“I’m sure I don’t know what you did,” retorted the pater. “Find out a man in one lie, and you may suspect him of others. What was the name of the people, at these lodgings?”
Stephen Radcliffe, sitting down again, put his hands on his knees, apparently considering; but I saw him take an outward glance at the Squire from under his grey eyebrows—very grey and bushy they were now. He could see that for once in his life the pater was resolute.
“Her name was Mapping,” he said. “A widow. Mrs. Mapping.”
“Put that down, Johnny. ‘Mrs. Mapping, Gibraltar Terrace, Islington district.’ And now, Mr. Radcliffe, where is Pitt to be found? He has left Dale House.”
“In the moon, for aught I can tell,” was the insolent answer. “I paid him for his attendance when we came back from the funeral—and precious high his charges were!—and I know nothing of him since.”
We said good-night to Stephen Radcliffe with as much civility as could be called up under the circumstances, and went home in the fly. The next day we steamed up to London again to make inquiries at Gibraltar Terrace. It was not that the Squire exactly doubted Stephen’s word, or for a moment thought that he had dealt unfairly by Frank: nothing of that sort: but he was in a state of explosion at the deceit Stephen Radcliffe had practised on him; and needed to throw the anger off. Don’t we all know how unbearable inaction is in such a frame of mind?
Well. Up one street, down another, went we, in what Stephen had called the Islington district, but no Gibraltar Terrace could we see or hear of. The terrace might have been in Gibraltar itself, for all the sign there was of it.
“I’ll go down to-morrow, and issue a warrant against Ste Radcliffe,” cried the Squire, when we got in, tired and heated, to the Castle and Falcon—at which inn, being convenient to the search, he had put up. “I will, Johnny, as I’m a living man. It is infamous to send us up here on a wild-goose chase, to a place that has no name, and no existence. I don’t like the aspect of things at all; and he shall be made to explain them.”
“But I suppose we have not looked in all parts of Islington,” I said. “It seems a large place. And—don’t you think, sir—that it might be as well to ascertain where Pitt is? I dare say Dr. Dale knows.”
“Perhaps it, would, Johnny.”