Chapter XXXII: The End of It All 434 (5)

“One day I sent for him to dine with me in a private room at an expensive hotel. I vaguely suggested to him that his fortune was made; that within a few days I should be able to put him in position to twiddle his fingers at the florists and the caterers. But I gave him no details. I gave him limitless champagne instead, and, as my digestion resented champagne at that time, I excused myself from drinking more than a very small share of the enticing beverage. We decided to play poker, after dinner, just for amusement. The chips were valued high—a dollar for a white chip, two and a half for a red, and five dollars for a blue.

“For a time your brother had marvellous ‘luck.’ He won enough of my paper promises to pay to make him feel already quite independent of the caterers and the florists, and to convince him that at poker I was exceedingly easy prey to a man who ‘really understood the game,’ as he conceitedly thought he did. Well, we played on till morning; and when sunrise came, he had given me his I O U’s for more money than he had ever owned in his life.”

“That is to say, you had made him drunk on champagne, and then had cheated him without limit?”

“Well, yes, that’s about it. Anyhow, I owned him. After he had got over the headache and the champagne, he came to me at my office to see what could be done by way of compromise. I told him that I had no money and no resources except my wits; I frankly confessed that but for certain cash payments he had made early in the game, I could not have paid for the hotel room and tipped the waiters to the tune that waiters set when they are privy to a game of that kind.

“‘But it’s all right,’ I assured him. ‘Don’t bother about the I O U’s. They’ll keep. They are debts of honour, of course, but they needn’t be paid till it is convenient to pay them; and when you go into the position that I’ve secured for you, it will be not only convenient, but exceedingly easy.’

“Then I told him about the receivership and my purpose to have him appointed. I explained that in the mere matter of commissions it would give him a princely income, to say nothing of perquisites. I didn’t explain what ‘perquisites’ in such a case meant. That was because I had no moral character. He didn’t ask. That was because he thought he had a moral character and wished to spare it affront.

“It was easily arranged that the judge I owned should appoint as receiver the man I owned. But I didn’t own my man completely, as yet. He owed me more money, as a debt of honour, than he could pay at that time; but once in the receivership, he could quickly pay off all that, and then I shouldn’t own him at all. Indeed, he might have repudiated the I O U’s as illegal gambling debts; he might have refused to pay them at all. But I wasn’t afraid of that. Your brother fondly imagined that he was a man of honour, of high moral principle, and so I knew that in order to keep up that pretence with himself he would stand by his debts of honour. But I foresaw that he might presently discharge them all, out of the proceeds of the receivership, and send me adrift. I must get a stronger grip on him. So I told my judge to send for him and say certain things to him.

“‘You must setup a house,’ the judge told him, ‘in a fashionable quarter of the town, by way of maintaining your position. You see, it won’t do for me to put anybody in charge of those many millions who isn’t recognised as himself a man of independent wealth. You must have a good house and enlarge your establishment. The receivership will abundantly recoup you in the end, but from the beginning we must keep up appearances.’

“Your brother came to me in great distress of mind to tell me what the judge had required of him. He frankly told me he hadn’t the money necessary to make a first payment on the lease of a town house, to furnish it suitably, and to establish himself in it. I pretended to be worried over the matter, and I took twenty-four hours in which to think about it. Then I sent for your brother again and told him I saw a way out; that certain clients of mine had money to invest on bond and mortgage, and had placed it in my hands; that by a little stretching of my authority I could let him have the amount he needed, as a mortgage loan on his place in the country. I saw his face fall when I suggested this, as I had expected to see it fall. Presently he explained that in order to give a mortgage on his country place, which really stood in his wife’s name and had in fact come to her as a dowry, he must get her to execute the papers. That would be very awkward, he explained, as he had never thought it necessary to bother his womankind about his affairs. To ask his wife to execute a mortgage would necessitate a statement to her of his financial position, and a whole lot more of that sort, which I had expected. I told him I thought I could arrange the matter; that my clients had placed their affairs completely in my hands; that all they wanted was the prompt payment of interest and adequate security for their invested money; that the profits of the receivership would be ample to secure all this; and that any arrangement I might make would never be questioned by my clients. I told him that the mortgage security was after all only a matter of form in a case where the other security was so ample, and that the whole thing was in my hands. So I suggested that he should—as a mere matter of form—execute the mortgage, himself signing his wife’s name in her stead. I would take care of the document, not even recording it, and the loan could be paid off presently, with nobody the wiser. Your brother fell into the trap. He executed the mortgage, signing his wife’s name to it, and he was at once made receiver of the bank.

“From that hour, of course, he was my property. No negro slave in all the South was ever more completely owned, or more absolutely under the control of his master.

“I had only to reveal the facts at any moment in order to send him to jail. He had committed a felony—he, the highly respectable receiver of a savings bank, and a man regarded as a leader in social and even in religious movements of every kind. I held complete proofs of his felony in my own hands. He must do my bidding or go to State’s prison.

“My first order to him was to put me into the bank as counsel to the receiver, at a good salary, and also as expert accountant, at another good salary. The bank could afford all this and vastly more. Its assets were easily three times its liabilities—if properly handled, and I knew how to handle them. I meant no harm to your brother. On the contrary, I meant to make him rich and let him retire from the completed receivership with the commendation of the court for the masterly manner in which he had so handled the affairs of the institution as to make good every dollar of its deposits with interest, and to deliver it into the hands of its trustees again in a perfectly solvent condition. You see, the assets were ample for that, and to provide for my future besides. The only trouble before had been bad management and a deficient knowledge of the art of bookkeeping on the part of the respectable old galoots who had been in control of the bank. They might easily have straightened out everything without any court proceedings at all, if they had known how. Their violations of the law had been purely technical—such as occur in every bank every day—and these things can always be arranged on a good basis of assets, if the people in charge only know how.

“Now, when I began operations in the bank, your brother was inclined to object to some of the things I did. I had only to remind him of the mortgage papers in order to reduce him to subjection. He still thought he had a moral character, and so when I proposed to sell out the bank’s securities at ten or twenty or fifty per cent less than their value, and take a commission of five or ten or forty per cent for ourselves from the buyers, he raised grave moral objections. But he was in no position to insist upon them, and besides he was largely profiting by the transactions. Meanwhile, I was slowly getting the bank’s affairs into shape—very slowly, for there were the salaries of him and myself to be considered. Then came the revolt of the chief bookkeeper, and his complaint that we were robbing the bank. I tried hard to square him, but he wouldn’t square. That fellow really had a moral character, and, worse still, he couldn’t be scared. I showed him that as he had already permitted false entries in the bank’s books, he must himself be involved in any exposure that might be made. He answered that he knew that, and was prepared to explain matters in court and ‘take the consequences.’ Then your brother got scared half to death, and consulted you. If he had waited for forty-eight hours, I should have had that bookkeeper in jail, and your brother would have got credit for extreme vigilance. But when he sent for you, all was up. You came into the bank and practically took your brother’s place and function. But you neglected to provide yourself with legal authority to be in the bank at all. Another thing you didn’t reckon upon was my foresight. I had taken pains to win several of the clerks and bookkeepers to my side. I had ‘let them in,’ so that when you angrily dismissed me, I still had daily and hourly information of what was going on. You found out that the bank’s securities had been sold for less than they were worth, and you set to work to repair the wrong. You couldn’t cancel the sales that had been made, but you could and did pay your own money into the bank to make good what you regarded as the defalcations. That made it easy for me. I went to my judge—the one I owned—and laid before him the fact that you were handling the bank’s assets without a shadow of legal authority; that you had dismissed me—the receiver’s counsel and expert accountant—upon discovering that I knew of defalcations, and all the rest of it. You know that part of the story, for you suffered from it. To save your brother, you had sacrificed large sums of money. When that failed and you found that either he or you must go to prison for these defalcations, you decided to sacrifice your liberty and your reputation in order to save him and his wife and daughters. You refused to defend yourself. I thought your plan was to get a stay, give bail, and skip it. But you had the disadvantage of having a moral character, so you stood your hand and were sent to prison. Your brother, having no moral character, let you do this thing and pretended great grief over your dishonesty and perfidy. But he had learned the business by that time, and so he got away with the swag, and with the reputation of a man of truly Roman virtue who suffered acutely over the misbehaviour of his ‘black sheep’ brother. What a farce it all is anyhow—life, I mean—if one tries to take it seriously! Let me have a little brandy, please! I’m growing very faint.”

The brandy did its appointed work of stimulation, and presently Campbell resumed:—

“I don’t in the least understand why you should care for your brother, but, as you do, it may gratify you to know that he is leading a quiet life of luxury in the country on the Hudson. He is a comfortably rich man; for he kept the money he got out of the bank and invested it prudently—a thing I never could do when I had money. He highly disapproved of me, of course; but when I quitted the Southern army and went North—”

“When you deserted, you mean.”

“Yes, if you look at it in that way—he used his influence to get me my present commission. That was cheaper than supporting me, which he must otherwise have done, for I had lost and squandered everything. That brings me to what I really want to talk to you about. I have a daughter somewhere in the South, if she is still alive. She was captured a few months ago during an effort on the part of—well, never mind whom—to smuggle her through the lines into the South, where she has some relatives, though I don’t believe she knows who they are. It doesn’t matter. They say I’ve persecuted the girl—and I suppose in a way I have.

“Never mind that. I’m sinking fast now and haven’t any time for explanations. I have some papers here that may mean everything to her after she comes of age. She has been taught that she is only seventeen years old. In fact, she is nineteen, and she must have these papers when she is twenty-one. I sent for you to ask you to find her and deliver them. You really have a moral character, and so you won’t trade on this matter. With your wide acquaintance, you’ll know how to find the girl. Her name is Evelyn Byrd.”

If a shell had exploded in the room, Kilgariff would not have been so startled as he was by this announcement. But he had no time for questions. He had heard picket-firing for several minutes past, and his practised ear told him with certainty that the rattle of the musketry was steadily drawing nearer. He knew what that meant. The Federals were advancing in adequate force for the recapture of the position and the destruction of Major Irby’s little handful of men.

A few minutes before Campbell made his startling announcement, a note had come to Kilgariff from Major Irby, saying:—

“Enemy advancing in considerable force, but I can hold place for an hour or more if absolutely necessary. You needn’t hurry. Only cut it as short as you can.”

But just at the moment of the mention of Evelyn Byrd’s name, the voices of two rifled cannon were heard near at hand, and Kilgariff knew the guns for his own. Instantly he sprang up, and, taking the papers from Campbell’s hand, passed out of the house without a word of farewell, leaped upon his horse, and galloped to the little hill where his guns had been posted.

It was in the gray of early dawn, and even considerable bodies of troops could not be seen except at short distances. But the enemy was pressing Major Irby hard, apparently bent upon capturing his force. Both his flanks were threatened, while his centre was specially hard pressed.

No sooner had Kilgariff reported that his mission was finished, and that he was himself with the guns, than Irby gave some rapid commands, threw his whole force upon the enemy with great impetuosity, and then, while the recoil before his charge lasted, swung his little band about and made good its escape at a gallop.

XIV

IN THE WATCHES OF THE NIGHT

OWEN KILGARIFF was now beset with perplexities. So long as he should continue to serve with Early in the valley, he must retain the rank of captain which that commander had forced upon him, and this he was determined not to do. He knew that Early had reported upon his case, and that very certainly a commission would come to him in regular form from Richmond. He foresaw that its coming would greatly increase his embarrassment. He could not decline it except officially through General Early, to whom, of course, he could give no satisfactory reason for his erratic course.

Then, too, he was puzzled about the papers that Campbell had given him. These clearly belonged to Evelyn, and his first impulse was to send them to her and let her do what she would with them. But he remembered that Campbell’s injunction had been, or seemed to be, to deliver the documents into her hands only when she attained the age of twenty-one years. Not knowing what might be in the papers, Kilgariff could not know what or how much of harm might come to her from their premature delivery.

It is true that he had given no promise to Campbell, and as for the wishes of the adventurer, Kilgariff was in no way bound to respect them, and certainly he was not disposed to do so. His sole concern in the matter was for Evelyn’s welfare, and he could not make up his mind what his course of conduct ought to be with respect to that. He needed counsel very sorely, and there was only one man in all the South of whom he could freely ask counsel. That man was Arthur Brent, who might be still at Petersburg, or might have gone back to his laboratory work at Wyanoke.

In either case, consultation with him seemed equally out of the question. No confidence was to be placed in mails at that disturbed time, and of course Kilgariff would not ask for or accept even the sick furlough which the increasing inflammation of his neglected wound rendered exceedingly desirable, so long as there was well-nigh continuous fighting in progress at the front.

Altogether, Owen Kilgariff was sorely beset with puzzling uncertainty of mind. He was in action during most of the day after the night he had spent with Campbell, but neither weariness nor loss of sleep enabled him to close his eyes during the following night. He lay throughout the hours of darkness stretched upon the ground under a great chestnut tree, weary but with wide-open eyes, staring upward at the stars that showed through the leaves, and thinking to no purpose.

One thought occurred to him at last which caused him suddenly to sit up, and for a moment made his heart bound.

His vigil of ceaseless thought and perplexity had taught him much of his own soul’s condition which he had but vaguely guessed at before. It had shown him clearly what his feeling was toward Evelyn Byrd. He understood now, as he had not done before, that his love for the girl was the supreme passion of his life—the limitless, all-embracing, all-conquering impulse of a strong nature which had schooled itself to repression and self-sacrifice. He saw clearly that all this self-discipline—greatly as it had enabled him to endure and to make sacrifice—had given him no strength adequate to his present need. He had thought to conquer his passionate love; he knew now that he could never conquer it. He had thought to put it out of his mind as a longing for the unattainable; he knew now that it would for ever refuse to be dismissed.

“So long as I live,” he thought, “I must bear this burden; so long as I live, I must suffer and be still. For I shall at any rate retain too much of manhood and courage to win Evelyn’s love or to sadden her life by linking it with my own. My honour, at any rate, shall remain unspotted. Fortunately, a bullet or a sabre stroke is likely to solve all my riddles for me before this year comes to an end—and so much the more imperative is it that I arrange quickly for the disposal of her papers to her best advantage. But what is best? If these papers reveal to her the cruel fact that her father was an adventurer, a gambler, a swindler—and they must if they reveal anything—will it not be a great wrong to let her have them at all? And yet who but herself has a right to decide that she shall not receive whatever revelation the documents may make?”

Then it was that the thought came to Kilgariff which made him sit up suddenly.

“She is the daughter of that man. Is there not in that fact an offset to my disability? Am I not free to tell her concerning myself, after she has learned her own origin, and to stand with eyes on a level with her own, asking her to be my wife?”

No sooner had he formulated the thought thus than he rejected it as unworthy. For a time he scourged himself for permitting the suggestion to arise in his mind, but presently he comforted himself by recalling the words of a great divine who, speaking of evil thoughts quickly dismissed, said:—

“I cannot prevent the birds from flying over my head, but I can forbid them to make nests in my hair.”

“I will not let that bird make a nest in my hair,” thought Kilgariff, resolutely, and greatly to the relief of his troubled conscience.

At that moment the reveille sounded in all the camps, and Kilgariff rose to his feet, stripped himself to the waist, sluiced his head, shoulders, and chest in the cold water of a neighbouring spring, resumed his clothing, and was ready for the day’s duties, whatever their nature might be. But his vigil had not brought him any nearer than he was before to the solution of the problems that so greatly perplexed him. It had only added a new and distressing self-knowledge to the burdens that weighed upon his mind. He had never feared death; now he looked upon it as a chance of welcome release from a sorely burdened life. Thenceforth he thought of the bullets as friendly messengers, one of which might bear a message for him.

XV

IN THE TRENCHES

OPERATIONS in front of Petersburg had by this time settled down into a sullenly obstinate struggle for mastery between the two finest armies of veterans that ever met each other anywhere in the world. It is no exaggeration to characterise those armies by such superlatives. For in them it was not only organisations—regiments, brigades, and divisions—that were war-seasoned, but the individual men themselves. They had educated themselves by four years of fighting into a personal perfection of soldiership such as has nowhere else been seen among the rank and file of contending armies.

The slender lines of hastily constructed earthworks behind which these two opposing hosts had confronted each other at the beginning of that supreme struggle of the war, had been wrought into other and incalculably stronger forms by work that had never for one moment ceased and would not pause until the end.

The breastworks had been raised, broadened, and strengthened under the direction of skilled engineers. At every salient angle a regular fort of some sort had been constructed and heavily armed for offence and defence.

In rear of these lines every little eminence had been crowned by a frowning fortification, as sullen in appearance and as capable of destructive work as the Redan or the Malakoff at Sebastopol.

At brief intervals along the outer lines traverses had been built at right angles to the works, as a protection against all enfilading fire.

The fields just behind the lines were intricately laced with trenches and protective earthworks of every kind. Without these the men in front would have been completely cut off from communication with the rear, by a resistless, all-consuming fire.

Great covered ways—protected passages—were cut as the only avenues by which men or supplies could be moved even for the shortest distances. Every spring that could yield water with which to quench the thirst of the fighting men was defended by jealous fortifications.

There was no more thought now of enumerating the actions fought, or naming them. There was one continuous battle, ceaseless by day or by night, in which dogged resistance opposed itself daily and hourly to desperate assault, both inspired by a courage that did not so much resemble anything human as it did the struggle of opposing and titanic natural forces. Did the reader ever see the breaking up of the ice in a great river or lake, under the angry impulse of flood and storm? As the great ice floes in that case assailed the rocks with seemingly resistless fury, and as the rocks stood fast in the courage of their immovability, so at Petersburg the opposing forces met, day after day, with the courage and determination of inanimate forces.

Every great gun that either side could bring from any quarter was placed in position, so that the fire, continuous by day and by night, grew steadily greater in volume and more destructive in effect.

In this matter of guns, as well as in numbers of men, the Federals had enormous advantage. They had arsenals and foundries equipped with the most improved machinery to supply them, and they could draw freely upon the armouries of Europe, besides. The Confederates had no such resources. The few and small shops within their command were antiquated in their equipment and very sharply limited in their capacity. But they did their best.

As soon as regular siege operations began, the Federals set to work establishing mortar batteries at every available point. Mortars are very short guns fired at a high “elevation”; that is, pointing upward at an angle of forty-five degrees to the horizon, or more than that, so as to throw shells high in air and let them fall perpendicularly upon an enemy’s works, breaking down defences and reaching points in rear of works to which ordinary cannon fire cannot penetrate.

The lines were so close together—at one point only fifty yards apart—that everything had to be done under cover of some kind, and thus mortars became a vitally necessary arm with which to break down the enemy’s cover. The Confederates had none of these guns at first, but their foundries were at least capable of manufacturing so simple a weapon in a rude but effective fashion, making the mortars of iron instead of brass, and mounting them in oaken blocks heavily banded with wrought iron. In a very brief time the mortars began to arrive, and their numbers rapidly increased, but there were very few of the officers who knew how to handle a weapon so wholly different from ordinary guns both in construction and in methods of use.

This scarcity of mortar-skilled officers in the lower grades gave Owen Kilgariff his opportunity. The thought occurred to him suddenly on the day after his vigil, and he acted upon it at once.

He wrote to Arthur Brent, addressing his letter to Wyanoke, whence it would of course be forwarded should Doctor Brent be at Petersburg still.

I want you, Arthur [he wrote], to use your influence in my behalf in a matter that touches me closely. For several reasons I want to be ordered from this place to Petersburg. For one thing, there is a matter of business, vitally interesting to you and me and closely involving the welfare of others. I simply must see you concerning it without delay. If I can get to Petersburg, I can see you, for Wyanoke is near enough to the beleaguered city for you to visit me in the trenches. There are other reasons, but the necessity of seeing you is the most important and the least personal to myself, so I need not bother you now with the other considerations that move me to desire this change, which you can bring about if you will—and I am sure you will.

I should ask for the transfer of the battery now under my command, if I did not know that it would be idle to do so. For some reason General Early seems to have taken a fancy to me, and still more to two highly improved rifle guns that I recently added to the battery by capture. He will never let me go unless compelled by orders to do so.

But I see another way. I learn that our mortar fire at Petersburg is less effective than it should be, by reason of our lack of battery officers skilled in handling that species of ordnance. Now that is a direction in which I could render specially valuable service, not only by commanding many mortar pits myself, and instructing the men, but also by teaching our unskilled battery officers what to do with such guns, and how to do it. If you will personally see General Lee’s chief of artillery and lay the case before him, I am sure he will order me transferred to the trenches. You can tell him that I was graduated at Annapolis, taking special honours in gunnery. You need tell him no more of my personal history than that after graduation I resigned from the navy to study medicine, and that you learned to know me well in our student days at Jena, Berlin, and Paris.

Do this thing for me, Arthur, and do it as quickly as possible. And as soon as I reach Petersburg, make some occasion to see me there, bearing in mind that to see you with reference to matters of vital importance to others is my primary purpose in asking for this transfer.

Arthur Brent was at Wyanoke when this letter came, but he hastened to Petersburg to execute his friend’s commission. He told more of Kilgariff’s personal history than Kilgariff had suggested. That is to say, he told of his gallantry at Spottsylvania and of its mention in general orders. He had neither to urge nor beseech. No sooner was the chief of artillery made aware of the facts than he answered:—

“I want such a man badly. Orders for his immediate transfer to the lines here shall go to-day.”

So it came about that before the end of that week, Owen Kilgariff stood in a drenching rain-storm and nearly up to his knees in the mud of a mortar pit at Petersburg, bombarding a salient in the enemy’s lines.

The storm of bullets and rifle shells that raged around his pits was as ceaseless as the downpour of rain, but as calmly as a schoolmaster expounding a lesson in algebra, he alternately instructed his men and explained to the half a dozen subaltern officers who had been sent to him to learn. He was teaching them the methods of mortar range-finding, the details of powder-gauging for accuracy, the art of fuse-cutting, and all the rest of it, when out of a badly exposed covered way came Doctor Arthur Brent to greet him.

XVI

THE STARVING TIME

THE stress of war had now fallen upon every Southern household. Its terrors had invaded every home. Its privations made themselves manifest in scanty food upon tables that had been noted for lavish and hospitable abundance, and in a score of other ways. The people of Virginia were not only standing at bay, heroically confronting an invading force three or four times outnumbering their own armies, but at the same time starvation itself was staring them in the face.

The food supplies of Virginia were exhausted. Half the State had been trampled over by contending armies, until it was reduced to a desert so barren that—as Sheridan picturesquely stated the case—“the crow that flies over it must carry his rations with him.” The other half of the State, already stripped to bareness, was compelled during that terrible summer, almost wholly to support the army at Richmond and Petersburg and the army in the valley, for the reason that the means of drawing even scanty supplies from the well-nigh exhausted country farther south were practically destroyed. Little by little Grant had extended his left southward and westward until it crossed the Weldon Railroad south of Petersburg, thus severing that most important line of communication. In the meanwhile the Federal cavalry was continually raiding the South Side Railroad and the Richmond and Danville Line, tearing up tracks, burning the wooden bridges, and so seriously interrupting traffic as to render those avenues of communication with the South practically valueless, so far at least as the bringing of supplies for the armies was concerned.

Thus Virginia had not only to bear the calamities of the war, but also, single-handed, to maintain the armies in the field, and Virginia was already stripped to the point of nakedness.

Yet the people bore all with patriotic cheerfulness. They emptied their smokehouses, their corncribs, and their granaries. They sent even their milky herds to the slaughter, by way of furnishing meat for soldiers’ rations, and they went thereafter without milk and butter for lack of cows, as they were already going without meat. Those of them who were near enough the lines desolated their poultry yards, and lived thereafter upon corn pone, with greens gathered in the fields and such perishable fruits as could in no wise be converted into rations.

The army was being slowly destroyed by the daily losses in the trenches, which, excluding the greater losses of the more strenuous battles, amounted to about thirty per cent a month in the commands that defended the most exposed points. Thus Owen Kilgariff’s mortar command of two hundred and ten men lost sixty-two within a single month, and some others lost still more heavily for lack of the wise discretion Kilgariff constantly brought to bear upon the problem of husbanding the lives and limbs of his men while getting out of them the uttermost atom of effective service of which they were capable.

Whenever a severe mortar fire was opened upon his line of pits, he would station himself in a peculiarly exposed position on top of the earth mound that protected his magazine. From that point he could direct the work of every gun under his command and at the same time do much for the protection of his men. A mortar shell can be seen in the air—particularly at night, when its flaming fuse is a torch—and its point of contact and explosion can be calculated with a good deal of precision. It was Kilgariff’s practice to watch for the enemy’s shells, and whenever he saw that one of them was likely to fall within one or other of his pits and explode there with the certainty of blowing a whole gun detachment to atoms, he would call out the numbers of the exposed pits, whereupon the men within them would run into the boom-proofs provided for that purpose and shelter there till the explosion was over.

In the meanwhile, he, posted high upon the magazine mound, was exposed not only to the mortar fire that endangered his men, but still more to a hail-storm of musket bullets and to a ceaseless flow of rifled cannon shells that skimmed the edge of his parapet, with fuses so skilfully timed and so accurately cut that every shell exploded within a few feet of his head.

Perhaps he was thinking of the kindly bullet or the friendly shell fragment that was to make an end of his perplexities. Who knows? Yet his exposure of himself was not reckless, but carefully calculated for the preservation of his men. It was only such as was common among the Confederate officers at Petersburg, where the percentage of officers to men among the killed and wounded was greater than was ever recorded in any war before or since.

By this exposure of his own person Kilgariff undoubtedly saved the lives of many of his men, all of whom were volunteers who had offered themselves to man a position so dangerous that the chief of artillery had refused to order mortars to occupy it, and had reluctantly consented to its occupation by Kilgariff and his desperately daring men as volunteers in an excessively perilous service. He might have reduced his losses still more if he had been willing to order his subordinates at the several groups of pits to expose themselves as he did in the interest of the men. But this he refused to do, on the ground that to order it would be to exact more than even a soldier’s duty requires of the bravest man.

One of his sergeants—a boy of fifteen, who had won promotion by gallantry—had indeed emulated his captain’s example in the hope of sparing his men. But the second time he did it, a Hotchkiss shell carried away his head and shoulders, and the world suffered loss.

The hospital service, under such conditions, was terribly overtaxed, and for relief the plantation houses were asked to receive and care for such of the wounded as could in any wise be removed to their hospitable shelter. Thus, presently, every half-starving family in the land was caring for and feeding as best it could from three to a dozen wounded men.

At Wyanoke Dorothy had met this emergency by establishing a regular hospital camp, in which she received and cared for not less than fifty wounded officers and men. With the wise foresight that was part of her mental make-up, and aided by Arthur’s advance perceptions of what this terrible campaign was likely to bring forth, Dorothy had begun early in the spring to prepare for the emergency. She had withdrawn a large proportion of the field hands from the cultivation of crops, and set them at work raising garden stuff instead. To the same end, she had diverted to her gardens a large part of the stable fertiliser which was ordinarily spread upon corn, wheat, or tobacco lands. She had said to Arthur:—

“There is nothing certain after this year except disaster. We must meet disaster as bravely as we can, and leave the future to take care of itself. I shall devote all our resources this year, outside the poppy fields, to the production of food stuffs—vegetables, fowls, and pigs—with which to feed the wounded who must presently come to us.”

Thus it came about that Dorothy was able to care for fifty wounded men at a time, when the mistresses of other plantations as great as Wyanoke and Pocahontas found themselves sorely taxed in taking ten. And as the wounded men were impatient to get back into the trenches as soon as their injuries were endurably half healed, the ministry of mercy at Wyanoke was brought to bear upon many hundreds of brave fellows during that most terrible of summers, and the fame of Dorothy Brent as an angel of mercy and kindness spread throughout the army, fairly rivalling that of her mother—unknown as such—Madame Le Sud. Madame Le Sud, defiant alike of weariness and danger, poured water down many parched throats on Cemetery Hill at Petersburg, until at last a Minié ball made an end of her ministry; and on that same day a dozen brave fellows fell while carving her name on a rude boulder which marked the place of her final sacrifice. The places of those who fell in this service were promptly taken by others equally intent, at whatever cost, upon marking for remembrance the spot on which that woman gave up her life who had ministered so heroically to human suffering.

All these things are only incidents illustrative of that heroism on the part of women which the poet, if we had a poet, would seize upon as the vital and essential story of the Confederate war. If that heroism could be properly celebrated, it would make a literature worthy to stand shoulder to shoulder with the hero-songs of old Homer himself. But that story of woman’s love and woman’s sacrifice has never been told and never will be, for the reason that there is none worthy to tell it among those of us who survive of those who saw it and knew the self-sacrificing absoluteness of its heroism.

Into all this work of mercy Evelyn Byrd entered not only with enthusiasm, but with the tireless energy of healthy youth and with a queer sagacity—born, perhaps, of her strange life-experience—which enabled her sometimes to double or quadruple the beneficent effects of her work by the deftness of its doing.

Her enthusiasm in the cause rather astonished Dorothy, at first. If the girl had been brought up in Virginia, if her home had always been there, if she had had a people of her own there, with a father and a brother in the trenches, her devotion would have been natural enough. But none of those reasons for her enthusiasm existed. She had probably been born in Virginia, or at least of Virginian parentage, though even that assumption rested upon no better foundation than the fact that she bore a historic Virginian name. She had lived elsewhere during her childhood and youth. She had come into the Southern country under compulsion, and three fourths of the war was over before she came. So far as she knew, she had no relatives in Virginia, and very certainly she had none there whom she knew and loved.

Yet she was passionate almost to madness in her Virginianism, and she was self-sacrificing even beyond the standards of the other heroic women around her.

That she should enter passionately into any cause into which she enters at all [wrote Dorothy to Arthur during one of his absences at the front] is altogether natural. Her nature is passionate in an extreme degree, and, good as her judgment is when it is cool, she sends it about its business whenever it assumes to meddle with her passionate impulses. She has certain well-fixed principles of conduct, from which she never departs by so much as a hair’s breadth—chiefly, I imagine, because they are principles which she has wrought out in her mind without anybody’s teaching or anybody’s suggestion. They are the final results of her own thinking. She regards them as ultimates of truth. But subject to these, she is altogether a creature of impulse. Even to save one she loves from great calamity, she would not think of compromising the most trivial of her fundamental principles; yet for the sake of one she loves, she would sacrifice herself illimitably even upon the most trivial occasion. It is a dangerous character to possess, but a most interesting one to study, and certainly it is admirable.

Arthur smiled lovingly as he read this analysis. “How little we know ourselves!” he exclaimed, in thought. “If I had worked with pen and paper for a month in an effort to describe Dorothy’s own character fittingly, I couldn’t have done it so perfectly as she has done it in describing the make-up of Evelyn. Yet she never for one moment suspects the similarity. Just because the external circumstances are different in the two cases, she is utterly blind to the parallel. It doesn’t matter. It is far better to have such a character as Dorothy’s than to try to create it—much better to have it than to know that she has it.”

It is worthy of observation and remark that in his thinking about this matter of character, and admiring and loving it, Arthur Brent connected the subject altogether with Dorothy, not at all with Evelyn.

That was because Arthur Brent was in love with his wife, and happy is the man with whom such a love lingers and dominates after the honeymoon is over!

One day Dorothy and Evelyn talked of this matter of Evelyn’s enthusiasm for the Confederate cause and her passionate devotion to those who had received wounds in the service of it. It was Evelyn who started the conversation.

“The best thing about you, Dorothy,” she said, one morning while they two were waiting for a decoction they were making to drip through the filtering-paper, “is your devotion to Cousin Arthur.” Evelyn had come to that stage of Virginian culture in which affection expressed itself in the claiming of kinship where there was none. “It seems to me that that is the way every woman should feel toward her husband, if he is worthy of it, as Cousin Arthur is.”

“Tell me your whole thought, Byrdie,” answered Dorothy, who had fastened that pet name upon her companion. “It interests me.”

“Well, you see I haven’t seen much of this sort of thing between husbands and wives, though I am satisfied it ought to exist in every marriage. I heard a woman lecture once on what she called the ‘Subjection of Women.’ She made me so angry that I wanted to answer her—mere slip of a girl that I was—but they—well, I wasn’t let. That isn’t good English, I know, but it is what I mean. The woman wanted to strike the word ‘obey’ out of the marriage service, just as if the form of a marriage ceremony had anything to do with a real marriage. As well as I could make out her meaning, she wanted every woman to enter upon wedlock with fixed bayonets, with her glove in the ring, and with a challenge upon her lips. I don’t believe in any such marriage as that. I regard it as an infamous degradation of a holy relation. It isn’t marriage at all. It is a mere bargain, like a contract for supplies or any other contract. You see, I had never seen a perfect marriage like yours and Cousin Arthur’s at that time, but I had thought about it, because I had seen the other kind. It was my idea that in a true marriage the wife would obey for love, while for love the husband would avoid commanding. I don’t think I can explain—but you understand me, Dorothy—you must understand, because it is just so with you and Cousin Arthur.”

“Yes, I understand,” answered Dorothy.

“Of course you do. You are never so happy as in doing whatever you think Cousin Arthur would like you to do, and he never wants you to do anything except what it pleases you to do. I reckon the whole thing may be ciphered down to this: you love Cousin Arthur, and Cousin Arthur loves you; each wants the other to be free and happy, and each acts as is most likely to produce that result. I can’t think of any better way than that.”

“Neither can I,” answered Dorothy, with two glad tears glistening on her cheeks; “and I am glad that you understand. I can’t imagine anything that could be better for you than to think in that way. But tell me, Byrdie, why you are so enthusiastic in our Southern cause and in your ministry to our wounded soldiers?”

“Because your cause is my cause. I haven’t any friends in the world but you and Cousin Arthur, and—your friends.”

Dorothy observed that the girl paused before adding “—and your friends,” and Dorothy understood that the girl was thinking of Owen Kilgariff. To Dorothy it meant much that she avoided all mention of Kilgariff’s name.

The girl had completely lost her mannerisms of speech in a very brief while, a fact which Dorothy attributed to her rare gift of imitation. Only once in a great while, when she was under excitement, did she lapse into the peculiarities either of pronunciation or of construction which had at first been so marked a characteristic of her utterance. She read voraciously now, reading always, apparently, with minute attention to language in her eager desire to learn. Her time for reading was practically made time. That is to say, it consisted chiefly of brief intervals between occupations. She was up every morning at five o’clock, in order that she might go to the stables and personally see to it that the horses and mules were properly fed and curried.

“The negroes neglect them shamefully when I am not there in Cousin Arthur’s place,” she said, “and it is cruel to neglect poor dumb beasts that cannot provide for themselves or even utter a complaint.”

As soon after seven as Dorothy’s nursery duties permitted, the two mounted their horses and rode away for a half-intoxicating draught of the air of a Virginia summer morning. Returning to a nine o’clock “breakfast of rags,” as Dorothy called the scant, makeshift meal that alone was possible to them in that time of stress, Evelyn went at once to the laboratory. After setting matters going there, she mounted again and rode away to the camp of the wounded soldiers to whose needs she ministered with a skill and circumspection that had been born of her peculiar experience in remote places.

“The best medicine she brings us,” said one of the wounded men, one day, “is her laugh.” And yet Evelyn rarely laughed at all. It was her ever present smile and the general joyousness of her countenance that the invalids interpreted as laughter.

She always carried a light shot-gun with her, and she rarely returned to the “gre’t house” without three or four squirrels for her own and Dorothy’s dinner. Now and then she filled her bag with partridges—or “quails,” as those most toothsome of game birds are generally, and quite improperly, called at the North. When September came, she got an occasional wild turkey also, her skill both in finding game and in the use of her gun being unusually good.

One day Dorothy challenged her on this point.

“You are a sentimentalist on the subject of animals,” she said, “and yet you are a huntswoman.”

“But why not?” asked Evelyn, in astonishment at the implied question. “In the summer, the wild creatures multiply enormously. When the winter comes, they starve to death because there is not food enough. In the fall, the woods are full of them; in the spring, there are very few. Nine tenths of them must die in any case, and if my gun hastens the death of one, it betters the chance of another to survive. I could never deceive them, or persuade them to trust me and then betray their trust. I don’t think I am a sentimentalist, Dorothy, and—”

Just then Dorothy thought of something else and said it, and the conversation was diverted into other channels.

Nearly always Evelyn had a book with her, which she read at odd moments, and quite always she had one book or more lying around the house, each open at the place at which she had last read, and each lying ready to her hand whenever a moment of leisure should come in her very busy day. For besides her attendance upon the sick, she relieved Dorothy of the greater part of her household duties, and was tireless in her work in the laboratory. Her knowledge of chemistry was scant, of course, but she had quickly and completely mastered the processes in use in the laboratory, and her skill in drug manufacture was greater than that of many persons more familiar with the technical part of that work.

She had from the first taken exclusive care of her own room, peremptorily ordering all the maids to keep out of it.

“A maid always reminds me,” she said to Dorothy, by way of offering an explanation that did not explain; for she did not complete her sentence. But so earnest was her objection that, even to the daily polishing of the white ash floor with a pine needle rubbing, she did everything within those precincts with her own hands.

Dorothy let her have her way. It was Dorothy’s habit to let others do as they pleased so long as their pleasing was harmless.

XVII

A GUN-PIT CONFERENCE

FOR full half an hour after Arthur Brent came out of the covered way and greeted his friend, Kilgariff’s bombardment and the enemy’s vigorous response continued. Arthur Brent stood by his friend in the midst of it all quite as if “the scream of shot, the burst of shell, and the bellowing of the mortars” had been nothing more than a harmless exhibition of “pyrotechny for our neighbour moon,” as Bailey phrases it in _Festus_.

It did not occur to Kilgariff to invite Doctor Brent to take refuge in one of the bomb-proofs till the fierceness of the fire should be past. It never did occur to Owen Kilgariff that a gentleman of education and culture could think of shrinking from danger, even though, as in this case, he had nothing to do with the war business immediately in hand, but was, technically at least, a non-combatant. Indeed, that gallant corps of doctors who constituted the medical field-service in the Confederate army never did regard themselves as non-combatants, at least so far as going into or keeping out of danger was concerned. They fired no guns, indeed, but in all other ways they participated in the field-fighting on quite equal terms with officers of the line. Wherever their duty called them, wherever an errand of mercy demanded their presence, they went without hesitation and stayed without flinching. They performed the most delicate operations, where a moment’s unsteadiness of hand must have cost a human life, while shells were bursting about their heads and multitudinous bullets were whistling in their ears. Sometimes their patients were blown out of their hands by a cannon shot. Sometimes the doctors themselves went to their death while performing operations on the battlefield.