Читать книгу Under False Pretences - Sergeant Adeline - Страница 14

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It was already dusk under the thick branches of the wood, although the setting sun shone brilliantly upon the loch. Luttrell's friends were to dine with him, and as dinner was not until eight o'clock, they made rather a long circuit, and had some distance to return. Brian had joined Archie Grant; the second visitor was behind them with the keeper; Richard Luttrell had been accidentally separated from the others, and was supposed to be in front. Archie was laughing and talking gaily; Brian, whose mind ran much upon Hugo, was somewhat silent. But even he was no proof against Archie's enthusiasm, when the young fellow suddenly seized him by the arm, and pointed out a fine capercailzie which the dogs had just put up.

Brian gave a quick glance to his companion, who, however, had handed his gun to the keeper a short time before, and shook his head deprecatingly. Brian lifted his gun. It seemed to him that something was moving amongst the branches beyond the bird, and for a moment he hesitated—then pulled the trigger. And just as he touched it, Archie sprang forward with a cry.

"Don't fire! Are you blind? Don't you see what you are doing!"

But it was too late.

The bird flew away unharmed, but the shot seemed to have found another mark. There was the sound of a sudden, heavy fall. To Brian's horror and dismay he saw that a man had been standing amongst the brushwood and smaller trees just beyond the ridge of rising ground towards which his gun had been directed. The head only of this man could have been visible from the side of the bank on which Brian was standing; and even the head could be seen very indistinctly. As Brian fired, it seemed to him, curiously enough, as if another report rang in his ears beside that of his own gun. Was any one else shooting in the wood? Or had his senses played him false in the horror of the moment, and caused him to mistake an echo for another shot? He had not time to settle the question. For a moment he stood transfixed; then he rushed forward, but Archie had been before him. The young man was kneeling by the prostrate form and as Brian advanced, he looked up with a face as white as death.

"Keep back," he cried, scarcely knowing what he said. "Don't look—don't look, for a moment; perhaps he'll open his eyes: perhaps he is not dead. Keep back!"

Dead! Brian never forgot the sick feeling of dread which then came over him. What had he done? He did not hear Archie's excited words; he came hurriedly to the side of the man, who lay lifeless upon the ground with his head on the young fellow's knee. Archie looked up at him with dilated terrified eyes. And Brian stood stock still.

It was Richard who lay before him, dead as a stone. He had dropped without a cry, perhaps even without a pang. There was a little purple mark upon his temple, from which a drop of black blood had oozed. A half-smile still lingered on his mouth; his face had scarcely changed colour, his attitude was natural, and yet the spectators felt that Death had set his imprint on that tranquil brow. Richard Luttrell's day was over; he had gone to a world where he might perhaps stand in need of that mercy which he had been only too ready to deny to others who had erred.

Archie's elder brother, Donald Grant, and the keeper were hurrying to the spot. They found Brian on his knees beside the body, feeling with trembling hands for the pulse that beat no longer. His face was the colour of ashes, but as yet he had not uttered a single word. Donald Grant spoke first, with an anxious glance towards his brother.

"How——" he began, and then stopped short, for Archie had silenced him with an almost imperceptible sign towards Brian Luttrell.

"We heard two shots," muttered Donald, as he also bent over the prostrate form.

"Only one, I think," said Archie.

His brother pulled him aside.

"I tell you I heard two," he said in a hushed voice. "You didn't fire?"

"I had no gun."

"Was it Brian?"

"Yes. He shot straight at—at Richard; didn't see him a bit. He was always short-sighted."

Donald gave his brother a look, and then turned to the keeper, whose face was working with unwonted emotion at the sight before him.

"We must get help," he said, gravely. "He must be carried home, and some one must go to Dunmuir. Brian, shall I send to the village for you?"

He touched Brian's shoulder as he spoke. The young man rose, and turned his pale face and lack-lustre eyes towards his friend as though he could not understand the question. Donald, repeated it, changing the form a little.

"Shall I send for the men?" he said.

Brian pressed his hand to his forehead.

"The men?" he said, vaguely.

"To carry—him to the house."

Donald was compassionate, but he was uncomprehending of his friend's apparent want of emotion. He wanted to stir him up to a more definite show of feeling. And to some extent he got his wish.

A look of horror came into Brian's eyes; a shudder ran through his frame.

"Oh, my God!" he whispered, hoarsely, "is it I who have done this thing?"

And then he threw up his hands as though to screen his eyes from the sight of the dead face, staggered a few steps away from the little group, and fell fainting to the ground.

It was a sad procession that wound its way through the woodland paths at last, and stopped at the gate of Netherglen. Brian had recovered sufficiently to walk like a mourner behind the covered stretcher on which his brother's form was laid; but he paid little attention to the whispers that were exchanged from time to time between the Grants and the men who carried that melancholy burden to the Luttrells' door. On coming to himself after his swoon he wept like a child for a little time, but had then collected himself and become sadly quiet and calm. Still, he was scarcely awake to anything but the mere fact of his great misfortune, and it was not until the question was actually put to him, that he asked himself whether he could bear to take the news to his mother of the death of her eldest son.

Brave as he was, he shrank from the task. "No, no!" he said, looking wildly into Donald's face. "Not I. I am not the one to tell her, that I—that I——"

A great sob burst from him in spite of his usual self-control. Donald Grant turned aside; he did not know how to bear the spectacle of grief such as this. And there were others to be thought of beside Mrs. Luttrell. Miss Vivian—Richard Luttrell's promised wife—was in the house; Donald Grant's own sisters were still waiting for him and Archie. It was impossible to go up to the house without preparing its tenants for the blow that had fallen upon them. Yet who would prepare them?

"Here is the doctor," said Archie, turning towards the road. "He will tell them."

Doctor Muir had long been a trusted friend of the Luttrell family. He had liked Richard rather less than any other member of the household, but he was sincerely grieved and shocked by the news which had greeted him as he went upon his rounds. The Grants drew him aside and gave him their account of the accident before he spoke to Brian. The doctor had tears in his eyes when they had finished. He went up to Brian and pressed his unresponsive hand.

"My boy—my boy!" he said; "don't be cast down. It was the will of God." He pulled out a handkerchief and rubbed away a tear from his eyes as he spoke. "Shall I just see your poor mother? I'll step up to the house, and ye'll wait here till my return. Eh, but it's awful, awful!" The old man uttered the last words more to himself than to Brian, whose hand he again shook mechanically before he turned away.

Brian followed him closely. "Doctor," he said, in a low, husky voice, "I'll go with you."

"You'll do nothing of the sort," said Dr. Muir, sharply. "Why, man, your face would be enough to tell the news, in all conscience. You may walk to the door with me—the back door, if you please—but further you shall not come until I have seen Mistress Luttrell. Here, give me your arm; you're not fit to go alone with that white face. And how did it happen, my poor lad?"

"I don't know—I can't tell," said Brian, slowly. "I saw the bird rise from the bank—and then I saw something moving—but I thought I must be mistaken; and I fired, and he—he fell! By my hand, too! Oh, Doctor, is there a God in Heaven to let such things be?"

"Hut, tut, tut, but we'll have no such words as these, my bairn. If the Lord lets these things happen, we'll maybe find that He's had some good reason for't. He's always in the right. And ye must just learn to bow yourself, Brian, to the will of the Almighty, for there's no denying but He's laid a sore trial upon ye, my poor lad, and one that will be hard to bear."

"I shall never bear it," said Brian, who caught but imperfectly the drift of the doctor's simple words of comfort. "It is too hard—too hard to bear."

They had reached the back door, by which Dr. Muir preferred to make his entrance. He uttered a few words to the servants about the accident that had occurred, and then sent a message asking to speak alone with Mrs. Luttrell. The answer came back that Mrs. Luttrell would see him in the study. And thither the doctor went, leaving Brian in one of the cold, stone corridors that divided the kitchens and offices from the living-rooms of the house. Meanwhile, the body of Richard Luttrell was silently carried into one of the lower rooms until another place could be prepared for its reception.

How long Brian waited, with his forehead, pressed against the wall, deaf and blind to everything but an overmastering dread of his mother's agony which had taken complete possession of him, he did not know. He only knew that after a certain time—an eternity it seemed to him—a bitter, wailing cry came to his ears; a cry that pierced through the thick walls and echoed down the dark passages, although it was neither loud nor long. But there was something in the intensity of the grief that it expressed which seemed to give it a peculiarly penetrating quality. Ah, it was this sound that Brian now knew he had been dreading; this sound that cut him to the heart.

Dr. Muir, on coming hurriedly out from the study, found Brian in the corridor with his hands pressed to his ears as if to keep out the sound of that one fearful cry.

"Come away, my boy," he said, pitifully. "We can do no good here. Where is Miss Vivian?"

Brian's hands dropped to his sides. He kept his eyes fixed on the doctor's face as if he would read his very soul. And for the moment Doctor Muir could not meet that piercing gaze. He tried to pass on, but Brian laid his hand on his arm.

"Tell me all," he said. "What does my mother say? Has it killed her?"

"Killed her? People are not so easily killed by grief, my dear Mr. Brian," said the doctor. "Come away, come away. Your mother is not just herself, and speaks wildly, as mothers are wont to do when they lose their first-born son. We'll not mind what she says just now. Where is Miss Vivian? It is she that I want to see."

"I understand," said Brian, taking away his hands from the doctor's arm and hiding his face with them, "my mother will not see me; she will not forgive my—my—accursed carelessness——"

"Worse than that!" muttered the doctor to himself, but, fortunately, Brian did not hear. And at that moment a slender woman's figure appeared at the end of the corridor; it hesitated, moved slowly forward, and then approached them hastily.

"Is Mrs. Luttrell ill?" asked Angela.

She had a candle in her hand, and the beams fell full upon her soft, white dress and the Eucharis lily in her hair. She had twisted a string of pearls three times round her neck—it was an heirloom of great value. The other ornaments were all Richard's gifts; two broad bands of gold set with pearls and diamonds upon her arms, and the diamond ring which had been the pledge of her betrothal. She was very pale, and her eyes were large with anxiety as she asked her question of the two men, whom her appearance had struck with dumbness. Brian turned away with a half-audible groan. Doctor Muir looked at her intently from beneath his shaggy, grey eyebrows, and did not speak.

"I know there is something wrong, or you would not stand like this outside Mrs. Luttrell's door," said Angela, with a quiver in her sweet voice. "And Richard is not here! Where is Richard?"

There was silence.

"Something has happened to Richard? Some accident—some——"

She stopped, looked at Brian's averted face, and shivered as if an icy wind had passed over her. Doctor Muir took the candle from her hand, then opened his lips to speak. But she stopped him. "Don't tell me," she said. "I am going to his mother. I shall learn it in a moment from her face. Besides—I know—I know."

The delicate tinting had left her cheeks and lips; her eyes were distended, her limbs trembled as she moved. Doctor Muir stood aside, giving her the benefit of keen professional scrutiny as she passed; but he was satisfied. She was not a woman who would either faint or scream in an emergency. She might suffer, but she would suffer in silence rather than add by word or deed one iota to the burden of suffering that another might have to bear. Therefore, Doctor Muir let her enter the room in which the widowed mother wept, and prayed in his heart that Angela Vivian might receive the news of her bereavement in a different spirit from that shown by Mrs. Luttrell.

The noise of shuffling feet, of muffled voices, of stifled sobs, reached the ears of the watchers in the corridor from another part of the house. Doctor Muir had sent a messenger to bid the men advance with their sad burden to a side door which opened into a sitting-room not very generally used. The housekeeper, an old and faithful servant of the family, had already prepared it, according to the doctor's orders, for the reception of the dead. The visitors hurriedly took their departure; Donald Grant's wagonette had been at the door some little time, and, as soon as he had seen poor Richard Luttrell's remains laid upon a long table in the sitting-room, he drove silently away, with Archie on the box-seat beside him, and the three girls in the seats behind, crying over the troubles of their friends.

Doctor Muir and Brian Luttrell remained for some time in the passage outside the study door. The doctor tried several times to persuade his companion to leave his post, but Brian refused to do so.

"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.

"I do not know."

"He will be home to-night?"

"I do not know."

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.

Brian could not contain himself. He rushed forward and threw himself on the ground at his mother's feet. Mrs. Luttrell shrank back a little and clutched Angela's arm fiercely with her thin, white fingers.

"Mother, speak to me; tell me that you—mother, only speak!"

His voice died away in irrepressible sobs which shook him from head to foot. He dared not utter the word "forgiveness" yet. Unintentional as the harm might be that his hand had done, it was sadly irreparable, too.

Mrs. Luttrell looked at him with scarcely a change of feature, and tried to withdraw some stray fold of her garments from his grasp. He resisted; he would not let her go. His heart was aching with his own trouble, and with the consciousness of her loss—Angela's loss—all the suffering that Richard's death would inflict upon these two women who had loved him so devotedly. He yearned for one little word of comfort and affection, which even in that terrible moment, a mother should have known so well how to give. But he lay at that mother's feet in vain.

It was Angela who spoke first.

"Speak to him, mother," she said, tremblingly. "See how he suffers. It was not his fault."

The tears ran down her pale cheeks unnoticed as she spoke. It was only natural to Angela that her first words should be words of consolation to another, not of sorrow for her own great loss. But Mrs. Luttrell did not unclose her lips.

"Ye'll not be hard upon him, madam," said the old doctor, deprecatingly. "Your own lad, and a lad that kneels to you for a gentle word, and will be heartbroken if you say him nay."

"And is my heart not broken?" asked the mother, lifting her head and looking away into the darkness of the long corridor. "The son that I loved is dead; the boy that came to me like a little angel in the spring of my youth—they say that he is dead and cold. I am going to look at his face again. Come, Angela. Perhaps they have spoken falsely, and he is alive—not murdered, after all."

"Murdered? Mother!"

Brian raised himself a little and repeated the word with shuddering emphasis.

"Murdered!" said Mrs. Luttrell, steadily, as she turned her burning eyes full upon the countenance of her younger son; as if to watch the workings of his agitated features. "If not by the laws of man, by God's laws you are guilty. You had quarrelled with him that day; and you took your revenge. I tell you, James Muir, and you, Angela Vivian, that Brian Luttrell took his brother's life by no mistake—that he is Richard's murderer——"

"No; I swear it by the God who made me—no!" cried Brian, springing to his feet.

But his mother had turned away.