"What! You have induced Laurence to come while she is here—without giving him any intimation that he is likely to meet her?" I said, aghast. "You are a bold man, John Flint!"
The study windows were open and the sweet wind and the warm sun poured in unchecked. The stir of bees, the scent of honey-locust just opening, drifted in, and the slow solemn clangor of church bells, and lilts and flutings and calls and whistlings from the tree-tops. We could see passing groups of our neighbors, fathers and mothers shepherding little flocks of children in their Sunday best, trotting along with demure Sabbath faces on their way to church. The Butterfly Man looked out, waved gaily to the passing children, who waved back a joyous response, nodded to their smiling parents, followed the flight of a tanager's sober spouse, and sniffed the air luxuriously.
"Oh, somebody's got to stage-manage, parson," he said at last, lightly enough, but with a hint of tiredness in his eyes. "And then vanish behind the scenes, leaving the hero and heroine in the middle of the spotlight, with the orchestra tuning up 'The Voice that Breathed o'er Eden,'" he finished, without a trace of bitterness. "So I sent Madame a note by a little nigger newsie." His eyes crinkled, and he quoted the favorite aphorism of the colored people, when they seem to exercise a meticulous care: "Brer Rabbit say, 'I trus' no mistake.'"
"You are a bold man," said I again, with a respect that made him laugh. Then we went over to his rooms to wait, and while we waited I tried to read a chapter of a book I was anxious to finish, but couldn't, my eyes being tempted by the greener and fresher page opening before them. Flint smoked a virulent pipe and read his papers.
Presently he laid his finger upon a paragraph and handed me the paper. ... And I read where one "Spike" Frazer had been shot to death in a hand-to-hand fight with the police who were raiding a dive suspected of being the rendezvous of drug-fiends. Long wanted and at last cornered, Frazer had fought tigerishly and died in his tracks, preferring death to capture. A sly and secretive creature, he had had a checkered career in the depths. It was his one boast that more than anybody else he had known and been a sort of protegé of the once notorious Slippy McGee, that King of Crooks whose body had been found in the East River some years since, and whose daring and mysterious exploits were not yet altogether forgotten by the police or the underworld.
"Sic transit gloria mundi!" said the Butterfly Man in his gentle voice, and looked out over the peaceful garden and the Sunday calm with inscrutable eyes. I returned the paper with a hand that shook. It seemed to me that a deep and solemn hush fell for a moment upon the glory of the day, while the specter of what might have been gibbered at us for the last time.
Out of the heart of that hush walked two women—one little and rosy and white-haired, one tall and pale and beautiful with the beauty upon which sorrow has placed its haunting imprint. Her black hair framed her face as in ebony, and her blue, blue eyes were shadowed. By an odd coincidence she was dressed this morning just as she had been when the Butterfly Man first saw her—in white, and over it a scarlet jacket. Kerry and little Pitache rose, met them at the gate, and escorted them with grave politeness. The Butterfly Man hastily emptied his pipe and laid aside his newspapers.
"Your note said we were to come, that everything was all right," said my mother, looking up at him with bright and trustful eyes. "Such a relief! Because I know you never say anything you don't mean, John."
He smiled, and with a wave of the hand beckoned us into the workroom. Madame followed him eagerly and expectantly—she knew her John Flint. Mary Virginia came listlessly, dragging her feet, her eyes somber in a smileless face. She could not so quickly make herself hope, she who had journeyed so far into the arid country of despair. But he, with something tender and proud and joyful in his looks, took her unresisting hand and drew her forward.
"Mary Virginia!" I had not known how rich and deep the Butterfly Man's voice could be. "Mary Virginia, we promised you last night that if you would trust us, the Padre and me, we'd find the right way out, didn't we? Now this is what happened: the Padre took his troubles to the Lord, and the Lord presently sent him back to me—with the beginning of the answer in his hand! And here's the whole answer, Mary Virginia." And he placed in her hand the package of letters that meant so much to her.