Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man Part 41

I was very grateful to the McCall estimate of Appleboro's future, for the long stretch shadowed by their overgrown shrubbery brought us to the door leading to the upstair offices, without any possible danger of detection.

The bank had been a stately old home before business seized upon it, tore out its whole lower floors, and converted it into a strong and commodious bank. It is the one building in all Appleboro that keeps a light burning all night, a proceeding some citizens regard as unnecessary and extravagant; for is not Old Man Jackson there employed as night watchman? Old Man Jackson lost a finger and a piece of an ear before Appomattox, and the surrender deprived him of all opportunity to repay in kind. It was his cherished hope that "some smartybus crooks 'd try to git in my bank some uh these hyuh nights--an' I cert'nly hope to G.o.d they'll be Yankees, that's all."

Somehow, they hadn't tried. Perhaps they had heard of Old Man Jackson's watchful waiting and knew he wasn't at all too proud to fight. His quarters was a small room in the rear of the building, which he shared with a huge gray tomcat named Mosby. With those two on guard, Appleboro knew its bank was as impregnable as Gibraltar. But as n.o.body could possibly gain entrance to the vaults from above, the upper portion of the building, given over to offices, was of course quite unguarded.

One reached these upper offices by a long walled pa.s.sageway to the left, where the sidewall of the bank adjoins the McCall garden. The door leading to this stairway is not flush with the street, but is set back some feet; this forms a small alcove, which the light flickering through the bank's barred windows does not quite reach.

John Flint stepped into this small cavern and I after him. As if by magic the locked door opened, and we moved noiselessly up the narrow stairs with tin signs tacked on them. At the head of the flight we paused while the flashlight gave us our bearings. Here a short pa.s.sage opens into the wide central hall. Inglesby's offices are to the left, with the windows opening upon the tangled wilderness of the McCall place.

Right in front of us half a dozen sets of false teeth, arranged in a horrid circle around a cigar-box full of extracted molars such as made one cringe, grinned bitingly out of a gla.s.s case before the dentist's office door. The effect was of a lipless and ghastly laugh.

Before the next door a fatuously smiling pink-and-white bust simpered out of the Beauty Parlor's display-case, a bust elaborately coiffured with pounds of yellow hair in which glittered rhinestone buckles. Hair of every sort and shade and length was cl.u.s.tered about her, as if she were the presiding genius of some barbarian scalping-cult. Seen at that hour, in the pale l.u.s.ter of the flashlight, this sorry plunder of lost teeth and dead hair made upon one a melancholy impression, disparaging to humanity. I had scant time to moralize on hair and teeth, however, for Flint was stopping before a door the neat bra.s.s plate of which bore upon it:

_Mr. Inglesby_.

Mr. Inglesby had a desk downstairs in the bank, in the little pompous room marked "President's Office," where at stated hours and times he presided grandly; just as he had a big bare office at the mills, where he was rather easy of access, willing to receive any one who might chance to catch him in. But these rooms we were entering without permission were the sanctum sanctorum, the center of that wide web whose filaments embraced and ensnared the state. It would be about as easy to stroll casually into the Vatican for an informal chat with the Holy Father, to walk unannounced into the presence of the Dalai Lama, or to drop in neighborly on the Tsar of all the Russias, as to penetrate unasked into these offices during the day.

We stepped upon the velvet square of carpet covering the floor of what must have once been a very handsome guest chamber and was now a very handsome private office. One had to respect the simple and solid magnificence of the mahogany furnishings, the leather-covered chairs, the big purposeful desk. Above the old-fashioned marble mantel hung a life-sized portrait in oils of Inglesby himself. The artist had done his sitter stern justice--one might call the result retribution; and one wondered if Inglesby realized how immensely revealing it was.

There he sat, solid, successful, informed with a sort of brutal egotism that never gives quarter. In despite of a malevolent determination to look pleasant, his smile was so much more of a threat than a promise that one could wish for his own sake he had scowled instead. He is a throaty man, is Inglesby; and this, with an uncompromising squareness of forehead, a stiffness of hair, and a hard hint of white in the eyes, lent him a lowering likeness to an unpedigreed bull.

John Flint cast upon this charming likeness one brief and pregnant glance.

"Regular old Durham shorthorn, isn't he?" he commented in a low voice.

"Wants to charge right out of his frame and trample. Take a look at that nose, parson--like a double-barreled shotgun, for all the world!

Beautiful brute, Inglesby. Makes you think of that minotaur sideshow they used to put over on the Greeks."

In view of Laurence and of Mary Virginia, I saw the resemblance.

Mr. Hunter's office was less formal than Mr. Inglesby's, and furnished with an exact and critical taste alien to Appleboro, where many a worthy citizen's office trappings consist of an alpaca coat, a chair and a pine table, three or four fly-specked calendars and shabby ledgers, and a box of sawdust. To these may sometimes be added a pot of paste with a dead c.o.c.kroach in it, or a hound dog either scratching fleas or snapping at flies.

Here the square of carpet was brown as fallen pine-needles in October, the walls were a soft tan, the ceiling and woodwork ivory-toned. One saw between the windows a bookcase filled with handsomely bound books, and on top of it a few pieces of such old china as would enrapture my mother. The white marble mantel held one or two signed photographs in silver frames, a pair of old candlesticks of quaint and pleasing design, and a dull red pottery vase full of j.a.panese quince. There were a few good pictures on the walls--a gay impudent Detaille Lancer whose hardy face of a fighting Frenchman warmed one's heart; some sketches signed with notable American names; and above the mantel a female form clothed only in the ambient air, her long hair swept back from her shoulders, and a pearl-colored dove alighting upon her outstretched finger.

I suppose one might call the whole room beautiful, for even the desk was of that perfection of simplicity whose cost is as rubies. It was not, however, a womanish room; there was no slightest hint of femininity in its uncluttered, sane, forceful orderliness. It was rather like Hunter himself--polished, perfect, with a note of finality and of fitness upon it like a hall-mark. Nothing out of keeping, nothing overdone. Even the red petal fallen from the pottery vase on the white marble mantel was a last note of perfection.

Flint glanced about him with the falcon-glance that nothing escapes.

For a moment the light stayed upon the nude figure over the mantel--the one real nude in all Appleboro, which cherishes family portraits of rakeh.e.l.ly old colonials in wigs, chokers, and tight-fitting smalls, and lolloping ladies with very low necks and sixteen petticoats, but where scandalized church-goers have been known to truss up a little plaster copy of the inane Greek Slave in a pocket-handkerchief, by way of needful drapery.

"What I want to know is, _why_ a lady should have to strip to the buff just to play with a pigeon?" breathed John Flint, and his tone was captious.

It did not strike me as being to the last degree whimsical, improbable, altogether absurd, that such a man should pause at such a time to comment upon art as he thinks it isn't. On the contrary it was a consistent and coherent feature of that astounding nightmare in which we figured. The absurd and the impossible always happen in dreams. I am sure that if the dove on the woman's finger had opened its painted bill and spoken, say about the binomial theorem, or the Effect of Too Much Culture upon Women's Clubs, I should have listened with equal gravity and the same abysmal absence of surprise. I pattered plat.i.tudinously:

"The greatest of the Greeks considered the body divine in itself, my son, and so their n.o.blest art was nude. Some moderns have thought there is no real art that is not nude. Truth itself is naked."

"Aha!" said my son, darkly. "I see! You take off your pants when you go out to feed your chickens, say, and you're not bughouse. You're art. Well, if Truth is naked, thank G.o.d the rest of us are liars!"

What I have here set down was but the matter of a moment. Flint brushed it aside like a cobweb and set briskly about his real business. Over in the recess next to the fireplace was the safe, and before this he knelt.

"Hold the light!" he ordered in a curt whisper. "There--like that.

Steady now." My hand closed as well upon the rosary I carried, and I clung to the beads as the shipwrecked cling to a spar. The familiar feel of them comforted me.

I do not know to this day the make of that safe, nor its actual strength, and I have always avoided questioning John Flint about it. I do know it seemed incredibly strong, big, heavy, ungetatable. There was a dark-colored linen cover on top of it, embroidered with yellow marguerites and their stiff green leaves. And there was a bra.s.s fern-jar with claw feet, and rings on the sides that somehow made me think of fetters upon men's wrists.

"A little lower--to the left. So!" he ordered, and with steady fingers I obeyed. He stood out sharply in the clear oval--the "cleverest crook in all America" at work again, absorbed in his task, expert, a mind-force pitting itself against inanimate opposition. He was smiling.

The tools lay beside him and quite by instinct his hand reached out for anything it needed. I think he could have done his work blindfolded. Once I saw him lay his ear against the door, and I thought I heard a faint click. A gnawing rat might have made something like the noise of the drill biting its way. With this exception an appalling silence hung over the room. I could hardly breathe in it. I gripped the rosary and told it, bead after bead.

_"Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death--"_

There are moments when time loses its power and ceases to be; before our hour we seem to have stepped out of it and into eternity, in which time does not exist, and wherein there can be no relation of time between events. They stand still, or they stretch to indefinite and incredible lengths--all, all outside of time, which has no power upon them. So it was now. Every fraction of every second of every minute lengthened into centuries, eternities pa.s.sed between minutes. The hashish-eater knows something of this terror of time, and I seemed to have eaten hashish that night.

I could still see him crouching before the safe; and all the while the eternities stretched and stretched on either side of us, infinities I could only partly bridge over with Hailmarys and Ourfathers.

_"And lead us not into temptation ... but deliver us from evil ..."_

Although I watched him attentively, being indeed unable to tear my eyes away from him, and although I held the light for him with such a steady hand, I really do not know what he did, nor how he forced that safe. I understand it took him a fraction over fourteen minutes.

"Here she comes!" he breathed, and the heavy door was open, revealing the usual interior, with ledgers, and a fairsized steel money-vault, which also came open a moment later. Flint glanced over the contents, and singled out from other papers two packages of letters held together by stout elastic bands, and with pencil notations on the corner of each envelope, showing the dates. He ran over both, held up the smaller of the two, and I saw, with a grasp of inexpressible relief, the handwriting of Mary Virginia.

He locked the vault, shut the heavy door of the rifled safe, and began to gather his tools together.

"You have forgotten to put the other packages back," I reminded him. I was in a raging fever of impatience to be gone, to fly with the priceless packet in my hand.

"No, I'm not forgetting. I saw a couple of the names on the envelopes and I rather think these letters will be a whole heap interesting to look over," said he, imperturbably. "It's a hunch, parson, and I've gotten in the habit of paying attention to hunches. I'll risk it on these, anyhow. They're in suspicious company and I'd like to know why." And he thrust the package into the crook of his arm, along with the tools.

The light was carefully flashed over every inch of the s.p.a.ce we had traversed, to make sure that no slightest trace of our presence was left. As we walked through Inglesby's office John Flint ironically saluted the life-like portrait:

"You've had a ring twisted in your nose for once, old sport!" said he, and led me into the dark hall. We moved and the same exquisite caution we had exercised upon entering, for we couldn't afford to have Dan Jackson's keen old ears detect footfalls overhead at that hour of the morning. Now we were at the foot of the long stairs, and Flint had soundlessly opened and closed the last door between us and freedom.

And now we were once more in the open air, under the blessed shadow of the McCall trees, and walking close to their old weather-beaten fence.

The light was still shining in the bank, and I knew that that redoubtable old rebel of a watchman was peacefully sleeping with his gray guerilla of a marauding cat beside him. He could afford to sleep in peace. He had not failed in his trust, for the intruders had no designs upon the bank's gold. Questioned, he could stoutly swear that n.o.body had entered the building. In proof, were not all doors locked?

Who should break into a man's office and rob his safe just to get a package of love-letters--if Inglesby made complaint?

I remember we stood leaning against the McCall fence for a few minutes, for my strength had of a sudden failed, my head spun like a top, and my legs wavered under me.

"Buck up!" said Flint's voice in my ear. "It's all over, and the baby's named for his Poppa!" His arm went about me, an arm like a steel bar. Half led, half carried, I went staggering on beside him like a drunken man, clutching a rosary and a packet of love-letters.

The streets were still dark and deserted, the whole town slept. But over in the east, when one glimpsed the skies above the trees, a nebulous gray was stealing upon the darkness; and the morning star blazed magnificently, in a s.p.a.ce that seemed to have been cleared for it. Somewhere, far off, an ambitious rooster crowed to make the sun rise.

It took us a long time to reach home. It was all of a quarter past four when we turned into the Parish House gate, cut across the garden, and reached Flint's rooms. Faint, trembling in every limb, I fell into a chair, and through a mist saw him kneel and blow upon the coals of the expiring fire, upon which he dropped a lightwood knot. A ruddy glow went dancing up the chimney. Then he was beside me again. Very gently he removed hat and overcoat. And then I was sitting peacefully in the Morris chair, in my old ca.s.sock, and with my own old biretta on my head; and there was no longer that thin buzzing, shrill and torturing as a mosquito's, singing in my ears. At my knee stood Kerry, with his beautiful hazel eyes full of a grave concern; and beside him, calm and kind and matter-of-fact, the b.u.t.terfly Man himself stood watching me with an equal regard. I rubbed my forehead. The incredible had happened, and like all incredible things it had been almost ridiculously simple and easy of accomplishment. Here we were, we two, priest and naturalist, in our own workroom, with an old dog wagging his tail beside us. Could anything be more commonplace? The last trace of nightmare vanished, as smoke dispelled by the wind. If Mary Virginia's letters had not been within reach of my hand I would have sworn I was just awake out of a dream of that past hour.

"She has escaped from them, they cannot touch her, she is free!" I exulted. "John, John, you have saved our girl! No matter what they do to Eustis they can't drag her into the quicksands _now_."

But he went walking up and down, shoulders squared, face uplifted. One might think that after such a night he would have been humanly tired, but he had clean forgotten his body. His eyes shone as with a flame lit from inward, and I think there was on him what the Irish people call the _Aisling_, the waking vision. For presently he began to speak, as to Somebody very near him.

"Oh, Lord G.o.d!" said the b.u.t.terfly Man, with a reverent and fierce joy, "she's going to have her happiness now, and it wasn't holy priest nor fine gentleman you picked out to help her toward it--it was me, Slippy McGee, born in the streets and bred in the gutter, with the devil knows who for his daddy and a name that's none of his own! For that I'm Yours for keeps: _You've got me_.

"You've done all even G.o.d Almighty can do, given me more than I ever could have asked You for--and now it's up to me to make good--and I'll do it!"

There came to listening me something of the emotion I experienced when I said my first Ma.s.s--as if I had been brought so close to our Father that I could have put out my hand and touched Him. Ah! I had had a very small part to play in this man's redemption. I knew it now, and felt humbled and abashed, and yet grateful that even so much had been allowed me. Not I, but Love, had transformed a sinner and an outlaw into a great scientist and a greater lover. And I remembered Mary Virginia's childish hand putting into his the gray-winged Catocala, and how the little moth, raising the sad-colored wings worn to suit his surroundings, revealed beneath that disfiguring and disguising cloak the exquisite and flower-like loveliness of the underwings.