“It was so awful, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head.... Oh, I should die also.”
Bertha could scarcely realise that her husband was by her side in the flesh, alive and well.
“Would you be sorry if I died?” she asked him.
“But you’re not going to do anything of the sort,” he said, cheerily.
“Sometimes I’m so frightened, I don’t believe I’ll get over it.”
He laughed at her, and his joyous tones were peculiarly comforting. She made him sit by her side and held his strong hands, the hands which to her were the visible signs of his powerful manhood. She stroked them and kissed the palms. She was quite broken with the past emotions; her limbs trembled and her eyes glistened with tears.
Chapter XVI
THE nurse arrived, bringing new apprehension. She was an old woman who, for twenty years, had helped the neighbouring gentry into the world; and she had a copious store of ghastly anecdote. In her mouth the terrors of birth were innumerable, and she told her stories with a cumulative art that was appalling. Of course, in her mind, she acted for the best; Bertha was nervous, and the nurse could imagine no better way of reassuring her than to give detailed accounts of patients who for days had been at death’s door, given up by all the doctors, and yet had finally recovered.
Bertha’s quick invention magnified the coming anguish till, for thinking of it, she could hardly sleep. The impossibility even to conceive it rendered it more formidable; she saw before her a long, long agony, and then death. She could not bear Edward to be out of her sight.
“Why, of course you’ll get over it,” he said. “I promise you it’s nothing to make a fuss about.”