Bawne's fair face glowed. He gasped in ecstasy:
"Father.... You mean Mr. Sherbrand—your Flying Man who's in the Hospital?"
"My Flying Man—but he is well again and back at work at Hendon. There was not much the matter with him; a slight obstruction in one of the nasal passages that prevented him from breathing with his mouth shut as he should. Now he has asked me—this afternoon if I am at leisure—to bring my little son to the aërodrome and see him make a flight."
"And go up in his aëroplane with him? Father, say Yes! Do, please do!"
As the little figure bobbed up and down beside him in joyous excitement, Saxham answered, not without an inward tug:
"If your mother says 'Yes' I shall not say No! Now off with you, my son!"
The boy saluted and went. Even his bright obedience wrung his father's heart. The man looked haggard and old. He hid his careworn face in his hands for a minute. His lips were still moving when he looked up and made the Sign so well known to many of us upon his forehead and breast. Prayer, that most powerful of all therapeutic agents, so often prescribed by Saxham for his patients, was his own tonic and sedative in moments of bodily exhaustion and mental overstrain.
He had prayed, he, the sceptic, on that unforgettable night at Gueldersdorp, when he wrestled with his possessing fiend.... Lynette had taught him the habit of prayer. And even as she, a friendless, neglected waif, had learned to look up and see the shining Faces of our Divine Redeemer and His Virgin Mother through the features of a pure and tender woman; so her husband, looking in the eyes of Lynette, had found the gift of Faith lost years before.
"Oh! ... Prayer!" you say—"Faith!" ... and I see you shrug and sneer a little, you who are intellectual and highly educated, and have ceased to believe in what you term the Hebraic myth or the Christian legend—since you learned to point out the weak places in the First Book of Genesis, and sneer at the discrepancies between the statements of the Gospel narrators—though you will hear such testimonies sworn to in good faith, wherever witnesses are examined in a Court of Law.
But no! you tell me, you are not an Agnostic. You credit the existence of Almighty God, but prayer is the parson's affair. Well, because a man wears a straight black coat, will you abandon to him so inestimable a privilege? Is it not a marvellous thing that you or I should lift up our earth-made, earth-begrimed hands, and that He who set this tiny planet to spin out its æons of cycles amidst the innumerable millions of systems wheeling through His Universe should stoop to hear the words we utter? Feeble cries, drowned by the orchestras of the winds, and the chorus of the Spheres revolving in their orbits, or silent utterances imperceptible to any Ear save His alone.