Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man. Marie Conway Oemler
stone wall, had to fall back, baffled. He could be sure of only one thing: that never again could he be what he had been once—"the slickest cracksman in America." This in itself tortured him. Heretofore, life had been exactly what he chose to make it: he had put himself to the test, and he had proven himself the most daring, the coolest, shrewdest, most cunning, in that sinister world in which he had shone with so evil a light. He had been Slippy McGee. Sure of himself, his had been that curious inverted pride which is the stigmata of the criminal.
More than once I saw him writhe in his chair, tormented, shaken, spent with futile curses, impotently lamenting his lost kingdom. He still had the skill, the cold calculating brain, the wit, the will; and now, by a cruel chance and a stupid accident, he had lost out! The end had come for him, and he in his heyday! There were moments when, watching him, I had the sensation as of witnessing almost visibly, here in our calm sunny garden, the Dark Powers fighting openly for a soul.
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."
CHAPTER IVToC
UNDERWINGS
If I have not heretofore spoken of Mary Virginia, it is because all that winter she and Mrs. Eustis had been away; and in consequence Appleboro was dull enough. For the Eustises are our wealthiest and most important family, just as the Eustis house, with its pillared, Greek-temple-effect front, is by far the handsomest house in town. When we have important folks to entertain, we look to the Eustises to save our faces for us by putting them up at their house.
One afternoon, shortly after we had gotten settled in Appleboro, I came home to find my mother entertaining no less a personage than Mrs. Eustis; she wasn't calling on the Catholic priest and his mother, you understand; far from it! She was recognizing Armand De Rancé and Adele de Marsignan!
Mrs. Eustis was a fair, plump little partridge of a woman, so perfectly satisfied with herself that brains, in her case, would have amounted to a positive calamity. She is an instance of the fascination a fool seems to have for men of undoubted powers of mind and heart, for Eustis, who had both to an unusual degree, loved her devotedly, even while he smiled at her. She had, after some years of childlessness, laid him under an everlasting obligation by presenting him with a daughter, an obligation deepened by the fact that the child was in every sense her father's child, not her mother's.
That afternoon she brought the little girl with her, to make our acquaintance. When the child, shyly friendly, looked up, it seemed to me for an anguished moment as if another little girl had walked out of the past, so astonishingly like was she to that little lost playmate of my youth. Right then and there Mary Virginia walked into my heart and took possession, as of a place swept and garnished and long waiting her coming.
When we knew her better my mother used to say that if she could have chosen a little girl instead of the little boy that had been I, she must have chosen Mary Virginia Eustis out of all the world.
Like Judge Mayne's Laurence, she chose to make the Parish House her second home—for indeed my mother ever seemed to draw children to her, as by some delightful magic. Here, then, the child learned to sew and to embroider, to acquire beautiful housewifely accomplishments, and to speak French with flawless perfection; she reaped the benefit of my mother's girlhood spent in a convent in France; and Mrs. Eustis was far too shrewd not to appreciate the value of this. And so we acquired Mary Virginia.
I watched the lovely miracle of her growth with an almost painful tenderness. Had I not become a priest, had I realized those spring hopes of mine; and had there been little children resembling their mother, then my own little girls had been like this one. Even thus had been their blue eyes, and theirs, too, such hair of such curling blackness.
The hours I spent with the little girl and Laurence helped me as well as them; these fresh souls and growing minds freshened and revived mine, and kept me young in heart.
"We are all made of dust," said my mother once. "But Mary Virginia's is star dust. Star dust, and dew, and morning gold," she added musingly.
"She simply cannot imagine evil, much less see it in anything or in anybody," I told Madame, for at times the child's sheer innocence troubled me for her. "One is puzzled how to bring home to this naïve soul the ugly truth that all is not good. Now, Laurence is better balanced. He takes people and events with a saving grain of skepticism. But Mary Virginia is divinely blind."
My mother regarded me with a tolerant smile. "Do not worry too much over that divinely blind one, my son," said she. "I assure you, she is quite capable of seeing a steeple in daylight! Observe this: yesterday Laurence angered her, and she seized him by the hair and bumped his head against the study wall—no mild thump, either! She has in her quite enough of the leaven of unrighteousness to save her, at a pinch—for Laurence was entirely right, she entirely wrong. Yet—she made him apologize before she consented to forgive him, and he did it gratefully. She allowed him to understand how magnanimous she was in thus pardoning him for her own naughtiness, and he was deeply impressed, as men-creatures should be under such circumstances. Such wisdom, and she but a child! I was enchanted!"
"Good heavens! Surely, Mother, I misunderstand you! Surely you reproved her!"
"Reprove her?" My mother's voice was full of astonishment. "Why should I reprove her? She was perfectly right!"
"Perfectly right? Why, you said—indeed, I assure you, you said that Laurence had been entirely right, she entirely wrong!"
"Oh, that! I see; well, as for that, she was."
"Then, surely—"
"My son, a woman who is in the wrong is entirely right when she makes the man apologize," said my mother firmly. "That is the Law, fixed as the Medes' and the Persians', and she who forgets or ignores it is ground between the upper and the nether millstones. Mary Virginia remembered and obeyed. When she grows up you will all of you adore her madly. Why, then, should she be reproved?"
I have never been able to reflect upon Laurence getting his head bumped and then gratefully apologizing to the darling shrew who did it, without a cold wind stirring my hair. And yet—Laurence, and I, too, love her all the more dearly for it! Miserere, Domine!
It was May when Mary Virginia came back to Appleboro. She had written us a bubbling letter, telling us just when we were to expect her, and how happy she was at the thought of being home once more. We, too, rejoiced, for we had missed her sadly. My mother was so happy that she planned a little intimate feast to celebrate the child's return.
I remember how calm and mild an evening it was. At noon there had been a refreshing shower, and the air was deliciously pure and clear, and full of wet woodsy scents. The raindrops fringing the bushes became prisms, a spiderweb was a fairy foot-bridge; and all our birds, leaving for a moment such household torments as squalling insatiable mouths that must be filled, became jubilant choristers. "The opulent dyepots of the angels" had been emptied lavishly across the sky, and the old Parish House lay steeped in a serene and heavenly glow, every window glittering diamond-bright to the west.
Next door Miss Sally Ruth was feeding and scolding her cooing pigeons, which fluttered about her, lighting upon her shoulder, surrounding her with a bright-colored living cloud; the judge's black cat Panch lay along the Mayne side of the fence and blinked at them regretfully with his slanting emerald eyes. From the Mayne kitchen-steps came, faintly, Daddy January's sweet quavering old voice:
"—Gwine tuh climb up higher 'n' higher,
Some uh dese days—"