obliged, sir. It’s only to bury him now. There’s one mercy anyways,—it don’t cost much for funerals up here. It’s just get a preacher and dig a hole and my man to make a box. Thank you, all the same.”
Here was poverty so brutal in its results that even the pretense of sentiment was absent. Rose was troubled. Before her was death, and it was new to her. She turned to her father. “Oh, can’t something be done?”
He tried a moment with unprofessional awkwardness to find the pulse. There was none he could feel. “What did the doctor say? What is the matter with the boy, Mrs. Colkett?”
“He left some medicine stuff; but laws! the child couldn’t take it. The doctor he says it’s diphthery, or something like that. I don’t rightly know. It don’t matter none.”
All this was said in a slow monotone, as if, Rose thought,—almost as if the woman, the mother, had been an uninterested spectator. After a pause she added, in the same slow voice:
“If he’s goin’ he’ll go, and that’s all there is of it.”
At the word diphtheria, Lyndsay recoiled, pushing Rose back from the bed. “Harry!” he exclaimed. “It was that! Go out, Rose! Go at once!”
“Lord, is it ketchin’?” said the woman, shrinking back from the bed. “That fool never said so. If I’m to git it, I guess the mischief’s done. If Joe he gits it, Hiram’ll have to make the box.”
“Come away, Rose.”