65
February 1931
T h e
K i n g ’ s
B u s i n e s s
“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death . . . 0 death, where is thy stingf 0 grarve, where is thy victory? Thanks be to God, which gvveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 15:26, 55, 5 7).
Constance sat peering into the fire with puckered brow and puzzled heart, praying for them all. * * * The transcontinental plane rose grandly from the field and circled overhead. “A rash, foolhardy project!” exclaimed a bystander. “Why are you trembling, Mother?” asked Althea as they stood watching, the great humming winged thing as it soared off into the east. “Bert is not going over thé water in it ! It’s such a relief to know that he’ll just park it near New York and take a perfectly good boat over. This new plane that’s waiting in France must be wonder ful ! And if he makes the Europe-Asia flight alone, you will be so proud! Just think, they’re beginning to call him an eaglet already !” Althea spoke cheerfully for her mother’s sake. Bui that night, alone with her cousin, she shook her head. “I ’m not merely blue—I ’m indigo,” she said. And later, weeping, she prayed, with her arm over Connie’s shoul der, not as though she hoped for Bert’s safety, but with intense yearning for his salvation. * . ♦ * Was that an old Tibetan temple? A lamasery? Bert wondered ! And were those strange-looking men in red outlandish attire lamas? He knew that he had been badly smashed up last night when he had gone away off his course, when he had groped and circled helplessly and had struck into a merci less mountainside in a heavy storm. He had just been calculating before the crash that he was somewhere over Tibet, “the roof of the world.” He had an idea that he had lost consciousness after he had crawled to the shelter of a great rock. He remembered noticing that the rain and hail had kept his wrecked plane from blazing up. He had marveled that he himself was alive, as he dragged a badly cut and injured leg after him. He had suffered intensely, too, from an injured side and wondered if any ribs were broken. He felt sure that he was bleeding in ternally. It was good to get out of the wind! Blowing such a gale that the rain and snow were stopping! A star or two peeped down. He vaguely looked for the Pleiades, those hinges of the universe, and then murmured to the projection above him, childishly, “Good old rock, shelter me !” Then his mind had become confused. At daybreak he had come to himself with an odd, light feeling over his whole being. The pain was there, but somehow he did not feel it so keenly, He made out, as the sun arose, the outline of some sort of heathen build-
S I walked through the wilderness of this world —’ ” Constance was reading aloud. Althea’s brother reached out from his chaise longue and and seized the book. “ ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ !” he exclaimed. “This is more than enough! Mother, come in! See what your Boston niece is reading to your only son! Heh! Heh!’’ Althea’s mother came swiftly to his side. Althea watched her with lazy amusement from her low chair by the fire. Bert was so obviously her favorite child! “Do you think, Constance dear,” M,rs. Sumner began in her cultured, somewhat throaty voice, “that this is just the thing for Bert? He needs to be entertained until his eyes are strong again, the doctor says.” “Yes! And then he will go off to the air port, so cheerio, Connie!” interrupted Althea. Mrs. Sumner turned quickly toward her. “Certainly! He will be flying away all too soon!” she said in an an noyed tone. Althea flushed a little. She invariably hit the wrong key at home. She had just meant to be cheerful! “I should not have chosen that dear old book,” Con stance hastily interposed. She knew, all too well now, the situation. She had long since discerned that Althea was politely hampered in her Christian life, in every pos sible way, by her world-loving mother and brother. She divined that Althea’s father would have been sympathetic had he dared. Once, when the girls were having one of the good-night talks so dear to the feminine heart, Althea had said, as she shook down the heavy ripples of her red- gold hair, “Pops let me tell him all about the Thin Red Line tonight! And Connie—his eyes were really wet—oh my dear!” Constance had tried, in her own girlish way, to cushion for Althea some of the sharp corners of her home life. And occasionally Bert himself, with the genuine capricious ness of a favorite child, had come over to Althea’s side. “Connie and Althea are, and have been, the comfort of my life,” he remarked, drawing his fine dark brows together in the frown his mother dreaded. “My only complaint is that they are always members of that Thin Red Line of theirs, and anyone with any penetration can see it.” “ ‘This one thing I do,’ ” cried Althea. And, “ ‘To me to live is Christ,’ ” Connie murmured softly. Bert flung himself out of his chair and out of the room, while Mrs. Sumner continued to reprove Althea and
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