Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man. Marie Conway Oemler
then, you know theirs, too, and you are at liberty to employ the same fearsome frankness, provided you do it politely and are not speaking to an outsider. It is perfectly permissible for you to say exactly what you please about your own people to your own people, but should an outsider and an alien presume to do likewise, the Carolina code admits of but one course of conduct; borrowing the tactics of the goats against the wolf, they close in shoulder to shoulder and present to the audacious intruder an unbroken and formidable front of horns.
And it is the last place left in all America where decent poverty is in nowise penalized. You can be poor pleasantly—a much rarer and far finer art than being old gracefully. Because of this, life in South Carolina sometimes retains a simplicity as fine and sincere as it is charming.
I deplore the necessity, but I will be pardoned if I pause here to become somewhat personal, to explain who and what I am and how I came to be a pastor in Appleboro. To explain myself, then, I shall have to go back to a spring morning long ago, when I was not a poor parish priest, no, nor ever dreamed of becoming one, but was young Armand De Rancé, a flower-crowned and singing pagan, holding up to the morning sun the chalice of spring; joyous because I was of a perishable beauty, dazzled because life gave me so much, proud of an old and honored name, secure in ancestral wealth, loving laughter so much that I looked with the raised eyebrow and the twisted lip at austerities and prayers.
If ever I reflected at all, it was to consider that I had nothing to pray for, save that things might ever remain as they were: that I should remain me, myself, young Armand De Rancé, loving and above all beloved of that one sweet girl whom I loved with all my heart. Young, wealthy, strong, beautiful, loving, and beloved! To hold all that, crowded into the hollow of one boyish hand! Oh, it was too much!
I do not think I had ever felt my own happiness so exquisitely as I did upon that day which was to see the last of it. I was to go a-Maying with her who had ever been as my own soul, since we were children playing together. So I rode off to her home, an old house set in its walled inclosure by the river. At the door somebody met me, calling me by my name. I thought at first it had been a stranger. It was her mother. And while I stood staring at her changed face she took me by the hand and began to whisper in my ear … what I had to know. Blindly, like one bludgeoned on the head, I followed her into a darkened room, and saw what lay there with closed eyes and hair still wet from the river into which my girl had cast herself.
No, I cannot put into words just what had happened; indeed, I never really knew all. There was no public scandal, only great sorrow. But I died that morning. The young and happy part of me died, and, only half-alive I walked about among the living, dragging about with me the corpse of what had been myself. Crushed by this horrible burden which none saw but I, I was blind to the beauties of earth and deaf to the mercies of heaven, until a great Voice called me to come out of the sepulcher of myself; and I came—alive again, and free, of a strong spirit, but with youth gone from it. Out of the void of an irremediable disaster God had called me to His service, chastened and humbled.
"Who is weak and I am not weak? who is offended and I burn not?"
And yet, although I knew my decision was irrevocable, I did not find it easy to tell my mother. Then:
"Little mother of my heart," I blurted, "my career is decided. I have been called. I am for the Church."
We were in her pleasant morning room, a beautiful room, and the lace curtains were pushed aside to allow free ingress of air and sunlight. Between the windows hung two objects my mother most greatly cherished—one an enameled Petitot miniature, gold-framed, of a man in the flower of his youth. His hair, beautiful as the hair of Absalom, falls about his haughty, high-bred face, and so magnificently is he clothed that when I was a child I used to associate him in my mind with those "captains and rulers, clothed most gorgeously, all of them desirable young men, … girdled with a girdle upon their loins, exceeding in dyed attire upon their heads, all of them princes to look to" … whom Aholibah "doted upon when her eyes saw them portrayed upon the walls in vermilion."
The other is an Audran engraving of that same man grown old and stripped of beauty and of glory, as the leaf that falls and the flower that fades. The somber habit of an order has replaced scarlet and gold; and sackcloth, satin. Between the two pictures hangs an old crucifix. For that is Armand De Rancé, glorious sinner, handsomest, wealthiest, most gifted man of his day—and his a day of glorious men; and this is Armand De Rancé, become the sad austere reformer of La Trappe.
My mother rose, walked over to the Abbé's pictures, and looked long and with rather frightened eyes at him. Perhaps there was something in the similarity to his of the fate which had come upon me who bore his name, which caused her to turn so pale. I also am an Armand De Rancé, of a cadet branch of that great house, which emigrated to the New World when we French were founding colonies on the banks of the Mississippi.
Her hand went to her heart. Turning, she regarded me pitifully.
"Oh, no, not that!" I reassured her. "I am at once too strong and not strong enough for solitude and silence. Surely there is room and work for one who would serve God through serving his fellow men, in the open, is there not?"
At that she kissed me. Not a whimper, although I am an only son and the name dies with me, the old name of which she was so beautifully proud! She had hoped to see my son wear my father's name and face and thus bring back the lost husband she had so greatly loved; she had prayed to see my children about her knees, and it must have cost her a frightful anguish to renounce these sweet and consoling dreams, these tender and human ambitions. Yet she did so, smiling, and kissed me on the brow.
Three months later I entered the Church; and because I was the last De Rancé, and twenty four, and the day was to have been my wedding-day, there fell upon me, sorely against my will, the halo of sad romance.
Endeared thus to the young, I suppose I grew into what I might call a very popular preacher. Though I myself cannot see that I ever did much actual good, since my friends praised my sermons for their "fine Gallic flavor," and I made no enemies.
But there was no rest for my spirit, until the Call came again, the Call that may not be slighted, and bade me leave my sheltered place, my pleasant lines, and go among the poor, to save my own soul alive.
That is why and how the Bishop, my old and dear friend, after long argument and many protests, at length yielded and had me transferred from fashionable St. Jean Baptiste's to the poverty-stricken missionary parish of sodden laboring folk in a South Carolina coast-town: he meant to cure me, the good man! I should have the worst at the outset.
"And I hope you understand," said he, sorrowfully, "that this step practically closes your career. Such a pity, for you could have gone so far! You might even have worn the red hat. It is not hoping too much that the last De Rancé, the namesake of the great Abbé, might have finished as an American cardinal! But God's will be done. If you must go, you must go."
I said, respectfully, that I had to go.
"Well, then, go and try it out to the uttermost," said the Bishop. "And it may be that, if you do not kill yourself with overwork, you may return to me cured, when you see the futility of the task you wish to undertake." But I was never again to see his kind face in this world.
And then, as if to cut me off yet more completely from all ties, as if to render my decision irrevocable, it was permitted of Providence that the wheel of my fortune should take one last revolution. Henri Dupuis of the banking house which bore his name shot himself through the head one fine morning, and as he had been my guardian and was still the executor of my father's estate, the whole De Rancé fortune went down with him. All of it. Even the old house went, the old house which had sheltered so many of the name these two hundred years. If I could have grieved for anything it would have been that. Nothing was left except the modest private fortune long since secured to my mother by my father's affection. It had been a bridal gift, intended to cover her personal expenses, her charities, and her pretty whims. Now it was to stand between her and want.
Stripped all but bare, and with one servant left of all our staff, we turned our backs upon our old life, our old home, and faced the world anew, in a strange place