Part 39 (1/2)

Madame slid out of her bed and reached for her neatly folded garments.

”Wait in the hall, Armand; I will be with you in ten minutes.” And she was, wrapped and hatted.

Once in the workroom, she cast a deep and searching woman-glance at the pale girl in the chair. Her face was so sweet with motherliness and love and pity, and that profound comprehension the best women show to each other, that I felt my throat contract. Gathered into Madame's embrace, Mary Virginia clung to her old friend dumbly. Madame had but one question:

”My child, have you told John Flint and my son what this trouble of yours is?”

”Yes; I had to, I had to!”

”Thank the good G.o.d for that!” said my mother piously. ”Now we will go home, dearest, and you can sleep in peace--you have nothing more to worry about!”

The clasp of the comforting arms, the sweet serenity of the mild eyes, and above all the little lady's perfect confidence, aroused Mary Virginia out of her torpor. She felt that she no longer stood alone at the mercy of the merciless. Bundled in the wraps my mother had provided, she paused at the door.

”I think you will forgive me any trouble I may cause you, because I am sure all of you love me. And whatever comes, I will be brave enough to face and to bear it. Padre, dear Padre, you understand, don't you?”

”My child, my darling child, I understand.”

”I'll be back in half an hour, parson,” the b.u.t.terfly Man remarked meaningly. Then the three melted into the night.

Left alone, I was far from sharing Madame's simple faith in our ability to untangle this miserable snarl. I knew now the temper of the men we had to deal with. I also understood that in cases like this the Southern trigger-finger is none too steady. Seen from a certain point of view, if ever men deserved an unconditional and thorough killing, these two did. Yet this homicidal specter turned me cold, for Mary Virginia's sake.

For Eustis himself I could see nothing but ruin ahead, but I wished pa.s.sionately to help the dear girl who had come to me in her stress.

But what was one to do? How should one act?

I sat there dismally enough, my chin sunk upon my breast; for as a plotter, a planner, a conspirator, I am a particularly hopeless failure. I have no sense of intrigue, and the bare idea of plotting reduces me to stupefaction.

Perhaps because I am a priest by instinct, I always discover in myself the instant need of prayer when confronted by the unusual and the difficult. I have prayed over seemingly hopeless problems in my time and I think I have been led to a clear solution of many of them.

Major Cartwright insists that this is merely because I bring desire and will to bear upon a given point and so release an irresistible natural force. He says prayer is as much a science as, say, mathematics--such and such its units, and such and such its fixed results. Well, maybe so. All I know is that when I beseech aid I think I receive it.

So I ran over to the church and let myself in. I felt that at least for a few minutes I must kneel before the altar and implore help for her who was like my own child to me.

The empty church was quite black save for the sanctuary lamp and the little red votive lights burning before the statues of the saints and of our Lady. All these many little lights only cast the veriest ghosts of brightness upon the darkness, but the white altar was revealed by the larger glow of the sanctuary lamp. There it shone with a mild and pure l.u.s.ter, unfailing, calm, steady, burning through the night, the sign and symbol of that light of Love which cannot fail, but burns and burns and burns forever and forever before an altar that is the infinite universe itself.

My little-faith, my ready-to-halt faith, raised its head above the encompa.s.sing waters; the wild turmoil and torment died away: ... after the earthquake and the fire and the whirlwind, the still small voice....

Then I, to whom life at best can only be working and waiting, was for a s.p.a.ce able to pray for her to whom life should be ”_as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, even a clear morning without clouds; and as the tender gra.s.s by clear s.h.i.+ning after rain_.” I remembered her as she had first come to me, a little loving child to fill my empty heart, the poor clay heart that cannot even hold fast to the love of G.o.d but by these frail all-powerful ties of simple human affection. And when I thought of her now, so young and so sore-beset, a bird caught in the snare of the fowler, I beat my breast for pity and for grief. Oh, how should I help her, how!

I turned my head, and there stood St. Stanislaus upon his pedestal, the memorial lights flickering upon his long robe, his smooth boy's face, his sheaf of lilies. I regarded him rather absently. Something stirred in my consciousness; something I always had to remember in connection with St. Stanislaus....

Across my mind as across a screen flashed a series of pictures--a mangled tramp carried into the Parish House, my mother watching with a concerned and shocked face, and the hall mud-stained by the trampling feet of the clumsy bearers; the s.h.a.ggy Poles, caps off, turning over to me as to high authority the heavy oilskin package they had found; I opening that package later and standing amazed and startled before its contents; and that same package, hidden under my ca.s.sock, carried over to the church and placed for security and secrecy in the keeping of the little saint. Well, that had been quite right; there had been nothing else to do; one had to be secret and careful when one had in one's keeping the tools of that notorious burglar, Slippy McGee.

Small wonder that I did not connect those pictures with the fate of Mary Virginia Eustis! No, I did not immediately grasp their tremendous bearing upon the pet.i.tions I was repeating. And all the while, with a dull insistence, an enraging persistence, they flickered before the eyes of my memory--the Poles, the screaming cursing tramp; Westmoreland pondering aloud as to why he had been permitted to save so apparently worthless a life; and the little saint hiding from the eyes of men all traces of lost Slippy McGee. Nor, more curiously yet, did I connect them with the b.u.t.terfly Man. The b.u.t.terfly Man was somebody else altogether, another and a different person, a man of whom even one's secretest thoughts were admiring and respectful. He was so far removed from the very shadow of such things as these, that it did one's conscience a sort of violence to think of him in connection with them. I tried to dismiss the memories from my mind. I wished to concentrate wholly upon the problem of Mary Virginia.

And then that mysterious, hidden self-under-self that lives in us far, far beneath thought and instinct and conscience and heredity and even consciousness itself, rose to the surface with a message:

_Slippy McGee had been the greatest cracksman in all America...._ ”Honest to G.o.d, skypilot, I can open any box made, easy as easy!” ...

_And even as his tools were hidden in St. Stanislaus, Slippy McGee himself was hidden in John Flint_.

Recoiling, I clung to the altar railing. What dreadful thing was I contemplating, what fearful temptation was a.s.sailing me, here under the light of the sanctuary lamp? I looked reproachfully at St.

Stanislaus, as if that seraphic youth had betrayed my confidence. I suspected him of being too anxious to rid himself of the ambiguous trust imposed upon him without so much as a by-your-leave. Perhaps he was secretly irked at the use to which his painted semblance had been put, and seized this first opportunity to extricate himself from a position in which the boldest saint of them all might well hesitate to find himself.