"I must wait; I must see my mother," he repeated, when the doctor pressed him to come away. "Oh, I know that she will not want to see me; she will never wish to look on my face again, but I must see her and remind her that--that--she has one son left--who loves her still." And then Brian's voice broke and he said no more. Doctor Muir shook his head. He did not believe that Mrs. Luttrell would be much comforted by his reminder. She had never seemed to love her second son.
"Where is Hugo?" the doctor asked, in an undertone, when the silence had lasted some time.
All this time no sound had reached them from the interior of the room where the two women sat together. Their voices must have been very low, their sobs subdued. Angela had not cried out as Mrs. Luttrell had done when she received the fatal news. No movement, no sign of grief was to be heard.
Brian lifted up his grief-stricken eyes at last, and fixed them on the doctor's face.
"Are they dead?" he muttered, strangely. "Will they never speak again?"
Doctor Muir did not immediately reply. He had placed the candle on a wooden bracket in the wall, and its flickering beams lighted, the dark corridor so feebly that until now he had scarcely caught a glimpse of the young man's haggard looks. They frightened him a little. He himself took life so easily--fretted so little against the inevitable--that he scarcely understood the look of anguish which an hour or two of trouble had imprinted upon Brian Luttrell's face. It was the kind of sorrow which has been known to turn a man's hair from black to white in a single night.
"I will knock at the door," said the doctor. But before he could carry out his intention, footsteps were heard, and the handle of the door was turned. Both men drew back involuntarily into the shadow as Mrs. Luttrell and Angela came forth.
Angela had been weeping, but there were no signs of tears upon the elder woman's face. Rigid, white, and hard, it looked almost as if it were carved in stone; a mute image of misery too deep for tears. There were lines upon her brow that had never been seen there before; her lips were tightly compressed; her eyes fiercely bright. She had thrown a black shawl over her head on coming away from the drawing-room into the draughty corridors. This shawl, which she had forgotten to remove, together with the dead blackness of her dress, gave her pale face a strangely spectral appearance. Clinging to her, and yet guiding her, came Angela, with the white flower crushed and drooping from her hair. She also was ashy pale, but there was a more natural and tender look of grief to be read in her wet eyes and on her trembling lips than in the stony tranquility of Richard Luttrell's mother.