"Old Mister Biggity!" flashed Mary Virginia. And then she turned and met, face to face, the fixed stare of John Flint, hanging upon his crutches as one might upon a cross,--a stare long, still, intent, curious, speculative, almost incredulous.
"You are the Padre"s last guest, aren"t you?" her eyes were full of gravest sympathy. "I"m so sorry you met with such a misfortune--but I"m gladder you"re alive. It"s so good just to be alive in the spring, isn"t it?" She smiled at him directly, taking him, as it were, into a pleasant confidence. She seemed perfectly unconscious of the evil unloveliness of him; Mary Virginia always seemed to miss the evil, pa.s.sing it over as if it didn"t exist. Instead, diving into the depths of other personalities, always she brought to the surface whatever pearl of good might lie concealed at the bottom. To her this sinister cripple was simply another human being, with whose misfortune one must sympathize humanly.
Clelie, in a speckless white ap.r.o.n and a brand-new red-and-white bandanna to do greater honor to the little girl whom she adored, set a table under the trees and spread it with the thin dainty sandwiches, the delectable little cakes, and the fine bonbons she and my mother had made to celebrate the child"s return. And we had tea, making very merry, for she had a thousand amusing things to tell us, every airy trifle informed with something of her own brave bright mirthful spirit. John Flint sat nearby in the wheel chair, his crutches lying beside it, and looked on silently and ate his cake and drank his tea stolidly, as if it were no unusual thing for him to break bread in such company.
"Padre," said Mary Virginia with deep gravity. "My aunt Jenny says I"m growing up. She says I"ll have to put up my hair and let down my frocks pretty soon, and that I"ll probably be thinking of beaux in another year, though she hopes to goodness I won"t, until I"ve got through with school at least."
The almost unconscious imitation of Miss Jenny"s pecking, birdlike voice made me smile.
"Beaux! Long skirts! Put up hair! Great Scott, will you listen to the kid!" scoffed Laurence. "You everlasting little silly, you! P"t.i.te Madame, these cakes are certainly all to the good. May I have another two or three, please!"
"I"m "most thirteen years old, Laurence Mayne," said Mary Virginia, with dignity. "You"re only seventeen, so you don"t need to give yourself such hateful airs. You"re not too old to be greedy, anyhow.
Padre, _am_ I growing up?"
"I fear so, my child," said I, gloomily.
"You"re not glad, either, are you, Padre?"
"But you were such a delightful child," I temporized.
"Oh, lovely!" said Laurence, eying her with unflattering brotherliness. "And she had so much feeling, too, Mary Virginia! Why, when I was sick once, she wanted me to die, so she could ride to my funeral in the front carriage; she doted on funerals, the little ghoul! She was horribly disappointed when I got better--she thought it disobliging of me, and that I"d done it to spite her. Once, too, when I tried to reason with her--and Mary Virginia needed reason if ever a kid did--she b.u.mped my head until I had knots on it. There"s your delightful Mary Virginia for you!"
"Anyhow, you didn"t die and become an angel--you stayed disagreeably alive and you"re going to become a lawyer," said Mary Virginia, too gently. "And your head was b.u.mpable, Laurence, though I"m sorry to say I don"t ever expect to b.u.mp it again. Why, I"m going away to school and when I come back I"ll be Miss Eustis, and you"ll be Mr. Mayne!
Won"t it be funny, though?"
"I don"t see anything funny in calling you Miss Eustis," said Laurence, with boyish impatience. "And I"m certainly not going to notice you if you"re silly enough to call me Mister Mayne. I hope you won"t be a fool, Mary Virginia. So many girls are fools." He ate another cake.
"Not half as big fools as boys are, though," said she, dispa.s.sionately. "My father says the man is always the bigger fool of the two."
Laurence snorted. "I wonder what we"ll be like, though--both of us?"
he mused.
"You? You"re biggity now, but you"ll be lots worse, then," said Mary Virginia, with unflattering frankness. "I think you"ll probably strut like a turkey, and you"ll be baldheaded, and wear double-lensed horn spectacles, and spats, and your wife will call you "Mr. Mayne" to your face and "Your Poppa" to the children, and she"ll perfectly _despise_ people like Madame and the Padre and me!"
"You never did have any reasoning power, Mary Virginia," said Laurence, with brotherly tact. "Our black cat Panch would put it all over you. Allow me to inform you I"m _not_ biggity, miss! I"m logical--something a girl can"t understand. And I"d like to know what you think _you"re_ going to grow up to be?"
"Oh, let"s quit talking about it," she said petulantly. "I hate to think of growing up. Grown ups don"t seem to be happy--and _I_ want to be happy!" She turned her head, and met once more the absorbed and watchful stare of the man in the wheel-chair.
"Weren"t you sorry when you had to stop being a little boy and grow up?" she asked him, wistfully.
"Me?" he laughed harshly. "I couldn"t say, miss. I guess I was born grown up." His face darkened.
"That wasn"t a bit fair," said she, with instant sympathy.
"There"s a lot not fair," he told her, "when you"re born and brought up like I was. The worst is not so much what happens to you, though that"s pretty bad; it"s that you don"t know it"s happening--and there"s n.o.body to put you wise. Why," his forehead puckered as if a thought new to him had struck him, "why, your very looks get to be different!"
Mary Virginia started. "Oh, looks!" said she, thoughtfully. "Now, isn"t it curious for you to say just that, right now, for it reminds me that I brought something to the Padre--something that set me to thinking about people"s looks, too,--and how you never can tell. Wait a minute, and I"ll show you." She reached for the pretty crocheted bag she had brought with her, and drew from it a small pasteboard box.
None of us, idly watching her, dreamed that a moment big with fate was upon us. I have often wondered how things would have turned out if Mary Virginia had lost or forgotten that pasteboard box!
"I happened to put my hand on a tree--and this little fellow moved, and I caught him. I thought at first he was a part of the tree-trunk, he looked so much like it," said the child, opening the little box.
Inside lay nothing more unusual than a dark-colored and rather ugly gray moth, with his wings folded down.
"One wouldn"t think him pretty, would one?" said she, looking down at the creature.
"No," said Flint, who had wheeled nearer, and craned his neck over the box. "No, miss, I shouldn"t think I"d call something like that pretty,"--he looked from the moth to Mary Virginia, a bit disappointedly.
Mary Virginia smiled, and picking up the little moth, held his body, very gently, between her finger-tips. He fluttered, spreading out his gray wings; and then one saw the beautiful pansy-like underwings, and the glorious lower pair of scarlet velvet barred and bordered with black.
"I brought him along, thinking the Padre might like him, and tell me something about him," said the little girl. "The Padre"s crazy about moths and b.u.t.terflies, you must understand, and we"re always on the lookout to get them for him. I never found this particular one before, and you can"t imagine how I felt when he showed me what he had hidden under that gray cloak of his!"
"He"s a member of a large and most respectable family, the Catocalae,"
I told her. "I"ll take him, my dear, and thank you--there"s always a demand for the Catocalae. And you may call him an Underwing, if you prefer--that"s his common name."
"I got to thinking," said the little girl, thoughtfully, lifting her clear and candid eyes to John Flint"s. "I got to thinking, when he threw aside his plain gray cloak and showed me his lovely underwings, that he"s like some people--people you"d think were very common, you know. You couldn"t be expected to know what was underneath, could you?
So you pa.s.s them by, thinking how ordinary, and matter of fact, and uninteresting and even ugly they are, and you feel rather sorry for them--because you don"t know. But if you can once get close enough to touch them--why, then you find out!" Her eyes grew deeper, and brighter, as they do when she is moved; and the color came more vividly to her cheek. "Don"t you reckon," said she navely, "that plenty of folks are like him? They"re the sad color of the street-dust, of course, for things do borrow from their surroundings, didn"t you know that? That"s called protective mimicry, the Padre says. So you only think of the dust-colored outside--and all the while the underwings are right there, waiting for you to find them! Isn"t it wonderful and beautiful? And the best of all is, it"s true!"
The cripple in the chair put out his hand with a hint of timidity in his manner; he was staring at Mary Virginia as if some of the light within her had dimly penetrated his grosser substance.
"Could I hold it--for a minute--in my own hand?" he asked, turning brick-red.
"Of course you may," said Mary Virginia pleasantly. "I see by the Padre"s face this isn"t a rare moth--he"s been here all along, only my eyes have just been opened to him. I don"t want him to go in any collection. I don"t want him to go anywhere, except back into the air--I owe him that for what he taught me. So I"m sure the Padre won"t mind, if you"d like to set him free, yourself."
She put the moth on the man"s finger, delicately, for a Catocala is a swift-winged little chap; it spread out its wings splendidly, as if to show him its loveliness; then, darting upward, vanished into the cool green depth of the shrubbery.
"I remember running after a b.u.t.terfly once, when I was a kid," said he. "He came flying down our street, Lord knows where from, or why, and I caught him after a chase. I thought he was the prettiest thing ever my eyes had seen, and I wanted the worst way in the world to keep him with me. A brown fellow he was, all sprinkled over with little splotches of silver, as if there"d been plenty of the stuff on hand, and it"d been laid on him thick. But after awhile I got to thinking he"d feel like he was in jail, shut up in my hot fist. I couldn"t bear that, so I ran to the end of the street, to save him from the other kids, and then I turned him loose and watched him beat it for the sky.
They"re pretty things, b.u.t.terflies. Somehow I always liked them better than any other living creatures." He was staring after the moth, his forehead wrinkled. He spoke almost unconsciously, and he certainly had no idea that he had given us cause for a hopeful astonishment.
Now, Mary Virginia"s eyes had fallen, idly enough, upon John Flint"s hands lying loosely upon his knees. Her face brightened.
"Padre," she suggested suddenly, "why don"t you let him help you with your b.u.t.terflies? Look at his hands! Why, they"re just exactly the right sort to handle setting needles and mounting blocks, and to stretch wings without loosening a scale. He could be taught in a few lessons, and just think what a splendid help he could be! And you do so need help with those insects of yours, Padre--I"ve heard you say so, over and over."
The child was right--John Flint did have good hands--large enough, well-shaped, steel-muscled, powerful, with flexible, smooth-skinned, sensitive fingers, the fingers of an expert lapidary rather than a prize-fighter.
"If you think there"s any way I could help the parson for awhile, I"d be proud to try, miss. It"s true," he added casually, with a sphinx-like immobility of countenance, "that I"m what might be called handy with my fingers."
"We"ll call it settled, then," said Mary Virginia happily.
Laurence took her home at dusk; it was a part of his daily life to look after Mary Virginia, as one looks after a cherished little sister. When they were younger the boy had often complained that she might as well be his sister, she quarreled with him so much; and the little girl said, bitterly, he was as disagreeable as if he"d been a brother. In spite of which the little girl, for all her delicious impertinences, looked up to the boy; and the boy had adored her, from the time she gurgled at him from her cradle.
My mother left us, and John Flint and I sat outdoors in the pleasant twilight, he smoking the pipe Laurence had given him.
"Parson," said he, abruptly, "Parson, you folks are swells, ain"t you?
The real thing, I mean, you and Madame? Even the yellow n.i.g.g.e.r"s a lady n.i.g.g.e.r, ain"t she?"
"I am a poor priest, such as you see, my son, Madame is--Madame. And Clelie is a good servant."
"But you were born a swell, weren"t you?" he persisted. "Old family, swell diggings, trained flunkies, and all that?"
"I was born a gentleman, if that is what you mean. Of an old family, yes. And there was an old house--once."