‘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.