THE SEARCH
Eleanor had not bought a ticket at the station, Margaret ascertained,
but the ticket agent had tried to persuade her to. She had thanked him
and told him that she preferred to buy it of the conductor. He was a
lank, saturnine individual and had been seriously smitten with
Eleanor's charms, it appeared, and the extreme solicitousness of his
attitude at the suggestion of any mystery connected with her departure
made Margaret realize the caution with which it would be politic to
proceed. She had very little hope of finding Eleanor back at the
school, but it was still rather a shock when she telephoned the school
office and found that there was no news of her there. She concocted a
somewhat lame story to account for Eleanor's absence and promised the
authorities that she would be sent back to them within the week,--a
promise she was subsequently obliged to acknowledge that she could not
keep. Then she fled to New York to break the disastrous news to the
others.
She told Gertrude the truth and showed her the pitiful letter Eleanor
had left behind her, and together they wept over it. Also together,
they faced David and Jimmie.
"She went away," Margaret told them, "both because she felt she was
hurting those that she loved and because she herself was hurt."
"What do you mean?" David asked.
"I mean--that she belonged body and soul to Peter and to nobody else,"
Margaret answered deliberately.
David bowed his head. Then he threw it back again, suddenly.
"If that is true," he said, "then I am largely responsible for her
going."
"It is I who am responsible," Jimmie groaned aloud. "I asked her to
marry me and she refused me."
"I asked her to marry me and didn't give her the chance to refuse,"
David said; "it is that she is running away from."
"It was Peter's engagement that was the last straw," Margaret said.
"The poor baby withered and shrank like a flower in the blast when I
told her that."
"The damned hound--" Jimmie said feelingly and without apology. "Who's
he engaged to anyway?"
"Eleanor says it's Beulah, and the more I think of it the more I think
that she's probably right."
"That would be a nice mess, wouldn't it?" Gertrude suggested.
"Remember how frank we were with her about his probable lack of
judgment, Margaret? I don't covet the sweet job of breaking it to
either one of them."
Nevertheless she assisted Margaret to break it to them both late that
same afternoon at Beulah's apartment.
"I'll find her," Peter said briefly. And in response to the halting
explanation of her disappearance that Margaret and Gertrude had done
their best to try to make plausible, despite its elliptical nature, he
only said, "I don't see that it makes any difference why she's gone.
She's gone, that's the thing that's important. No matter how hard we
try we can't really figure out her reason till we find her."
"Are you sure it's going to be so easy?" Gertrude asked. "I
mean--finding her. She's a pretty determined little person when she
makes up her mind. Eleanor's threats are to be taken seriously. She
always makes good on them."
"I'll find her if she's anywhere in the world," Peter said. "I'll find
her and bring her back."
Margaret put out her hand to him.
"I believe that you will," she said. "Find out the reason that she
went away, too, Peter."
Beulah pulled Gertrude aside.
"It wasn't Peter, was it?" she asked piteously. "She had some one else
on her mind, hadn't she?"
"She had something else on her mind," Gertrude answered gravely, "but
she had Peter on her mind, too."
"She didn't--she couldn't have known about us--Peter and me. We--we
haven't told any one."
"She guessed it, Beulah. She couldn't bear it. Nobody's to blame. It's
just one of God's most satirical mix-ups."
"I was to blame," Beulah said slowly. "I don't believe in shifting
responsibility. I got her here in the first place and I've been
instrumental in guiding her life ever since. Now, I've sacrificed her
to my own happiness."
"It isn't so simple as that," Gertrude said; "the things we start
going soon pass out of our hands. Somebody a good deal higher up has
been directing Eleanor's affairs for a long time,--and ours too, for
that matter."
"Don't worry, Beulah," Peter said, making his way to her side from the
other corner of the room where he had been talking to Margaret. "You
mustn't let this worry you. We've all got to be--soldiers now,--but
we'll soon have her back again, I promise you."
"And I promise you," Beulah said chokingly, "that if you'll get her
back again, I--I will be a soldier."
* * * * *
Peter began by visiting the business schools in New York and finding
out the names of the pupils registered there. Eleanor had clung firmly
to her idea of becoming an editorial stenographer in some magazine
office, no matter how hard he had worked to dissuade her. He felt
almost certain she would follow out that purpose now. There was a fund
in her name started some years before for the defraying of her college
expenses. She would use that, he argued, to get herself started, even
though she felt constrained to pay it back later on. He worked on this
theory for some time, even making a trip to Boston in search for her
in the stenography classes there, but nothing came of it.
Among Eleanor's effects sent on from the school was a little red
address book containing the names and addresses of many of her former
schoolmates at Harmon. Peter wrote all the girls he remembered hearing
her speak affectionately of, but not one of them was able to give him
any news of her. He wrote to Colhassett to Albertina's aunt, who had
served in the capacity of housekeeper to Eleanor's grandfather in his
last days, and got in reply a pious letter from Albertina herself, who
intimated that she had always suspected that Eleanor would come to
some bad end, and that now she was highly soothed and gratified by the
apparent fulfillment of her sinister prognostications.
Later he tried private detectives, and, not content with their
efforts, he followed them over the ground that they covered, searching
through boarding houses, and public classes of all kinds; canvassing
the editorial offices of the various magazines Eleanor had admired in
the hope of discovering that she had applied for some small position
there; following every clue that his imagination, and the acumen of
the professionals in his service, could supply;--but his patient
search was unrewarded. Eleanor had apparently vanished from the
surface of the earth. The quest which had seemed to him so simple a
matter when he first undertook it, now began to assume terrible and
abortive proportions. It was unthinkable that one little slip of a
girl untraveled and inexperienced should be able permanently to elude
six determined and worldly adult New Yorkers, who were prepared to tax
their resources to the utmost in the effort to find her,--but the fact
remained that she was missing and continued to be missing, and the
cruel month went by and brought them no news of her.
The six guardians took their trouble hard. Apart from the emotions
that had been precipitated by her developing charms, they loved her
dearly as the child they had taken to their hearts and bestowed all
their young enthusiasm and energy and tenderness upon. She was the
living clay, as Gertrude had said so many years before, that they had
molded as nearly as possible to their hearts' desire. They loved her
for herself, but one and all they loved her for what they had made of
her--an exquisite, lovely young creature, at ease in a world that
might so easily have crushed her utterly if they had not intervened
for her.
They kept up the search unremittingly, following false leads and
meeting with heartbreaking discouragements and disappointments. Only
Margaret had any sense of peace about her.
"I'm sure she's all right," she said; "I feel it. It's hard having her
gone, but I'm not afraid for her. She'll work it out better than we
could help her to. It's a beautiful thing to be young and strong and
free, and she'll get the beauty out of it."
"I think perhaps you're right, Margaret," David said. "You almost
always are. It's the bread and butter end of the problem that worries
me."
Margaret smiled at him quaintly.
"The Lord provides," she said. "He'll provide for our ewe lamb, I'm
sure."
"You speak as if you had it on direct authority."
"I think perhaps I have," she said gravely.
Jimmie and Gertrude grew closer together as the weeks passed, and the
strain of their fruitless quest continued. One day Jimmie showed her
the letter that Eleanor had written him.
"Sweet, isn't she?" he said, as Gertrude returned it to him, smiling
through her tears.
"She's a darling," Gertrude said fervently. "Did she hurt you so much,
Jimmie dear?"
"I wanted her," Jimmie answered slowly, "but I think it was because I
thought she was mine,--that I could make her mine. When I found she
was Peter's,--had been Peter's all the time, the thought somehow cured
me. She was dead right, you know. I made it up out of the stuff that
dreams are made of. God knows I love her, but--but that personal thing
has gone out of it. She's my little lost child,--or my sister. A man
wants his own to be his own, Gertrude."
"Yes, I know."
"My--my real trouble is that I'm at sea again. I thought that I
cared,--that I was anchored for good. It's the drifting that plays the
deuce with me. If the thought of that sweet child and the grief at her
loss can't hold me, what can? What hope is there for me?"
"I don't know," Gertrude laughed.
"Don't laugh at me. You've always been on to me, Gertrude, too much so
to have any respect for me, I guess. You've got your work," he waved
his arm at the huge cast under the shadow of which they were sitting,
"and all this. You can put all your human longings into it. I'm a poor
rudderless creature without any hope or direction." He buried his face
in his hands. "You don't know it," he said, with an effort to conceal
the fact that his shoulders were shaking, "but you see before you a
human soul in the actual process of dissolution."
Gertrude crossed her studio floor to kneel down beside him. She drew
the boyish head, rumpled into an irresistible state of curliness, to
her breast.
"Put it here where it belongs," she said softly.
"Do you mean it?" he whispered. "Sure thing? Hope to die? Cross your
heart?"
"Yes, my dear."
"Praise the Lord."
"I snitched him," Gertrude confided to Margaret some days later,--her
whole being radiant and transfigured with happiness. "You snitch
David."