"I remember running after a butterfly once, when I was a kid," said he. "He came flying down our street, Lord knows where from, or why, and I caught him after a chase. I thought he was the prettiest thing ever my eyes had seen, and I wanted the worst way in the world to keep him with me. A brown fellow he was, all sprinkled over with little splotches of silver, as if there'd been plenty of the stuff on hand, and it'd been laid on him thick. But after awhile I got to thinking he'd feel like he was in jail, shut up in my hot fist. I couldn't bear that, so I ran to the end of the street, to save him from the other kids, and then I turned him loose and watched him beat it for the sky. They're pretty things, butterflies. Somehow I always liked them better than any other living creatures." He was staring after the moth, his forehead wrinkled. He spoke almost unconsciously, and he certainly had no idea that he had given us cause for a hopeful astonishment.
Now, Mary Virginia's eyes had fallen, idly enough, upon John Flint's hands lying loosely upon his knees. Her face brightened.
"Padre," she suggested suddenly, "why don't you let him help you with your butterflies? Look at his hands! Why, they're just exactly the right sort to handle setting needles and mounting blocks, and to stretch wings without loosening a scale. He could be taught in a few lessons, and just think what a splendid help he could be! And you do so need help with those insects of yours, Padre—I've heard you say so, over and over."
The child was right—John Flint did have good hands—large enough, well-shaped, steel-muscled, powerful, with flexible, smooth-skinned, sensitive fingers, the fingers of an expert lapidary rather than a prize-fighter.
"If you think there's any way I could help the parson for awhile, I'd be proud to try, miss. It's true," he added casually, with a sphinx-like immobility of countenance, "that I'm what might be called handy with my fingers."
"We'll call it settled, then," said Mary Virginia happily.
Laurence took her home at dusk; it was a part of his daily life to look after Mary Virginia, as one looks after a cherished little sister. When they were younger the boy had often complained that she might as well be his sister, she quarreled with him so much; and the little girl said, bitterly, he was as disagreeable as if he'd been a brother. In spite of which the little girl, for all her delicious impertinences, looked up to the boy; and the boy had adored her, from the time she gurgled at him from her cradle.
My mother left us, and John Flint and I sat outdoors in the pleasant twilight, he smoking the pipe Laurence had given him.
"Parson," said he, abruptly, "Parson, you folks are swells, ain't you? The real thing, I mean, you and Madame? Even the yellow nigger's a lady nigger, ain't she?"
"I am a poor priest, such as you see, my son, Madame is—Madame. And Clélie is a good servant."