A VAIN SEARCH.
‘THE young gentleman not there? Why, sir, that’s impossible,’ said the
cabman, astonishment written on every feature of his honest red face,
as the excited doctor jumped out of the cab again and demanded rather
sharply where his son had gone. ‘You shut the door yourself when you
left, and he was inside right enough then, and I would have heard him
if he had opened the door since, and shut it again behind him.’
‘But I tell you he is gone,’ said the doctor. ‘Here is the bag, and
the rug, and even his gloves; but the boy has got out, that is clear
enough.’
‘I can hardly think as ’ow I didn’t hear him,’ answered the man,
rubbing his head in perplexity. ‘But, anyhow, he can’t be far away.
He has got tired of waiting, no doubt, and slipped out, and has gone
to the bookstall or the waiting-room. He’ll be there all right, sir,
never fear;’ and he smiled to himself at the nervousness of ‘country
folk,’ as Dr Armitage set off, almost at a run, in the direction of the
bookstall.
But neither there nor in any of the waiting-rooms did he find Vivian;
and although he scoured every nook and cranny of the station,
accompanied by a policeman whom he sent for in hot haste, and made
inquiries at the booking-office and the bookstall, and questioned
all the outside porters, it was all in vain. No one had seen a boy
answering to Vivian’s description. The little fellow had vanished,
leaving no trace behind him.
The half-frantic doctor wished to set out at once to search for him in
the adjoining streets, but the policeman dissuaded him.
‘’Twould do no good, sir,’ he said. ‘If the young gentleman has run
away—given you the slip for any reason—he’ll be half-a-mile or more
from here now, and you may as well look for a needle in a haystack
as look for him in the network of streets that lie between here and
the river. We’ll go to a telephone-office and we’ll telephone his
description to all the police stations in London. I’ll take the
cabman’s number, although he’s all right; I know him for as decent a
man as ever lived, and you go quietly home, and probably you will have
news of the youngster by midnight.’
‘But he wouldn’t run away. He couldn’t run away,’ argued the doctor,
although a horrible suspicion began to come over him that Vivian,
tempted by the fear of the exposure that lay before him, might have
done so. ‘He has only been in London once before in his life; he does
not know a soul in it except the friends whose house we are going to;
and, besides, he has not a penny in his pocket that I know of.’
Policeman X10 shook his head. ‘Lads are queer, sir,’ he said. ‘One
never knows what they are up to. You say you have had no disagreement
or anything? He wasn’t being took to school, or anything of that sort?
Of course you know best; but to me it looks pretty like as if ’e had
given you the slip. It ain’t likely that a boy of his age could be
lifted bodily at this time of day. ’Tain’t as if ’e had been a little
un. Hadn’t a notion of the sea, had he? It’s jolly cold weather to try
that little tip. All the same, we had better keep a lookout at the
docks.’
‘No, I was not taking him to school,’ replied Dr Armitage, ignoring the
man’s hint about ‘any disagreement,’ and feeling almost angry with him
for coming so near the truth in his conjectures; but during the long,
cold drive up to Hampstead he was forced to admit to himself that in
all probability he was right, and that Vivian, goaded on by the thought
of the ordeal that lay before him, had taken the desperate step of
running away.
Bitterly did he blame himself for leaving the boy alone under the
circumstances, although he felt that he could not honestly accuse
himself of being harsh or unkind to him, and he remembered gladly the
few words which had passed between them at the station, and the promise
he had held out to Vivian that, now that he had spoken out and told the
truth, his mother and he would stand by him, and help him through the
rest.
Up at Eversley bright faces greeted him. The improvement which had set
in in Isobel’s condition in the early morning had been maintained, and
Sir Antony Jones, who had just paid a second visit, had declared his
belief that, if she went on as she was doing, the danger would be over
by the following morning. The threatened inflammation had subsided.
‘Of course she will need care for a considerable time, and may have to
be kept on her back for a month or two. I suspect a slight injury to
the spine. But nothing permanent—nothing permanent. And with a garden
like yours, Mrs Osbourne, she could not be better situated.’
And with this favourable verdict, the great man had departed, leaving
thankful hearts behind him.
In the face of such relief from pressing anxiety—for there seemed no
reason to fear that Isobel would not pass a good night—Dr Armitage
shrank from telling his story and bringing another cloud down on the
hearts which had gone through so much already.
Even if he had wished to remain silent, however, he could not have done
so, for his wife’s loving eyes soon saw that something was amiss, and
the whole sad story had to come out. And a startling story it was.
To Mrs Armitage, with her faith in her boys’ truthfulness and
high-mindedness, the news of Vivian’s deceit came as a great shock,
and for the moment everything else seemed to fade from her mind. His
disappearance, his probable danger even, did not seem to touch her as
the knowledge of his falseness did.
‘Oh my boy!’ she moaned, ‘my little boy, whom I have prayed for all his
life, and tried to lead in the right way! I have seen it all along, his
moral cowardice, his love of praise. And it has led to this. And now
he has run away because he dare not face his own mother! Oh Jack,’ she
cried piteously, turning to her husband, ‘I think I would almost rather
he had died when he had that fever so badly three years ago than that
you should have to tell me all this terrible story.’
‘Come, come, Margaret,’ said Uncle Walter kindly, for he saw that his
sister-in-law scarcely knew what she was saying, ‘this is unlike you.
All the strain and anxiety has been too much for you, and now this news
on the top of all! It is a bad business, and I don’t wonder that you
are surprised and grieved. I know what we would have felt if it had
been Ralph. But, after all, the poor little chap is only eleven, and he
has owned up like a brick, remember that. This will be a lesson to him
that he will remember all his life, and he will make a fine man yet, or
my name is not Walter Osbourne. Faith, I doubt if I would have had the
courage to have made a clean breast of it myself, as he has done, at
his age, after getting so far down in the mud. It shows that he has the
right sort of grit in him.
‘But the first thing is to find him, and bring him back, and then let
the police know all he has to tell us about the rascal whom he saw in
the summer-house. I expect the whole gang will soon be caught once they
have his description. And I promise you that Vivian will hear no more
than is necessary about the whole business from any one in this house.
Of course the police will have to know about the pistol, in order to
release Joe; but we can hush it up in some way.
‘In the meantime, I’ll run up and tell Dora, and do you get Jack and
me something to eat—something solid remember—and we will go down to
Scotland Yard, and see that everything is being done to trace the poor
little chap. Probably they have got him by now. Very likely he only
ran out of the station to have a look at the lighted streets, and
took a wrong turning. We will take a look round the hospitals too,’
he added, for he wanted to break the strange calm hardness which had
fallen on Vivian’s mother, which was so unlike her, and so unlike the
passionate love which she had for her children.
The words had their expected effect.
‘The hospitals!’ she said sharply. ‘Surely you don’t think that an
accident can have happened? You don’t know Vivian. He is much too
wide-awake to allow himself to be run over.’ But the mother-love, which
the shock seemed almost to have deadened, was awake again, and when
in a few minutes Aunt Dora came down, full of sympathy, and thinking
of nothing but Vivian’s mysterious disappearance, making all possible
excuses for him, and blaming herself bitterly for not noticing his
doings more closely, and thus making it impossible for such things to
happen, her sister-in-law blessed her in her heart for her kind words,
and, laying down her head on her shoulder, relieved her overburdened
heart by a good cry, after which she was once more her calm,
practical, hopeful self again.
But although every police station in London was warned, and every
railway station watched, every hospital visited, and every city
missionary told of Vivian’s mysterious disappearance, day after day
passed, and nothing was heard of him.
Hope dies hard, however, and long after the detectives who had been
employed to try to solve the mystery had given it up, and expressed
their opinion that the lost boy had wandered from the station down
to the river, either out of pure boyish curiosity, or in the hope of
finding a boat in which he could embark as cabin-boy, and so escape any
possible punishment which might await him, and had missed his footing
in the fog, which it was remembered had come down rather thickly that
Tuesday night, and had fallen into the river and been drowned, the
members of the two households where he had been known and loved still
clung to the hope that some day he would turn up again.
But month succeeded month, and when at last Easter arrived, and no
clue was to be had to the mystery, they were compelled to give up
their slender hope, and to mourn for him as dead—mourn him all the more
bitterly because he had left them with a cloud hanging over him, and
perhaps lost his life in trying to hide from them, because he dreaded
their anger.