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--"
John Flint, silent, depressed, with folded lips and somber eyes,
hobbled about awkwardly, savagely training himself to use the crutches
Westmoreland had lately brought him. Very unlovely he looked, dragging
himself along like a wounded beast. The poor wretch struck a
discordant note in the sweet peacefulness of the spring evening; nor
could we say anything to comfort him, we who were not maimed.
Came a high, sweet, shrill call at the gate; a high yelp of delight
from Pitache, hurtling himself forward like a woolly white cannonball;
a sound of light and flying feet; and Mary Virginia ran into the
garden, the little overjoyed dog leaping frantically about her. She
wore a white frock, and over it a light scarlet jacket. Her blue eyes
were dancing, lighting her sweet and fresh face, colored like a rose.
The gay little breeze that came along with her stirred her skirts, and
fluttered her scarlet ribbons, and the curls about her temples. You
might think Spring herself had paused for a lovely moment in the
Parish House garden and stood before you in this gracious and virginal
shape, at once delicate and vital.
Miss Sally Ruth, scattering pigeons right and left, dashed to the
fence to call greetings. My mother, seizing the child by the arms,
held her off a moment, to look her over fondly; then, drawing her
closer, kissed her as a daughter is kissed.
I laid my hand on the child's head, happy with that painful happiness
her presence always occasioned me, when she came back after an
absence--as if the Other Girl flashed into view for a quick moment,
and then was gone. Laurence, who had followed, stood looking down at
her with boyish condescension.
"Huh! I can eat hominy off her head!" said he, aggravatingly.
"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,
passing 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.
Clélie, in a speckless white apron 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'tite
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 bumped 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 bumpable, Laurence, though I'm sorry to say
I don't ever expect to bump 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,
dispassionately. "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 nobody 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 butterflies, 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 Catocalæ,"
I told her. "I'll take him, my dear, and thank you--there's always a
demand for the Catocalæ. 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 pass 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 naïvely, "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 butterfly 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, butterflies. 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 butterflies? 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 nigger's a
lady nigger, ain't she?"
"I am a poor priest, such as you see, my son, Madame is--Madame. And
Clélie 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."
"How'd _you_ ever hit the trail for the Church? I wonder! But say,
you never asked me any more questions than you had to, so you can tell
me to shut up, if you want to. Not that I wouldn't like to know how
the Sam Hill the like of you ever got nabbed by the skypilots."
"God called me through affliction, my son."
"Oh," said my son, blankly. "Huh! But I bet you the best crib ever
cracked you were some peach of a boy before you got that 'S.O.S.'"
"I was, like the young, the thoughtless young, a sinner."
"I suppose," said he tentatively, after a pause, "that _I'm_ one hell
of a sinner myself, according to Hoyle, ain't I?"
"I do not think it would injure you to change your--course of life,
nor yet your way of mentioning it," I said, feeling my way cautiously.
"But--we are bidden to remember there is more joy in heaven over one
sinner saved than over the ninety-and-nine just men."
"Is that so? Well, it listens like good horse-sense to me," said Mr.
Flint, promptly. "Because, look here: you can rake in ninety-and-nine
boobs any old time--there's one born every time the clock ticks,
parson--but they don't land something like me every day, believe me!
And I bet you a stack of dollar chips a mile high there was some
song-and-dance in the sky-joint when they put one over on _you_ for
fair. Sure!" He puffed away at his pipe, and I, having nothing to say
to this fine reasoning, held my peace.
"Parson, that kid's a swell, too, ain't she? And the boy?"
"Laurence is the son of Judge Hammond Mayne."
"And the little girl?" Insensibly his voice softened.
"I suppose," I agreed, "that the little girl is what you might call a
swell, too."
"I never," said he, reflectively, "came what you might call _talking_
close to real swells before. I've seen 'em, of course--at a distance.
Some of 'em, taking 'em by and large, looked pretty punk, to me; some
of 'em was middling, and a few looked as if they might have the goods.
But none of 'em struck me as being real live breathing _people_, same
as other folks. Why, parson, some of those dames'd throw a fit,
fancying they was poisoned, if they had to breathe the same air with
folks like me--me being what I am and they being--what they think they
are. Yet here's you and Madame, the real thing--and the boy--and the
little girl--the little girl--" he stopped, staring at me dumbly, as
the vision of Mary Virginia rose before him.
"She is, indeed, a dear, dear child," said I. His words stung me
somewhat, for once upon a time, I myself would have resented that such
as he should have breathed the same air with Mary Virginia.
"I'd almost think I'd dreamed her," said he, thoughtfully, "that is,
if I was good enough to have dreams like that," he added hastily, with
his first touch of shame. "I've seen 'em from the Battery up, and some
of 'em was sure-enough queens, but I didn't know they came like this
one. She's bran-new to me, parson. Say, you just show me what she
wants me to help you with, and I'll do it. She seems to think I can,
and it oughtn't to be any harder than opening a time-vault, ought it?"
"No," said I gravely, "I shouldn't think it would be. Though I never
opened a time-vault, you understand, and I hope and pray you'll never
touch one again, either. I'd rather you wouldn't even refer to it,
please. It makes me feel, rather--well, let's say _particeps
criminis_."
"I suppose that's the polite for punching you in the wind," said he,
just as gravely. "And I didn't think you'd ever monkeyed with a vault;
why, you couldn't, not if you was to try till Gabriel did his little
turn in the morning--not unless you'd been caught when you were softer
and put wise. Man, it's a bigger job than you think, and you've got to
have the know-how and the nerve before you can put it over. But
there--I'll keep it dark, seeing you want me to." He stretched out his
hands, regarding them speculatively. "They _are_ classy mitts," he
remarked impersonally. "Yep, seemed like they were just naturally made
to--do what they did. They were built for fine work." At that his jaw
snapped; a spasm twitched his face; it darkened.
"The work little Miss Eustis suggested for you," I insinuated hastily,
"is what very many people consider very fine work indeed. About one in
a thousand can do it properly."
"Lead me to it," said he wearily, and without enthusiasm, "and turn me
loose. I'll do what I can, to please her. At least, until I can make a
getaway for keeps."