“Yes,” he said at last. “What is it?”
“Will you make haste and go across to Lady Gowan’s apartments, sir?” said a voice. “She has been very ill all night, and wishes to see you.”
“Oh!” groaned Frank to himself. Then aloud: “Yes; come over directly.”
He began to dress rapidly, with all the troubles of the night magnified and made worse by the mental lens of reproach through which he was looking at his conduct.
“How can I be such a miserable, thoughtless wretch!” he thought. “How could I neglect everything which might have helped to save my poor father for the sake of grovelling here, and all the time my mother ill, perhaps dying, while I slept, not seeming to care a bit!”
He had a few minutes of hard time beneath the unsparing lashes he mentally applied to himself as he was dressing; and then, ready to sink beneath his load of care, and feeling the while that he ought to have obtained from Captain Murray the route the prisoners would take, and then have found Drew Forbes and told him, so as to render the attempt at rescue easier, he hurried across the first court, and then into the lesser one to his mother’s apartments.
“The doctor’s with her, sir,” whispered the maid.
“How is she now?” asked Frank.
“Dreadfully bad, sir. Pray make haste to her; she asked for you again when the doctor came.”
Frank hurried up, to find the quiet physician who attended her and a nurse in the room, while the patient lay with her eyes looking dim, and two hectic spots in her thin cheeks, gazing anxiously at the door.