“He was here a moment ago,” the doctor explained hurriedly. “Somebody called him. I do not know where he went.”
She poured the tea with a steady hand.
“He does not care, of course. His brother was nothing to him alive. Dead, his memory will be less than nothing. You will go home to-night, Deborah, I suppose?”
The words framed more command than interrogation, but the girl’s quiet assent was not in the very least submissively acquiescent. Deb might be poor, might have lost everything she had hoped for in the world, but she was a Lyndesay meeting Lyndesay upon equal terms, and the mistress of Crump knew it.
“Christian will go with you. I will have him sent for,” she went on, and, almost as if he had heard, Christian appeared in the doorway. He shook hands with Deborah silently and rather shyly, for they had met but seldom since they were children, and then, still without speaking, laid a hand on his mother’s shoulder, and bent to kiss her. She started violently when he touched her, twisting her head and staring up into the fair, kind face so near her own with an expression that made the onlookers catch their breath; and he withdrew his hand slowly, flushing as he stood away from her.
“Sit down!” she said coldly. “We can dispense with that sort of thing, you and I. Why were you not here to meet us?”
“Old Brathay called me,” he replied, taking a seat quietly, and handing Deborah a plate which she refused with a gesture. “One of the puppies is ill. I ought to have been here, of course. I am sorry.”
“I suppose you know your brother is dead?” she went on, in the same lifeless tone. “You would not have cared to see him, I am aware, and he did not ask for you. But before he died he gave us news of importance.”
“Of importance—to me,” Deb put in on her own account, with curious ease. “We were to have been married this year, as I believe you know. And now, it seems, he was married already.”
The elder men did look at her then—at the aloof face, and the straight, slim figure with its loosely-clasped hands; and from her to the rigid mother and Christian’s dropped eyes. It was said the Lyndesays always wore a mask.