Silver Wings (20 page)

As the lights of the car were flung ahead on this frightful decline, Barry stepped on his gas and plunged down.

“Oh, don’t! Please don’t! Barry, don’t!” screamed the girls.

“Lemme alone!” blared Barry. “You think I can’t drive! I’ll show you, or we’ll all die in the attempt!”

He laughed a horrible vacant cackle and stepped on the gas again. The car toppled wildly round one curve, then another, and was going straight for the chasm at a breakneck speed, when suddenly a strong arm knocked Barry’s hand from the wheel and turned it just enough to save them from an awful death.

Dunleith kept the car heading to the left of the road, and as they went off the slippery paving onto the rough shoulder, he ground on the brakes. The sudden bumping frightened the girls again, and they screamed in terror.

Barry, groping for his right senses, realized only that he had been rudely set aside, and began actively to protest.

Dunleith had no time to deal with him then, though Barry’s struggles to regain the wheel made driving twice as difficult. Barry, dazed and furious, raised his hand to strike at the other man, when with one quick movement, a soft silken scarf slid down over his face and jerked his head back sharply.

With a strange glad thrill in his heart that Diana had taken his part, Dunleith finally succeeded in bringing the car to a standstill.

“Now, get out!” he ordered.

Barry tried to protest in no pleasant language, but Dunleith threw open the door and pushed him from the front seat. Barry stood, wobbling crazily for a moment on the running board, and Dunleith got out and put him into the passenger’s seat he had just been occupying. Then he went back to the driver’s seat and took the wheel.

Slowly, carefully, he piloted the car down the rest of the treacherous hill and back to the highway safely.

“Well,” said Caroline, leaning forward when the excitement was past, “we’ll have to tell Mama she was mistaken. She said you didn’t know how to drive a car. She said you never had a chance to learn. But that was simply great! Where did you ever drive before, John?”

“Oh, I drove a truck sometimes over in France,” said John Dunleith casually. Then looking back to Caroline’s escort he said, “Look out for Barry, won’t you? He’s quite beyond looking out for himself.”

At last they drove up to the house from which they had departed so joyfully. Caroline rushed in to make known in a loud voice their narrow escape and Cousin John’s marvelous rescue at the critical moment. Mr. Whitney came out to see about it, angry, excited, grateful. He put his arm on his young son’s shoulder lovingly, and Neddy looked up to his father’s face with a wise, understanding grin: “Say, Dad, you oughtta have seen Cousin John handle that car! He certainly is one crackerjack driver!”

It was Dunleith who got Barry up to his room, quietly, by the back stairs, and put him to bed, and he did not linger downstairs to hear his praises sounded. He was sick at heart over the whole day. A girl like that and a young man like that throwing their lives away! A girl who could look earnest and ask questions that showed her heart was stirred! A thoughtless, giddy, butterfly of a girl who didn’t know what it was all about. But would she tie her life to a young man already given over to drink? What a sad awakening there would be for her someday!

And over in her room, Amory was putting away her wet garments, preparing for the night, and thinking what a day this had been! Oh, she was earning every penny of her salary, that was for sure!

Down below in the library, with the windows wide open, somebody had turned on the radio, and the voice of the announcer came out loud and clear: “Ted Kingsley, the flier who set out at midnight Sunday night to make a nonstop flight to Nome and was reported to have passed over the city of Dawson at six this morning, his engine going strong, has not been heard from since, and it is feared something has gone wrong with his radio. He is now ten hours overdue at Nome.”

Amory dropped on her knees and began to pray.

M
orning brought no better news.

A couple of mining camps in the Canadian Rockies reported that they heard a plane about midnight, but it was not near enough for them to be sure. Down near Sitka there came one or two other rumors that an engine had been heard. But nothing had come through the air from the lost plane, and the gravest apprehensions were felt for young Kingsley, whose genial grin was a nationwide joy, and whose former daring feats had made him a hero. There was a hint that rescuers were even now preparing to go in search of him. In Briarcliffe, a pall suddenly settled down upon the house. Added to the fact that it was the day after the picnic, and most of them were feeling the physical effects of a strenuous outing with no intervals of rest, the entire household was depressed by the terrible uncertainty concerning one who had been among them so happily but a few short hours before.

Barry came down late, looking haggard and sullen. He smoked incessantly and scarcely answered when he was spoken to.

Most of the company resorted to cards as a quiet and decent manner of passing this time of solemn uncertainty. But there was no interest in the games, and finally Diana flung down her cards and got up.

“Count me out,” she said. “I can’t seem to put my mind on the cards. Here, you, Sam Marsden”—looking at the young neighbor who had just dropped in—“you take my place.”

Barry glared, but Diana went out of the room.

She went restlessly from room to room, as if searching for someone, and then stepped out on the terrace.

Dunleith was down at the end of the garden, sitting in a rose arbor with a book, and Ned, not far away by the basin of the big fountain, was working away at a miniature ship, repairing its tiny sails.

Diana went straight down to the arbor and appeared suddenly before Dunleith.

“What becomes of people when they die?” she asked abruptly without preamble. “Do they know anything afterward? Do they go somewhere?”

“Most certainly!” answered Dunleith with a quick lighting of his eyes.

“But, where do they go?”

“If they are Christ’s they go immediately to be with Him.”

Diana’s eyes widened perplexedly.

“I don’t believe Ted was,” she said sorrowfully. “He never talked about such things. I don’t believe he ever thought anything about them.”

“You can’t ever tell when a soul may have met God and become His child. It takes only an instant for such a transaction to take place.”

“You mean, if he knew he was falling, he could do something about it—even then?”

Dunleith nodded. “God is always close at hand. It does not take time to take God.”

“But he would not know what to do,” said Diana, her eyes full of tears.

“God has ways of talking to souls that we do not understand. The Holy Spirit would show him what to do.”

The tears were falling now, much to Diana’s astonishment. She was not a crying girl, and she brushed them away almost angrily and turned her face from him to hide them.

“Was he very close to you?” asked Dunleith with keen pity in his voice.

“Ted? Oh, no, but we’ve been pals since we could creep. It just seems so awful, that’s all!” she said, dabbing her eyes with a bright little Paris handkerchief and facing about with an attempt at a smile.

“But they have not given up hope yet,” said Dunleith kindly. “Any one of a hundred different things may have happened to him. He may have had to come down in some lonely place where no one saw him, and his radio may be out of order. Perhaps he’ll turn up again and surprise everybody. He may have stopped to sleep, you know. That’s the greatest danger, really, on those long flights, that a man will fall asleep at the wheel. I imagine Kingsley has a lot of sense, and if he found himself in danger of dropping off, he would feel it was far more sensible to come down when he found a good landing place and take a little rest before he went on. A flier has to think of all sorts of things. Or, he may have come down to repair some of his machinery. I wouldn’t give up hope.”

She looked at him curiously.

“You talk as if you knew all about it,” she said.

“Well, I did quite a bit of flying when I was in the army,” he said, “but nothing of course in the line that Kingsley has taken. Mine was only in the way of duty.” Diana stared at him.

“You’re rather wonderful yourself, aren’t you?” she said, and again, for the third time, Dunleith noticed something genuine in her voice that made him look at her and wonder.

But he had no opportunity to reply, for suddenly Barry appeared on the scene.

“We’re going to ride, Di!” he announced as if he had all right to order her doings. “Come on!”

Diana frowned but went, and Dunleith sat for a long time looking out through the rose-draped arbor.

“Poor little girl!” he said to himself. “Poor little girl!”

The day wore on and the crowd still played cards, the stakes growing higher and higher as they felt the need of keener excitement to keep them from thinking what might be happening to Kingsley. Mrs. Whitney had forbidden them to go to the country club. She said it didn’t look right for them to be over there having a good time publicly when their cousin was dead, perhaps. Mrs. Whitney’s greatest anxiety always was how her actions would appear to an onlooking world. She did not relish the idea of a published snapshot of Caroline, perhaps, playing tennis at the country club, and labeled, “Cousin of the lost flier taken this morning at Briarcliffe.” One must be careful about those things. The family was going to be rather prominent just now, anyway, whatever was the outcome.

So the house party stayed at home or drove quietly in country lanes. They did not dance, they did not even sing. They were not readers, so their only recourse was cards.

From time to time came messages over the radio, most of them speculations or false leads. A man down in the mountains of West Virginia had seen a strange plane flying over his head that acted as if it were in trouble, and had telegraphed the government. Another man in North Dakota had seen a man in flier’s clothes driving madly by his house toward the north in an old Ford car, and he had sent a telegram to a New York paper. Every edition of the newspapers had some new theory as to what had become of Ted Kingsley.

By this time several search parties had been organized and sent to the rescue, and Mr. Whitney had been at the telephone for two hours arranging a private rescue party that the Whitney family should send out after their beloved nephew.

“It will certainly look awfully well in the papers, Henry,” Leila Whitney had reminded him, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief. “You know people expect things of the family when they are at all able to do it.”

“I don’t give a hang what people expect!” roared the annoyed master of the house, hoarse with feeling and furious at the telephone company for keeping him on the line so long. “I’m doing this for Ted! If there’s anything that can save that kid’s life, I’m only too glad to do it! As for the rest, poppycock! Spending a lot of money to make people think something of you that isn’t so! That’s your idea! But it isn’t mine by a long shot. What is the matter with this infernal telephone? I wish you’d go away and leave me alone. I can’t hear what they say, Leila! Operator! Operator!”

Down on the terrace everybody was having an attack of nerves.

“Great cats! I can’t stand this!” said Susanne. “If the gloom doesn’t lift, I’m going to beat it! Everybody as long-faced as a funeral director! Barry drinking himself to death and Diana gone fluey! What’s one flier? He knew this might happen when he went, didn’t he? Well, he went, didn’t he? Well, then that’s that! Let’s live our lives and forget it!”

The next morning she sweetly professed to have a letter from her mother calling her home, and departed bag and baggage. But Mrs. Whitney promptly replaced her with Mary Lou Westervelt, and the house party dragged itself along.

These were hard days for Amory. She could not understand herself. Why should a man whom she had seen but twice, and then only for a few minutes each time, have taken such a hold upon her heart that she could think of nothing else? Of course the peril of even a stranger was a thing that stirred anyone, but this was different. This man had taken a place in her life that no one had ever taken before, and his few words, especially his good-bye over the telephone, rang over and over again in her ears as she went about her tasks.

She was glad that there was much work to be done. There were some invitations to be recalled; there were people calling constantly on the telephone to learn the latest news of Kingsley. She had schooled her voice to answer calmly, gravely, when they asked the inevitable question, “Do you think he is still alive?” As if anybody knew that! As if anybody could do anything but hope and fear. Why put these awful things into words that cut and tortured one?

Amory came and went as a part of the machinery of the household. She had come to be accepted as such now by the guests and the daughters of the house. Since they saw that she did not presume upon the privileges that were granted her socially, they no longer resented her presence among them, almost as one of them. Yet she was never one of them, and she felt as aloof as if she were dwelling in another world, a sort of spirit world, where they could not see her and thought as little of her as if she had been but a spirit.

She prayed continually for Gareth as she went about her work or sat down just to think about it all.

When she wrote to Aunt Hannah and Aunt Jocelyn, she shrank from mentioning the calamity that had overtaken the household in which she had come to abide for a time. Yet after long thought she decided that she should. Sometime something would be said, even if Aunt Jocelyn did not read the whole account in the papers and notice that Kingsley was connected with the Whitney family. Yes, of course, there were the papers, and she would have to talk about the occurrence or they would think it strange. So she wrote briefly of the sadness and anxiety everybody there was going through, and then after another pause to consider, she wrote: