Chapter XXXII: The End of It All 434 (3)

A few hours later, finding that the temporary hospital was exposed to both artillery and musketry fire, Doctor Brent ordered the removal of the wounded men to a point a mile or so in the rear; and finding Kilgariff, thanks to his elastic constitution, able to endure a little longer journey, he took him to his own quarters, still farther to the rear.

Here Captain Pollard managed to visit his sergeant-major during the night.

“General Anderson, who is in command of Longstreet’s corps, now that Longstreet is wounded,” he said, during the interview, “has asked for your report of your action on the hill. If you are strong enough to answer a question or two, I’ll make the report in your stead.”

“I think I can write it myself,” answered Kilgariff; “and I had rather do that.”

Paper and a pencil were brought, and, with much difficulty, the wounded man wrote:—

Under orders this day, I took the left section of Captain Pollard’s Virginia Battery to the crest of a hill in front.

After three minutes of firing, infantry having come up, I was ordered to retire, and did so. My losses were eighteen men killed and fifteen wounded, of a total force of thirty-eight men. One of my gun carriages was destroyed by an enemy’s shell, and two limber-chests were blown up. All of the horses having fallen, I brought off the remaining gun and the two caissons by hand, in obedience to orders. I was fortunately able also to bring off all the wounded. Every man under my command behaved to my satisfaction.

All of which is respectfully submitted.

OWEN KILGARIFF,

_Sergeant-major_.

“Is that all you wish to say?” asked Pollard, when he had read the report.

“Quite all.”

“You make no mention of your own wound.”

“That was received later. It has no proper place in this report.”

“True. That is for me to mention in my report for the day.”

But in his indorsement upon the sergeant-major’s report Pollard wrote:—

I cannot too highly commend to the attention of the military authorities the extraordinary courage, devotion, and soldierly skill manifested by Sergeant-major Kilgariff, both in this affair and in the fighting of the last few days in the Wilderness.

In the meantime General Ewell had mentioned in one of his reports the way in which Kilgariff had done his work in the Wilderness, and now General Anderson wrote almost enthusiastically in commendation of this young man’s brilliant and daring action, so that when the several reports reached General Lee’s headquarters, the great commander was deeply impressed. Here was a young enlisted man whose conduct in action had been so conspicuously gallant and capable as to attract favourable mention from two corps commanders within a brief period of three or four days. General Lee officially recommended that a captain’s commission should be issued at once to a man so deserving of promotion and so fit to command.

The document did not reach Kilgariff until a fortnight later, after Arthur Brent had sent him to Wyanoke for treatment and careful nursing. Kilgariff took the commission in his enfeebled hands and carefully read it through, seeming to find some species of pleasure in perusing the formal words with which he was already familiar. Across the sheet was written in red ink:—

This commission is issued in accordance with the request of General R. E. Lee, commanding, in recognition of gallant and meritorious conduct in battle.

That rubric seemed especially to please the sick man. For a moment it brought light to his eyes, but in the next instant a look of trouble, almost of despair, overspread his face.

“Send it back,” he said to Evelyn, who was watching by the side of the couch that had been arranged for him in the broad, breeze-swept hall at Wyanoke. “Send it back; I do not want it.”

Ever since Kilgariff’s removal to the house of the Brents, Evelyn had been his nurse and companion, tireless in her attention to his comfort when he was suffering, and cheerily entertaining at those times when he was strong enough to engage in conversation.

“You know, it was he who took me out of the burning house,” she said to Dorothy, by way of explanation, not of apology; for in the innocent sincerity of her nature, she did not understand or believe that there can ever be need of an apology for the doing of any right thing.

For one thing, she was accustomed to write the brief and infrequent letters that Kilgariff wished written. These were mostly in acknowledgment of letters of inquiry and sympathy that came to him from friends in the army.

Usually he dictated the notes to her, and she wrote them out in a hand that was as legible as print and not unlike a rude print in appearance. At first glance her manuscript looked altogether masculine, by reason of the breadth of stroke and the size of the letters, but upon closer scrutiny one discovered in it many little peculiarities that were distinctly feminine.

Kilgariff asked her one day:—

“Who taught you to write, Evelyn?”

“Nobody. Nobody ever taught me much of anything till I came to live at Wyanoke.”

“How, then, did you learn to read and write, and especially to spell so well?”

The girl appeared frightened a bit by these questions, which seemed to be master keys of inquiry into the mystery of her early life. Kilgariff, observing her hesitation, said quickly but very gently:—

“There, little girl, don’t answer my ‘sick man’s’ questions. I didn’t mean to ask them. They are impertinent.”

“No,” she said reflectively, “nothing that comes from you can be impertinent, I reckon,”—for she was rapidly adopting the dialect of the cultivated Virginians. “You see, you took me out of that house afire, and so you have a right—”

“I claim no right whatever, Evelyn,” he said, “and you must quit thinking about that little incident up there on the Rapidan.”

“Oh, but I can never quit thinking about that. You were great and good, and oh, so strong! and you did the best thing that ever anybody did for me.”

“But I would have done the same for a negro.”

“But you didn’t do it for a negro. You did it for me. So you see I am right about it. Am I not?”

“I suppose so. Your logic is a trifle lame, perhaps, but your heart is right. Never mind that now.”

“But I want to tell you all I can,” the girl resumed. “You see, I can’t tell you much, because I don’t know much about myself, and because they made me swear. But I can answer this question of yours. I don’t know just how I learned to read. I reckon somebody must have taught me that when I was so little that I have forgotten all about it. Anyhow, I don’t remember. But after I had read a good many books, there came a time when I couldn’t get any books, except three that I was carrying with me. That was when I was a little boy, and—”

“A little boy? A little girl, you mean.”

“No, I mean a little boy, but I mustn’t tell you about that, only I have already told you that once I was a little boy. It slipped out, and you must forget it, please, for I didn’t mean to say it. I wasn’t really a boy, of course, but I had to wear a boy’s clothes and a boy’s name. Never mind that. You mustn’t ask me about it. As I was saying, when I grew tired of reading my three books over and over again, I decided to write some new ones for myself. The only trouble was that I had never learned to write. That didn’t bother me much, because I had seen writing and had read a little of it sometimes; so I knew that it was just the same as print, only that the letters were made more carelessly and some of them just a little differently in shape. I knew I could do it, after a little practice. I got some eagle’s quills from—” here the girl checked herself, and bit her lip. Presently she continued:—

“I got some eagle’s quills from a man who had them, and I made myself some pens. I had some blank-books that had been partly written in at the—well, partly written in. But there wasn’t any ink there, so I made myself some out of oak bark and nutgalls, ‘setting’ the colour with copperas, as I had seen the people at the—well, as I had seen somebody do it in that way. It made very good ink, and I soon taught myself how to write. As for the spelling, I tried to remember how all the words looked in the books I had read, and when I couldn’t remember, I would stop writing and look through the three books I still had till I came upon the word I wanted. After that, I never had any trouble about spelling that word.”

“I should imagine not,” said Kilgariff. “But did you succeed in writing any books for yourself?”

“Yes, two of them.”

“What were they about?”

“Well, in one of them I wrote all I could remember about myself; they got hold of that and threw it into the fire.”

“Who did that?”

“Why—well, the people I was with—no, I mustn’t tell you about them. In another of my books I wrote all I had learned about birds and animals and trees and other things. I reckon I know a good deal about such things, but what I wrote was only what I had learned for myself by seeing so much of them. You see, I was alone a good deal then, except for the wild creatures, and I got pretty well acquainted with them. Even here, where they never knew me, I can call birds or squirrels to me out of the trees, and they soon get so they will come to me even without my calling them.”

“Is that book in existence still?” asked Kilgariff, with manifest eagerness.

“I reckon so, but maybe not. I really don’t know. Anyhow, I shall never see it again, of course, and nobody else would care for it.”

“Oh, yes, somebody else would. I would give a thousand dollars in gold for it at this moment.”

“Why, what for? It was only a childish thing, and besides I had never studied about such things.”

“Listen!” interrupted Kilgariff. “Do you know where science comes from, and what it is? Do you realise that absolutely every fact we know, of the kind we call scientific, was originally found out just by somebody’s looking and listening as you did with your animals and birds and flowers? And the persons who looked and listened and thought about what they saw, told other people about them in books, and so all our science was born? Those other people have put things together and given learned names to them, and classified the facts for convenience, but the ones who did the observing have always been the discoverers, the most profitable workers in science. Audubon was reckoned an idle, worthless fellow by the commonplace people about him, because he ‘wasted his time’ roaming about in the woods, making friends of the wild creatures and studying their habits. But scientific men, who are not commonplace or narrow-minded, were glad to listen when this idle fellow told them what he had learned in the woods. In Europe and America the great learned societies never tired of heaping honours upon him and the books he wrote; and the pictures he painted of his woodland friends sold for fabulous sums, bringing him fame and fortune.”

“I am glad of that,” answered the girl, simply; “for I like Audubon. I’ve been reading his _Birds of America_, since I came to Wyanoke. But I am not Audubon, and my poor, childish writings are not great like his.”

“They are if they record, as they must, observations that nobody else had made before. On the chance of that, I would give a thousand dollars in gold, as I said before, for that childish manuscript. Could you not reproduce it?”

“Oh, no; never. Of course, I remember all the things I put into it, but I set them down so childishly—”

“You set them down truthfully, of course.”

“Oh, yes—but not in any proper order. I just wrote in my book each day the new things I had seen or learned or thought. Mostly I was interested in finding out what animals think, and how or in what queer ways plants behave under certain circumstances. There was nothing in all that—”

“There was everything in all that, and it was worth everything. But of course, as you say, you cannot reproduce the book—not now at least. Perhaps some day you may.”

“But I don’t understand?” queried the girl. “If I can’t rewrite the book now—and I certainly can’t—how shall I ever be able to do it ‘some day’? Before ‘some day’ comes I shall have forgotten many things that I remember now.”

“No, you will not forget anything of vital interest. But now you are self-conscious and therefore shy and self-distrustful, as you were not in your childhood when you wrote the book, and as you will not be when you grow into a maturer womanhood and learn to be less impressed by what you now think the superiority of others. When that time comes, you will write the book again, adding much to its store of observed facts, for you are not going to stop observing any more than you are going to stop thinking.”

Evelyn shook her head.

“I could never write a book—a real book, I mean—fit to be printed.”

“We shall see about that later,” said Kilgariff. “You are a young woman of unusual intellectual gifts, and under Mrs. Brent’s influence you will grow, in ways that you do not now imagine.”

Kilgariff was profoundly interested, and he was rapidly talking himself into a fever. Evelyn was quick to see this, and she was also anxious to escape further praise and further talk about herself. So, with a demure little air of authority, she said:—

“You must stop talking now. It is very bad for you. You must take a few sips of broth and then a long sleep.”

All this occurred long after the day when Kilgariff handed her his captain’s commission and bade her “send it back,” saying, “I don’t want it.” At that time she was wholly ignorant of military formalities. She did not know that under military usage Kilgariff could not communicate with the higher authorities except formally and “through the regular channels”; that is to say, through a succession of officers, beginning with his captain. She saw that this commission was dated at the adjutant-general’s office in Richmond and signed, “S. Cooper, Adjutant-general.” Nothing could be simpler, she thought, than to relieve Kilgariff of all trouble in the matter by herself sending the document back, with a polite note to Mr. S. Cooper. So she wrote the note as follows:—

S. COOPER, Adj’t-general,
Richmond.

DEAR SIR:—

Sergeant-major Kilgariff is too weak from his wound to write his own letters, so I’m writing this note for him, to send back the enclosed paper. Mr. Kilgariff doesn’t want it, but he thanks you for your courtesy in sending it.

Yours truly,

EVELYN BYRD.

Precisely what would have happened if this extraordinary note with its enclosure had reached the adjutant-general of the army, in response to his official communication, it is difficult to imagine. Fortunately, Evelyn was puzzled to know whether she should write on the envelope, “Mr. S. Cooper,” or “S. Cooper, Esq.” So she waited till Kilgariff should be awake and able to instruct her on that point.

When he saw what she had written, his first impulse was to cry out in consternation. His second was to laugh aloud. But he did neither. Instead, he quietly said:—

“We must be a little more formal, dear, and do this business in accordance with military etiquette. You see, these official people are very exacting as to formalities.”

Then he wrote upon the official letter which had accompanied the commission a respectful indorsement declining the commission, after which he directed his secretary-nurse to address it formally to Captain Marshall Pollard, who, he explained, would indorse it and forward it through the regular channels, as required by military usage.

“But why not accept the commission?” asked Evelyn, simply. She did not at all realise—and Kilgariff had taken pains that she should not realise—the enormity of her blunder or the ludicrousness of it. “Isn’t it better to be a captain than a sergeant-major?”

“For most men, yes,” answered Kilgariff; “but not for me.”

But he did not explain.

VIII

SOME REVELATIONS OF EVELYN

IN the meanwhile Arthur Brent had acted upon Dorothy’s suggestion. He had prepared a careful statement of Kilgariff’s case, withholding his name of course, and had submitted it to General Stuart, with the request that that typical exemplar of all that was best in chivalry should himself choose such officers as he deemed best, to constitute the court.

The verdict was unanimous. Stuart wrote to Arthur Brent:—

Every member of the court is of opinion that your own assurance of the innocence of the gentleman concerned is conclusive. They are all of opinion that he is entirely free and entitled to accept a commission, and that he is not under the slightest obligation to reveal to anybody the unfortunate circumstances that have caused him to hesitate in this matter. It is the further opinion of the court, and I am asked to express it with emphasis, that the course of the gentleman concerned, in refusing to accept a commission upon the point of honour that influenced him to that decision, is in itself a sufficient assurance of his character. Tell him from me that, without at all knowing who he is, I urge and, if I may, I command him to accept the post you offer him, in order that he may render his best services to the cause that we all love.

Arthur Brent hurried this letter to his friend at Wyanoke; but before it arrived, the writer of it, the “Chevalier of the Lost Cause,” had passed from earth. He fell at the Yellow Tavern, at the head of his troopers in one of the tremendous onsets which he knew so well how to lead, before this generous missive—perhaps the last that he ever wrote—fell under the eyes of the man, all unknown to him, whom he thus commanded to accept honour and duty with it.

The fact of Stuart’s death peculiarly embarrassed a man of Kilgariff’s almost boyish sensitiveness.

I feel [he wrote to Arthur Brent] as if I were disobeying Stuart’s commands and disregarding his dying request, in still refusing to reconsider my decision. Yet I feel that I must do so in spite of the decision of your court of honour, in spite of your friendly insistence, in spite of everything. After all, Arthur, a man must be judge in his own case, when his honour is involved. The most that others can do—the most even that a court of honour can do—is to excuse, to pardon, to permit. I could never submit to the humiliation of excuse, of pardon, of permission, however graciously granted. I sincerely wish you could understand me, Arthur. In aid of that, let me state the case. I am a man condemned on an accusation of crime. I am an escaped prisoner, a fugitive from justice. I am innocent. I know that, and you are generous enough to believe it. But the hideous fact of my conviction remains. It seems to me that even upon the award of a court of honour, backed by something like the dying injunction of our gallant cavalier, Stuart, I cannot honourably consent to accept a commission and meet men of stainless reputation upon equal terms, or perhaps even as their superior and commanding officer, without first revealing to each and all of them the ugly facts that stand in the way. Generous they may be; generous they are. But it is not for me to impose myself upon their generosity, or to deceive them by a reserve which I am bound to practise.

I have already sent back a captain’s commission which I had fairly won by that little fight on the hill at Spottsylvania. With you I may be frank enough to say that any sergeant-major doing what I did on that occasion would have been entitled to his captaincy as a matter of right, and not at all as a matter of favour. I had fairly won that commission, yet I returned it to the war department, simply because I could not forget the facts in my case. How much more imperative it is that I should refuse the higher commission which you press upon me, and which I have not won by any conspicuous service! Will you not understand me, my friend? Will you not try to look at this matter from my point of view? So long as I am a condemned criminal, a fugitive from justice, I simply cannot consent to become a commissioned officer entitled by my government’s certification to meet on equal terms men against whom no accusation has been laid.

Let that matter rest here. I shall remain a sergeant-major to the end—an enlisted man, a non-commissioned officer whose captain may send him back to the gun whenever it pleases him to do so, a man who must touch his cap to every officer he meets, a man subject to orders, a man ready for any work of war that may be given him to do. In view of the tedious slowness with which I am recovering from this wound, and the great need I know Captain Pollard has for an executive sergeant, I wrote to him, two weeks ago, resigning my place, and asking him to select some other capable man in my stead. He replied in his generous fashion, absolutely refusing to accept my resignation.

That was Kilgariff’s modest way of putting the matter. What Pollard had actually written was this:—

By your gallantry and your capacity as a hard-fighting soldier, you have won for my battery such honour and distinction as had not come to it from all its previous good conduct. Do you imagine that I am going to lose such a sergeant-major as you are, merely because his honourable wounds temporarily incapacitate him? I had thought to lose you by your richly earned promotion to a rank equal to my own, or superior to it. That promotion you have refused—foolishly, I think—but at any rate you have refused it. You are still my sergeant-major, therefore, and will remain that until you consent to accept a higher place.

This was the situation so far as Kilgariff was concerned, as it revealed itself to Pollard and Arthur Brent. Dorothy knew another side of it. For with Dorothy, Kilgariff had quickly established relations of the utmost confidence and the truest friendship; and to Dorothy, Kilgariff revealed every thought, as he had never done to any other human being.

Indeed, revelation was not necessary. Dorothy was a woman of that high type that loves sincerely and with courage, and Dorothy had seen the daily and hourly growing fascination of Kilgariff for Evelyn. She had seen Evelyn’s devoted ministry to him, and had understood the unconscious love that lay behind its childlike reserve. She had understood, as he had not, that, all unknown to herself, Evelyn had made of Kilgariff the hero of her adoration, and that Kilgariff’s soul had been completely enthralled by a devotion which did not recognise its own impulse or the fulness of its meaning. Dorothy knew far more, indeed, of the relations between these two than either of themselves had come to know.

She was in no way unprepared, therefore, when one day Kilgariff said to her, as they two sat in converse:—

“You know, of course, that I am deeply in love with Evelyn?”

“Yes,” Dorothy answered; “I must be blind if I did not see that.”

“Of course,” responded the man, “I have said nothing to her on the subject, and I shall say nothing, to the end. I speak to you of it only because I want your help in avoiding the danger-point. Evelyn is not in the least in love with me.”

Dorothy made no response to that.

“She is grateful to me for having saved her life, and gratitude is a sentiment utterly at war with love. Moreover, Evelyn is perfectly frank and unreserved in her conversations with me. No woman is ever so with the man she loves, until after he has made her his wife. So I regard Evelyn, as for the present, safe. She is not in love with me, and I shall do nothing to induce such sentiment on her part.”

Again Dorothy sat silent.

“But there is much that I can do for her, and I want to do it. You must help me. And above all you must tell me the moment you discover in her any shadow or trace of that reserve toward me which might mean or suggest a dawning of love. I shall be constantly on the lookout for such signs, but you, with your woman’s wit and intuitions, may be quicker than I to see.”

“Precisely what do you mean, Kilgariff?” Dorothy asked, in her frank way of going directly to the marrow of every matter with which she had occasion to deal. “You say you are in love with Evelyn. Do you not wish her to be in love with you?”

“No! By every consideration of propriety, by every sentiment of honour, no!” he answered, with more of vehemence than he was accustomed to put into his words.

“Do you not understand? I can never ask her to marry me; I am therefore in honour bound not to win her love. I shall devote myself most earnestly to the task of repairing such defects in her education as I discover. But the moment I see or suspect the least disposition on her part to think of me otherwise than with the indifference of mere friendship, I shall take myself out of her life completely. I ask you to aid me in watching for such indications of dawning affection, and in forestalling them.”

“You shall have all the assistance you need to discover and do your real duty,” said Dorothy. But that most womanly of women did not at all share Kilgariff’s interpretation either of his own duty or of Evelyn’s sentiment toward him. She knew from her own experience that a woman grows shy and reserved with a man the moment she understands herself to be in love with him. But equally she knew that love may long conceal itself even from the one who cherishes it, and that reserve, when it comes, comes altogether too late for purposes of safeguarding.

But Dorothy did not care. She wanted these two to love each other, and she saw no reason why they should not. She recognised their peculiar fitness for each other’s love, and as for the rest—wise woman that she was—she trusted love to overcome all difficulties. In other words, Dorothy was a woman, and she herself had loved and mated as God meant that women should. So she was disposed to let well alone in this case.

Kilgariff’s wound was healing satisfactorily now, and little by little his strength was coming back to him. So, every day, he sat in the laboratory with Dorothy and Evelyn, helping in the work by advice and suggestion, and often in more direct and active ways. For Arthur Brent had written to Dorothy:—

I must remain with the army yet a while in order to keep the hospital service in as efficient a state as adverse circumstances will permit, and the constant shiftings from one place to another render this difficult. When Kilgariff grows strong enough, set him at work in the laboratory. He would never tell you so, but he is a better chemist than I am, better even than you in some respects. Especially he is expert in shortening processes, and the army’s pressing need of medicines renders this a peculiarly valuable art just now. We need everything at every hour, but especially we need opium and its products, and quinine or quinine substitutes. Please give your own special attention to your poppy fields, and get all you can of opium from them. Send to Richmond all the product except so much as you can use in the laboratory in extracting the still more valuable alkaloids.

Another thing: the dogwood-root bark bitters you are sending prove to be a valuable substitute for quinine. Please multiply your product if you can. Enlist the services of your friends everywhere in supplying you with the raw material. Get them to set their little negroes at work digging and drying the roots, so that you may make as much of the bitters as possible. There are a good many wild cherry trees at Wyanoke and on other plantations round about. Won’t you experiment, with Kilgariff’s assistance, and see if you can’t produce some quinine? Our need of that is simply terrible. Malaria kills five times as many men as Federal bullets do, and, apart from that, hundreds of sick or wounded men could be returned to duty a month earlier than they now are if we had quinine enough. Tell Kilgariff I invoke his aid, and you’ll get it.

Kilgariff responded enthusiastically to this appeal. He personally investigated the quinine-producing capacity of every tree and plant that grew at Wyanoke or in its neighbourhood.

“The dog fennel,” he said to Dorothy, “is most promising. It yields quinine in greater quantity, in proportion to the time and labour involved, than anything else we have. Of course, if ours were a commercial enterprise, it would not pay to attempt any of these manufactures. But our problem is simply to produce medicines for the army at whatever cost. So I have taken the liberty of ordering all your chaps”—the term “chaps” in Virginia meant juvenile negroes—“to gather all the dog fennel they can, and to dry it on fence-rail platforms. I am having the men put up some kettles in which to steep it. The rest we must do in the laboratory. Our great lack is that of kettles enough.”

“Must they be of iron?” asked Evelyn, with earnest interest. “Must they have fires under them?”

“N-no,” answered Kilgariff, hesitatingly. “I suppose washtubs or anything that will hold water will do. We must use hot water to steep the plants in, but we might pour hot water into vessels in which we couldn’t heat it. Yes, Evelyn, any sort of vessel that will hold water will answer our purpose.”

“Then I’ll provide all the tanks you need, if Dorothy will give me leave to command the servant-men. I do know how.”

The leave was promptly given, and Evelyn instructed the negroes how to make staves of large proportions, and how to put them together. Three days later, with an adequate supply of these, and with a quantity of binding hoops which she had herself fashioned out of hickory saplings to the utter astonishment of her comrades, the girl manufactured a number of wooden and water-tight tanks, each capable of holding many scores of gallons.

“Where did you learn to do that?” Kilgariff asked, when the first of the tanks was set up.

“Among the whale fishermen,” she answered. “But I mustn’t tell you about that, and you mustn’t ask. But my tanks will hold oil as well as water, and I am going to make a little one for castor oil. You know we have five acres in castor beans. I reckon you two do know how to make castor oil out of them.”

“Come here, Evelyn, and sit down,” said Dorothy. “Of course we know how to extract castor oil from the beans, but we don’t know where or how you got your peculiar English. Tell us about it.”

“I do not understand. Is my English not like your own?”

“In some respects, no. When you volunteered to make these tanks for us, you said, ‘I do know how,’ and now you say, ‘You do know.’ We should say, ‘I know,’ and ‘You know.’ Where did you get your peculiar usage?”

The girl flushed crimson. Presently she answered:—

“It is that I have not been taught. Pardon me. I am trying to learn. I do listen—no, I should say—I listen to your speech, and I try to speak the same. I have read books and tried to learn from them what the right speech is. Am I not learning better now? I try, or I am trying—which is it? And the big book—the dictionary—I am studying. I never saw a dictionary until I came to Wyanoke.”

“Don’t worry,” said Kilgariff, tenderly. “You speak quite well enough to make us glad to listen.”

And indeed they were glad to listen. For now that the girl had become actively busy in the laboratory, she had lost much of her shy reserve, and her conversation was full of inspiration and suggestiveness. It was obvious that while her instruction had been meagre and exceedingly irregular, she had done a world of thinking from such premises as were hers, and the thinking had been sound.

Her ways were sweet and winning, chiefly because of their utter sincerity, and they fascinated both Dorothy and Kilgariff.

“Kilgariff must marry her,” Dorothy wrote to Arthur Brent. “God evidently intended that, when he made these two; but how it is to come about, I do not at all know. Kilgariff has some foolish notions that stand in the way, but of course love will overcome them. As for Evelyn—well, she is a woman, and that is quite enough.”

Evelyn’s use of the intensives, ‘do’ and ‘did’ and the like, was not at all uniform. Often she would converse for half an hour without a lapse into that or any other of her peculiarities of speech. It was usually excitement or embarrassment or enthusiasm that brought on what Dorothy called “an attack of dialect,” and Kilgariff one day said to Dorothy:—

“The girl’s speech ‘bewrayeth her,’ as Peter’s did in the Bible.”

“How do you mean?”

“Why, it is easy and perfectly safe to infer from her speech a good deal of her life-history.”

“Go on, I am interested.”

“Well, you observe that she has almost a phenomenal gift of unconscious imitation. She has been with you for only a very brief while, yet in the main her pronunciation, her inflection, and even her choice of words are those of a young woman brought up in Virginia. She says ‘gyarden,’ ‘cyart,’ and the like, and her _a_’s are quite as broad as your own when she talks of the grass or the basket. Now when she lapses into her own dialect, there is a distinctively French note in her syntax, from which I argue that she has lived among French-speaking people for a time, catching their construction. But, on the other hand, her English is so good that I cannot think her life has been mainly passed among French-speaking people. Have you tried her in French itself?”

“Yes, and she speaks the most extraordinary French I ever heard.”

“Well, that fits in with the other facts. This morning she spoke of a hashed meat at breakfast as ‘pemmican,’ though she quickly corrected herself; she often uses Indian terms, too, by inadvertence. Then again, her accomplishments all smell of the woods. Putting all things together, I should say that she has spent a good deal of time among, or at least in frequent contact with, Canadian Frenchmen and Indians.”

“I think you are right,” said Dorothy, “and yet some part of her life has been passed in company with a well-bred and accomplished woman.”

“Your body of facts, please?” said Kilgariff.

“Her speech, for one thing; for in spite of its oddities it is mainly the speech of a cultivated woman. She never uses slang; indeed, I’m sure she knows no slang. Her constructions, though often odd, are always grammatical, and her diction is that of educated people. Then again, her scrupulous attention to personal neatness tells me much. More important still, at least in my woman’s eyes, is the fact that she perfectly knows how to make a bed and how to make the most of the little ornaments and fripperies of a room. She did not learn these things from squaws or half-breeds. Moreover, she does needlework of an exquisite delicacy which I never saw matched anywhere. That tells of a highly bred woman as an influence in her life and education.”

While these three were at dinner that day, the negro head-man—for even in his enforced absence Arthur Brent would not commit his authority over his negroes to the brutal instincts of any overseer—came to the door and asked to speak with “Mis’ Dorothy.”

“Bring me a decanter and a glass, Elsie,” said Dorothy to the chief serving-maid. She poured a dram into the glass, and handed it to the girl.

“Take that out to Uncle Joe,” she said, “and tell him to come in after he has drunk it.”

It was a peculiarity of the plantation negro in Virginia that he never refused a dram from “the gre’t house,” and yet that he never drank to excess. Those negroes that served about the house in one capacity or another were always supplied with money—the proceeds of “tips”—and could have bought liquor at will. Yet none of them ever formed the drink habit.

When Uncle Joe came into the dining-room, he had a number of matters concerning which he desired instruction. When these affairs had been disposed of, and Dorothy had directed him to slaughter a shoat on the following morning, the mistress asked:—

“How about the young mare, Uncle Joe? Are you ever going to have her broken?”

“Well, you see, Missus, Dick’s de only pusson on de plantation what dars to tackle dat dar mar’, an’ Dick he’s done gone off to de wah wid Mahstah. ‘Sides dat, de mar’ she done trowed Dick hisse’f tree times. Dey simply ain’t no doin’ nuffin’ wid dat dar mar’, Missus. I reckon de only ting to do wid her is to sell her to de artillery, whah dey don’ ax no odds o’ no hoss whatsomever. She’s five year ole, an’ as strong as two mules, an’ nobody ain’t never been able to break her yit.”

“Poor creature!” said Evelyn. “May I try what I can do with her, Dorothy?”

“You, little Missus?” broke in Joe. “_You_ try to tackle de iron-gray mar’? Why, she’d mash you like a potato wid her foh-feet, an’ den turn roun’ an’ kick you to kingdom come wid de hind par.”

“May I try, Dorothy?” the girl calmly asked again, quite ignoring Uncle Joe’s prophecies of evil.

“Hadn’t you better let some of the men or boys break her first?”

“No. To me it is plain they have done too much of that already. Let me have her as she is. Have her brought up to the house, Uncle Joe, soon after dinner, with nothing on her but a halter.”

“Why, little Mis’, you don’ know—”

“Do precisely as I tell you,” interrupted the girl, who could be very imperious when so minded.

When the mare was brought, she was striking viciously at the negro who led her. With ears laid back close to her head, and with the whites of her eyes showing menacingly, she was striking out with her hoofs as if intent upon committing homicide without further delay.

“Turn her loose, Ben,” said the girl, who sat idly in the porch as if she had no task on her hands. “Then go away from her, and make all the rest go away, too—” motioning toward the gang of little negroes who had assembled, “to see de iron-gray mar’ kill little Missie.”

When all were gone, Evelyn began nibbling at a sugar lump. Presently, after the mare had discovered that she was quite free and that her tormentors were gone, Evelyn held out her hand with the sugar lump in its palm. The animal was obviously unfamiliar with sugar lumps, but she had the curiosity which is commonly—perhaps erroneously—attributed to her sex. So, as Evelyn sat on the bench and made no motion indicative of any purpose to seize the halter, the animal presently became interested in the extended hand. Little by little, and with occasional snortings and recessions, she approached the girl. Finally, finding that the extended hand was not moved, she nosed the sugar lump, and then with her long, flexible tongue, swept it into her mouth.

Evelyn did not withdraw the hand at once, but held it extended till the mare had got the full flavour of the sweet. Meanwhile, she cooed to the animal soothingly, and, after a little, she produced a second sugar lump and laid it upon the extended palm. This time, as the mare took the dainty, Evelyn, still talking soothingly, ventured with her other hand to stroke the beast’s silky nose, caressingly. There was a shrinking back on the part of the timid creature, but the lure of the sugar was enticing, and after once the gentle hand had stroked the mare’s face, she seemed rather to welcome than to resent the caress.

Thus, little by little, did the girl establish relations of amity between herself and the spirited mare. After a while, Evelyn quitted her seat, went out upon the lawn, and with a sugar-lump bribe tempted the animal to approach her. Then she stroked its head and neck and sides, gradually giving it to understand that she meant no harm and accustoming it to the pleasant touch of her hands. Finally she stroked its legs vigorously, and lifted one foot after another, examining each.

By this time the mare seemed to have concluded that the young woman, who talked ceaselessly in her cooing, contralto voice, was an altogether pleasant acquaintance. Wherever the girl went, around the grounds, the mare followed, nosing her and seemingly soliciting her attention.

At last the girl tolled the mare to a horse block, and for a time stood upon it, gently stroking her silky back.

Then she made a motion as if to sit upon that shapely back. The mare shied away, perhaps remembering former attempts of the kind which she had resented as indignities. But as Evelyn did not insist upon her apparent purpose, and as the mare was by this time very much in sympathy, if not in love, with the gentle girl, she presently sidled back into position, and Evelyn seated herself upon her back, at the same time caressingly stroking the sides of her neck. She had neither saddle on which to sit securely, nor bridle with which to control her mount, but there was no need of either. The mare was nibbling grass by this time, and Evelyn permitted her to do so, letting her wander about the house grounds at will, in search of the most succulent tufts. As the supper hour drew near, the girl slipped from the animal’s back and led the way, the animal following, to the stables. There, with her own hands she filled the manger and the hay-rack, and after an affectionate farewell to her new friend, returned to the house. But first she said to Ben, the hostler:—

“Let nobody feed the mare but me. I will be at the stables in time in the morning. And let nobody touch her with a currycomb. I will myself attend to all.”

Three or four days later the high-spirited mare was Evelyn Byrd’s very humble servant indeed. The girl rode her everywhere, teaching her a number of pretty tricks, the most astonishing of which was the art of lifting a gate latch with her teeth, and letting herself and her rider through the many barriers that Virginian law accommodatingly permitted planters to erect across the public roads.

“But how did you learn all this?” asked Kilgariff, full of interest.

“Oh, I do not know. I reckon I never learned it at all. You see, the animals fight us only because they think we mean to fight them. So long as they are afraid of us, they fight, of course. When they learn that we are friendly, they are glad to be friends. Anybody can tame any animal if he goes to work in the right way. I once tamed a Canada lynx, and it became so used to me that I let it sleep on the foot of my bed. But the lynx has a great deal of sense and very little affection, while a horse has a great deal of affection and very little sense. With the lynx, I appealed to its good sense, but I did never—I mean, I never trusted its affection.

“I have treated this mare like a baby that does not understand much, but I have won its affection completely, and I trust that. The animal has so little sense that it would scare at a scrap of paper lying in the road, and go almost frantic if it saw a man pulling a buggy. But if I were on its back, it would not run or do anything that might throw me off. You see, one must know which is stronger in each animal—sense or sentiment. With a horse it is sentiment, so I curry the mare myself, talking to her all the while in a loving way, and I never let anybody else go into the stall. Another thing: a horse loves liberty better than anything else, so I have taken off the halter with which the mare used to be tied in her stall, and, as you know, I turn her loose every morning when she has finished her fodder, and she follows me up here to the house grounds where she is perfectly free to nibble grass. But she loves me so much that she often quits the grass and comes up here to the porch just to get me to rub her nose or stroke her neck. She is strong, and I am light, so she likes me to sit upon her back, as you have seen me do for an hour at a time. She doesn’t quite like a saddle yet—and neither do I. I would never use anything more than a blanket, just for the protection of my clothes, only that Dorothy thinks that people would wonder, if I should go visiting or to church riding bareback. Why do people wonder in that way, Mr. Kilgariff, about other people’s doings?”

“Upon my word, I don’t know, unless it is that we are all like the Pharisee in the parable, and want to emphasise our own superiority by criticising others.”

“But why shouldn’t the others criticise, too? The ways of the people they criticise are no more different from their ways, than their ways are different from those of the people they criticise. I confess I don’t quite understand.”

“Neither do I, Evelyn, except that it is the habit of people to set up their own ways as a standard and model, and to regard every departure from them as a barbarism. If it were not an accepted fact that the Venus of Milo is the most perfect exemplification we have of feminine beauty, and that it is the fashion to go into raptures over that piece of sculpture, I imagine that nine fashionable women in every ten would ridicule the way in which her hair is done up, simply because they do not do up theirs in the same way.”

“Yes, I know,” answered the girl, dreamily, and as if in a reverie. “That was the trouble in the circus.”

“In the circus? What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Don’t ask me.”

IX

THE GREAT WAR GAME

ALL this while the war was going on tremendously and Kilgariff was chafing at the restraint of a wound which forbade him to bear his part in it.

As we have seen, General Grant had crossed into the Wilderness with a double strategic purpose. He had hoped to turn Lee’s right flank and compel the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. Failing in that, he had hoped, with his enormously superior numbers, to crush and destroy Lee’s army in battle.

He had failed in that purpose also. By his promptitude and vigour in assailing Grant’s army in flank, Lee had compelled his adversary to abandon his flanking purpose, and to withdraw his advance columns over a distance of more than ten miles in order to reinforce his sorely beset divisions in the Wilderness and to save his own army from the destruction he had hoped to inflict upon his adversary.

After suffering a far heavier loss than he inflicted, Grant had summoned reinforcements and moved by his left flank to Spottsylvania Court House. By this movement he had again hoped to turn Lee’s right flank, place himself between the Confederates and their capital, and in that way compel the surrender or dispersal of the Army of Northern Virginia. Again he had been foiled by Lee’s alertness and by the marvellous mobility of an army that moved without a baggage-train, and whose men carried no blankets, no extra clothing, no overcoats, no canteens, no tin cups, no cooking-utensils—nothing, in fact, except their rifles and their ammunition.

Those men were on the verge of starvation all the while. Often they had no rations at all for two days or more at a time. When rations were fullest, they consisted of one, two, or three hard-tack biscuits a day for each man, and perhaps a diminutive slice of salt pork or bacon, which was eaten raw.

But these men, who had formerly fought with the courage of hope, inspired by splendid victory, were fighting now with the courage of utter despair. A great wave of religious fervour had passed over the army and the South. It took upon itself the fatalistic forms of Calvinism, for the most part. The men of the army came to believe that every event which occurs in this world was foreordained of God to occur, decreed “before ever the foundations of the world were laid.” They had not ceased to trust the genius and sagacity of Lee, but they had accepted the rule and guidance of a greater than Lee—of God Almighty himself. With a faith that was sublime even in its perversion, these men committed themselves and their cause to God, and ceased to reckon upon human probabilities as factors in the problem.

There were prayer meetings in every tent and at every bivouac fire, every day and every night. At every pause in the fighting, were it only for a few minutes, the men on the firing-line threw themselves upon their knees and besought God to crown their efforts and their arms with victory, submissively leaving it to Him to determine the where, the when, the how. And in this worship of God and this absolute dependence upon His will the men of that army learned to regard themselves personally as mere pawns upon the chess-board of the divine purpose. They came to regard their own lives as dust in the balance, to be blown away by the breath of God’s will, to be sacrificed, as fuel is, for the maintenance of a flame.

Believing firmly and without question that their cause was in God’s charge, they executed every order given to them with an indifference to personal consequences for the like of which one may search history in vain.

In his movement from the Wilderness to Spottsylvania, General Grant again failed to turn the flank of his wily adversary, and, after a prolonged endeavour to break and destroy Lee’s army there, the Federal commander again moved by his left flank, in the hope of reaching Hanover Court House in advance of the arrival there of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Again he was baffled of his purpose. Again Lee got there first, and took up a position in which, by reason of the river’s tortuous course and the conformation of the ground, Grant could not assail him without dividing his own army into three parts, no one of which could be depended upon to support either of the others.

At one point the Federal general very nearly succeeded. There was a bridge across the stream near Hanover Court House. If that could be seized, the Federal forces might cross and assail Lee’s left flank with effect. A strong column of Federals was thrown forward to possess the bridge, and for a time it looked as if they would succeed and bring the war to an end right there.

But two Confederate batteries—utterly unsupported—were thrown forward. One was Captain Pollard’s; the other was a battery from the battalion of Major Baillie Pegram. Advancing at a full run, the two batteries planted their guns at the head of the bridge, just as the Federal columns were beginning to cross it, and within five minutes the bridge had ceased to be.

Has the reader ever seen Shepard’s spirited painting called “Virginia, 1864”? The sketch from which that painting was made was drawn on this hotly contested field, the artist having three pencils carried away from his grasp by rifle bullets and half a dozen rents made in his drawing-paper while he worked.