Death Comes Without Warning — North and South

Mr. Hale has been declining without anyone quite tracking the depth of the decline. In the chapter's early sections, Margaret is managing her own moral weight, the lie she told Thornton, with a severity that reaches its harshest formulation here, the faithlessness that gave birth to that abasing falsehood. She is also managing the household, her father's grief-induced abstraction, and the ongoing correspondence with Frederick in Cadiz. Hale spends the chapter in a state of quiet diminishment. He visits friends, including Bell at Oxford, with the energy of a man trying to outrun something. Gaskell notes, in the chapter's most restrained elegiac passage, that if someone had had a prophetic eye they would have seen the angel standing very close and beckoning. That night, Hale goes to bed and does not wake up. The news comes to Margaret through a face before words. She reads it from the expression of the person who comes to tell her, and her response is broken and entirely correct: incomplete sentences that know what they mean without being able to finish themselves, arriving finally at the only thing left to say: papa.