"How would he be the better?" the Rector asked again presently. "And if I say to him now, 'Lizarann is dying, but you cannot be beside her when she dies'—why—will not that be quite the worst thing of all? I can only judge by imagining myself in his position. Poor Jim!"
"You must do as you think best, Athel dear," said Aunt Bessy. She was not a tower of strength in a crisis, this good lady; but she wouldn't hinder, though she couldn't help. Only, there are ways and ways of not hindering. Her brother-in-law would have liked another sample, this time one with less flavour of protest.
"Just look at it this way, Bessy," said he. "If I could say to Jim, 'The doctors are sending bad accounts of the little one, and you must come with me straight away to see how things are going'—well!—that would be quite another thing. But to prepare him for bad news, and the rest of it, and then leave him alone in the cottage...!"
"He will be alone in the cottage. I had forgotten that. But it won't be so soon ... surely...?" The hushed voice shows what is referred to—the "arch-fear in a terrible form" on whose face Europe at least cannot bear to look. How rarely does even the bravest among us speak of the grim terror by name, with reference to a particular case! What does it matter? Ways of saying the same thing are provided by conventions that seem quite alive to the whereabouts of the sting of Death, of the victory of the Grave. If the language of the daily press is any evidence on the subject, the Immortalism of the Creeds is only skin-deep. Disorders terminate fatally; folk breathe their last; they share the common lot; they succumb; none is so old and weary with the storms of Fate that the vernacular forecast of his release will not "anticipate the worst." But nobody dies, except paupers, in contemporary speech. Did you ever hear of a disorder "terminating fatally" in a workhouse? Or perhaps insolvents die—was one ever known to succumb?
Aunt Bessy was flinching before the inexorable, and pleading for useless respite. "I know what it means," said the Rector, "when telegrams like this begin. The old story!" He put the point aside with a sigh. "Ah well!—anyhow, Jim may be alone for some days. It isn't even as if I could be with him now and again. I must go to this Memorial business at Chipping Chester, and I can't get off stopping to marry Audrey: she would never forgive me." He enumerated other engagements—things that would keep him absent a week—even longer. They were matters quite outside the story.
"When do you suppose old Margy will be back?"
"How can I tell? When do you suppose her niece's baby intends to be born?"