‘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.
CHAPTER XVII.
MADAME GENVIÈVE.
SPRING comes early in Brittany, and by the end of May the apple-blossom is already almost over, while the hedgerows on each side of the smooth, broad roads are one tangled glory of golden broom, sweet-smelling honeysuckle, and delicate bramble-blossom.