"Ouch! Turn loose! I take it back! The devil! It wasn't intended for any mortal man to marry you--Sally Ruth, I wouldn't marry you now for forty billion dollars and a mule! Turn loose, you hussy! Turn loose!"

screeched the major.

Unheeding his anguished protests, which brought Judge Hammond Mayne on the run, thinking somebody was being murdered, Miss Sally Ruth marched her suitor out of her house and led him to her front gate. Here she paused, jaws firmly set, eyes glittering, and, as with hooks of steel, took firm hold upon the gallant major's other ear. Then she shook him; his big crimson countenance, resembling a huge overripe tomato, waggled deliriously to and fro.

"I was born"--_shake_--"an old maid,"--_shake, shake, shake_--"I have lived--by the grace of G.o.d"--_shake, shake, shake_--"an old maid, and I expect"--_shake_--"to die an old maid! I don't propose to have"--_shake_--"an old windbag offering _me_ his blubbery old bosom"--_shake, shake, SHAKE_--"at this time of my life!--and don't you forget it, Appleby Cartwright! _THERE!_ You go back home"--_shake, shake, shake_--"and sober up, you old gander, you!"

Major Appleby Cartwright stood not upon the order of his going, but went at once, galloping as if a company of those Yankees with whom he had once fought were upon his hindquarters with fixed bayonets.

However, they being next-door neighbors and friends of a lifetime's standing, peace was finally patched up. In Appleboro we do not mention this historic meeting when either of the partic.i.p.ants can hear us, though it is one of our cla.s.sics and no home is complete without it.

The Major ever afterward eschewed Artillery Punch.

This morning, over the fence, Miss Sally Ruth addressed our invalid directly and without prelude, after her wont. She doesn't believe in beating about the bush:

"The wages of walking up and down the earth and going to and fro in it, tramping like Satan, is a lost leg. Not that it wasn't intended you should lose yours--and I hope and pray it will be a lesson to you."

"Well, take it from me," he said grimly, "there's n.o.body but me collecting my wages."

A quick approval of this plain truth showed in Miss Sally Ruth's snapping eyes.

"Come!" said she, briskly. "If you've got sense enough to see _that_, you're not so far away from the truth as you might be. Collecting your wages is the good and the bad thing about life, I reckon. But everything's intended, so you don't need to be too sorry for yourself, any way you look at it. And you could just as well have lost _both_ legs while you were at it, you know." She paused reflectively. "Let's see: I've got chicken-broth and fresh rolls to-day--I'll send you over some, after awhile." She nodded, and went back to her housework.

Laurence went on to High School, Madame had her house to oversee, I had many overdue calls; so we left Pitache and John Flint together, out in the birdhaunted, sweet-scented, sun-dappled garden, in the golden morning hours. No one can be quite heartless in a green garden, quite hopeless in the spring, or quite desolate when there's a dog's friendly nose to be thrust into one's hand.

I am afraid that at first he missed all this; for he could think of nothing but himself and that which had befallen him, coming upon him as a bolt from the blue. He had had, heretofore, nothing but his body--and now his body had betrayed him! It had become, not the splendid engine which obeyed his slightest wish, but a drag upon him.

Realizing this acutely, untrained, undisciplined, he was savagely sullen, impenetrably morose. He tired of Laurence's reading--I think the boy's free quickness of movement, his well-knit, handsome body, the fact that he could run and jump as pleased him, irked and chafed the man new and unused to his own physical infirmity.

He seemed to want none of us; I have seen him savagely repulse the dog, who, shocked and outraged at this exhibition of depravity, withdrew, casting backward glances of horrified and indignant reproach.

But as the lovely, peaceful, healing days pa.s.sed, that bitter and contracted heart had to expand somewhat. Gradually the ferocity faded, leaving in its room an anxious and brooding wonder. G.o.d knows what thoughts pa.s.sed through that somber mind in those long hours, when, concentrated upon himself, he must have faced the problem of his future and, like one before an impa.s.sable 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 princ.i.p.alities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."_

CHAPTER IV

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 Rance 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 nave 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 a.s.sure 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 b.u.mped 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 a.s.sure 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 b.u.mped 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.