He was in the chair—the particular one, the one everybody in that house knew about and nobody mentioned. And he was sitting bolt upright with both hands on the arms of it, and the window was open to the November air, and he was fighting for every single breath.
Hannah Sedge stood in that doorway. She did not say anything. She came in, shut the door behind her, went and sat down on the floor beside that chair with her back against it, and did not touch him, and did not speak.
It went on about forty minutes. She never once told anybody how bad it was, then or afterward, including her own daughters, and she never wrote it down. At about the thirtieth minute, his hand came off the arm of that chair and found her shoulder, and Hannah Sedge put her own hand over it, and held on, and went on saying nothing at all.
And at about three, when it had passed and he could speak again, and had been sitting there for some minutes not doing it, Nicholas Ware said to the open window, "I am extremely frightened."
Hannah did not move.
"I have not said that to any person alive," he said. "Not to Pell, and not to my mother, and not to my agent. And I have been six-and-thirty years old and dying for eight of them. And I have been so extremely calm about the whole business that this county has decided I am brave, and I am not brave. I am frightened every single night of my life. And it has been getting worse for about two years. And there has not been one person in that time that I could say it to. Because the moment I say it to anybody in this house, they will be kind to me about it. And then I shall have to spend the rest of my life being a man who says frightening things and is comforted."
Hannah Sedge sat on the floor of that garden room with her hand over his. "Yes," she said.
"That is all?"
"That is all," said Hannah. "I am not going to tell you that you are brave, and I am not going to tell you it will be all right, because I do not know that it will, and you would know I was inventing it inside four seconds. You are frightened. I should be terrified. And I am going to sit on this floor until you want me to go, and that is the whole of what I have got, and I am not going to pretend it is more."