WITH THE AID OF PROVIDENCE
To the little French girl, Petite Jeanne, each day dawned as a bright
new adventure. Mysteries might come and go, as indeed they often had,
but adventure! Ah yes, adventure was always with her.
Nor had her new treasure, the airplane with its gauze-like wings,
lessened her opportunity for adventure. Indeed it had increased it
tenfold. To Rosemary Sample one might say, “Well, you’re off to another
airplane journey,” and she undoubtedly would answer with a sigh, “Yes,
one more trip.” Not so Petite Jeanne. She was not reckless, this slender
child of the air. Her motor was inspected often, each guy and strut
tested, her radio tuned to the last degree of perfection. For all that,
each day as she took to the air it was with such a leaping of the heart
as comes only with fresh adventure.
And so it was that, as she climbed into the cockpit, with Madame Bihari,
Danby Force, and the tiny gypsy girl at her back, she touched the
controls of her perfect little plane for all the world as if never
before had her fingers known that touch. And as, after skimming along
the air above the foothills, she began climbing toward one lone snowy
peak among the Rockies, her heart was filled to overflowing with a fresh
zest for living.
“Just to live,” she whispered, “to live, to love, to dream, to hope and
sometimes see our hopes fulfilled! To see the dew on the grass in the
early morning, to hear the robins chirping in the early evening, to
watch children play, to feel the wind playing in your hair, to feel the
warm sunshine kiss your cheeks, to watch the red and gold of evening
sky. Ah yes, and to watch that snowy peak just before me, watch it grow
and grow and grow—that is _life_—_beautiful, wonderful, glorious life!_”
The airplane, which might have seemed to one far away a giant silver
insect, went gliding about the white capped mountain to drop at last
with scarcely a bump upon that landing field that had at other times
been a pasture above the clouds.
How convenient it would be if at times one’s spirit might, for a space
of a half hour or more, leave the body that, closing about it, holds it
in one place, and go with the speed of light to distant scenes. The
spirit of Rosemary Sample, speeding away toward Chicago, might for a
quarter hour or more have been spared from the great trans-continental
airplane. No one surely would have begrudged so faithful a worker such a
short period of recreation. And surely Rosemary would have been thrilled
by the opportunity of following our little company on the mountain crest
as they left Jeanne’s plane and followed the trail winding down to the
hunting lodge.
Had the spirit of Rosemary truly been with them, she must surely have
been asking herself, “Why is Danby Force here? What does he expect to
find at the lodge? Did he take the dark lady’s traveling bag? Is it
hidden there? Will he find it? And if he does, what will he take from
it? ‘Valuable papers’ were the dark lady’s words. Were there such
papers? There is some relation between this fine-appearing young man and
that lady. What can it be?” So the spirit of Rosemary Sample might have
spoken to itself had it followed down the mountainside. But the spirit
of Rosemary Sample was not there. Rosemary Sample, body, soul and
spirit, was in the trans-continental plane speeding on toward Chicago.
And beside her, now talking loudly and boastfully of his dangerous
exploits as an amateur aviator, and now speaking in kindly and gentle
tones of his mother, was young Willie VanGeldt.
“I should not care for him at all,” Rosemary told herself. Yet there was
something about him, his light and good-natured views of life, his smile
perhaps, something about him that claimed her interest.
“As if the stars had willed that for a time our lives should run
together, like trains on parallel tracks,” she whispered to herself.
Little did she guess the part that this youth with his wealth and his
reckless ways would play in her life, nor that which she would play in
his.
In the meantime Jeanne, Danby Force and their gypsy companions were
wending their way down the trail that led to the hunting lodge.
“I shan’t detain you long,” Danby Force was saying to Jeanne. “It’s just
a little thing I want to look into up here.”
Jeanne, whose curiosity had not as yet been aroused, scarcely heard him.
She was awed and charmed by the grandeur and beauty of the mountains. To
look up two thousand feet to the snow-clad rocks that were the mountain
peaks, then to look down quite as far to the tree-grown canyons far
below—ah that was grand!
When at last they came in sight of the rustic lodge, flanked as it was
by massive rocks and half covered by overhanging boughs of evergreens,
she stopped in her tracks to stand there lost in admiration.
“Ah!” she murmured, “What a grand solitude is here! Who would not wish
to return many, many times!”
She was soon enough to learn that it was not solitude the interesting
young man, Danby Force, sought. For, contrary to Rosemary Sample’s
suspicion, he had not hidden the dark lady’s traveling bag. He had
returned to seek it. How did he hope to succeed when, on that other
occasion, all others had failed? Well may one ask. Yet Danby Force did
not lack for hope. He believed in a kind Providence that sometimes
guides an honest soul in its search for hidden things. With the aid of
this Providence he might succeed where others had failed.