"I'm ready for the word to start, chief." And heaven knows he was.
His passion transformed him; he forgot himself; took his mind off himself and his affairs and grievances and hatreds and fears; and thus had chance to expand and to grow, in those following years of patientest effort, of untiring research and observance, of lovingest study. Days in the open woods and fields burned his pale skin a good mahogany, and stamped upon it the windswept freshness of out of doors. The hunted and suspicious glance faded from his eyes, which took on more and more the student's absorbed intensity; the mouth lost its sinister straightness; and while it retained an uncompromising firmness, it learned how to smile. He was a familiar figure, tramping from dawn to dusk with Kerry at his heels, for the dog obeyed Mary Virginia's command literally. He looked upon John Flint as his special charge, and made himself his fourlegged red shadow. I am sure that if we had seen Kerry appear in the streets of Appleboro without John Flint, we would have incontinently stopped work, sounded a general alarm, and gone to hunt for his body. And to have seen John Flint without Kerry would have called forth condolences.
Sometimes—when I had time—I went with him moth-hunting at night; and never, never could either of us forget those enchanted hours under the stars!
We moved in a quiet fresh and dewy, with the night wind upon us like a benediction. Sometimes we skirted a cypress swamp and saw the shallow black water with blacker trees reflected upon its bosom, and heard the frogs' canorous quarrelings, and the stealthy rustlings of creatures of the dark. We crossed dreaming fields, and smelt leaves and grasses and sleeping flowers. We saw the heart of the wood bared to the magic of the moon, which revealed a hidden and haunting beauty of places commonplace enough by day; as if the secret souls of things showed themselves only in the holy dark.
For the world into which we stepped for a space was not our world, but the fairy world of the Little People, the world of the Children of the Moon. And oh, the moths! Now it was a tiger, with his body banded with yellow and his white opaque delicate wings spotted with black; now the great green silken Luna with long curved tails bordered with lilac or gold, and vest of ermine; now some quivering Catocala, with afterwings spread to show orange and black and crimson; now the golden-brown Io, with one great black velvet spot; and now some rarer, shyer fellow over which we gloated.
How they flashed and fluttered about the lantern, or circled about the trees upon which the feast had been spread! The big yellow-banded sphinx whirred hither and thither on his owl-like wings, his large eyes glowing like rubies, hung quivering above some flower for a moment, and then was off again as swift as thought. The light drew the great Regalis, all burnished tawny brown, striped and spotted with raw gold; and the Cynthia, banded with lilac, her heavy body tufted with white. The darkness in which they moved, the light which, for a moment revealed them, seemed to make their colors alive; for they show no such glow and glory in the common day; they pale when the moon pales, and when the sun is up they are merely moths; they are no longer the fantastic, glittering, gorgeous, throbbing Children of the Dark.
Home we would go, at an hour when the morning star blazed like a lighted torch, and the pearl-gray sky was flushing with pink. No haul he had ever made could have given him such joy as the treasures brought home in dawns like these, so free of evil that his heart was washed in the night dew and swept by the night wind.
My mother, after her pleasant, housewifely fashion, baked a big iced cake for him on the day he replaced his clumsy wooden peg with the life-like artificial limb he himself had earned and paid for. I had wished more than once to hasten this desirable day; but prudently restrained myself, thinking it best for him to work forward unaided. It had taken months of patient work, of frugality, and planning, and counting, and saving, to cover a sum which, once on a time, he might have gotten in an hour's evil effort. And it represented no small achievement and marked no small advance, so that it was really the feast day we made of it. That limb restored him to a dignity he seemed to have abdicated. It hid his obvious misfortune—you could not at first glance tell that he was a cripple, a something of which he had been morbidly conscious and savagely resentful. He would never again be able to run, or even to walk rapidly for any length of time, although he covered the ground at a good and steady gait; and as he grew more and more accustomed to the limb there was only a slight limp to distinguish him. The use of the stick he thought best to carry became perfunctory. I have seen Kerry carrying that stick when his master had forgotten all about it.
Meeting him now upon the streets, plainly but really well-dressed, scrupulously brushed, his linen immaculate, and with his trimmed red beard, his eyeglasses, and his soft hat, he conveyed the impression of being a professional man—say a pleasantly homely and scholarly college professor. There was a fixed sentiment in Appleboro that I knew very much more about Mr. Flint's past than I would tell—which was perfectly true, and went undenied by me; that he had seen better days; that he had been the black sheep of a good family, gotten into a scrape of some sort, and had then taken to traveling a rough road into a far country, eating husks with the swine, like many another prodigal; and that aware of this I had kept him with me until he found himself again.
So when folks met him and Kerry they smiled and spoke, for we are friendly people and send no man to Coventry without great cause. And there wasn't a child, black or white, who didn't know and like the man with the butterfly net.