“Thank you, sir, kindly,” said the sick man, feebly.  “But I’m past doin’ anything for now.  Doctor’s giv’n me up; he gives me a week.  But thank you all the same.”

He closed his eyes for a moment; and then, looking round quickly, fingering the counterpane, he said, “Ah, sir, this isn’t a place for you to be in; but I take it very kindly of you.  Ah!  Ah!  It seems as if it might have been made a bit easier, might dyin’.  It’s hard work—­it’s terrible hard.  It’s bad enough by itself, having to go out into the dark—­and all alone; but it’s full of worse terrors than even that.  The air’s full of them.  When I am lyin’ here still, with my eyes shut, prayin’ for it all to be over, I seem to hear them buzzin’ and whisperin’ in the air.  Then it comes, all on a sudden, on me—­here”—­putting his hand to his heart.  “It makes me sick and trembling—­with fear and horror—­I can’t bear it.  It’s comin’ now.  Ah!  Ah!  Ah!”

I remember feeling inexpressibly shocked and horrified.  I was not used to such scenes.  The room seemed to swim; I could hardly stand or see.  To settle myself, I spoke to the woman about wines and medicines; but I seemed to hear my own voice hollow and from a distance, and started at the sound of it.

But Arthur knelt simply down by the bedside and said, “I think it will make it easier if you can only fix your thoughts on one thing.  I know the effort is hard; but think that there’s a loving hand waiting to take yours; there’s One that loves you, better than you have ever loved anyone yourself, waiting the other side of the darkness.  Oh, only think of that, and it will not be hard!  Dear friend,” he said—­“for I may call you that—­we have all of us the same passage before us, but we have all the same hope:  and He hears the words you speak to Him.  He has been here, He is here now, to listen to your very thoughts.  He has seen your trouble, and wished He could help you—­why He can not I am not able to tell you; but it will all be well.

“Let me say one prayer with you.”  And he began in his low quiet voice.  The woman knelt down beside him, shaken with sobbing.  Till, at the words “Suffer us not, for any pains of death, to fall from thee,” poor George put out his old withered hand and took Arthur’s, and smiled through his pain—­“the first time he ever smiled since his illness began,” his wife told us after his death, “and he smiled many times after that.”

He did not speak to us again; the effort had been too great.  The woman accompanied us down-stairs, showing, in her troubled officious hurry to anticipate Arthur’s wishes, and the way in which she hung about the gate as we rode out, what it had been to her.

We rode home almost in silence.  Arthur, as we got near to the lodge, turned to me, and said, half apologetically, “We must speak to simple people in the language that they can understand.  Fortunately, there is one language we can all understand.”

CHAPTER IX