Silver Wings (6 page)

She walked on for some distance till at last she reached a little woods on the upper edge of the airstrip, which seemed to extend along the back of the Whitney property, and she finally entered the grounds once more through a break in the hedge a good way above the garages.

Anxious not to meet anyone, feeling almost guilty because of her clandestine meeting with the departed guest, she hurried breathlessly to the back entrance and succeeded in regaining her room without meeting any of the family or guests, though she just escaped coming face-to-face with the golden-haired Diana, who was coming out on the terrace as Amory slid into the doorway of the back hall.

Up in her room she locked her door and fell on her knees beside the bed. So much seemed to have happened since she had left that room that morning, so very much. It seemed as if the whole universe was turned upside down for her. She wanted to laugh and she wanted to cry, but she wanted most of all to pray, and the words were choked in tears in her throat. All she could say was, “Oh, Father, keep him safely. Save him, and keep him safely.”

When she grew calmer she got up from her knees and took out the handkerchief, examining it more carefully. With excited fingers she unknotted the corner. Pinned safely inside was a pair of little silver wings, evidently a prize for some deed of valor. On the back was his name, Theodore Gareth Kingsley, and a date.

She looked long at it, holding it in her hand, pinning it on her dress just for a moment to see how it would look, studying the fine engraving, wondering at herself, trembling at herself lest somehow she had done the wrong thing.

Again she chastised herself. Nothing like this had ever come into her life before. For years Will Hazard had seen her home from prayer meeting, and Frank Burton had carried her books from school, and Sam Thomas had taken her to the Rayport High School games, and several boys had called upon her often, sometimes alone, sometimes together. But to have a stranger pick her up in this astonishing way seemed all wrong. It was not according to the bringing up of Aunt Hannah and Aunt Jocelyn. She had always felt that such things would not happen to a good, decent girl. Yet this had happened to her. Was she wrong to keep these little silver wings? Ought she perhaps to fling them away in the grass and let some other girl find them and bring them into the house someday, thinking their friend “Teddy” had lost them? But no, he had put the wings into her hand to keep. They were evidently something he cared for, as much perhaps as she cared for the little Testament that her own dear mother had given her on a birthday long ago, before that mother went home to heaven. Perhaps she should not have given her Testament away, yet when he asked, she had felt a heaven-sent urge to give it to him. It was God’s book. It might show him the way to God.

Some girls might have given that book coquettishly, but not Amory. She was serious in all that she did, and the book meant so much to her own heart that she could not lightly give it to anyone.

A clamor suddenly arose outside the window, and in new alarm, Amory quickly wrapped her treasures away, the pin fastened firmly in the handkerchief, which she wrapped in a bit of paper and placed in the inner pocket of her suitcase. No one in this house should ever see them. She would not even write to the aunts about it, for they would never understand. Perhaps, when she was back home and time had made this thing more plain, she might tell them what had happened and get their judgment on her own actions. But no, she was not sure Aunt Hannah would understand even then. They would be grieved, the aunts, and think she had soon departed from their upbringing. They would be afraid to have her away from them a day lest the birdman would steal her and spirit her away.

So she locked away her treasures and went to the window to see what the outcry was about.

It was Caroline who had started it.

“Ted isn’t in his room, Mother! I knocked and knocked, and then I opened the door a tiny crack and nobody was there. Christine says she heard him go down the back stairs quite early. I’ll bet he has gone out to that old plane! I’ll bet he’s taken a fly without any of us along. And I told him it was my turn first, because he promised the last time he was here! If he has taken anybody else, I’m off him for life. Is anybody missing? Where’s Di? Oh, there you are! And Susanne? Well, then maybe he’s gone alone, the pig!”

She stamped her foot angrily.

Amory hovered behind her curtain guiltily and watched them all, knowing that she could so easily explain where their Teddy had gone, hugging the thought wickedly to herself that she alone of all that company had been asked to take that first flight. She was glad that she had not accepted of course, but glad, glad that he had cared to ask her.

Was that wrong for her to feel glad about that? Oh, was it? She had not realized before how easy it was for her to be selfish, how romantic she could become. What on earth was the matter with her?

“Why, I’ll tell you where he is of course,” said Mrs. Whitney, coming out smiling. “He’s out on the airstrip, Caroline, babying that precious old engine of his. You ought to have looked for him there at once, for that’s where he always goes the first thing in the morning.”

There was an immediate stampede down through the garden to the little gate and out on the airstrip. Amory, standing back in her room watching them, found herself trembling, as if her recent escapade were about to be discovered—as if she herself were out there now, standing with her back against that hedge, the soft handkerchief in her hands, waiting to be brought to shame.

It was a relief, when they all came trooping back, to realize that she was up here safe and the handkerchief hidden away from sight. They did not even know she was here, unless someone had seen her from the window when she went out very early. She had come in by such a roundabout way that surely no one would suspect her of having been with the missing guest.

She nevertheless felt guilty, as if she ought to go down and explain the absent one. It was such a relief to know she need not.

“The plane is gone, Mother! I told you so!” cried Caroline angrily. “There goes our plan for the day right at the start. There won’t be even couples, and how can we play our tournament? I declare, I think Ted is the limit! I didn’t think he’d be mean like that. He knew what we were intending to do, and he just went off without a word.”

“Perhaps he’ll be back,” said Diana confidently. “You know he has a date with me tonight.” She threw herself down in a big picturesque chair and tilted her chin toward the sky. “He’ll probably be back in time for the first game.”

Then came Christine with a note.

“I found it in the library on your desk, Madam,” she said.

Annoyed, Mrs. Whitney took the note and opened it. If he had left a note, it must mean he did not intend to return. It was most provoking when she had thought she had him safely for once.

Frowning, she read the note aloud.

“Now isn’t that just like him!” she said, looking up in vexation. “He’s quite impossible. I never could depend on him for a thing since he got this flying craze. And mercy! What is he going to do next? I nearly turned gray when he did that endurance test. I suppose we’ll see it in the papers tomorrow though, if he doesn’t come back. Now, girls, what are we going to do to fill his place?”

“I know, Teacher,” said Susanne, raising her hand eagerly. “Let’s take the preacher and train him for the part.”

“The preacher?” said Mrs. Whitney, raising her eyebrows. “What preacher?”

“She means John Dunleith, Mother,” said Caroline, with infinite scorn in her voice. “She hasn’t the least idea what a nut he is!”

“Oh, John! Why, my dear Susanne. Impossible! He would run from a playing card as if it were a serpent, and I doubt if he would know a tennis racket if he met one. Of course, I haven’t seen him since he was a boy, and then only for a few hours, but he writes the most religious letters to your uncle, and he has had no contact with our world whatever. Of course he’ll be polite and all that, I suppose, but he’s a sort of recluse, I imagine, always trying to convert somebody. We really can’t be burdened with trying to include him in the company. We’ll have to telephone and get somebody else here quickly before he arrives, and then he will understand that our numbers are full. Of course we must be polite, but he really wouldn’t do for bridge or dancing or even any of the sports, I’m sure. Now, who else is there? Tommy Hague, I suppose, though he is a little too fond of cocktails, and Mr. Whitney has taken the most incredible dislike to him.”

“You leave Mr. Dunleith to me, Mother Whitney!” called out Diana, swinging her long, slim, silken leg back and forth in her lounging chair. “I’ll wind him round my little finger. You don’t know what I’ll do to him. I might teach him to dance, or I may even decide to teach him bridge, in which case nobody is to fuss if he proves terribly dumb. It’s part of the game, you know, and we all agreed to help.”

They went on planning their diabolical joke, and Amory in her room fumed indignantly and wished she knew a way to warn the young minister before he arrived and so foil their plans.

They all trooped in noisily to breakfast, and she was glad to hear Christine’s knock as she came in with the breakfast tray, for her early walk and exciting experiences had made her very hungry.

“Madam wishes to see you at eleven in her dressing room,” Christine announced when she had arranged the tray on a little table for Amory. “She usually has her breakfast in bed and opens her mail before she gets up. She will want you then to take dictations. But this morning she took a notion to get up for breakfast, so she can’t see you till eleven. She said I was to tell you that you were to feel free to go to the library and get anything you want to read.”

Amory thanked her pleasantly and sat down to her breakfast with a good appetite in spite of the turmoil of her mind.

W
hen Amory finished breakfast, she looked at her watch. It was half past nine, and there would just be time before she was summoned to Mrs. Whitney to write a letter home to the dear aunts who would be watching and waiting hourly for the first word from her. Could she do it without showing so much as a hint of the excitement of the morning? Would she be able to keep the incident of the flier out of the atmosphere of her letter? Well, she must try, though she suspected that Aunt Jocelyn would find out. Aunt Jocelyn during the years had always somehow managed to find out everything in Amory’s life. It was hard to deceive a love so understanding and true.

But this was something that must be kept from her at least while Amory was away, for it would only plant a seed of uneasiness that would give infinite pain to the two dear women—pain for which there was no need, and an uneasiness that had absolutely no foundation. For of course she would never see that flier again, and of course she must treat the incident as a mere opportunity to send forth her little Testament to plant a possible seed in a heart that needed it.

So she wrote her letter, full of lovely descriptions—mountains and castles and mansions. Oh, such mansions, and the country club! The airstrip figured only as a bit of the landscape next door with the wonder of a plane landing in full view. That was as much as she permitted herself to put in. If ever the rest of the story came to light, it would be easier to have mentioned that landing plane as a simple incident and nothing that had to be hid.

The letter was further filled with character sketches of the guests of the house as she saw them on the terrace from her window, and closed with a detailed description of her room. On the whole she felt that she had done pretty well, and she was just addressing her envelope when the sound of an automobile arriving at the entrance way, just beyond the terrace and visible from her window, sent her to her curtained point of observation again. And it was so she saw the arrival of the much discussed and unwelcome cousin.

There was nothing awkward or gawky about the stranger’s appearance. Perhaps this was not he after all. Perhaps it was the substitute for Teddy whom they had raked up from somewhere by telephone. Only, this was the hour when they had said he would arrive. What was the pleasant-sounding name by which they called him? Dunleith, that was it, John Dunleith! It had a Scotch sound and smacked of heather and noble Norman blood or something like that. She felt hazy in her knowledge of things Scotch. But she liked his face, as much as she saw of it, as he got out of the car and went up the steps. He had a square, firm chin and pleasant lips, not rippling into a grin like the flier’s, but graver, more settled perhaps. Nice gray eyes, too, and a clear-cut face. He was tall and did not have the ascetic look she had expected from his relatives’ description.

He wore a plain gray business suit, tweed, of a good cut, and there was nothing in the least countrified about him. Neither did he have the pale, fine, frenzied look of a fanatic. In fact, he appeared like a real man with good, sound common sense, so far as a first casual glance went. But probably she was wrong, and it wasn’t John Dunleith at all.

A few minutes later she was summoned into Mrs. Whitney’s dressing room, and there sat the man she had just seen arrive.

Mrs. Whitney received her graciously, coolly, and introduced her quite casually to the man. “My nephew, Mr. Dunleith, Miss Lorrimer. I am going to ask you later to show him around the place, as I shall be busy myself, and I believe the other young people are all busy elsewhere. You can ask Christine to direct you, in case you haven’t already discovered your way around.”

Then she turned to the young man.

“John, if you have letters to write, suppose you go to your room and get them done now. Michael goes down to the office about noon and can take them for you, and Miss Lorrimer and I will get through the morning mail while you are writing. I’ll have someone call you when Miss Lorrimer is at leisure.”