1 Sa: 32.

Mary Virginia had gone, weeping and bewept, and the spirit of youth seemed to have gone with her, leaving the Parish House darkened because of its absence. A sorrowful quiet brooded over the garden that no longer echoed a caroling voice. Kerry, seeking vainly for the little mistress, would come whining back to John Flint, and look up mutely into his face; and finding no promise there, lie down, whimpering, at his feet. The man seemed as desolate as the dog, because of the child’s departure.

“When I come back,” Mary Virginia said to him at parting, “I expect you’ll know more about moths and butterflies than anybody else in the world does. You’re that sort. I’d love to be here, watching you grow up into it, but I’ve got to go away and grow up into something myself. I’m very glad you came here, Mr. Flint. You’ve helped me, lots.”

“Me?” with husky astonishment.

“You, of course,” said the child, serenely. “Because you are such a good man, Mr. Flint, and so patient, and you stick at what you try to do until you do it better than anybody else does. Often and often when I’ve been trying to do sums I’m frightfully stupid about arithmetic and I wanted to give up, I’d think of you over here just trying and trying and keeping right on trying, until you’d gotten what you wanted to know; and then I’d keep on trying, too. The funny part is, that I like you for making me do it. You see, I’m a very, very bad person in some things, Mr. Flint,” she said frankly. “Why, when my mother has to tell me to look at so and so, and see how well they behave, or how nicely they can do certain things, and how good they are, and why don’t I profit by such a good example, a perfectly horrid raging sort of feeling comes all over me, and I want to be as naughty as naughty! I feel like doing and saying things I’d never want to do or say, if it wasn’t for that good example. I just can’t seem to bear being good-exampled. But you’re different, thank goodness. Most really good people are different, I guess.”

He looked at her, dumbly he had no words at his command. She missed the irony and the tragedy, but she sensed the depths of feeling under that mute exterior.

“I’m glad you’re sorry I’m going away,” said she, with the directness that was so engaging. “I perfectly love people to feel sorry to part with me. I hope and hope they’ll keep on being sorry because they’ll be that much gladder when I come back. I don’t believe there’s anything quite so wonderful and beautiful as having other folks like you, except it’s liking other folks yourself!”

“I never had to be bothered about it, either way,” said he dryly. His face twitched.

“Maybe that’s because you never stayed still long enough in any one place to catch hold,” said she, and laughed at him.

“Good-by, Mr. Flint! I’ll never see a butterfly or a moth, the whole time I’m gone, without making believe he’s a messenger from Madame, and the Padre, and you, and Kerry. I’ll play he’s a carrier-butterfly, with a message tucked away under his wings: ’Howdy, Mary Virginia! I’ve just come from flying over the flowers in the Parish House garden; and the folks are all well, and busy, and happy. But they haven’t forgotten you for a single solitary minute, and they miss you and wish you’d come back; and they send you their dear, dear love and I’ll carry your dear, dear love back to them!’ So if you see a big, big, beautiful, strange fellow come sailing by your window some morning, why, that’s mine, Mr. Flint! Remember!”

And then she was gone, and he had his first taste of unselfish human sorrow. Heretofore his worries had been purely personal and self-centered: this was different, and innocent. It shocked and terrified him to find out how intensely he could miss another being, and that being a mere child. He wasn’t used to that sort of pain, and it bewildered him.

Eustis himself had wanted the little girl sent to a preparatory school which would fit her for one of the women’s colleges. He had visions of the forward sweep of women visions which his wife didn’t share. Her daughter should go to the Church School at which she herself had been educated, an exclusive and expensive institution where the daughters of the wealthy were given a finishing hand-polish with ecclesiastical emery, as a sort of social hall-mark. Mrs. Eustis had a horror of what she called, in quotation-marks, the modern non-religious method of educating young ladies.

The Eustis house was closed, and left in charge of the negro caretakers, for Mrs. Eustis couldn’t stand the loneliness of the place after the child’s departure, and Eustis himself found his presence more and more necessary at the great plantation he was building up. Mrs. Eustis left Appleboro, and my mother missed her. There was a vein of pure gold underlying the placid little woman’s character, which the stronger woman divined and built upon.

Laurence, too, entered college that Fall. I had coached him, in such hours as I could spare. He was conscientious enough, though his Greek was not the Greek of Homer and he vexed the soul of my mother with a French she said was spoke

full fair and fetisly
After ye schole of Strattford atte Bowe.

But if he hadn’t Mary Virginia’s sensitiveness to all beauty, nor her playful fancy and vivid imagination, he was clear-brained and clean-thinking, with that large perspective and that practical optimism which seem to me so essentially American. He saw without confusion both the thing as it was and as it could become. With only enough humor to save him, he had a sternness more of the puritan than of the cavalier blood from which he had sprung. Above all was he informed with that new spirit brooding upon the face of all the waters, a spirit that for want of a better name one might call the Race Conscience.

It was this last aspect of the boy’s character that amazed and interested John Flint, who was himself too shrewd not to divine the sincerity, even the commonsense, of what Laurence called “applied Christianity.” Altruism and Slippy McGee! He listened with a puzzled wonder.

“I wish,” he grumbled to Laurence, “that you’d come off the roof. It gives a fellow stiff neck rubbering up at you!”

“I’d rather stay up the air’s better, and you can see so much farther,” said Laurence. And he added hospitably: “There’s plenty of room come on up, yourself!”

“With one leg?” sarcastically.

“And two eyes,” said the boy. “Come on up the sky’s fine!” And he laughed into the half-suspicious face.

The gimlet eyes bored into him, and the frank and truthful eyes met them unabashed, unwavering, with a something in them which made the other blink.

“When I got pitched into this burg,” said the lame man thoughtfully, “I landed all there except a leg, but I never carried my brains in my legs. I hadn’t got any bats in my belfry. But I’m getting ’em. I’m getting ’em so bad that when I hear some folks talk bughouse these days it pretty near listens like good sense to me. Why, kid, I’m nut enough now to dangle over the edge of believing you know what you’re talking about!”

“Fall over: I know I know what I’m talking about,” said Laurence magnificently.

“I’m double-crossed,” said John Flint, soberly and sadly, “Anyway I look at it ” he swept the horizon with a wide-flung gesture, “it’s bugs for mine. I began by grannying bugs for him,” he tossed his head bull-like in my direction, “and I stand around swallowing hot air from you ” He glared at Laurence, “and what’s the result? Why, that I’ve got bugs in the bean, that’s what! Think of me licking an all-day sucker a kid dopes out! Me! Oh, he venly saints!” he gulped. “Ain’t I the nut, though?”

“Well, supposing?” said Laurence, laughing. “Buck up! You could be a bad egg instead of a good nut, you know!”

John Flint’s eyes slitted, then widened; his mouth followed suit almost automatically. He looked at me.

“Can you beat it?” he wondered.

“Beating a bad egg would be a waste of time I wouldn’t be guilty of,” said I amusedly. “But I hope to live to see the good nut grow into a fine tree.”

“Do your damnedest excuse me, parson!” said he contritely. “I mean, don’t stop for a little thing like me!”

Laurence leaned forward. “Man,” said he, impressively, “he won’t have to! You’ll be marking time and keeping step with him yourself before you know it!”

“Huh!” said John Flint, non-committally.

Laurence came to spend his last evening at home with us.

“Padre,” said he, when we walked up and down in the garden, after an old custom, after dinner, “do you really know what I mean to do when I’ve finished college and start out on my own hook?”

“Put ‘Mayne & Son’ on the judge’s shingle and walk around the block forty times a day to look at it!” said I, promptly.

“Of course,” said he. “That first. But a legal shingle can be turned into as handy a weapon as one could wish for, Padre, and I’m going to take that shingle and spank this sleepy-headed old town wide awake with it!” He spoke with the conviction of youth, so sure of itself that there is no room for doubt. There was in him, too, a hint of latent power which was impressive. One did not laugh at Laurence.

“It’s my town,” with his chin out. “It could be a mighty good town. It’s going to become one. I expect to live all my life right here, among my own people, and they’ve got to make it worth my while. I don’t propose to cut myself down to fit any little hole: I intend to make that hole big enough to fit my possible measure.”

“May an old friend wish more power to your shovel?”

“It’ll be a steam shovel!” said he, gaily. Then his face clouded.

“Padre! I’m sick of the way things are run in Appleboro! I’ve talked with other boys and they’re sick of it, too. You know why they want to get away? Because they think they haven’t got even a fighting chance here. Because towns like this are like billion-ton old wagons sunk so deep in mudruts that nothing but dynamite can blow them out and they are not dealers in dynamite. If they want to do anything that even looks new they’ve got to fight the stand-patters to a finish, and they’re blockaded by a lot of reactionaries that don’t know the earth’s moving. There are a lot of folks in the South, Padre, who’ve been dead since the civil war, and haven’t found it out themselves, and won’t take live people’s word for it. Well, now, I mean to do things. I mean to do them right here. And I certainly shan’t allow myself to be blockaded by anybody, living or dead. You’ve got to fight the devil with fire; I’m going to blockade those blockaders, and see that the dead ones are decently buried.”

“You have tackled a big job, my son.”

“I like big jobs, Padre. They’re worth while. Maybe I’ll be able to keep some of the boys home the town needs them. Maybe I can keep some of those poor kids out of the mills, too. Oh, yes, I expect a right lively time!”

I was silent. I knew how supinely Appleboro lay in the hollow of a hard hand. I had learned, too, how such a hand can close into a strangling fist.

“Of course I can’t clean up the whole state, and I can’t reorganize the world,” said the boy sturdily. “I’m not such a fool as to try. But I can do my level best to disinfect my own particular corner, and make it fit for men and safe for women and kids to live and breathe in. Padre, for years there hasn’t been a rotten deal nor a brazen steal in this state that the man who practically owns and runs this town hadn’t a finger in, knuckle-deep. He’s got to go.”

“Goliath doesn’t always fall at the hand of the son of Jesse, my little David,” said I quietly. I also had dreamed dreams and seen visions.

“That’s about what my father says,” said the boy. “He wants me to be a successful man, a ‘safe and sane citizen.’ He thinks a gentleman should practise his profession decently and in order. But to believe, as I do, that you can wipe out corruption, that you can tackle poverty the same as you would any other disease, and prevent it, as smallpox and yellow fever are prevented, he looks upon as madness and a waste of time.”

“He has had sorrow and experience, and he is kind and charitable, as well as wise,” said I.

“That’s exactly where the hardest part comes in for us younger fellows. It isn’t bucking the bad that makes the fight so hard: it’s bucking the wrong-idea’d good. Padre, one good man on the wrong side is a stumbling-block for the stoutest-hearted reformer ever born. It’s men like my father, who regard the smooth scoundrel that runs this town as a necessary evil, and tolerate him because they wouldn’t soil their hands dealing with him, that do the greatest injury to the state. I tell you what, it wouldn’t be so hard to get rid of the devil, if it weren’t for the angels!”

“And how,” said I, ironically, “do you propose to set about smoothing the rough and making straight the crooked, my son?”

“Flatten ’em out,” said he, briefly. “Politics. First off I’m going to practice general law; then I’ll be solicitor-general for this county. After that, I shall be attorney-general for the state. Later I may be governor, unless I become senator instead.”

“Well,” said I, cautiously, “you’ll be so toned down by that time that you might make a very good governor indeed.”

“I couldn’t very well make a worse one than some we’ve already had,” said the boy sternly. There was something of the accusing dignity of a young archangel about him. I caught a glimpse of that newer America growing up about us an America gone back to the older, truer, unbuyable ideals of our fathers.

“I guess you’d better tell me good-by now, Padre,” said he, presently. “And bless me, please it’s a pretty custom. I won’t see you again, for you’ll be saying mass when I’m running for my train. I’ll go tell John Flint good-by, too.”

He went over and rapped on the window, through which we could see Flint sitting at his table, his head bent over a book.

“Good-by, John Flint” said Laurence. “Good luck to you and your leggy friends! When I come back you’ll probably have mandibles, and you’ll greet me with a nip, in pure Bugese.”

“Good-by,” said John Flint, lifting his head. Then, with unwonted feeling: “I’m horrible sorry you’ve got to go I’ll miss you something fierce. You’ve been very kind thank you.”

“Mind you take care of the Padre,” said the boy, waiving the thanks with a smile. “Don’t let him work too hard.”

“Who, me?” Flint’s voice took the knife-edge of sarcasm. “Oh, sure! It don’t need but one leg to keep up with a gent trying to run a thirty-six hour a day job with one-man power, does it? Son, take it from me, when a man’s got the real, simonpure, no-imitation, soulsaving bug in his bean, a forty-legged cyclone couldn’t keep up with him, much less a guy with one pedal short.” He glared at me indignantly. From the first it has been one of his vainest notions that I am perversely working myself to death.

“There’s nothing to be done with the Padre, then, I’m afraid,” said Laurence, chuckling.

“I might soak him in the cyanide jar for ten minutes a day without killing him,” mused Mr. Flint. “But,” disgustedly, “what’d be the use? When he came to and found he’d been that long idle he’d die of heart-failure.” He pushed aside the window screen, and the two shook hands heartily. Then the boy, wringing my hand again, walked away without another word. I felt a bit desolate there are times when I could envy women their solace of tears as if he figured in his handsome young person that newer, stronger, more conquering generation which was marching ahead, leaving me, older and slower and sadder, far, far behind it. Ah! To be once more that young, that strong, that hopeful!

When I began to reflect upon what seemed visionary plans, I was saddened, foreseeing inevitable disillusion, perhaps even stark failure, ahead of him. That he would stubbornly try to carry out those plans I did not doubt: I knew my Laurence. He might accomplish a certain amount of good. But to overthrow Inglesby, the Boss of Appleboro for he meant no less than this why, that was a horse of another color!

For Inglesby was our one great financial figure. He owned our bank; his was the controlling interest in the mills; he owned the factory outright; he was president of half a dozen corporations and chairman and director of many more.

Did we have a celebration? There he was, in the center of the stage, with a jovial loud laugh and an ultra-benevolent smile to hide the menace of his little cold piglike eyes, and the meaning of his heavy jaw. Will the statement that he had a pew in every church in town explain him? He had one in mine, too; paid for, which many of them are not.

At the large bare office in the mill he was easy of access, and would listen to what you had to say with flattering attention and sympathy. But it was in his private office over the bank that this large spider really spun the web of our politics. Mills, banks, churches, schools, lights, railroads, stores, heating, water-power all these juicy flies apparently walked into his parlor of their own accord. He had made and unmade governors; he had sent his men to Washington. How? We suspected; but held our peace. If our Bible had bidden us Americans to suffer rascals gladly instead of mere fools we couldn’t be more obedient to a mandate.

Men like James Eustis and Judge Mayne despised Inglesby but gave him a wide berth. They wouldn’t be enmeshed. It was known that Major Appleby Cartwright had blackballed him.

“I can stand a man, suh, that likes to get along in this world within proper bounds. But Inglesby hasn’t got any proper bounds. He’s a a cross between a Republican mule and a party-bolting boa-constrictor, an’ a hybrid like that hasn’t got any place in nature. On top of that he drinks ten cents a bottle grape juice and smokes five cent cigars. And he’s got the brazen and offensive effrontery to offer ’em to self-respectin’ men!”

And here was Laurence, our little Laurence, training himself to overthrow this overgrown Goliath! Well, if the boy could not bring this Philistine to the earth, he might yet manage to give him a few manful clumps on the head; perhaps enough to insure a chronic headache.

So thinking, I went in and watched John Flint finish a mounting-block from a plan in the book open upon the table, adding, however, certain improvements of his own.

He laid the block aside and then took a spray of fresh leaves and fed it to a horned and hungry caterpillar prowling on a bit of bare stem at the bottom of his cage.

“Get up there on those leaves, you horn-tailed horror! Move on, you lepidopterous son of a wigglejoint, or I’ll pull your real name on you in a minute and paralyze you stiff!” He drew a long breath. “You know how I’m beginning to remember their real names? I swear ’em half an hour a day. Next time you have trouble with those hickeys of yours, try swearing caterpillar at ’em, and you’ll find out.”

I laughed, and he grinned with me.

“Say,” said he, abruptly. “I’ve been listening with both my ears to what that boy was talking to you about awhile ago. Thinks he can buck the Boss, does he?”

“Perhaps he may,” I admitted.

“Nifty old bird, the Big Un,” said Mr. Flint, squinting his eyes. “And,” he went on, reflectively, “he’s sure got your number in this burg. Take you by and large, you lawabiders are a real funny sort, ain’t you? Now, there’s Inglesby, handing out the little kids their diplomas come school-closing, and telling ’em to be real good, and maybe when they grow up he’ll have a job in pickle for ’em work like a mule in a treadmill, twelve hours, no unions, and the coroner to sit on the remains, free and gratis, for to ease the widow’s mind. Inglesby’s got seats in all your churches first-aid to the parson’s pants-pockets.

“Inglesby’s right there on the platform at all your spiel-fests, smirking at the women and telling ’em not to bother their nice little noddles about anything but holding down their natural jobs of being perfect ladies ain’t he and other gents just like him always right there holding down their natural jobs of protecting ’em and being influenced to do what’s right? Sure he is! And nobody howls for the hook! You let him be It him with a fist in the state’s jeans up to the armpit!

“Look here, that Mayne kid’s dead right. It’s you good guys that are to blame. We little bad ones see you kowtowing to the big worse ones, and we get to thinking we can come in under the wires easy winners, too. However, let me tell you something while I’m in the humor to gas. It’s this: sooner or later everybody gets theirs. My sort and Inglesby’s sort, we all get ours. Duck and twist and turn and sidestep all we want, at the end it’s right there waiting for us, with a loaded billy up its sleeve: Ours! Some fine day when we’re looking the other way, thinking we’ve even got it on the annual turnout of the cops up Broadway for class, why, Ours gets up easy on its hind legs, spits on its mitt, and hands us exactly what’s coming to us, biff! and we wake up sitting on our necks in the middle of day-before-yesterday and year-after-next. I got mine. If I was you I wouldn’t be too cock-sure that kid don’t give Inglesby his, some of these days, good and plenty.”

“Maybe so,” said I, cautiously.

“Gee, that’d be fly-time for all the good guys in this tank, wouldn’t it?” he grinned. “Sure! I can see ’em now, patting the bump on their beams where they think the brain-patch sprouts, and handing out hunks of con to the Lord about his being right on his old-time job of swatting sinners in their dinners. Yet they’ll all of them go right on leading themselves up to be trimmed by the very next holdup that’s got the nerve to do them! Friend, believe a goat when he tells you that you stillwater-and-greenpasture sheep are some bag of nuts!”

“Thank you,” said I, with due meekness.

“Keep the change,” said he, unabashed. “I wasn’t meaning you, anyhow. I’ve got more manners, I hope, than to do such. And, parson, you don’t need to have cold feet about young Mayne. If you ask me, I’d bet the limit on him. Why, I think so much of that boy that if he was a rooster I’d put the gaffs and my last dollar on him, and back him to whip everything in feathers clean up to baldheaded eagles. Believe me, he’d do it!” he finished, with enthusiasm.

Bewildered by a mental picture of a Laurence with ruffled neck-feathers and steel spurs, I hurriedly changed the subject to the saner and safer one of our own immediate affairs.

“Yep, ten orders in to-day’s mail and seven in yesterday’s; and good orders for the wasp-moths, single or together, and that house in New York wants steady supplies from now on. And here’s a fancy shop wants a dozen trays, like that last one I finished. We’re looking up,” said he, complacently.

The winter that followed was a trying one, and the Guest Rooms were never empty. I like to record that John Flint put his shoulder to the wheel and became Madame’s right hand man and Westmoreland’s faithful ally. His wooden leg made astonishingly little noise, and his entrance into a room never startled the most nervous patient. He went on innumerable errands, and he performed countless small services that in themselves do not seem to amount to much, but swell into a great total.

“He may have only one leg,” said Westmoreland, when Flint had helped him all of one night with a desperately ill millworker, “but he certainly has two hands; he knows how to use his ears and eyes, he’s dumb until he ought to speak, and then he speaks to the point. Father, Something knew what It was about when you and I were allowed to drag that tramp out of the teeth of death! Yes, yes, I’m certainly glad and grateful we were allowed to save John Flint.”

From that time forth the big man gave his ex-patient a liking which grew with his years. Absent-minded as he was, he could thereafter always remember to find such things as he thought might interest him. Appleboro laughs yet about the day Dr. Westmoreland got some small butterflies for his friend, and having nowhere else to put them, clapped them under his hat, and then forgot all about them; until he lifted his hat to some ladies and the swarm of insects flew out.

Without being asked, and as unostentatiously as he did everything else, Flint had taken his place in church every Sunday.

“Because it’d sort of give you a black eye if I didn’t,” he explained. “Skypiloting’s your lay, father, and I’ll see you through with it as far as I can. I couldn’t fall down on any man that’s been as white to me as you’ve been.”

I must confess that his conception of religion was very, very hazy, and his notions of church services and customs barbarous. For instance, he disliked the statues of the saints exceedingly. They worried him.

“I can’t seem to stand a man dolled-up in skirts,” he confessed. “Any more than I’d be stuck on a dame with whiskers. It don’t somehow look right to me. Put the he-saints in pants instead of those brown kimonas with gold crocheting and a rope sash, and I’d have more respect for ’em.”

When I tried to give him some necessary instructions, and to penetrate the heathen darkness in which he seemed immersed, he listened with the utmost respect and attention and wrinkled his brow painfully, and blinked, and licked his lips.

“That’s all right, father, that’s all right. If you say it’s so, I guess it’s so. I’ll take your word for it. If it’s good enough for you and Madame, there’s got to be something in it, and it’s sure good enough for me. Look here: the little girl and young Mayne have got a different brand from yours, haven’t they?”

“Neither of them is of the Old Faith.”

“Huh! Well, I tell you what you do: you just switch me in somewhere between you and Madame and him and her. That’ll give me a line on all of you and maybe it’ll give all of you a line on me. See?”

I saw, but as through a glass darkly. So the matter rested. And I must in all humility set down that I have never yet been able to get at what John Flint really believes he believes.