Timid tentative rifts and wedges of blue had ventured back into the cold gray sky, and a stout-hearted robin or two heralded spring. One morning coming from mass I saw in the thin watery sunshine the painted wings of the Red Admiral flash by, and I welcomed him as one welcomes the long-missed face of a friend. I cannot choose but love the Red Admiral. He has always stirred my imagination, for frail as his gay wings are they have nevertheless borne this dauntless small Columbus of butterflies across unknown seas and around uncharted lands, until like his twin-sister the Painted Lady he has all but circled the globe. A few days later a handful of those gold butterflies that resemble nothing so much as new bright dandelions in the young grass, dared the unfriendly days before their time as if to coax the lagging spring to follow.

The sad white streamers disappeared from doors and for a space the little white hearse ceased to go glimmering by. Then at many windows appeared small faces bearing upon them the mark of the valley of the shadow through which they had just passed. Although they were on side streets in the dingy mill district, far removed from our pleasant windows that looked out upon trees and flowers, all Appleboro was watching these wan visages with wiser and kinder eyes.

Perhaps the most potent single factor in the arousing of our civic conscience was a small person who might have justly thought we hadn’t any: I mean Loujaney’s little ma, whose story had crept out and gone from lip to lip and from home to home, making an appeal to which there could be no refusal.

When Major Cartwright heard it, the high-hearted old rebel hurried over to the Parish House and thrust into my hand a lean roll of bills. And the major is by no means a rich man.

“It’s not tainted money,” said the major, “though some mighty good Bourbon is goin’ to turn into pap on account of it. However, it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody good Marse Robert can come on back upstairs now an’ thaw himself out while watchin’ me read the Lamentations of Jeremiah who was evidently sufferin’ from a dry spell himself.”

On the following Sunday the Baptist minister chose for his text that verse of Matthew which bids us take heed that we despise not one of these little ones because in heaven their angels do always behold the face of our Father. And then he told his people of that little one who had pretended to love dry bread when she couldn’t get any butter in Appleboro. And who had gone to her rest holding to her thin breast a rag-doll that was kin to her by bornation, Loujaney being poor folks herself and knowing prezactly how’t was.

Over the heads of loved and sheltered children the Baptist brethren looked at each other. Of course, it wasn’t their fault any more than anybody else’s. In a very husky voice their pastor went on to tell them of the curl which the woman who hadn’t a God’s thing left to wish for had given as a remembrance to “that good and kind man, our brother John Flint, sometimes known as the Butterfly Man.”

Dabney put the plain little discourse into print and heightened its effect by an editorial couched in the plainest terms. We were none of us in the humor to hear a spade called an agricultural implement just then, and Dabney knew it; particularly when the mill dividends and the cemetery both showed a marked increase.

Something had to be done, and quickly, but we didn’t exactly know how nor where to begin doing it. Laurence, insisting that this was really everybody’s business, called a mass-meeting at the schoolhouse, and the Clarion requested every man who didn’t intend to bring his women-folks to that meeting to please stay home himself. Wherefore Appleboro town and county came with the wife of its bosom or maybe the wife came and fetched it along.

Laurence called the meeting to order, and his manner of addressing the feminine portion of his audience would have made his gallant grandfather challenge him. He hadn’t a solitary pretty phrase to tickle the ears of the ladies he spoke of and to them as women.

“And did you see how they fell for him?” rejoiced the Butterfly Man, afterward. “From the kid in a middy up to the great old girl with three chins and a prow like an ocean liner, they were with him. When you’re in dead earnest, can the ladies; just go after women as women and they’re with you every time. They know.”

A Civic Leaguer followed Laurence, then Madame, and after her a girl from the mills, whose two small brothers went in one night. There were no set speeches. Everybody who spoke had something to say; and everybody who had something to say spoke. Then Westmoreland, who like Saul the king was taller by the head and shoulders than all Israel, bulked up big and good and begged us to remember that we couldn’t do anything of permanent value until we first learned how to reach those folks we had been ignoring and neglecting. He said gruffly that Appleboro had dumped its whole duty in this respect upon the frail shoulders of one old priest, and that the Guest Rooms were overworked. Didn’t the town want to do its share now? The town voted, unanimously, that it did.

There was a pause. Laurence asked if anybody else had anything to say? Apparently, anybody else hadn’t.

“Well, then,” said Laurence, smiling, “before we adjourn, is there anybody in particular that Appleboro County here assembled wants to hear?”

And at that came a sort of stir, a murmur, as of an immense multitude of bees:

“The Butterfly Man!” And louder: “The Butterfly Man!”

Followed a great hand-clapping, shrill whistles, the stamping of feet. And there he was, with Westmoreland and Laurence behind him as if to keep him from bolting. His face expressed a horrified astonishment. Twice, thrice, he opened his lips, and no words came. Then:

“I?” in a high and agonized falsetto.

“You!” Appleboro County settled back with rustles of satisfaction. “Speech! Speech!” From a corn-club man, joyfully.

“Oh, marmar, look! It’s the Butterfly Man, marmar!” squealed a child.

“A-a-h! Talk weeth us, Meester Fleent!” For the first time a “hand” felt that he might speak out openly in Appleboro.

John Flint stood there staring owlishly at all these people who ought to know very well that he hadn’t anything to say: what should he have to say? He was embarrassed; he was also most horribly frightened. But then, after all, they weren’t anything but people, just folks like himself! When he remembered that his panic subsided. For a moment he reflected; as if satisfied, he nodded slightly and thrust his hand into his breast pocket.

“Instead of having to listen to me you’d better just look at this,” said the Butterfly Man. “Because this can talk louder and say more in a minute than I could between now and Judgment.” And he held out Louisa’s dear fair whimsy of a curl; the sort of curl mothers tuck behind a rosy ear of nights, and fathers lean to and kiss. “I haven’t got anything to say,” said the Butterfly Man. “The best I can do is just to wish for the children all that Louisa pretended to pull out of her wishin’ curl and never got. I wish on it that all the kids get a square deal their chance to grow and play and be healthy and happy and make good. And I wish again,” said the Butterfly Man, looking at his hearers with his steady eyes, “I wish that you folks, every God-blessed one of you, will help to make that wish come true, so far as lies in your power, from now until you die!” His funny, twisty smile flashed out. He put the fairy tress back into his breast pocket, made a casual gesture to imply that he had concluded his wishes for the present; and walked off in the midst of the deepest silence that had ever fallen upon an Appleboro audience.

But however willing we might be, we discovered that we could not do things as quickly or as well as might be wished. People who wanted to help blundered tactlessly. People who wanted to be helped had to be investigated. People who ought to be helped were suspicious and resentful, couldn’t always understand or appreciate this sudden interest in their affairs, were inclined to slam doors, or, when cornered, to lie stolidly, with wooden faces and expressionless eyes.

Ensued an awkward pause, until the Butterfly Man came unobtrusively forward, discovering in himself that amazing diplomacy inherent in the Irish when they attend to anybody’s business but their own. It was amusing to watch the only democrat in a solidly Democratic county infusing something of his own unabashed humanness into proceedings which but for him might have sloughed into

Organized charity, carefully iced,
In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.

Having done what was to be done, he went about his own affairs. Nobody gushed over him, and he escaped that perilous popularity which is as a millstone around a man’s neck. Nevertheless the Butterfly Man had stumbled upon the something divine in his fellows, and they entertained for him a feeling that wasn’t any more tangible, say, than pure air, and no more emotional than pure water, but was just about as vital and life-giving.

I was enchanted to have a whole county endorse my private judgment. I rose so in my own estimation that I fancy I was a bit condescending to St. Stanislaus! I was vain of the Butterfly Man’s standing folks couldn’t like him too much, to please me. And I was greatly interested in the many invitations that poured in upon him, invitations that ranged all the way from a birthday party at Michael Karski’s to a state dinner at the Eustis’s.

From Michael’s he came home gaily, a most outrageous posy pinned upon him by way of honor, and whistling a Slavic love song so dismal that one inferred love must be something like toothache for painfulness. He had had such a bully time, he told me. Big Jan had been there with his wife, an old friend of Michael’s Katya. Although pale, and still somewhat shaky as to legs, Jan had willingly enough shaken hands with his conqueror.

It seemed quite right and natural that he and Jan should presently enter into a sort of Dual Alliance. Meester Fleent was to be Arbitrator Extraordinary. When he stipulated that thereafter Big Jan was only to tackle a man his own size, everybody cheered madly, and Mrs. Jan herself beamed red-eyed approval. She said her prayers to the man who had trounced Jan into righteousness.

But from the Eustis dinner, to which he went with my mother, he came home somber and heavy-hearted. Laurence was conspicuously absent; it is true he was away, defending his first big case in another part of the State. But Mr. George Inglesby was just as conspicuously present, apparently on the best of all possible terms with himself, the world in general, and Mrs. James Eustis in particular. His presence in that house, in the face of persistent rumors, made at least two guests uneasy. Mrs. Eustis showed him a most flattering attention. She was deeply impressed by him. He had just aided her pet mission in China what he had given the heathen would have buttered my children’s bread for many a day. Also, he was all but lyrical in his voicing of the shibboleth that Woman’s Sphere is the Home, wherein she should be adored, enshrined, and protected. Woman and the Home! All the innate chivalry of Southern manhood

I don’t know that Louisa’s Ma was ever enshrined or protected by the chivalry of any kind of manhood, no, nor any of the mill women. Their kind don’t know the word. But Mrs. Eustis was, and she agreed with Mr. Inglesby’s noble sentiments.

“Parson, you should have heard him!” raved the Butterfly Man. “There’s a sort of man down here that’s got chivalry like another sort’s got hookworm, and he makes the man that hasn’t got either want to set up an image to the great god Dam!

“You’d think being chivalrous would be enough for him, wouldn’t you?” continued the Butterfly Man, bitterly. “Nix! What’s he been working the heavy charity lay for, except that it’s his turn to be a misunderstood Christian? Doesn’t charity cover a multitude of skins, though? And doesn’t it beat a jimmy when it comes to breaking into society!”

Mary Virginia, he added in an altered voice, had been exquisite in a frock all silver lace and shimmery stuffs like moonbeams, and with a rope of pearls about her throat, and in her black hair. Appleboro folks do not affect orchids, but Mary Virginia wore a huge cluster of those exotics. She had been very gracious to the Butterfly Man and Madame. But only for a brief bright minute had she been the Mary Virginia they knew. All the rest of the evening she seemed to grow statelier, colder, more dazzlingly and imperially regal. And her eyes were like frozen sapphires under her level brows, and her mouth was the red splendid bow of Pride.

Watching her, my mother was pained and puzzled; as for the Butterfly Man, his heart went below zero. Those who loved Mary Virginia had cause for painful reflections.

Blinded by her beauty, were we judging her by the light of affection, instead of the colder light of reason? We couldn’t approve of her behavior to Laurence, nor was it easy to refrain from disapproval of what appeared to be a tacit endurance of Inglesby’s attention. She couldn’t plead ignorance of what was open enough to be town talk the man’s shameless passion for herself, a passion he seemed to take delight in flaunting. And she made no effort to explain; she seemed deliberately to exclude her old friends from the confidence once so freely given. She hadn’t visited the Parish House since she had broken her engagement.

And all the while the spring that hadn’t time for the little concerns of mortals went secretly about her immortal business of rejuvenation. The blue that had been so timid and so tentative overspread the sky; more robins came, and after them bluebirds and redbirds and Peterbirds, and the impudent screaming robber jay that is so beautiful and so bold, and flute-voiced vireos, and nuthatches, and the darling busybody wren fussing about her house-building in the corners of our piazzas. The first red flowers of the Japanese quince opened flame-like on the bare brown bushes. When the bridal-wreath by the gate saw that, she set industriously to work upon her own wedding-gown. The yellow jessamine was full of waxy gold buds; and long since those bold frontiersmen of the year, the Judas-trees, had flaunted it in bravest scarlet, and the slim-legged scouts of the pines showed shoulder-straps and cockades of new gay green above gallant brown leggings.

One brand new morning the Butterfly Man called me aside and placed in my hands a letter. The American Society of Natural History invited Mr. John Flint, already a member of the Entomological Society of France, a Fellow of the Entomological Society of London, and a member of the greatest of Dutch and German Associations, to speak before it and its guests, at a most notable meeting to be held in the Society’s splendid Museum in New York City. Not to mention two mere ex-Presidents, some of the greatest scientific names of the Americas were included in that list. And it was before such as these that my Butterfly Man was to speak. Behold me rocking on my toes!

The first effect of this invitation was to please me immensely, I being a puffed-up old man and carnal-minded at times; nor do I seem to improve with age. The plaudits of the world, for anybody I admire and love, ring most sweetly in my foolish ears. Now the honors he had gotten from abroad were fine and good in their way, but this meant that the value of his work was recognized and his position established in his own country, in his own time. It meant a widening of his horizon, association with clever men and women, ennobling friendships to broaden his life. A just measure of appreciation from the worthwhile sweetens toil and encourages genius. And yet our eyes met, and mine had to ask an old question.

“Would you better accept it?” I wondered.

“I can’t afford not to,” said he resolutely. “The time’s come for me to get out in the open, and I might just as well face the music, and Do it Now. Risks? I hardly think so. I never hunted in couples, remember I always went by my lonesome and got away with it. Besides, who’s remembering Slippy? Nobody. He’s drowned and dead and done with. But, however, and nevertheless, and because, I shall go.”

Again we looked at each other; and his look was untroubled.

“The pipe-dreams I’ve had about slipping back into little old New York! But if anybody had told me I’d go back like I’m going, with the sort of folks waiting for me that will be waiting now, I’d have passed it up. Well, you never can tell, can you? And in a way it’s funny now isn’t it?”

“No, you never can tell,” said I, soberly. “But I do not think it at all funny. Quite the contrary.” Suppose, oh, suppose, that after all these years, when a well-earned success was in his grasp, it should happen I turned pale. He read my fear in my face and his smile might have been borrowed from my mother’s mouth.

“Don’t you get cold feet, parson,” he counseled kindly. “Be a sport! Besides, it’s all in the Game, you know.”

“Is it?”

“Sure!”

“And worth while, John?”

He laughed. “Believe me! It’s the worthwhilest thing under the sun to sit in the Game, with a sport’s interest in the hands dealt out, taking yours as it comes to you, bluffing all you can when you’ve got to, playing your cards for all they’re worth when it’s your turn. No reneging. No squealing when you lose. No boasting how you did it when you win. There’s nothing in the whole universe so intensely and immensely worth while as being you and alive, with yourself the whole kitty and the sky your limit! It’s one great old Game, and I’m for thanking the Big Dealer that I’da whack at playing it.” And his eyes snapped and his lean brown face flushed.

“And you are really willing to to stake yourself now, my son?”

“Lord, parson, you ought to know! And you a dead ringer for the real thing in a classy sport yourself!”

“My dear son !”

My dear son waved his fine hand, and chuckled in his red beard.

“Would you back down if this was your call? Why, you’re the sort that would tackle the biggest noise in the ring, even if you knew you’d be dragged out on your pantry in the first half of the first round, if you thought you’d got holy orders to do it! If you saw me getting jellyfish of the spine now, you’d curl up and die wouldn’t you, honest Injun?” His eyes crinkled and he grinned so infectiously that my fears subsided. I had an almost superstitious certainty that nothing really evil could happen to a man who could grin like that. Fate and fortune are perfectly powerless before the human being who can meet them with the sword of a smile.

“Well,” I admitted cautiously, “jellyfish of the spine must be an unlovely ailment; not that I ever heard of it before.”

“You’re willing for me to go, then?”

“You’d go anyhow, would you not?”

“Forget it!” said he roughly. “If you think I’d do anything I knew would cause you uneasiness, you’ve got another thing coming to you.”

“Oh, go, for heaven’s sake!” said I, sharply.

“All right. I’ll go for heaven’s sake,” he agreed cheerfully. “And now it’s formally decided I’m to go, and talk, the question arises what they really want me to talk about? I don’t know how to deal in glittering generalities. A chap on the trail of truth has got to let generalities go by the board. The minute he tackles the living Little People he chucks theories and bucks conditions.

“Suppose I tell the truth as I see it: that most so-called authorities are like cats chasing their tails because they accept theories that have never been really proven, run after them, and so never get anywhere? And that facts dug up in the open under the sunlight don’t always fit in with notions hatched out in libraries under the electric light?

“Suppose I say that after they’ve run everything down to that plasma they’re so fond of beginning and ending with, there is still something behind it all their theories can’t explain away? Protoplasm doesn’t explain Life any more than the battery explains electricity. Instinct? Evolution? The survival of the fittest? Well, nothing is tagged for fair, and I’m more than willing to be shown. For the more I find out from the living things themselves, you can’t get truth from death, you’ve got to get it from life the more self-evident it seems to me that to exist at all insects must have arrived on the scene complete, handfinished, with the union label of the Great Workshop on them by way of a trade-mark.”

“As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, one God, world without end, Amen!” said I, smiling. I have never thought it necessary to explain or excuse the Creator. God is; things are.

But he shook his head, wrinkling his forehead painfully. “I wish I knew,” said he, wistfully. “You’re satisfied to believe, but I have got to know. Oh, great Power behind Things, I want to know! I want to know!”

Ah, but I also do most passionately wish to know! If, however, the Insect has taught me anything in my lifelong study of it, it is to recognize the Unknowable, to know there is that which I cannot hope to know. But if under the law of its world, so different from ours and yet so alike because so inevitable, the Insect must move in a fixed circle within which it is safe, a circle whose very limitation preserves it from error and thus from destruction, may not a like fixed circle beyond which we may not penetrate preserve us, too? Are these mountain peaks of the Unknowable, the Impassable, which encompass the skyline of our humanity, these heights so mysterious and so unscalable, not rather bulwarks between man’s pride and the abyss?

Something of this I said to the Butterfly Man, and he nodded, but did not answer. He fell into a brown study; then plunged from the room without further look or word and made for his own desk. I was not afraid of what the Butterfly Man, fresh from little Appleboro’s woods and fields, would have to say to the scholars and scientists gathered to hear him!

Apparently he was not either, for after he had gotten a few notes together he wisely turned the whole affair over to that mysterious Self that does our work and solves our problems for us. On the surface he busied himself with a paper setting forth the many reasons why the County of Appleboro should appropriate adequate funds for a common dipping vat, and hurried this to Dabney, who was holding open a space in the Clarion for it. Then there were new breeding cages to be made, for the supply of eggs and cocoons on hand would require additional quarters, once they began to emerge.

By the Saturday he had finished all this; and as I had that afternoon free we spent some beautiful hours with the microscope and slide mounts. I completed, too, the long delayed drawings of some diurnal wasp-moths and their larvae. We worked until my mother interrupted us with a summons to an early dinner, for Saturday evening belongs to the confessional and I was shortly due at the church.

I left Flint with Madame and Miss Sally Ruth, who had run over after the neighborly Appleboro wont with a plate of fresh sponge-cake and a bowl of fragrant custard. Miss Sally Ruth is nothing if not generous, but there are times when one could wish upon her the affliction of dumbness. As I slipped into my cassock in the study, I could hear her uplifted voice, a voice so insistent and so penetrating that it can pierce closed doors and come through a ceiling:

“I declare to goodness, I don’t know what to believe any more! She’s got money enough in her own right, hasn’t she? For heaven’s sake, then, why should she marry for more money? But you never really know people, do you? Why, folks say ”

I hurried out of the house and ran the short distance to the church. I wished I hadn’t heard; I wished Miss Sally Ruth, good as she is, would sometimes hold her tongue. She will set folks by the ears in heaven some of these days if she doesn’t mend her ways before she gets there.

It must have been all of ten o’clock when I got back to the Parish House. Madame had retired; John Flint’s rooms were dark. The night itself was dark, though in between the clouds that a brisk wind pulleyhauled about the skies, one saw many stars.

Too tired to sleep, I sat beside my window and breathed the repose that lay like a benediction upon the little city. I found myself praying; for Mary Virginia, whom I loved and over whom I was sorely troubled; for Laurence, even now walking such a road as I also once had to travel with feet as young but no more steadfast; and then with a thankfulness too deep for words, I thought a prayer for the Butterfly Man. So thinking and so praying, with a glow in my heart because of him, I closed my window, and crept into bed and into sleep.

I awoke with a start. Somebody was in the room. There was an urgent voice whispering my name, an urgent hand upon me. A pocket light flashed, and in its pale circle appeared the face of John Flint.

“Get up!” said he in an intense whisper. “And come. Come!”

“Why, what in the name of heaven ”

“Don’t make a row!” he snarled, and brought his face close. “Here let me help you. Heaven, man, how slow you are!” With furious haste he forced my clothes upon me and even as I mechanically struggled to adjust them he was hustling me toward the door, through the dark hall, and down the stairs.

“Easy there careful of that step!” he breathed in my ear, guiding me.

“But what is the matter?” I whispered back impatiently. I do not relish mystery and I detest being led willynilly.

“In my rooms,” said he briefly, and hustled me across the garden on the double run, I with my teeth chattering, for I had been dragged out of my sleep, and the night air was cold.

He fairly lifted me up his porch-steps, unlocked his door, and pushed me inside. With the drawn shades and the flickering firelight, the room was peaceful and pleasant enough. Then Kerry caught my astonished gaze, for the dog stood statue-like beside the Morris chair, and when I saw what Kerry guarded I crossed myself. Sunk into the chair, the Butterfly Man’s old gray overcoat partly around her, was Mary Virginia.

At my involuntary exclamation she raised her head and regarded me. A great sigh welled from her bosom and I could see her eyes dilate and her lips quiver.

“Padre, Padre!” Down went her head, and she began to cry childishly, with sobs.

I watched her helplessly, too bewildered to speak. But the other man’s face was the face of one crucified. I saw his eyes, and something I had been all too blind to rushed upon me overwhelmingly. This, then, was what had driven him forth for a time, this was what had left its indelible imprint upon him! He had hung upon his cross and I had not known. Oh, Butterfly Man, I had not known!

“She’ll be able to talk to you in a few minutes now, parson.” He was so perfectly unconscious of himself that he had no idea he had just made mute confession. He added, doubtfully: “She said she had to come to you, about something I don’t know what. It’s up to you to find out she’s got to talk to you, parson.”

“But I wanted to talk to you, Padre. That’s why I ran away from home in the middle of the night.” She sat suddenly erect. “I just couldn’t stand things, any more by myself ”

Gone was the fine lady, the great beauty, the proud jilt who had broken Laurence’s heart and maddened and enslaved Inglesby. Here was only a piteous child with eyes heavy from weeping, with a pale and sad face and drooping childish lips. And yet she was so dear and so lovely, for all her reddened eyelids and her reddened little nose, that one could have wept with her. The Butterfly Man, with an intake of breath, stood up.

“I shall leave you with the Padre now,” he said evenly, “to tell him what you wanted to tell him. Father, understand: there’s something rotten wrong, as I’ve been telling you all along. Now she’s got to tell you what it is and all about it. Everything. Whether she likes to or not, and no matter what it is, she’s got to tell you. You understand that, Mary Virginia?”

She fixed him with a glance that had in it something hostile and oblique. Even with those dearest of women whom I adore, there are moments when I have the impression that they have, so to speak, their ears laid back flat, and I experience what I may justly term cat-fear. I felt it then.

“Oh, don’t have too much consideration for my feelings, Mr. Flint!” said she, with that oblique and baffling glance, and the smile Old Fitz once likened to the Curve in the Cat’s Tail. “Indeed, why should you go? Why don’t you stay and find out why I wanted to run to the Padre to beg him to find some way to help me, since I can’t fall like a plum into Mr. Inglesby’s hand when Mr. Hunter shakes the Eustis family tree!”

His breath came whistlingly between his teeth.

“Parson! You hear?” he slapped his leg with his open palm. “Oh, I knew it, I knew it!” And he turned upon her a kindling glance:

“I knew all along it was never in you to be anything but true!” said the Butterfly Man.