Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man Part 1

Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the b.u.t.terfly Man.

by Marie Conway Oemler.

FOREWORD

I have known life and love, I have known death and disaster; Foregathered with fools, succ.u.mbed to sin, been not unacquainted with shame; Doubted, and yet held fast to a faith no doubt could o'ermaster.

Won and lost:--and I know it was all a part of the Game.

Youth and the dreams of youth, hope, and the triumph of sorrow: I took as they came, I played them all; and I trumped the trick when I could.

And now, O Mover of Men, let the end be to-day or to-morrow-- I have staked and played for Myself, and You and the Game were good!

SLIPPY McGEE

CHARACTERS

FATHER ARMAND JEAN DE RANCe, Catholic Priest of Appleboro, South Carolina MADAME DE RANCe, his Mother CLeLIE, their Servant LAURENCE MAYNE, the Boy MARY VIRGINIA EUSTIS, the Girl JAMES EUSTIS, Man of the New South MRS. EUSTIS, a Lady DOCTOR WALTER WESTMORELAND, the Beloved Physician JIM DABNEY, Editor of the Appleboro "Clarion"

MAJOR APPLEBY CARTWRIGHT } MISS SALLY RUTH DEXTER } Neighbors JUDGE HAMMOND MAYNE } GEORGE INGLESBY, the Boss of Appleboro J. HOWARD HUNTER, his Private Secretary KERRY, an Irish Setter PITACHE, the Parish House Dog THE MOTHS AND b.u.t.tERFLIES OF SOUTH CAROLINA THE CHILDREN, THE MILL-HANDS, THE FACTORY FOLKS, and SLIPPY MCGEE, sometimes known as the b.u.t.terfly Man

SLIPPY McGEE

CHAPTER I

APPLEBORO

"Now there was my cousin Eliza," Miss Sally Ruth Dexter once said to me, "who was forced to make her home for thirty years in Vienna! She married an attache of the Austrian legation, you know; met him while she was visiting in Was.h.i.+ngton, and she was such a pretty girl and he was such a charming man that they fell in love with each other and got married. Afterward his family procured him a very influential post at court, and of course poor Cousin Eliza had to stay there with him.

Dear mama often said she considered it a most touching proof of woman's willingness to sacrifice herself--for there's no doubt it must have been very hard on poor Cousin Eliza. She was born and raised right here in Appleboro, you see."

Do not think that Miss Sally Ruth was anything but most transparently sincere in thus sympathizing with the sad fate of poor Cousin Eliza, who was born and raised in Appleboro, South Carolina, and yet sacrificed herself by dragging out thirty years of exile in the court circles of Vienna! Any trueborn Appleboron would be equally sorry for Cousin Eliza for the same reason that Miss Sally Ruth was. Get yourself born in South Carolina and you will comprehend.

"What did you see in your travels that you liked most?" I was curious to discover from an estimable citizen who had spent a summer abroad.

"Why, General Lee's standin' statue in the Capitol an' his rec.u.mbent figure in Was.h.i.+ngton an' Lee chapel, of co'se!" said the colonel promptly. "An' listen hyuh, Father De Rance, I certainly needed him to take the bad taste out of my mouth an' the red out of my eye after viewin' Bill Sherman on a bra.s.s hawse in New York, with an angel that'd lost the grace of G.o.d prancin' on ahead of him!" He added reflectively: "I had my own ideah as to where any angel leadin' _him_ was most likely headed for!"

"Oh, I meant in Europe!" hastily.

"Well, father, I saw pretty near everything in Europe, I reckon; likewise New York. But comin' home I ran up to Was.h.i.+ngton an' Lee to visit the general lyin' there asleep, an' it just needed one glance to a.s.sure me that the greatest an' grandest work of art in this round world was right there before me! What do folks want to rush off to foreign parts for, where they can't talk plain English an' a man can't get a satisfyin' meal of home cookin', when we've got the greatest work of art an' the best hams ever cured, right in Virginia? See America first, I say. Why, suh, I was so glad to get back to good old Appleboro that I let everybody else wait until I'd gone around to the monument an' looked up at our man standin' there on top of it, an' I found myself sayin' over the names he's guardin' as if I was sayin' my prayers: _our names_.

"Uh huh, Europe's good enough for Europeans an' the Nawth's a G.o.d's plenty good enough for Yankees, but Appleboro for me. Why, father, they haven't got anything like our monument to their names!"

They haven't. And I should hate to think that any Confederate living or dead ever even remotely resembled the gray granite one on our monument. He is a brigandish and bearded person in a foraging cap, leaning forward to rest himself on his gun. His long skirted coat is buckled tightly about his waist to form a neat bustle effect in the back, and the solidity of his granite shoes and the fell rigidity of his granite breeches are such as make the esthetic shudder; one has to admit that as a work of art he is almost as bad as the statues cluttering New York City. But in Appleboro folks are not critical; they see him not with the eyes of art but with the deeper vision of the heart. He stands for something that is gone on the wind and the names he guards are our names.

This is not irrelevant. It is merely to explain something that is inherent in the living spirit of all South Carolina; wherefore it explains my Appleboro, the real inside-Appleboro.

Outwardly Appleboro is just one of those quiet, conservative, old Carolina towns where, loyal to the customs and traditions of their fathers, they would as lief white-wash what they firmly believe to be the true and natural character of General William Tec.u.mseh Sherman as they would their own front fences. Occasionally somebody will give a backyard henhouse a needed coat or two; but a front fence? Never! It isn't the thing. n.o.body does it. All normal South Carolinians come into the world with a native horror of paint and whitewash and they depart hence even as they were born. In consequence, towns like Appleboro take on the venerable aspect of antiquity, peacefully drowsing among immemorial oaks draped with long, gray, melancholy moss.

Not that we are cut off from the world, or that we have escaped the clutch of commerce. We have the usual shops and stores, even an emporium or two, and street lights until twelve, and the mills and factory. We have the river trade, and two railroads tap our rich territory to fetch and carry what we take and give. And, except in the poor parish of which I, Armand De Rance, am pastor, and some few wealthy families like the Eustises, Agur's wise and n.o.ble prayer has been in part granted to us; for if it has not been possible to remove far from us all vanity and lies, yet we have been given neither poverty nor riches, and we are fed with food convenient for us.

In Appleboro the pleasant and prejudiced Old looks askance at the noisy and intruding New, before which, it is forced to retreat--always without undue or undignified haste, however, and always unpainted and unreconstructed. It is a town where families live in houses that have sheltered generations of the same name, using furniture that was not new when Marion's men hid in the swamps and the redcoats overran the country-side. Almost everybody has a garden, full of old-fas.h.i.+oned shrubs and flowers, and fine trees. In such a place men and women grow old serenely and delightfully, and youth flourishes all the fairer for the rich soil which has brought it forth.

One has twenty-four hours to the day in a South Carolina town--plenty of time to live in, so that one can afford to do things unhurriedly and has leisure to be neighborly. For you do have neighbors here. It is true that they know all your business and who and what your grandfather was and wasn't, and they are p.r.o.ne to discuss it with a frankness to make the scalp p.r.i.c.kle. But then, you know theirs, too, and you are at liberty to employ the same fearsome frankness, provided you do it politely and are not speaking to an outsider. It is perfectly permissible for _you_ to say exactly what you please about your own people to your own people, but should an outsider and an alien presume to do likewise, the Carolina code admits of but one course of conduct; borrowing the tactics of the goats against the wolf, they close in shoulder to shoulder and present to the audacious intruder an unbroken and formidable front of horns.

And it is the last place left in all America where decent poverty is in nowise penalized. You can be poor pleasantly--a much rarer and far finer art than being old gracefully. Because of this, life in South Carolina sometimes retains a simplicity as fine and sincere as it is charming.

I deplore the necessity, but I will be pardoned if I pause here to become somewhat personal, to explain who and what I am and how I came to be a pastor in Appleboro. To explain myself, then, I shall have to go back to a spring morning long ago, when I was not a poor parish priest, no, nor ever dreamed of becoming one, but was young Armand De Rance, a flower-crowned and singing pagan, holding up to the morning sun the chalice of spring; joyous because I was of a perishable beauty, dazzled because life gave me so much, proud of an old and honored name, secure in ancestral wealth, loving laughter so much that I looked with the raised eyebrow and the twisted lip at austerities and prayers.

If ever I reflected at all, it was to consider that I had nothing to pray for, save that things might ever remain as they were: that I should remain me, myself, young Armand De Rance, loving and above all beloved of that one sweet girl whom I loved with all my heart. Young, wealthy, strong, beautiful, loving, and beloved! To hold all that, crowded into the hollow of one boyish hand! Oh, it was too much!

I do not think I had ever felt my own happiness so exquisitely as I did upon that day which was to see the last of it. I was to go a-Maying with her who had ever been as my own soul, since we were children playing together. So I rode off to her home, an old house set in its walled inclosure by the river. At the door somebody met me, calling me by my name. I thought at first it had been a stranger. It was her mother. And while I stood staring at her changed face she took me by the hand and began to whisper in my ear ... what I had to know.

Blindly, like one bludgeoned on the head, I followed her into a darkened room, and saw what lay there with closed eyes and hair still wet from the river into which my girl had cast herself.

No, I cannot put into words just what had happened; indeed, I never really knew all. There was no public scandal, only great sorrow. But I died that morning. The young and happy part of me died, and, only half-alive I walked about among the living, dragging about with me the corpse of what had been myself. Crushed by this horrible burden which none saw but I, I was blind to the beauties of earth and deaf to the mercies of heaven, until a great Voice called me to come out of the sepulcher of myself; and I came--alive again, and free, of a strong spirit, but with youth gone from it. Out of the void of an irremediable disaster G.o.d had called me to His service, chastened and humbled.

"_Who is weak and I am not weak? who is offended and I burn not?_"

And yet, although I knew my decision was irrevocable, I did not find it easy to tell my mother. Then:

"Little mother of my heart," I blurted, "my career is decided. I have been called. I am for the Church."

We were in her pleasant morning room, a beautiful room, and the lace curtains were pushed aside to allow free ingress of air and sunlight.

Between the windows hung two objects my mother most greatly cherished--one an enameled Pet.i.tot miniature, gold-framed, of a man in the flower of his youth. His hair, beautiful as the hair of Absalom, falls about his haughty, high-bred face, and so magnificently is he clothed that when I was a child I used to a.s.sociate him in my mind with those "_captains and rulers, clothed most gorgeously, all of them desirable young men, ... girdled with a girdle upon their loins, exceeding in dyed attire upon their heads, all of them princes to look to" ... whom Aholibah "doted upon when her eyes saw them portrayed upon the walls in vermilion_."

The other is an Audran engraving of that same man grown old and stripped of beauty and of glory, as the leaf that falls and the flower that fades. The somber habit of an order has replaced scarlet and gold; and sackcloth, satin. Between the two pictures hangs an old crucifix. For that is Armand De Rance, glorious sinner, handsomest, wealthiest, most gifted man of his day--and his a day of glorious men; and this is Armand De Rance, become the sad austere reformer of La Trappe.

My mother rose, walked over to the Abbe's pictures, and looked long and with rather frightened eyes at him. Perhaps there was something in the similarity to his of the fate which had come upon me who bore his name, which caused her to turn so pale. I also am an Armand De Rance, of a cadet branch of that great house, which emigrated to the New World when we French were founding colonies on the banks of the Mississippi.

Her hand went to her heart. Turning, she regarded me pitifully.

"Oh, no, not that!" I rea.s.sured her. "I am at once too strong and not strong enough for solitude and silence. Surely there is room and work for one who would serve G.o.d through serving his fellow men, in the open, is there not?"

At that she kissed me. Not a whimper, although I am an only son and the name dies with me, the old name of which she was so beautifully proud! She had hoped to see my son wear my father's name and face and thus bring back the lost husband she had so greatly loved; she had prayed to see my children about her knees, and it must have cost her a frightful anguish to renounce these sweet and consoling dreams, these tender and human ambitions. Yet she did so, smiling, and kissed me on the brow.

Three months later I entered the Church; and because I was the last De Rance, and twenty four, and the day was to have been my wedding-day, there fell upon me, sorely against my will, the halo of sad romance.

Endeared thus to the young, I suppose I grew into what I might call a very popular preacher. Though I myself cannot see that I ever did much actual good, since my friends praised my sermons for their "fine Gallic flavor," and I made no enemies.

But there was no rest for my spirit, until the Call came again, the Call that may not be slighted, and bade me leave my sheltered place, my pleasant lines, and go among the poor, to save my own soul alive.

That is why and how the Bishop, my old and dear friend, after long argument and many protests, at length yielded and had me transferred from fas.h.i.+onable St. Jean Baptiste's to the poverty-stricken missionary parish of sodden laboring folk in a South Carolina coast-town: he meant to cure me, the good man! I should have the worst at the outset.