She had not my cause for fear. Besides, in her secret heart, Madame was convinced that, rehabilitated, reclaimed, having more than proven his intrinsic worth, John Flint went to be reconciled with and received into the bosom of some preeminently proper parent, and to be acclaimed and applauded by admiring and welcoming friends. For although she had once heard the Butterfly Man gravely assure Miss Sally Ruth Dexter that the only ancestor his immediate Flints were sure of was Flint the pirate, my mother still clung firmly to the illusion of Family. Blood will tell!
As for me, I was equally sure that blood was telling now; and telling in the atrocious tongue of the depths. I felt that the end had come. Vain, vain, all the labor, all the love, all the hope, the prayers, the pride! The submerged voice of his old life was calling him; the vampire extended her white and murderous arms in which many and many had died shamefully; she lifted to his her insatiable lips stained scarlet with the wine of hell. Against that siren smile, those beckoning hands, I could do nothing. The very fact that I was what I am, was no longer a help, but rather a hindrance; he recognized in the priest a deterring and detaining influence against which he rebelled, and which he wished to repudiate. He was, as he had said so terribly, "home-sick for hell." He would go, and he would most inevitably be caught in the whirlpools; the naturalist, the scientist, the Butterfly Man, would be sucked into that boiling vortex and drowned beyond all hope of resuscitation; but from it the soul of Slippy McGee would emerge, with a larger knowledge and a clearer brain, a thousand-fold more deadly dangerous than of old; because this time he knew better and had deliberately chosen the evil and rejected the good. By the law of the pendulum he must swing as far backward into wrong as he had swung forward into right.
I could not bring myself to speak to him, I dared not bid him the mockery of a Godspeed upon his journey, dreading as I did that journey's end. So I stood at a window and watched him as with suitcase in hand he walked down our shady street. At the corner he turned and lifted his hat in a last farewell salute to my mother, standing looking after him in the Parish House gate. Then he turned down the side-street, and so disappeared.
From his closed rooms came a long wailing howl. For the first time Kerry might not follow his master; more yet, the master had thrust the astonished dog into his bedroom and shut the door upon him. He had refused to recognize the scratch at the door, the snuffling whine through the keyhole. The outer door had slammed. Kerry raced to the window. And the master was going, and going without him! He had neither net, knapsack, nor bottle-belt, but he carried a suitcase. He did not look back, nor whistle: he meant to leave him behind. Sensing that an untoward thing was occurring, a thing that boded no good to himself or his beloved, the red dog lifted his voice and howled a piercing protest.
The sash was down, but the blinds had not yet been closed to. One saw Kerry standing with his forepaws on the window-sill, his nose against the glass, his ears lifted, his eyes anxious and distressed, his lip caught in his teeth. At intervals he threw back his head, and then came the howls.
The catastrophe—for to me it was no less a thing—had come upon me so suddenly that I was fairly stunned. From sheer force of habit I went over to the church and knelt before the altar; but I could not pray; I could only kneel there dumbly. I heard the screech of the three o'clock express coming in, and, a few minutes later, its longer screech as it departed. He had gone, then! I was not dreaming it: it was true. Down and down and down went my heart. And down and down and down went my head, humbled and prostrate. Alas, the end of hope, the fall of pride! Alas and alas for the fair house built upon the sand, wrecked and scattered!
When I rose from my knees I staggered. I walked draggingly, as one walks with fetters upon the feet. Oh, it was a cruel world, a world in which nothing but inevitable loss awaited one, in which one was foredoomed to disappointment; a world in which one was leaf by leaf stripped bare.
I could not bear to look at his closed rooms, but turned my head aside as I passed them. Disconsolate Kerry barked at my passing step, and pawed frantically at the window, but I made no effort to release him. What comfort had I for the faithful creature, deserted by what he most loved?
His dismal outcries rasped my nerves raw; it was exactly as if the dog howled for the dead. And that John Flint was dead I had no reasonable cause to doubt. He was dead because Slippy McGee was alive. That thought drove me as with a whip out into the garden, for as black an hour as I have ever lived through—the sort of hour that leaves a scar upon the soul. The garden was very still, steeped and drowsing in the bright clear sunlight; only the bees were busy there, calling from flower-door to flower-door, and sometimes a vireo's sweet whistle fluted through the leaves. Pitache lay on John Flint's porch, and dozed with his head between his paws; Judge Mayne's Panch sat on the garden fence, and washed his black face, and watched the little dog out of his emerald eyes. All along the fences the scarlet salvia shot up its vivid spikes, and when the wind stirred, the red petals fell from it like drops of blood.
It seemed to me incongruous and cruel that one should suffer on such a day; grief is for gray days; but the sunlight mocks sorrow, the soft wind makes light of it. I was out of tune with this harmony, as I walked up and down with my rosary in my hand. I knew that every flying minute took him farther and farther away from me and from hope and happiness and honor, and brought him nearer and nearer to the whirlpool and the pit. I beat my hands together and the crucifix cut into my palms. I walked more rapidly, as if I could get away from the misery within. My heart ached intolerably, a mist dimmed my sight, and a hideous choking lump rose in my throat; and it seemed to me that, old and futile and alone, I was set down, not in my garden, but in the midst of the abomination of desolation.