Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 3

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER IV.

GOING TO LOOK HIM UP.

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They reached London in the dawn of the morning, when the blue day was coming in over the housetops, before the ordinary stir of the waking world had begun. Of course, at that early hour it was impossible to do anything save to take refuge in the big hotel, and try to rest a little till it should be time for further proceedings. They found at once from the sleepy waiter who received them that Mr Lycett-Landon was not there. He remembered the gentleman; but they hadn't seen him not since last summer, the man said.

"I told you so, mamma," said Horace; "he is in Jermyn Street, of course. If he had been anywhere else, he would have put the address."

They drove together to Jermyn Street as soon as it was practicable, but he was not there; and the landlord of the house returned the same answer that the waiter at the Euston had done. Not since last summer, he said. He had been wondering in his own mind what had become of Mr Lycett-Landon, and asking himself if the rooms or the cooking had not given satisfaction. It was a thing that had never happened to him with any of his gentlemen, but he had been wondering, he allowed, if there was anything. He would have been pleased to make any alteration had he but known. Mrs Lycett-Landon and her son looked at each other somewhat blankly as they turned away from this door. She smiled and said, "It is rather funny that we should have to hunt your father in this way. One would think his movements would be well enough known. But I suppose it's this horrid London." She was a little angry and hurt at the horrid London which takes no particular note even of a merchant of high standing. In Liverpool he could not have been lost sight of, and even here it was ridiculous, a thing scarcely to be put up with.

"Oh, we'll soon find him at the club," Horace said; and they drove there accordingly, more indignant than anxious. It was still early, and the club servants had scarcely taken the trouble to wake up as yet. Club porters are not fond of giving addresses, knowing how uncertain it is whether a gentleman may wish to be pursued to their last stronghold. The porter in the present instance hesitated much. He said Mr Lycett-Landon had not been there for some time; that there was a heap of letters for him, which he took out of a pigeon-hole and turned over in his hands as he spoke, and among which Horace (with a jump of his heart) thought he could see some of his mother's; but nothing had been said about forwarding them, and he really couldn't take upon himself to say that he knowed the address.

"But I'm his son," said Horace.

The porter looked at him very knowingly. "That don't make me none the wiser, sir," he said with great reason.

The youth went out to his mother somewhat aghast. "They don't know anything of him here," he said; "they say he hasn't been for long. There's quite a pile of letters for him."

"Then we must go to the office," Mrs Lycett-Landon said. "He must have been very busy, or—or something."

That was an assertion which no one could dispute. When the cab drove off again she repeated the former speech with an angry laugh. "It is ridiculous, Horace, that you and I should have to run about like this from pillar to post, as if papa could slip out of sight like a—like a—mere clerk." The mercantile world does not make much account of clerks, and she did not feel that she could find anything stronger to say.

"Nobody would believe it," said Horace, "if we were to tell them; but in the City it will be different," he added, gravely.

In Liverpool it must be allowed the City was not thought very much of. It had not the same prestige as the great mercantile town of the north. The merchant princes were considered to belong to the seaports, and the magnates of the City had an odour of city feasts and vulgarity about them; but in the present circumstances it had other attractions.

"The name of Lycett-Landon can't be unknown there," said the lad.

His mother was wounded even by this assertion. She drew herself up. "A Lycett-Landon has no right to be unknown anywhere," she said. "We don't need to take our importance from any firm, I hope. But London is insufferable; nobody is anybody that comes from what they are pleased to call the country 'here.'"

There was an indignant tone in Mrs Lycett-Landon's voice. But yet she too felt, though she would not acknowledge it, that for once the City would be the most congenial. They drove along through the crowded, noisy streets in a hansom, feeling, after all, a little more at home among people who were evidently going to business as the men did in their own town. The sight of a well-brushed, well-washed, gold-chained commercial magnate in a white waistcoat with a rose in his button-hole did them good. And thus they arrived at "the office," that one home-like spot amid all the desert of unaccustomed streets.

"Perhaps," the mother said, "we shall find him here, ready to laugh at us for this ridiculous expedition."

"Well, I hope not," said Horace, "for he will be angry. Papa doesn't like to be looked after."

This speech chilled Mrs Lycett-Landon a little, for it was quite true; and for her part she was not a woman who liked to be found fault with on account of silly curiosity. As a matter of fact, few women do. So that it was with a little check to their eagerness that they got out at the office door among all the press of people coming to their daily labour. Horace, though he had been intended to work there, scarcely knew the place; and his mother, though she had driven down three or four times to pick up her husband on the occasions when they were in town together, was but little better acquainted with it. And the clerks did not at all recognise these very unlikely visitors. Ladies appeared very seldom at the office, and at this early hour never.

"Your father, of course, would not be here so early," Mrs Lycett-Landon said as they went up-stairs; "and I don't suppose young Mr Fareham either is the sort of person—but we must ask for Mr Fareham."

Remembering all that her husband had said, she did not in the least expect to find that young representative of the house. How curious it was to wait until she had been inspected by the clerk, to be asked who she was, to be requested to take a seat, till it was known if Mr Fareham was disengaged! An impulse which she could scarcely explain restrained her from giving her name, which would at once have gained her all the respect she could have desired; and for the first time in her life Mrs Lycett-Landon realised what it must be to come as a poor petitioner to such a place. The clerks made their observations on her and her son behind their glass screen. They decided that she must want a place in the office for the young fellow, but that Fareham would soon give her her answer. These young men did not think much of the personal appearance of Horace, who was clearly from the country—a lanky youth whom it would be difficult to make anything of. Their consternation was extreme when young Mr Fareham, coming out somewhat superciliously to see who wanted him, exclaimed suddenly, "Mrs Landon!" and went forward holding out his hands. "If I had known it was you!" he said. "I hope I have not kept you waiting. But some mistake must have been made, for I was not told your name."

"It was no mistake," she said, looking graciously at the young clerk, who stood by very nervous and abashed. "I did not give my name. We shall not detain you a moment, we only want an address."

While she spoke she had time to remark the perfectly correct and orthodox appearance of young Fareham, of whom it was almost impossible to believe that he had ever committed an irregularity of any description in the course of his life. He led the way into his room with all the respect which was due to the wife of the chief partner, and gave her a chair. "My time is entirely at your service," he said; "too glad to be able to be of any use."

Mrs Lycett-Landon sat down, and then there ensued a moment of such embarrassment as perhaps in all her life she had never known before. There was a certain surprise in the air with which he regarded her, and not the slightest appearance of any idea what she could possibly want him for at this time in the morning. And somehow this surprised unconsciousness on his part brought the most curious painful consciousness to her. She was silent; she looked at him with a kind of blank appeal. She half rose again to go away without putting her question. She seemed to be on the eve of a betrayal, of a family exposure. How foolish it was! She looked at Horace's easy-minded, tranquil countenance, and took courage.

"Do you expect," she said, "Mr Landon here to-day?" with a smile, yet a catch of her breath.

"Mr Landon!" The astonishment of young Fareham was extreme. "Is he in town? We have not seen him since May."

"Horace," said Mrs Lycett-Landon, half-rising from her chair and then falling back upon it. "Horace, your father must be very ill. He must have had—some operation—he must have thought I would be over-anxious——"

She became very pale as she uttered these broken words, and looked as if she were going to faint; and Horace, too, stared with bewildered eyes. Young Fareham began to be alarmed. He saw that his quick response was altogether unexpected, and that there was evidently some mystery.

"Let me see," he said, appearing to ponder, "perhaps I am making a mistake. Yes, I am sure he was here in May—he had just come back from the Continent. Wasn't it so? Oh, then, I must have misunderstood him. I thought he said——Now I remember, he certainly was here in town. Yes, came to tell me something about letters—what was it?"

"Perhaps where you were to send his letters," Mrs Landon said quickly. "That is what we want to know." While she was listening to him, her mind had been going through a great many questions, and she had brought herself summarily back to calm. If it should be serious illness, all her strength would be wanted. She must not waste her forces with foolish fainting or giving in, but husband them all.

Then there arose an inquiry in the office. One clerk after another was called in to be questioned. One said Mr Lycett-Landon's letters were all forwarded to the Liverpool house, or to the Elms, Rockferry, his private address; another, that they were sent to the club; and it was not till some time had been lost that one of the youngest remembered an address to which he had once been sent, to a lodging where Mr Landon was staying. He remembered all about it, for it was a pretty house, with a garden, very unlike Jermyn Street.

"It was just after Mr Landon came back from abroad," the youth said; and by degrees he remembered exactly where it was, and brought it written down, in a neat, clerkly hand, on an office envelope. It was a flowery address, a villa in a road, both of them fanciful with a cockney sentiment.

Mrs Lycett-Landon took the paper from him with a smile of thanks; but she was so bewildered and confused that she rose up and went out of the office without even saying good-morning to young Fareham.

"Mamma, mamma," cried Horace after her, "you have never said——"

"Oh, don't trouble her," said young Fareham; "I can see she is anxious. You'll come back, won't you, and let me know if you've found him? But I hope there is some mistake."

He did not say what kind of mistake he hoped for, nor did Horace say anything as he followed his mother. He, like Milly, thought it impossible that papa would have hidden himself thus to be ill. He was a little nervous of speaking to his mother when he saw how pale and preoccupied she looked.

"Shall I call a cab?" he said. "Mother, do you really think there is so much to fear?"

"He has never been on the Continent," was all his mother could say.

"No; that's true. They just have got that into their heads. It was no business of theirs where he went."

"It is everybody's business where a man goes—a man like him. I think I know what it is, Horace. He has been fretful for some time, and restless; he must have been ill, and he has been going through an operation. Don't say anything; I feel sure of it. Perhaps there was danger in it, and he feared the fuss, and that I should be over-anxious."

"We always thought as children that papa liked to be made a fuss with," said simple Horace.

"You thought so in the nursery, because you liked it yourselves. Yes, we had better have a cab. How full the streets are! one cannot hear oneself talking."

Then she was silent a little till the hansom was called. It was a very noisy part of the City, where the traffic is continual, and it was very difficult to hear a woman's voice. She paused before she got into the cab.

"Now I think of it," she said, "you had better go and telegraph to Milly, for she will be anxious. Go back to the hotel and do it. Tell her that we have got to town all safe, and that you will send her word this evening how papa is."

"But, mother, you are not going without me! and it will be better to telegraph after we know."

"That is what I wish you to do, Horace. It might upset him. I think it a great deal better for me to go by myself. Just do what I tell you. Milly will want to know that we have arrived all right; and wait at the hotel till I send for you."

"You had much better let me come with you, mother."

The noise was so great that she only made a "No" with her mouth, shaking her head as she got into the cab, and gave him the address to show the cabman. Then, before Horace had awakened from his surprise, she was gone, and he was left, feeling very solitary, pushed about by all the passers-by upon the pavement. The youth was half angry, half astonished. To go back to the hotel was not a thing that tempted him, but he was so young that he obeyed by instinct, meaning to pour forth his indignation to Milly. Even in a telegram there is a possibility of easing one's heart.