“Good-bye, Captain,” answered Quick, then stretched out his hand, shook that of Orme, and without another word took his lamp and left the chamber.
An impulse prompted me to follow him, leaving Orme and Higgs discussing something before they parted. When he had walked about fifty yards in the awful silence of that vast underground town, of which the ruined tenements yawned on either side of us, the Sergeant stopped and said suddenly:
“You don’t believe in presentiments, do you, Doctor?”
“Not a bit,” I answered.
“Glad of it, Doctor. Still, I have got a bad one now, and it is that I shan’t see the Captain or you any more.”
“Then that’s a poor look-out for us, Quick.”
“No, Doctor, for me. I think you are both all right, and the Professor, too. It’s my name they are calling up aloft, or so it seems to me. Well, I don’t care much, for, though no saint, I have tried to do my duty, and if it is done, it’s done. If it’s written, it’s got to come to pass, hasn’t it? For everything is written down for us long before we begin, or so I’ve always thought. Still, I’ll grieve to part from the Captain, seeing that I nursed him as a child, and I’d have liked to know him well out of this hole, and safely married to that sweet lady first, though I don’t doubt that it will be so.”
“Nonsense, Sergeant,” I said sharply; “you are not yourself; all this work and anxiety has got on your nerves.”
“As it well might, Doctor, not but I daresay that’s true. Anyhow, if the other is the true thing, and you should all see old England again with some of the stuff in that dead-house, I’ve got three nieces living down at home whom you might remember. Don’t say nothing of what I told you to the Captain till this night’s game is played, seeing that it might upset him, and he’ll need to keep cool up to ten o’clock, and afterwards too, perhaps. Only if we shouldn’t meet again, say that Samuel Quick sent him his duty and God’s blessing. And the same on yourself, Doctor, and your son, too. And now here comes the Professor, so good-bye.”
A minute later they had left me, and I stood watching them until the two stars of light from their lanterns vanished into the blackness.