"Oh, my God! My God! Tell me, how was it?"
"We were going to Havre, he and I; he jumped overboard in the night to rescue a stowaway."
She drew herself up with pride, the bleared eyes shone with an unnatural light. "There! He was a sportsman to the last! He played wing three-quarter for England when he was nineteen, and the same year he scored fifty-six against the M.C.C. I was so proud, he was so handsome! And now he's gone! Oh, my boy, my boy, my lovely boy! Oh God, take me too." She fell forward on her face.
Carstairs picked her up and threw water over her; he called a servant, and hurried out for a doctor.
She was dead—quite dead—her heart, the doctor said.
Carstairs went away and hurried north, he was a day overdue as it was. He explained the matter as much as he could to the hard-headed ex-fitter.
"Ay!" the latter said, shaking his head, and there was a world of sympathy in that shake of the head. "It's a bad business, lad, a bad business." He had a commercial head equal to the best in the world, this man, but his heart was exactly in the right place, too. He broached the subject then to Carstairs that he was going to retire, and offered him a much more important position in the firm, which ultimately led (with the great success of his many patents) to a partnership.
For six months or so he was kept hard at the grindstone, external affairs troubled him not at all; he heard that Bessie Bevengton was engaged to Whitworth, who had got a good appointment on the staff of Sir Donald Cox of Westminster; Bounce never ceased to marvel at the manner in which the hunchback had broken out of the double lashing he had put round his wrists; his brother Stephen had got a picture hung in the academy: all these things seemed to affect Jack Carstairs like vague unimportant rumours, for he knew, in his soul, that the girl was his, waiting for him, and he wanted to go and fetch her: only, sometimes, in the early morning, when the atmosphere outside was some ten or fifteen degrees below freezing point, and he wallowed in his cold bath, breathing deeply and steadily through the nose, then with the exhilarating reaction of his blood as he briskly wiped down with a rough towel, these whispers from an external world would find an echo in his brain. "By Jove, I must write and congratulate old Whitworth," or "Jolly glad Stephen's done something at last."
Then he got a spell, and went to London. He stayed with his artist brother.
"We'll go to the opera, and hear the new singer," the latter said on their first evening together.