"You are right to come back," he said, in a voice which, although abstracted, was strangely calm. "He told you to leave the house for ever, did he not? But I think that--now--he would rather that you stayed. He told me that I might do for you what I chose."
The lad's head was bent still lower. He did not say a word.
"So," said Brian, leaning against the great oak bannisters as if he were utterly exhausted by fatigue, "so--if you stay--you will only be doing--what, perhaps, he wishes now. You need not be afraid."
"You are the master--now," murmured Hugo from between his fingers.
It was the last speech that Brian would have expected to hear from his cousin's lips. It cut him to the heart.
"Don't say so!" he cried, in a stifled voice. "Good God! to think that I--I--should profit by my brother's death!" And Hugo, lifting up his head, saw that the young man's frame was shaken by shuddering horror from head to foot. "I shall never be master here," he said.
Hugo raised his head with a look of wonder. Brian's feeling was quite incomprehensible to him.
"He was always a good brother to me," Brian went on in a shaken voice, more to himself than to his cousin, "and a kind friend to you so long as you kept straight and did not disgrace us by your conduct. You had no right to complain, whatever he might do or say to you. You ought to mourn for him--you ought to regret him bitterly--bitterly--while I--I----"
"Do not you mourn for him, then?" said Hugo, when the pause that followed Brian's speech had become insupportable to him.
"If I were only in his place I should be happy," said Brian, passionately. Then he turned upon Hugo with something like fierceness, but it was the fierceness of a prolonged and half-suppressed agony of pain. "Do you feel nothing? Do you come into his house, knowing that he is dead, and have not a word of sorrow for your own behaviour to him while he lived? Come with me and look at him--look at his face, and remember what he did for you when you were a boy--what he has done for you during the last eight years."
He seized Hugo by the arm and compelled him to rise; but the lad, with a face blanched by terror, absolutely refused to move from the spot.
"Not to-night--I can't--I can't!" he said, his dark eyes dilating, and his very lips turning white with fear. "To-morrow, Brian--not to-night."