“One slight trace only,” replied my friend; “enough to identify them disappearing among these millions of London. We found a porter at the Paddington station, who had seen a young lady and an old man stepping from a third-class carriage of a night-train. ‘You see, sir,’ said the man,—he evidently had a heart under his olive corduroys,—‘I marked the old gent and the young woman, she was so daughterly with him. I’ve got a little girl of my own, and mayhap I shall come out old and weakly, and she’ll have to look after me. It was the gray of the morning when the train come in. There warn’t many passengers. It was cold winter weather,—the month of February, I should say. The young woman,—she had dark hair, and looked as if she was one to go through thick and thin,—she jumped out of the carriage, where she had been settin’ all that cold night, and gave the old gent her hand. I heard her call him “Father,” and tell him to take care; and he had need. He seemed to be stiff with cold. He was an old gent, such as you don’t see every day. He had a long white beard,—a kind of swallow-tail beard. His clothes, too, was strange. He had a long gray top-coat, grayish and bluish, with a cape of the same over his shoulders, and brass buttons stamped with an eagle. A milingtary coat it was. I used to see such coats on the sentinels in France when I went over to dig on the Chalong Railway. The old gent looked like a foreigner, with his swallow-tail beard and that milingtary coat; but there was an Englishman under the coat, if I knows ’em. And the young woman, sir, was English,—I don’t believe there’s any such out of Old England.’”
“It must be they,” cried I. “I saw him in that very coat, tramping up and down like a hunted man, beside the wagons that were to take him from Fort Laramie.”
“You did? That completes the identification. But what good? This was a trace of them in London; so is a sailor’s cap on a surge a token of a sailor sunk and lying somewhere under the gray waste of sea. We lost them again utterly.”
With such talk, we had descended from Trafalgar Square, gone down Whitehall, turned in at the Horse Guards, and, crossing Green Park, had come out upon Hyde Park Corner. It was the very top moment of the London season. The world, all sunshine and smiles and splendor, was eddying about the corner of Apsley House. Piccadilly was a flood of eager, busy people. The Park blossomed with gay crowds. But under all this laughing surface, I saw with my mind’s eye two solitary figures slowly sinking away and drowning drearily,—two figures solitary except for each other,—a pale, calm woman, with gray, steady eyes, leading a vague old man, with a white beard and a long military surtout.
“Lost utterly!” said Brent again, as if in answer to my thought.
“No,” said I, shaking off this despondency. “We have seemed to lose her twice more desperately than now. It looked darker when we left them at Fort Bridger; much darker when we knew that those ruffians had got time and space the start of us; darkest of all when poor Pumps fell dead in Luggernel Alley. Searching in a Christian city is another thing than our agonized chase in the wilderness.”
“A Christian city!” said Brent, with a slight shudder. “You do not know what this Christian city is for a friendless woman. There are brutes here as evil and more numerous than in all barbarism together. Many times, in my searches up and down the foul slums of London, I have longed to exchange their walls for the walls of Luggernel Alley, and endure again the frenzy of our gallop there. You think me weak, perhaps, Wade, for my doubt of success; but remember that I have been at this vain search over England and on the Continent for five months.”
“But understand, Wade,” said Biddulph, “that we do not give it up, although we have found no clew.”
“Give it up!” cried Brent with fervor. “I live for that alone. When the hope ends, I end.”
How worn he looked, “with grief that’s beauty’s canker!” Life was wasting from him, as it ever does when man pursues the elusive and unattained. When a man like Brent once voluntarily concentrates all his soul on one woman, worthy of his love, thenceforth he must have love for daily food, or life burns dim and is a dying flame.