“Yes. Florrie told me. Twice. Can I do anything?”
“I’ll bring her round,” said Anne. “But you can do something. You can go to Sam at his office and tell him he’s wanted here. Tell him I want him, and there’s news for him. Send Florrie up as you go, and you needn’t take that horsewhip with you, neither.”
“No. I needn’t take it now.”
So Dubby, Effie’s brother, went out on an embassy for Anne. “Feeling it? Feeling?” he thought, “you God-abandoned devil, what right have you to feel? A journalist. A looker-on. There’s a story in this for you. There’s the guts of a story given away to you with a cup of tea... on, no, we didn’t have the tea; given neat, and you can’t be decently grateful. What’s the title? ‘The Charwoman’s Son’? No, damned if it is. Something about brother. Brother! Yes, you blighter, brother... brother, and proud of it. ‘Pride of Kin.’ That’ll do, and God help me to live up to it.” He turned into Sam’s office and delivered his message in a cold, unemotional voice. It seemed that Effie, brave herself, was the cause of bravery in others.
“Effie! My mother! What have you to do with them?” asked Sam, amazed.
“I’ve given you a message,” said the taciturn herald.
“But what’s behind it, Dubby? Is Effie ill?”
Stewart was silent.
“Is she—dead?”
Dubby was tempted to say he didn’t know. It; seemed to him that things went too happily with Branstone, that it was fit, if only for the twenty minutes which it would take for him to reach Busholme, to let Sam think that Effie might be dead, to let him taste the flavour of torture. Dubby suffered and would suffer, not for twenty minutes but, he gloomily anticipated, for a lifetime. Let Sam have his minutes of it! Then he remembered he was Effie’s brother, and before Sam had his hat and coat on, malice had left him. “It’s all right, man,” he said. “She’s neither ill nor dead. They’ve got good news for you.”