Both he and Miss Letty had lost sight of Boy. Since the morning on which he had restored the bank notes, and had, as he said, “left his love,” he had disappeared mysteriously and unaccountably. The Major had inquired in vain for him at his old lodgings, and finally, in desperation, had essayed the disagreeable task of interviewing his parents on the subject of his whereabouts. But he could get no news from them. The “Honourable” Jim, bolstered up in his chair, with drawn countenance and hollow eyes, was scarcely recognizable, save when his son’s name was mentioned, and then he straightway woke up from his semi-lethargy to swear. The Major was therefore reduced to the necessity of endeavouring to get what information he could out of Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, who, breathing hard and heavily like a porpoise, wept profusely at his first question, and allowed her tears to trickle down and mix with the various food stains on the dirty front of the ample dressing-gown in which she now enveloped her elephantine proportions.
“Oh, don’t talk to me about Boy!” she said. “Think of my sufferings as a mother! The disappointment I have had to endure is too terrible for words! The sacrifices I have made for him! The trouble I have had!”
“What trouble?” demanded the Major sharply. “You have done about as little for him as any one could, I fancy!”
Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir stopped producing her tears,—and stared at him with the air of an injured Roman matron.
“Little!” she echoed. “I have done everything for him—everything! Through my efforts, when his father grudged me any money for his education, he went to school in France——”
“And he’d better have stayed at home,” interpolated the Major.
“Then I never rested day or night till I could get him to college; and then—and then——”
“Then he was ‘crammed,’ and forgot that he was anything but a machine to take in facts and grind them to powder,—and then he went to Sandhurst, and then he got expelled for being drunk, having seen his father drunk before him all his life. Yes, ma’am, we know all that! But what I’m asking you now is—what’s become of him?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, beginning to be snappish. “I have not seen or heard anything of him for ages. He has deserted his mother! He is ungrateful—unnatural—and cruel! Sometimes I think he cannot be my son. I’m sure”—here she put her handkerchief to her eyes—“the stories one hears of changelings might really be true,—for Boy was never the same to me after he stayed with Miss Letty.”
As she spoke she almost screamed, for the Major, with one big stride, came close up to her and glared down upon her like a figure of fury.