"How would you start?" I queried sharply.
"What is the high-sounding name of that institution where she was
brought up?"
"Oh, don't tell them, for Heaven's sake," I cried out in alarm. "If she
is not there and they learn I have lost her, they'll never consent to my
adopting her; they'll consider me irresponsible."
"Don't let's be fools," retorted Dibdin. "Those people are not. Do you
know how many boys, girls, men and women turn up 'willfully missing'
every year?" No, I didn't know.
"But, by George!" he suddenly clapped his forehead in a burst of
inspiration--"Sergeant Cullum! Ever hear of Sergeant Cullum?." I shook
my head. "He is a policeman I know who has a genius for finding missing
persons. It's positively a sixth sense with him. He's a prodigy--has
traveled everywhere--a human bloodhound--he is the man to go to!"
"But--the police!" I stammered.
"Yes, I know--but we'll see whether we can make him take this as a
private case--out of hours--I'll find him!"
The surge of hope to my eyes must have told Dibdin better than any words
I could have uttered what I felt at that instant.
"But first we'll call that institution," he directed. "You put in a call
for the number and I'll tell you what to say."
"You needn't," I decided after a moment's reflection. "I know. I shall
simply inquire about the regulations governing adoptions. I can so word
it that if Alicia is there they will tell me."
"Ah, now your brain is functioning again," he concluded. "That being
so, I shall leave you and look up Cullum at the bureau of missing
persons."
Then I recalled that I had met with the phrase in newspapers. The fact
that missing persons were so numerous that a bureau of the metropolitan
police was required to handle them cheered me more than any other single
fact. It was consoling to feel that even, in my peculiar misery I had
joined a great multitude who suffered the loss of loved ones, even as in
toil and labor and poverty I had merged into the vast majority.
When Dibdin left me I learned that I might adopt Alicia without any
great obstacles, if she were willing, but I was no wiser as to her
whereabouts. The Home, in the person of the Matron, inquired how "she
was getting along." She was obviously not there, and I experienced a
misery of guilt as though I had robbed the world of its dearest
possession and then lost it.
Alone and bereft I sat, sinking to a mere pin's point in my abasement.
I had begun to believe myself schooled in life, something of a man among
men. But my own ineffectiveness was now dismally revealed to me. I had
proved myself incapable of guarding even what was dearest to me in the
world. I was at the bottom of an abyss from which I now felt hopeless
to scramble upward. The sheer and beetling walls of granite were
overpoweringly steep and forbidding. For the first time in long years,
I believe I mentally prayed. I waited for Dibdin.
And then suddenly, as is the way with me when I am at the bottom, my
spirits bounded upward. Alicia would come back to me, I felt in a
sudden surge of assurance. At that moment I felt sure that she was
thinking of me, that she was yearning to return. And before I knew it,
I was blocking in magnificent plans for her education, for making a
splendid woman of her, even though she already seemed perfect, of
supplementing nature's handiwork with all the force that was in me. I
saw her resplendent, a shining creature, the woman of my dreams! What a
florid designer is hope!
But why should she have been taken from me so abruptly? The vast
mystery of life encompassed me again like a shell, impenetrable--a
carapace through which nature must supply the openings--and she had
evidently not supplied them. Would Dibdin never come with his
policeman?
Books, for so long my mainstay and support, were now useless to me. I
turned over many volumes idly but my mind no longer reacted to that old
and magical alchemy. The volume of Epictetus that Dibdin had fingered
might have been a seed catalogue, so remote it seemed and so null. I
was now a ghost among my books: I was plunged in "The Woods of
Westermain," and my memory flung me the lines:
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
Nothing harms beneath the leaves
More than waves a swimmer cleaves.
Toss your heart up with the lark,
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare.
Only at a dread of dark
Quaver, and they quit their form;
Thousand eyeballs under hoods
Have you by the hair.
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
It was clear. I must toss my heart up with the lark to fare fairly,
even though my pain was great.
Late that afternoon; Dibdin returned, bringing Sergeant Cullum.
That excellent policeman gave me more hope than any one, excepting my
own heart, had yet succeeded in doing. He insisted upon being made
privy to all the circumstances, to which he listened, his broad shaven
face turned ceilingward, with the rapt air of a mystic, expecting
momentarily that lightning flash of inspiration that would reveal all.
Then he asked to be allowed to wander by himself throughout the house,
over which he went pointing and sniffing like some well-trained hound.
In the end he declared himself satisfied.
"Now give me a little time," he said.
"But what means--how do you go to work?" I asked, nettled that he should
see possibilities regarding Alicia that I had overlooked.
"I swear, Mr. Byrd, I don't know," he answered reverently. "I wait for
guidance."
"Guidance?" I faltered.
"Yes--from on high."
"You depend on that--only?"
"Only!--Well, yes and no. I pray, Mr. Byrd--I pray."
"You have no other means?" I queried, with a sinking heart.
"What other means are there," he demanded with glowing eyes, "that the
Lord can't supply? What detective in the world can equal the Lord--tell
me that, Mr. Byrd."