Part 15

She hated him, had said Griselda! There was a meager ray of comfort. But do what I would, my stunned mind continued to flutter heavily like a half-scorched moth around the ugly, sinister vision of Pendleton. Could he be at the bottom of Alicia's disappearance? How had he contrived the trick? If only I had gone to the station with him! Was it that that accounted for his hurry to be gone? No! It was impossible. Ought I to start in pursuit at once? No, no, no! I could not believe it. It could not be--not of her own free will! Yet my heart was lacerated by the possibility. When I lifted my head from my bosom, I gasped in a desolation of emptiness.

I had stifled the prompting to call Dibdin last night, but now I felt I must find him. I needed the solace and advice of a friend. I rose heavily and put on my hat. Visconti had not yet come in.

"Tell Mr. Visconti," I said to Varesi, my young understudy, "that I have been called away suddenly, on a serious private matter. I shall telephone him later."

"Yes, Mr. Byrd," responded Varesi, his lustrous Italian eyes flashing sympathy. He thought, no doubt, from what he must have overheard, that some rascal had run off with my younger sister--a killing matter, very possibly, to a properly constituted male. Had he known the truth, his Latin mind would have been shocked at my seeming Anglo-Saxon composure. Out of doors I heaved a deep sigh and boarded a north-bound elevated train for the eighties, where Dibdin has his lodgings, near the Museum of Natural History.

I found Dibdin not at his lodging but at the Museum, directing the rearrangement of the Polynesian section in the light of his additions to it.

He turned one intense glance upon me without speaking, hurriedly gave some directions to the men at work, and led me to an alcove where there was a bench.

"Now, let's hear--" he said. "What's he been doing?" He concluded at once that Pendleton was at the bottom of whatever wild appearance I must have presented.

Briefly, but without omitting any essential detail, I gave him an account of all that had happened the previous evening, including Griselda's announcement of the morning.

"And you think he enticed her to go off with him?" he demanded.

"Well--what do you think?" I queried.

"I think no," said Dibdin. "What does Griselda say?"

"She says Alicia hated him."

"Then take her word for it!" snapped Dibdin. "But why the devil didn't you call me last night from the Manhattan?" he turned upon me angrily.

"Why didn't I?" I murmured. "Maybe it's because you've done enough--maybe it's because there are some things a man wants to do without assistance."

Dibdin glanced at me sharply and gave a low whistle.

"Oh, that's it--" he muttered--"I see," and he looked away.

I am certain that at that moment Dibdin read my secret. For his expression swiftly changed. He grew suddenly warm and friendly, more than his usual self.

"A fine job you did there, Randolph," he cried, clapping my shoulder; "an excellent piece of work. I certainly admire your technique. As for Alicia--she didn't go with him--of that I feel sure!" I could have groveled before him in gratitude for those words.

"But where do you suppose she is?" I could not help eagerly asking. There was a gleam of amusement mingled with the sympathy in his eyes.

"Not very far, I imagine. We'll find her. Have no fear. Young girls are funny things. The instinct of sacrifice and the instinct of independence are always struggling in a woman like the twins in Rebekah's womb. When they're young it hits them very hard. Some notion like that must have swamped Alicia--sacrifice--earn her own living--ceasing to be a source of trouble--who knows? They don't think when they're young--or even when they're old. They feel. We'll find her--but we've got to think. Pull yourself together, old man."

"How," I asked in stupefaction, "do you come to know all that about women?" And my heart felt perceptibly lightened at his words.

"Oh, I've been studying them all my life," he laughed. "Never having had one of my own, I've been watching and thinking about the whole sex all over the earth. We'll find her. Have you communicated with the police?"

At the word "police," my heart turned leaden again.

"The--p-police!" I stammered aghast. "Invoke the publicity that means?--Horrible!" A shudder ran down my back.

"Right again!" cried Dibdin, nudging me. "Young man, you have an appreciation! Quite useless--the police. But you still--have a suspicion of Pendleton, haven't you?" I found myself wishing that even the best of men weren't so ready to imagine themselves amateur detectives. The very core of my heart of hearts, Alicia, had disappeared, and I wanted swift concrete help, not speculative questions.

I admitted that I had a lingering suspicion of Pendleton.

"Then, this is what we do," Dibdin rubbed his forehead as over a problem in chess. "We see a private detective agency here and acquaint them with the facts. Have them pick up Pendleton on the way--he hasn't reached Chicago yet, you know--and see if he's traveling alone. If he is, let him go on his way. If not--then, a description of the girl--you understand--"

A livid fury possessed me suddenly as I saw the all too vivid picture that Dibdin had evoked and was now trying to believe.

"No, no!" I cried. "I am going myself. I dare not--I cannot trust anybody else to do this. You don't know--you can't understand--"

"I know only too damned well," growled Dibdin staring at me quizzically. "But I am trying to show you sense--difficult, I admit, to one in your condition. However, I must try again," he went on with the patience of resignation.

"You are only one man--don't you see? A detective agency is an organization of many men in different places who can concentrate on the same job simultaneously. At this minute they would know on which train he might be traveling and some one or several could already be watching for his arrival. Suppose they miss him. There are many hotels in Chicago--there are many trains leaving for the coast--don't you see?"

"Yes," I breathed brokenly. "Then it's useless."

"Far from it," he laughed. "Come with me."

Less than an hour later we were at the Mahoney Detective Agency and a suave young Irishman was listening without emotion or eagerness to my story supplemented by Dibdin's interpolations. He seemed to care little for what concerned me most, but he was keen for personal details of Pendleton's appearance, height, build, clothes, lettering on his luggage and so on.

When it came to giving a detailed description of Alicia, my confusion was so pitiful that even the young detective glanced at me only once and then, like the gentleman he was, looked sedulously down upon the paper before him.

"Sixteen--in her seventeenth year!" he murmured in astonishment.

"But she is an unusual girl--well grown for her age," I caught him up.

"I see," he murmured gravely. "What's the color of her hair?"

I went on as best I could with the description.

"I could save you money," he smiled blandly, "by telling you that the girl is not with him--" and I could have wrung his hand like a brother's. "But," he added, "it won't cost much to pick him up. I'll have news for you to-morrow this time, I'm thinking."

As I sat down to lunch with Dibdin at his club, though in truth nothing was farther from my cravings than food, he suddenly burst forth into hearty laughter.

"So it's my thousand you gave Pendleton?" he chuckled. "That was sheer inspiration, Randolph--sheer, unadulterated genius! If you weren't so lugubrious just now, I could accuse you of a high ironic sense of humor that only a great man would be capable of!"

How terrible were the next twenty-four hours, in spite of Dibdin's companionship and his efforts to cheer me, no one will ever know. No funeral could possibly have darkened my household to such an extent. I dreaded to be seen by the children, who walked about like wraiths under the sense of tragedy. I dreaded to tell them lies and yet I could not tell them the truth. Finally I felt I must say something to Laura and Randolph.

The departure of their father they received without the least surprise. Randolph inquired where he had gone, but this, I answered, I could not tell him, save that he had gone West. But the absence of Alicia left them puzzled and strained and awed. Alicia's disappearance shook them almost as it had shaken me.

"When will she be back?" demanded Randolph.

"I don't know exactly," I answered miserably, "soon, I hope."

The following morning I gave up all thought of going to the office. If my mysterious truancy should cost me my job, then it must be so. I hovered in the region of the telephone. Again and again I was about to call up Mahoney's, but I forebore. Finally, toward noon, I could wait no longer. When the connection was made, I gave my name and asked for the young man who had charge of my case.

"Was just going to call you," was the bland apologetic answer. "Your man is at the La Salle Hotel, going out on the Santa Fe to-night. He is alone and arrived alone last night. We'll see whether he starts alone to-night."

Then, of course, I cursed myself for my folly in thinking that it might be otherwise and realized that I had really thought nothing of the sort.

But where in the meanwhile was Alicia?

I had believed myself by now schooled to emergencies, but here was an emergency that left me dazed and helpless. I had fondly thought myself a match for life, but life was crushing me with pain like a blind force.

I leaped up suddenly and wandered about the house and the garden like a dog searching miserably for a departed loved one. There was the stream--but I turned from it shivering. No--that was impossible! The sense of life in Alicia, her vitality, was too potent, too radiant to suffer extinction. I looked up at my little nest from the edge of the muddy stream, that frail eyrie upon the rock that I had felt so nestling, secure; barred by the trunks of intervening trees, it now seemed a prison. A faint breeze that was stirring the leaves made them murmurous with secret things which my heart cried out to interpret. Was it a litany, a dirge, or a whisper of hope? I could not read the riddle, but my bruised spirit was passionately clinging to hope.

Dibdin pretended not to observe my vagaries; when I returned I found him absorbed in Epictetus.

"This is rather good," he growled, pointing to a passage and puffing his pipe as he spoke:

"Have you not received facilities by which you may support any event? Have you not received a manly soul? Have you not received patience?"

"Yes," I muttered dejectedly, "all very well, but Epictetus never lost Alicia."

Dibdin laughed shortly. "Now," he said, "we must start out to find her. Though my feeling is she'll come back of her own accord very soon. The girl was frightened--no more."

I ignored the last part of his speech but leaped at the first.

"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."

I saw that I was in the presence of a fanatic and I stood abashed.

"The best man in the Department," Dibdin put in encouragingly. "Sergeant Cullum _is_ the bureau of missing persons."

"Give me a little time," he urged again, with the fervid intensity of prayer--Time! And it was Alicia who was missing!

I shook his hand and gave him time and parted from him with a hope that I should not have to wait for his ecstatic visions to restore her.

"He'll find her!" Dibdin exclaimed reassuringly. "Never fear. If there is one thing I've learned, it's to accept the methods of people so long as they produce the results. Let them use the divining rod if they want to, or incantations with henbane and hellebore, or trances and visions, or prayer. This almost human race of ours is made up of some very odd fish," he added with a laugh, and he looked at me quizzically as though I were the oddest fish of them all.

"But an ecstatic policeman"--I murmured--

"Yes--queer--I know," said Dibdin, "but I don't care. And now, old boy, I've got to run back to the museum and take a squint at the work. Cheer up."

I was alone in my study after a pretense of eating supper with the children, when Jimmie burst in and flung himself upon me.

"I want to know where is Alicia," he demanded with quivering lips, and he burst into a pitiful freshet of bitter weeping. His childish tears fell like scalding lead upon my hands and I hugged the quivering small figure to me in an anguished embrace.

"Don't you want Laura to put you to bed?" I murmured with my lips against his ear.

"Don't want Laura," he sobbed chokingly; "want Alicia to give me my bath and put me to bed. Where is she? Why don't she come?"

It was a cry that tore at my heart as it echoed there and reverberated. I hugged him closer.

"I'll give you your bath, Jimmikins," I endeavored to soothe him, "and we'll float ships."

"'Licia--tells me--stories!" he sobbed out, as one broken with tragedy, and I declare I came very near to joining him in his grief.

"I'll--tell you a story--Jimmie," I gulped foolishly, "and until Alicia comes back you must be the fine little man you are--and let me."

"When is she coming back?"

"I am not sure, Jimmie--possibly to-morrow." It was my throbbing hope. For that we could go on any longer without her was simply inconceivable to me.

Gradually his paroxysm subsided. He grew quiescent in my arms and heaved a deep sigh as we nestled against each other in silence. It is fortunate that the grief of children is like a summer shower. For so intense is it while it lasts that any serious continuation of agony would rack their small frames to pieces.

"All right, Uncle Ranny," he murmured finally. "Will you come in and give me my bath? I'll go and run it--I know how, first the hot and then the cold. And I'll put the ships in and undress. Then you come in and tell me a long story while I sail them." And he ran out of the room in a little whirlwind of energy.

I sat bowed in silence for a few minutes and then heavily made my way to the bathroom.

"Is the temp'ture a'right?" queried Jimmie, with an intense air of responsibility, his erect nude little figure standing with a ship under each arm, like a symbol of man adventuring his petty argosies on this storm-beaten planet. I put my hand judicially into the water. How important is the temperature of a child's bath! It must be neither too hot nor too cold, or disastrous results might follow.

I began to tell him an ancient story of an island that proved to be a sleeping whale, but he was impatient of that.

"'Licia," he informed me in deprecating protest, "tells me stories of Mowgli in the jungle--out of the 'Jungle Book.'" I endeavored with a heavy heart to match Alicia, and gradually I became absorbed in my task and in Jimmie, so that the darkness of life fell away from me. The water splashed and the ships tacked about in wild maneuvers, while Jimmie kept reminding me that "he was listening, Uncle Ranny."

The great mystics are those who submerge their intellect and senses into night so that their souls emerge before them like the full moon out of the blackness. Every parent, I suppose, must be in part a mystic: for by centering his heart on little children he discerns the pulsating irresistible life of the universe, the past and the future, alpha and omega.

At least Jimmie was courteous enough to assure me, when he hugged me for the last time, with sleepy eyes, that my tale was won'erful. "But, oh, Uncle Ranny," he whispered, "say that Alicia will be back to-morrow."

I kissed him but made no promise. In the dining room Laura and Randolph were sitting over their books,--Laura grave with an anxious pucker in her white forehead and Randolph with dilated, somewhat fevered eyes. He was obviously thinking rather than reading. But I dared not enter into any more discussion of Alicia's absence that evening.

Only now after many days can I write down the events of the day following my last entry with anything approximating composure; and even now my fingers are tremulous as they hold the pencil.

I had risen early, for my sleep had been broken and fitful--as, indeed, how could it have been otherwise?

I was parched and burning within, to act, to do something, to range the city, the country--Good God, I thought, can a person like Alicia disappear in that way like a pebble in the sea? But my frenzy of thought, that seemed as if it would burst the poor narrow limits of my skull, produced no definite idea. I lashed against the bars of the brain like a beast in its cage.

I entertained no thought of going to the office that morning, but half an hour after I was up, that was the only thought that flooded my mind. There are blessings in a routine of daily labor that those engaged therein can hardly understand. The treadmill, I imagine, leaves the mule but little time for speculation or grief or any other emotions. I was that kind--or, rather that mule let loose--that could find oblivion nowhere better than in the treadmill. For routine can dull despair.

It was still half an hour before breakfast when my nephew Randolph came clattering down the stairs, meticulously dressed, though somewhat wild-eyed. He gave me the impression of having--he also--slept badly. "Uncle Ranny," he approached me, "are you going to the office this morning?"

"Yes, I think I am. Why, Randolph?"

"I'd like to go in to town with you--and go round--look around."

"What do you mean, my boy?"

"Somebody ought to be looking for Alicia all the time--don't you think so, Uncle Ranny? I'd like to try," and he looked away shamefaced.

A boy in his sixteenth year can be a considerable pillar in a household. I had somehow overlooked Randolph in that role. Perhaps I had been inclined to treat Laura's children too much as nestlings all, wholly dependent upon me? I experienced a thrill of pleasurable surprise in the boy's words and manner. He had said no word concerning his father, had asked no disconcerting questions. He merely desired to help.