with some directness, “I was summoned to meet a wounded Federal
officer, who believed himself to be dying. Probably he was right. I
do not know. However that may be, he believed that his end was near,
and I think he tried to tell the truth—an art in which he has not had
much practice in his evil life. I had known him for some years. He had
injured me as no other man in all the world ever did or ever can again.
There were many things that I wanted him to tell me about, and the
time was very short; for I had got at the house in which he lay wounded
only under escort of an armed force, and I knew that my escort could
not long hold the position. By the time I had finished questioning him
concerning the matters in which I was personally interested, the enemy
was upon us in superior force, and we were compelled to retire. Just
as I was quitting his bedside, he told me something that surprised and
shocked me—something that deeply concerned you.”
“What was it, please?” asked the girl, now pale to the lips and
nervously twisting her fingers together.
“I should not tell you that, I think; not now, at any rate. It would
only distress you and do no good. Perhaps it may not have been true.”
“You must tell me that, or you must tell me nothing!” exclaimed the
girl, rising in a passion of excitement, and speaking as if utterance
involved painful effort. “Understand me, Colonel Kilgariff. I am not a
child, whose feelings must be spared by reservations and concealments.
I have not been much used to that sort of coddling, and I will not
submit to it. My life has been such as to teach me how to endure. You
have some things, you say, which you want to tell me—some things that
have somehow grown out of whatever it was that this man said to you.
Very well, I will not hear them, unless you can tell me all. I will not
listen to half-truths. I must hear all of this matter, or none of it.
You say it concerns me closely. I am entitled, therefore, to know all
of it, if I am to know any of it. You are free to tell me nothing, if
you choose. But if you tell me a part and keep back the rest, you wrong
me, and I will not submit to the wrong. I have endured enough of that
in my life.”
She paused for a moment, and then resumed:—
“Pardon me if I have seemed to speak angrily or resentfully to you. I
did not mean that. Such anger as I felt was aroused by bitter memories
of wrong, which were called up by your proposal to put me off with a
half-truth. Let me explain myself. You are doubtless thinking that I
myself have been practising reserve and concealment ever since I came
to Wyanoke. That is true, but it has been only because I have firmly
believed that I was oath-bound to do so; and at any rate I have not
told any half-truths. Whenever I have told anything, I have told
all of it. Another thing: I so hate concealments that at the first
moment after I learned that I might do so, I decided to tell Dorothy
everything that I myself know about my life. I feared to attempt that
orally, lest I should grow excited and break down; so I decided to
write out the whole story and give it to her. That is what I meant this
morning when I said I was writing a book for Dorothy alone to read.
After she has read it, it will be hers to do with as she pleases. It
will be an honest book, telling the whole truth and not half-truths.”
Kilgariff did not interrupt this passionate speech. It revealed to him
a new and stronger side than he had imagined to exist in the nature of
the woman he loved. He rejoiced that she felt and thought as she did,
and he was not sorry that an error of judgment on his part had brought
forth this character-revealing outburst. He promptly told her so.
“You are altogether right,” he said. “I apologise for my mistake,
but, frankly, I do not regret it. It has shown me the strength and
truthfulness of your nature with an emphasis that altogether pleases
me. I had miscalculated that strength, underestimating it. I sought to
spare your feelings, not knowing how brave you are to endure. I know
you better now, and the knowledge is altogether pleasing.”
“Thank you sincerely. And you will be generous and forgive me?”
As she said this, Evelyn resumed her familiar tone and manner of almost
childlike simplicity.
“There is nothing whatever for me to forgive,” the man answered, in a
way that carried conviction of his perfect sincerity with it. “Let me
go on with my story.”
“Please do.”
“Just as I was hurrying to leave the wounded man and go to my guns,
which were already bellowing, he handed me a bundle of papers. He said
that he had a daughter who must be somewhere in the South, if she had
not been shot in passing through the lines. He begged me to find her,
if possible, and give the papers to her. When I asked him the name of
his daughter, he answered that it was Evelyn Byrd.”
The girl was livid and trembling, but what passion it was that so shook
her Kilgariff could not make out. He paused, to give her time for
recovery. She slowly rose from the bench on which she was sitting,
and with a firm, elastic step walked out into the grounds, where her
mare was grazing. The animal abandoned the grass, and trotted up to her
mistress to be caressed.
As the young woman stood there, stroking the mare’s nose, Kilgariff
thought it the most beautiful picture he had ever looked upon—the
lithe, slender girl, who carried herself with the grace of an athlete
not overtrained, caressing the beautiful mare and seeming to hold mute
but loving converse with a boundlessly loyal friend.
“And how much it means!” he thought. “What a nature that woman has! And
what a life hers must have been so far!”
Then came over him a great and loving longing to be himself the agent
of atonement to her for all the wrong that had vexed her young life, to
make her future so bright and joyous that her past should seem to her
only a troubled dream from which he had been privileged to waken her.
But with this longing came the bitter thought that this could never
be—that he was debarred by his own misfortunes from the privilege of
winning or seeking to win Evelyn Byrd’s love.
Then arose again in his mind the questions of the early morning—the
question of duty, the question of the possibility of avoiding the wrong
he so dreaded to do. Was there yet time for him to take himself out
of Evelyn Byrd’s life? Or was it already too late? What and how much
did her embarrassment in his presence mean? Had she indeed already,
and all unconsciously, learned to return the great, passionate love he
felt for her? Had he blundered beyond remedy in making himself mean so
much to her? Could he now go away and leave her out of his life without
inflicting upon her even a greater wrong and a severer suffering than
that which his leaving would be meant to avert? If not, then what
should he do? What could he do?
He felt himself in a blind alley from which there was no escape.
Unhappy indeed is the man who is confronted with a divided duty, a
problem of right and wrong which he feels himself powerless to solve.
In that hour Owen Kilgariff was more acutely unhappy than he had ever
been, even in the darkest period of his great calamity.
Presently Evelyn returned to the porch and seated herself, quite as if
nothing had occurred out of the commonplace.
“What was the man’s name?” she asked, with no sign of excitement or
emotion of any kind in her voice or manner.
“He called himself Campbell, but he told me that it was an assumed
name, and not his own. I do not know his real name.”
“Nor do I,” said the young woman, in the tone of one who is recalling
events of the past. “I never knew that. But go on, please. What else
did he tell you—what else that concerns me, I mean?”
“Nothing. The enemy was upon us hotly, and I had no time for further
talk. Oh, yes, he did say that he had persecuted you ‘in a way’—that
was his phrase.”
“I wonder what ‘in a way’ signified to him,” said the young woman,
with an intensity of bitterness in her tone, the like of which Owen
Kilgariff had never heard in the utterance of man or woman before.
“Never mind that,” Evelyn said, an instant later, the look of agony
leaving her face as suddenly as it had appeared. “You have more to tell
me?”
“Yes. I must make a confession of grave fault in myself, and ask your
forgiveness. The man, Campbell, your father, gave me a bundle of
papers, as I told you a little while ago, and I have been impertinently
asking myself ever since what I ought to do with them. It did not
occur to me then that there was no question for me to decide; that my
undoubted duty was simply to place the papers in your hands, as I now
do”—withdrawing the parcel from a pocket and placing it in her lap.
Dorothy had returned it to him for that purpose. He continued:—
“I had not learned my lesson then. I still thought it my duty to guard
and protect you, as one guards and protects a child. I reasoned that
those papers very probably contained information or statements, true
or false, that would afflict you sorely, and I impertinently desired
to spare you the affliction. On the other hand, I realised that they
might contain, instead, information of the utmost consequence to you
and calculated to bring gladness rather than sorrow to your heart. In
my perplexity I turned to Dorothy for help. All of us who know Dorothy
do that, you know. I sent the papers to her, explaining my perplexity
concerning them. I asked her to examine them and determine whether or
not they should be given to you.
“Then I learned my first lesson. Dorothy wrote to me, rebuking me with
severity for my presumption. She explained to me what I ought to have
understood for myself—that the question of what it was best to do with
the papers was not mine to decide, or hers; that I had no shadow of
right to ask her to read the documents, and she no possible right to
read them. She bade me come to Wyanoke and do my duty like a man.
“That is the real reason I am here; for as to my wound, I should have
left that to take care of itself. If it had made an end of me, so much
the better.”
“You have no right, I reckon, to say that,” interrupted Evelyn, “or to
think it, or to feel it. It is a suicidal thought, and quite unworthy
of a brave man.”
“But my life is my own, and surely—”
“Not altogether your own; perhaps not chiefly. It belongs in part to
those of us who—I mean to all who care for you, all to whom your death
would bring sorrow or to whom your living might be of benefit. Above
all it belongs to our country and our cause. You recognise that fact
in being a soldier. No; I reckon your life is not your own to do with
as you please. It is cowardly in you to think in that way, just as it
is cowardly for one to commit suicide because he is in trouble out of
which death seems the only way of escape, or the easiest way. So please
never let yourself think in that way again.”
“I will try not to,” he replied, looking at his lecturer with
undisguised admiration.
“Now, while I had, myself, no right to say whether or not you should
read those papers, and while it was not my privilege to protect you
against any distress they might bring to you, I still have a good deal
of apprehension lest their reading shall needlessly wound you. I am
going to make a suggestion, therefore, which I hope you will take in
good part.”
“I am ashamed of myself,” answered Evelyn, “for making you feel in that
way. I am ashamed of what I said to you—though it was all true and
necessary—and of the way in which I said it. I wish I could explain
why I did it, why it hurt me so when you tried to conceal something
from me. My outbreak has hurt you, and almost humiliated you, I reckon,
and I don’t like to think of you being hurt and humiliated. It is good
and generous of you to try, as you have done, to spare me. Believe me
when I tell you that I feel it to have been so. I cannot explain, and
it vexes me that I must not. Won’t you believe that?”
“I believe anything you say, and everything you say. Indeed, it is more
than belief that I feel when you tell me anything; it is a conviction
of actual and positive knowledge. And now I very much want you to
believe me when I say that it was not your ‘outbreak,’ as you call it,
that hurt and humiliated me. It was only my consciousness of my own
presumptuous impertinence that hurt. I have nothing to forgive in you;
and my own fault I cannot forgive.”
There were tears in Evelyn’s eyes as the strong and generous man who
had been so careful of her said this, shielding her even now by taking
all blame upon himself, just as he had shielded her long before by
keeping his own person between her and the bullets that were raining
about them. For the moment the old childlike simplicity came into her
bearing. She advanced, took Kilgariff’s hand, and said:—
“Let’s forget all about it, please. You have always been good to me.”
Then the dignity came back, and, resuming her seat, she said:—
“You were going to offer a suggestion. I should like to hear it. I am
sure it is meant for my advantage.”
“It is only this: I have a haunting fear that your father—”
“He was not my father,” the young woman broke in, speaking the words
quite as if they had borne no special significance. “But go on, please.”
Kilgariff almost lost the thread of his thought in his astonishment at
this sudden statement. He went on:—
“Well, then, the man Campbell, or whatever his real name was. I have
a haunting fear that he has prepared those papers for the purpose
of wounding and insulting you. He was capable of any malice, any
malignity, any atrocity. He may have put into these papers falsehoods
that you will be the better for not reading. On the other hand, the
papers may be innocent of any such purpose, and it may even be of
the utmost importance that you should know their contents. I venture
to suggest that you yourself do what I had no right to do; namely,
ask Dorothy to examine the packet and tell you whether or not it is
well for you to read the papers. You love her and trust her, and her
judgment is unfailing, I might almost say infallible. This is only a
suggestion, of course. I have no right to press it.”
Evelyn sat silent, holding the packet in her hands and nervously
turning it over. At last she arose and took a few steps toward the
doorway. Then, turning about, she said:—
“If it were necessary for any one to read the papers and advise me
concerning them, I should ask _you_, Colonel Kilgariff, to stand as
my friend and counsellor in the matter. But it is not necessary. _I
already know what is in the papers._”
She turned instantly and entered the house, leaving Kilgariff alone in
the porch.
XXIII
A LESSON FROM DOROTHY
FOR ten days after the surgical operation, Kilgariff lay abed, his
head, neck, and shoulders held rigidly immovable by a wooden framework
devised for that purpose. Otherwise than as regarded the wound, he
seemed perfectly well, and the wound itself healed satisfactorily under
Arthur Brent’s skilful treatment.
In his constrained position it was impossible for the wounded man to
hold a book before his eyes, and so, to relieve the tedium of his
convalescence, Dorothy read to him for several hours each day.
He had vaguely hoped, without formulating the thought, that Evelyn
would render him this service, as she had done during his first
illness. But this time she came not. Every day—until the success of
the operation was fully assured, she inquired anxiously concerning his
condition; but at no time did she visit him, or ask to do so. When at
last Arthur so far relaxed the mechanical restraints that Kilgariff was
able to sit below stairs in the porch when the weather permitted, and
before a “great, bearded fire” in the hallway if it were too cool out
of doors—for the autumn was now advanced—he was sorely disappointed
to learn that Evelyn was no longer at Wyanoke. She had somewhat
suddenly decided to stay at Branton, for a week or ten days, as the
guest of Edmonia Bannister.
All this set Kilgariff thinking, and the thinking was by no means
comfortable. Did Evelyn’s course mean indifference on her part? It
would have given him some pain to believe that, but it would have
relieved him greatly. In that case, he might go away and never come
back, without fear of any harm to her or any wrong-doing on his own
account. In that case, the problem that so sorely vexed him would be
completely solved.
Certainly that was the outcome of the matter which he was bound to
hope for. Yet the very suggestion that such might be the end of it all
distressed him more than he had thought that any possible solution of
the difficulty could do.
But, in fact, Owen Kilgariff knew better. When he recalled what
had gone before, he could not doubt the interpretation of Evelyn’s
avoidance of him, and this thought troubled him even more than the
other. It brought back to him all the perplexities of that problem with
which he had been so hopelessly wrestling ever since that morning at
the stables.
What should he do? What could he do? These questions were insistent,
and he could give no answer to them. At one moment his old thought of
a parity of disability came back to him—the thought that as she was
the daughter of a gambling adventurer, the obligation on his part not
to seek her love or win it might not be altogether binding. But then
flashed into his mind a memory of her words:—
“He was not my father.”
That excuse, then, no longer availed him. He could no longer—and yet,
and yet. The more he thought, the more difficult he found it to accept
the hopelessness of the case or make up his mind to take himself out of
Evelyn’s life. Yet that, he confidently believed, he would instantly do
if he could satisfy himself that it was not already too late for Evelyn
herself to welcome such an outcome.
One morning he opened his mind to Dorothy on the subject, and got a
moral castigation for his pains. The gear that had restrained his
movements had been completely removed by that time, and Kilgariff was
contemplating an almost immediate return to his post on the lines at
Petersburg.
“I am sorely troubled, Dorothy,” he began. “I am going away two or
three days hence, and I wish I could go without seeing Evelyn again.”
“Oh, I can easily manage that,” answered she, with a composure and a
commonplaceness of tone which seemed inscrutable to her companion. She
took his remark quite as a matter of course, treating it as she might
had he merely said:—
“I should like to leave my horse here.”
It was not an easy conversational situation from which to find a way
out. Obviously it was for him to make the next remark, and he could not
think what it should be. Possibly Dorothy intended that he should be
perplexed. At any rate, she manifestly did not intend to help him out
of his difficulty.
Presently he found the way out of it for himself—the only way that
Dorothy would have tolerated. That is to say, he became perfectly frank
with her.
“I want to talk with you about that,” he said, “if I may. I am much
troubled; and while I have no right to call upon you for any sort of
help, I feel that it may clear my mind simply to tell you all about the
matter.”
“I will listen with pleasure,” she said, quite coldly.
Then he blurted out the whole story. He told her—as he need not have
done, for she was not a woman for nothing—of the intensity of his
love for Evelyn; of the purpose he had cherished to conceal his state
of mind from its object, and suffer in silence a love which he felt
himself honourably bound not to declare. Then, with some difficulty,
he told her of the scene at the stables, and of all that had followed:
he explained how these things had bred a fear in his mind that it was
already too late for him simply to go away, saying nothing.
Dorothy did not help him in the least in the embarrassment he
necessarily felt in suggesting that perhaps the girl loved him already.
On the contrary, she sat silent during the recital; and when it was
ended she said, very coldly, and with a touch of severity in her
manner:—
“If I correctly understand you, you are of opinion that Evelyn has
fallen in love with you without being asked. It is perhaps open to you
to cherish a belief of that kind, but is it quite fair to the young
woman concerned for you to make a statement of that kind to me—either
directly or by implication?”
“Of course I didn’t mean that—” stammered Kilgariff; but, instead of
accepting his protest, Dorothy mercilessly thrust him through with
another question:—
“Might I ask what you did mean, then?”
Kilgariff did not answer at once. It was impossible to escape the
relentless logic of Dorothy’s question. It was equally impossible to
turn Dorothy by so much as a hair’s breadth away from the truth she
sought. Gentle as she was, forbearing as it was her nature to be, she
was utterly uncompromising in her love of truth. Moreover, in this
case she was disposed to be the more merciless in her insistence upon
the truth for the reason that Kilgariff had blunderingly offended the
dignity of her womanhood. She held his assumption concerning Evelyn’s
state of mind and heart to be an affront to her sex, and she was not
minded to let it pass without atonement.
In his masculine way, Kilgariff had many of Dorothy’s qualities. He
shared her love of absolute truthfulness, and his courage was as
resolute as her own. He met her, therefore, on her own ground. After a
moment’s pause, he said:—
“I suppose I did mean what you say; and yet I meant it less offensively
than you assume. I frankly acknowledge my fault in speaking to you of
the matter. I had no right to do that, even with you. I was betrayed
into it by the exceeding perplexity of the situation. I was wrong. I
ask your forgiveness.”
“That is better,” responded Dorothy. “I fully believe you when you
say you did not mean to do an unmanly thing. For the rest, I cannot
see that your situation is at all a perplexing one, except as you
needlessly make it so.”
“I confess I do not understand you,” replied Kilgariff, “and yet
I cannot explain my difficulty in understanding without in effect
repeating my error and emphasising it. I should be rejoiced to know
that there is no foundation for the fears that I have been entertaining
without any right to entertain them.”
“Are you sure of that? Would you really rejoice to know that Evelyn
Byrd’s sentiments toward you are only those of friendship?”
“I believe so. It would involve a good deal of distress to me, of
course; but I count the other consideration as supreme. It would
enable me to feel that I am privileged to go away from here carrying
my burdens on my own back and allowing no straw’s weight to fall upon
the shoulders of the only woman in the world that I ever loved or ever
shall.”
Dorothy made no reply in words. Instead, she turned her great, brown
eyes full upon him and looked at him for the space of twenty seconds,
in a way that brought a flush to his face. Then, still making no direct
reply to anything he had uttered, she said:—
“I am very greatly displeased with you, Owen Kilgariff. And I am very
greatly disappointed.”
She rose to withdraw, but Kilgariff stopped her, and with eager
earnestness demanded:—
“Why, Dorothy?”
“I do not wish to explain.”
“But you must. It is my right to demand that. If you go away after
saying that, and without explaining what you mean, you will do me a
grievous injustice—and you hate injustice.”
“Perhaps I ought not to have said precisely what I did. I ought to have
remembered that you are morbid; that by your brooding you have wrought
yourself into a diseased condition of mind. When you recover, you will
understand clearly enough that it is every honest man’s privilege to
woo where his heart directs. He must woo honestly, of course, but the
honest wooing of a man is no wrong and no insult to a maid. Only a
morbid self-consciousness like your own could imagine otherwise.”
“Then you would wish me to—”
“I wish nothing in the case. I have said all that I shall say. If I
have spoken severely, it has been because I have little patience with
your diseased imaginings. I don’t think I like you very well just now.”
She left him to think.
XXIV
EVELYN’S BOOK
LATE that day, came a letter and a parcel from Evelyn to Dorothy. In
the letter the girl wrote:—
I am going to stay here at Branton for two or three more days. That
is because I do not want to be with you while you are reading the
book I have written for you. Two or three days will be enough for the
reading. Then I am going back to Wyanoke. I have been over to the
hospital camp every morning, so I don’t need to tell you that I am
perfectly well.