... That was a redbird again. And now a vireo. And this the mockingbird, love-drunk, emptying his heart of a troubadour in a song of fire and dew. And on a vagrant air, a gipsy air, the scent of the honey-locust. The spring for all the world else. But for him I loved,—what?
I suppose my wistful eyes betrayed me, for used to the changing expressions of my thin visage, he smiled; and stood up, stretching his arms above his head. He drew in great mouthfuls of the sweet air, and expanded his broad chest.
"I feel full to the brim!" said he gloriously. "I've got almost too much to hold with both hands! Parson, parson, it isn't possible you're fretting over me? Sorry for me? Why, man, consider!"
Ah, but had I not considered? I knew, I thought, what he had to hold fast to. Honor, yes. And the friendship of some and the admiration of many and the true love of the few, which is all any man may hope for and more than most attain. Outside of that, a gray moth, and a butterfly's wing, and a torn nest, and a child's curl, and a ragdoll in her grave; and now a girl's kiss on the palm and a tear to hallow it. But I who had greatly loved and even more greatly lost and suffered, was it not for me of all men to know and to understand?
"But I have got the thing itself," said the Butterfly Man, "that makes everything else worth while. Why, I have been taught how to love! My work is big—but by itself it wasn't enough for me. I needed something more. So I was swept and empty and ready and waiting—when she came. Now hadn't there got to be something fine and decent in me, when it was she alone out of all the world I was waiting for and could love?"
"Yes, yes. But oh, my son, my son!"
"Oh, it was bad and bitter enough at first, parson. Because I wanted her so much! Great God, I was like a soul in hell! After awhile I crawled out of hell—on my hands and knees. But I'd begun to understand things. I'd been taught. It'd been burnt into me past forgetting. Maybe that's what hell is for, if folks only knew it. Could anything ever happen to anybody any more that I couldn't understand and be sorry for, I wonder?
"No, don't you worry any about me. I wouldn't change places with anybody alive, I'm too glad for everything that's ever happened to me, good and bad. I'm not ashamed of the beginning, no, nor I'm not afraid of the end.
"Will you believe me, though, when I tell you what worried me like the mischief for awhile? Family, parson! You can't live in South Carolina without having the seven-years' Family-itch wished on you, you know. I felt like a mushroom standing up on my one leg all by myself among a lot of proper garden plants—until I got fed up on the professional Descendant banking on his boneyard full of dead ones; then I quit worrying. I'm Me and alive—and I should worry about ancestors! Come to think about it, everybody's an ancestor while you wait. I made up my mind I'd be my own ancestor and my own descendant—and make a good job of both while I was at it."
But I was too sad to smile. And after awhile he asked gently: