Chapter XXXII: The End of It All 434 (7)

“Bring a horse for Colonel Kilgariff; not his own, but some other.” This was the first time Evelyn had ever called Kilgariff by any military title. “You see, Colonel, your splendid animal has been badly overworked and underfed. I have promised him a restful morning in a clover field, and it would be too bad to disappoint him, don’t you think?”

“Yes, certainly. Thank you for thinking of that. How completely you seem to have schooled yourself to think of dumb animals as if they were human beings! You even assume—playfully, of course—that the big sorrel understood your promise about the clover field.”

“Why should he not? Dumb animals understand a great deal more than people think. Your sorrel understood, at any rate, that I regarded him with affection and pity. That in itself was to him a promise of good treatment, and just now good treatment means to him rest in a clover field. So, while he may not have understood the exact meaning of the words I used, he understood my promise. I am not so sure even about the words. Animals understand our words oftener than we think.”

“How do you mean? Would you mind giving me an illustration of your thought?”

“Oh, illustrations are plenty. But here are the horses. Let us mount and be off. We can continue our talk as we ride. Are you really strong enough?”

The man answered that he was, and the two set off.

When the horses had finished their first morning dash, Evelyn cried, “Walk,” to them and they instantly slowed down to the indicated gait.

“There!” said the girl. “That’s an illustration. The horses perfectly understood what I meant when I bade them walk. I am told that cavalry horses understand every word of command, and that, even when riderless, they sometimes join in the evolutions and make no mistakes.”

“That is true,” answered her companion. “I have seen them do it often. Both in the cavalry and in the artillery we depend far more upon the horses’ knowledge of the evolutions and the words of command, than upon that of the men. They learn tactics more readily than the men do, and, having once learned, they never make a mistake, while men often do.”

“How then can you doubt that horses understand words?”

“They understand words of command, but—”

“Yes? Well? ‘But’ what?”

“I really don’t know. The thought is so new to me that it seemed for the moment a misinterpretation of the facts—that there must be some other explanation.”

“But what other explanation can there be?”

“I don’t know. Indeed, I begin to see that there is no other possible. Animals certainly do understand _some_ words. That is a fact, as you have shown me, and one already within my own knowledge. I see no reason to doubt that they understand many more than we are accustomed to think. I wish you would write that book about them.”

“I am writing it,” she answered; “but I don’t think I’ll ever let anybody see it—at any rate, not now—not for a long time to come—maybe not for ever.”

As she ended, the pair reached the invalids’ camp, and the wounded men gave Evelyn a greeting that astonished Kilgariff quite as much as it pleased him.

“The little lady! The little lady!” they shouted, while those of them who could walk eagerly gathered about her, with welcome in their eyes and voices.

She briefly introduced Kilgariff, and together the two went the rounds of those patients who were still unable to sit up. There were few of these, but they must be the first attended to. After that, Evelyn closely questioned each of the others concerning the condition of his wounds, his sleep, his digestion, and everything else that Arthur might wish to learn in preparation for his own rounds after breakfast. Kilgariff was struck with the readiness Evelyn manifested in calling each of the men by his name, and with the minuteness of her knowledge of the special condition and the needs of each.

“How do you remember it all so minutely?” he asked, as they walked together from one side of the camp to the other.

“Why, it is my duty to remember,” she replied, in a surprised tone, as if that settled the whole matter. And in a woman of her character, it did.

XXI

EVELYN LIFTS A CORNER OF THE CURTAIN

DURING the return ride, Kilgariff carefully avoided all reference to the real purpose of his visit to Wyanoke. He had come to dread that subject, and in his present unsettled state of mind he feared it also. It might at any moment bring on an emotional crisis, and prompt him to do or say things that must afterward cause regret. He wished to think the matter out—the matter of his future relations with this girl—and to determine finally the course of conduct which this morning’s discovery might require of him.

He ought to have seized upon the opportunity for this that he had so recklessly thrown away. He ought to have let Evelyn go to the invalid camp alone, he remaining behind to think. But he had missed that opportunity, and no other was likely to come to him. Certainly no other so good could come. He must get through the matter of the papers on this day, not only because the chances of war might compel him to return to his post on the morrow, but because he might very probably decide that it was his duty to take himself out of this girl’s life, and, if that was to be, the sooner he should quit the house that held her the better.

Both Arthur and Dorothy were present to welcome him when he and Evelyn returned to the house, so that there was no chance then to do his thinking. Then Arthur decided to examine his wound before the breakfast hour; and when he did so, he grew grave of face and manner.

“I’m sorry to tell you, old fellow, that I must operate on your neck to-day. Your wound is in a very dangerous condition indeed. It should have been operated upon a week or ten days ago. You shall have breakfast with us this morning, as you’ll need all your strength. Of course I can’t chloroform you till your breakfast is digested, so I’ll not operate till a little after noonday.”

“You needn’t give me the chloroform at all,” answered Kilgariff.

“But, my dear fellow, the pain will be—”

“I’ll stand it.”

“But the operation will be a very delicate one, so near to the carotid artery that a mere flinch from the knife might end your life at once.”

“I’ll not flinch,” said the resolute young man.

“But what objection have you to an anæsthetic? Your heart and lungs are in perfect condition. There’s not the slightest danger—”

“Danger be hanged!” interrupted Kilgariff. “I am not thinking of danger or caring about it. But chloroform always leaves me helplessly ill for many days, and I mustn’t be ill or helpless just now. I am going back to the lines to-morrow. One night’s sleep after your operation will put me sufficiently in condition.”

“But you’re not fit for duty.”

“Fit or not fit, I am going.”

“But it will kill you.”

“That doesn’t signify in my case, you know.”

“Listen to me, Owen Kilgariff. You have brooded over the unfortunate circumstances of your life until you have grown morbid, particularly since this wound has been sapping your vitality. You must brace yourself up and take a healthier view of things. If you don’t, I shall make you. Here you are imagining yourself disgraced at the very time when others in high places are pressing honours upon you as the well-earned reward of your superb conduct. It is all nonsense, I tell you, and you must quit it; if not for your own sake, then for the sake of us who love you and rejoice in your splendid manhood. Your present attitude of mind is not to your credit. If you were not ill, it would be positively discreditable to you.”

“Wait a minute, Arthur. You are judging me without knowing all the facts. I’ll tell you of them after breakfast. Then, before you operate, I must talk with Evelyn about her papers. When that matter is disposed of, you shall operate without an anæthetic, and I must return to my duty on the lines.”

“Your duty there is done. You’ve already taught those fellows how to use mortars effectively. As to mere command, any other officer will attend to that as well as you could. I must operate upon your neck, and I will not do it without chloroform. Indeed, even from your own point of view, there would be nothing gained by that, for after this operation, whether done with or without an anæsthetic, you must not only lie abed for some days to come, but be so braced and harnessed that you cannot turn your head.”

Arthur then explained to his patient, as one surgeon to another, the exact nature of what it was necessary to do, and Kilgariff knew his surgery too well not to understand how imperatively necessary it would be for him to be kept perfectly still, so far as motion with his head was concerned, for a considerable period afterward.

“Very well,” Kilgariff responded. “Do as you will. But first I must arrange the matter of the papers. I’ll do that during the forenoon. Then I shall tell Dorothy the things I intended to tell you. There is no need that I shall tell you, and it will be easier to tell Dorothy.”

“As you please,” said Arthur, satisfied that he had carried his point. “Now we must go to breakfast.”

At the table, Kilgariff observed that, apart from the “coffee” made of parched rye, neither Dorothy nor Evelyn took anything but fruit. There was a cold ham on the table, and the customary loaf of hot bread, but the two women partook of neither. When Kilgariff half suggested, half asked, the reason for their abstemiousness, Dorothy replied:—

“We Virginia women are saving for the army every ounce of food we can. So far as possible, we eat nothing that can be converted into rations. Arthur compels Evelyn and me to take a little meat and a little bread or some potatoes for dinner. He thinks that necessary to our health. But for the rest, we do very well on fruits, vegetables, and other perishable things, don’t we, Byrdie?”

“Oh, yes, indeed. For my own part, I like it. I have had other experiences in living on a restricted diet. Once I had nothing to eat for three or four months except meat, so in going without meat now I am only bringing up the average.”

Kilgariff looked up in surprise.

“For three months or more you had no food but meat!” he exclaimed. “No bread, no starchy food of any kind?”

“Nothing whatever. There weren’t even roots or grass there to be chewed. The Indians often live in that way. Never mind that. At another time I lived for a month in winter almost exclusively on raw potatoes, with only now and then a bit of salt beef.”

“May I ask why you did not cook the potatoes? If it was winter, surely you had fire.”

“Oh, yes, plenty of it. But there was scurvy, and raw potatoes are best for that.”

“Are they? I never knew that.”

“Oh, yes. But for eating their potatoes raw, the people in the lumber-camps would never survive the winter. But I don’t want to talk about those things. I didn’t mean to. Perhaps I’ll put them all into another book that I’m writing just for Dorothy to read and nobody else in all the world.”

She looked at Dorothy as she spoke, and Dorothy understood. This was the first she had heard of the proposed “book.” It was the first reference Evelyn had made to their talk on the day when she had given her hostess an exhibition of bareback riding.

Kilgariff did not understand. Yet, taken in connection with other things that Evelyn had said to him during his former stay at Wyanoke, what she now said seemed at least to lift a little corner of the thick curtain of reserve which shrouded her life-history.

“She has lived,” he thought, “among the wildest of wild Indians, and she has passed at least one winter in some northern lumber-camp. I wonder why.”

He was not destined as yet to get any reply to the question in his mind.

XXII

ALONE IN THE PORCH

WHEN Kilgariff asked Evelyn to go with him to the front porch, telling her he had an important matter to discuss with her, she showed a momentary embarrassment. She quickly controlled it, but not so quickly that it escaped her companion’s recognition.

This troubled him at the outset. This young woman had been until now as frank and free with him as any child might have been. Her present embarrassment, momentary as it was, impressed him the more strongly because the scene at the stables in the early morning was still fresh in his memory, and because he had observed that ever since that time she had uniformly addressed him by his military title.

All these things added to the difficulty of his present task, but it was his habit to meet trouble of every kind half-way, to confront difficulty with courage and not with any show of the shrinking there might be in his mind.

He plunged at once into the matter in hand. Ordinarily he would have begun by addressing his companion as “Evelyn,” but for some reason which he did not stop to analyse, he felt now that he ought not to do so. Yet to address her in any other way, after having for so long called her by her first name, would be too marked a suggestion of reserve. So he avoided addressing her at all in any direct fashion.

“I have asked you to give me this half-hour because I feel that I owe you and myself a duty.”

He had no sooner uttered that sentence than he felt that it was a particularly bad beginning. In his own ears it sounded uncommonly like the introduction to a declaration of love, and he was annoyed with himself for his blundering. He began again, and tried to do so more circumspectly.

“I want to talk with you about a matter that touches your own happiness very closely, and may indeed affect your entire life.”

Another blundering sentence! Even more than the first it sounded to him like the preface to a formal courtship, and, realising the fact, Kilgariff made the matter worse by manifesting precisely such embarrassment as a lover might feel when about to put his fortune to the touch.

Evelyn was quick to see his embarrassment, though she probably had no clear idea of its cause, and she came to his relief by saying with a well-controlled and perfectly placid intonation:—

“I am deeply interested. I didn’t imagine myself a person of sufficient consequence for anybody to have important business affairs to discuss with me. Go on, please. What is it?”

“A little while ago,” he began again, this time approaching the subject with some directness, “I was summoned to meet a wounded Federal officer, who believed himself to be dying. Probably he was right. I do not know. However that may be, he believed that his end was near, and I think he tried to tell the truth—an art in which he has not had much practice in his evil life. I had known him for some years. He had injured me as no other man in all the world ever did or ever can again. There were many things that I wanted him to tell me about, and the time was very short; for I had got at the house in which he lay wounded only under escort of an armed force, and I knew that my escort could not long hold the position. By the time I had finished questioning him concerning the matters in which I was personally interested, the enemy was upon us in superior force, and we were compelled to retire. Just as I was quitting his bedside, he told me something that surprised and shocked me—something that deeply concerned you.”

“What was it, please?” asked the girl, now pale to the lips and nervously twisting her fingers together.

“I should not tell you that, I think; not now, at any rate. It would only distress you and do no good. Perhaps it may not have been true.”

“You must tell me that, or you must tell me nothing!” exclaimed the girl, rising in a passion of excitement, and speaking as if utterance involved painful effort. “Understand me, Colonel Kilgariff. I am not a child, whose feelings must be spared by reservations and concealments. I have not been much used to that sort of coddling, and I will not submit to it. My life has been such as to teach me how to endure. You have some things, you say, which you want to tell me—some things that have somehow grown out of whatever it was that this man said to you. Very well, I will not hear them, unless you can tell me all. I will not listen to half-truths. I must hear all of this matter, or none of it. You say it concerns me closely. I am entitled, therefore, to know all of it, if I am to know any of it. You are free to tell me nothing, if you choose. But if you tell me a part and keep back the rest, you wrong me, and I will not submit to the wrong. I have endured enough of that in my life.”

She paused for a moment, and then resumed:—

“Pardon me if I have seemed to speak angrily or resentfully to you. I did not mean that. Such anger as I felt was aroused by bitter memories of wrong, which were called up by your proposal to put me off with a half-truth. Let me explain myself. You are doubtless thinking that I myself have been practising reserve and concealment ever since I came to Wyanoke. That is true, but it has been only because I have firmly believed that I was oath-bound to do so; and at any rate I have not told any half-truths. Whenever I have told anything, I have told all of it. Another thing: I so hate concealments that at the first moment after I learned that I might do so, I decided to tell Dorothy everything that I myself know about my life. I feared to attempt that orally, lest I should grow excited and break down; so I decided to write out the whole story and give it to her. That is what I meant this morning when I said I was writing a book for Dorothy alone to read. After she has read it, it will be hers to do with as she pleases. It will be an honest book, telling the whole truth and not half-truths.”

Kilgariff did not interrupt this passionate speech. It revealed to him a new and stronger side than he had imagined to exist in the nature of the woman he loved. He rejoiced that she felt and thought as she did, and he was not sorry that an error of judgment on his part had brought forth this character-revealing outburst. He promptly told her so.

“You are altogether right,” he said. “I apologise for my mistake, but, frankly, I do not regret it. It has shown me the strength and truthfulness of your nature with an emphasis that altogether pleases me. I had miscalculated that strength, underestimating it. I sought to spare your feelings, not knowing how brave you are to endure. I know you better now, and the knowledge is altogether pleasing.”

“Thank you sincerely. And you will be generous and forgive me?”

As she said this, Evelyn resumed her familiar tone and manner of almost childlike simplicity.

“There is nothing whatever for me to forgive,” the man answered, in a way that carried conviction of his perfect sincerity with it. “Let me go on with my story.”

“Please do.”

“Just as I was hurrying to leave the wounded man and go to my guns, which were already bellowing, he handed me a bundle of papers. He said that he had a daughter who must be somewhere in the South, if she had not been shot in passing through the lines. He begged me to find her, if possible, and give the papers to her. When I asked him the name of his daughter, he answered that it was Evelyn Byrd.”

The girl was livid and trembling, but what passion it was that so shook her Kilgariff could not make out. He paused, to give her time for recovery. She slowly rose from the bench on which she was sitting, and with a firm, elastic step walked out into the grounds, where her mare was grazing. The animal abandoned the grass, and trotted up to her mistress to be caressed.

As the young woman stood there, stroking the mare’s nose, Kilgariff thought it the most beautiful picture he had ever looked upon—the lithe, slender girl, who carried herself with the grace of an athlete not overtrained, caressing the beautiful mare and seeming to hold mute but loving converse with a boundlessly loyal friend.

“And how much it means!” he thought. “What a nature that woman has! And what a life hers must have been so far!”

Then came over him a great and loving longing to be himself the agent of atonement to her for all the wrong that had vexed her young life, to make her future so bright and joyous that her past should seem to her only a troubled dream from which he had been privileged to waken her. But with this longing came the bitter thought that this could never be—that he was debarred by his own misfortunes from the privilege of winning or seeking to win Evelyn Byrd’s love.

Then arose again in his mind the questions of the early morning—the question of duty, the question of the possibility of avoiding the wrong he so dreaded to do. Was there yet time for him to take himself out of Evelyn Byrd’s life? Or was it already too late? What and how much did her embarrassment in his presence mean? Had she indeed already, and all unconsciously, learned to return the great, passionate love he felt for her? Had he blundered beyond remedy in making himself mean so much to her? Could he now go away and leave her out of his life without inflicting upon her even a greater wrong and a severer suffering than that which his leaving would be meant to avert? If not, then what should he do? What could he do?

He felt himself in a blind alley from which there was no escape. Unhappy indeed is the man who is confronted with a divided duty, a problem of right and wrong which he feels himself powerless to solve. In that hour Owen Kilgariff was more acutely unhappy than he had ever been, even in the darkest period of his great calamity.

Presently Evelyn returned to the porch and seated herself, quite as if nothing had occurred out of the commonplace.

“What was the man’s name?” she asked, with no sign of excitement or emotion of any kind in her voice or manner.

“He called himself Campbell, but he told me that it was an assumed name, and not his own. I do not know his real name.”

“Nor do I,” said the young woman, in the tone of one who is recalling events of the past. “I never knew that. But go on, please. What else did he tell you—what else that concerns me, I mean?”

“Nothing. The enemy was upon us hotly, and I had no time for further talk. Oh, yes, he did say that he had persecuted you ‘in a way’—that was his phrase.”

“I wonder what ‘in a way’ signified to him,” said the young woman, with an intensity of bitterness in her tone, the like of which Owen Kilgariff had never heard in the utterance of man or woman before.

“Never mind that,” Evelyn said, an instant later, the look of agony leaving her face as suddenly as it had appeared. “You have more to tell me?”

“Yes. I must make a confession of grave fault in myself, and ask your forgiveness. The man, Campbell, your father, gave me a bundle of papers, as I told you a little while ago, and I have been impertinently asking myself ever since what I ought to do with them. It did not occur to me then that there was no question for me to decide; that my undoubted duty was simply to place the papers in your hands, as I now do”—withdrawing the parcel from a pocket and placing it in her lap. Dorothy had returned it to him for that purpose. He continued:—

“I had not learned my lesson then. I still thought it my duty to guard and protect you, as one guards and protects a child. I reasoned that those papers very probably contained information or statements, true or false, that would afflict you sorely, and I impertinently desired to spare you the affliction. On the other hand, I realised that they might contain, instead, information of the utmost consequence to you and calculated to bring gladness rather than sorrow to your heart. In my perplexity I turned to Dorothy for help. All of us who know Dorothy do that, you know. I sent the papers to her, explaining my perplexity concerning them. I asked her to examine them and determine whether or not they should be given to you.

“Then I learned my first lesson. Dorothy wrote to me, rebuking me with severity for my presumption. She explained to me what I ought to have understood for myself—that the question of what it was best to do with the papers was not mine to decide, or hers; that I had no shadow of right to ask her to read the documents, and she no possible right to read them. She bade me come to Wyanoke and do my duty like a man.

“That is the real reason I am here; for as to my wound, I should have left that to take care of itself. If it had made an end of me, so much the better.”

“You have no right, I reckon, to say that,” interrupted Evelyn, “or to think it, or to feel it. It is a suicidal thought, and quite unworthy of a brave man.”

“But my life is my own, and surely—”

“Not altogether your own; perhaps not chiefly. It belongs in part to those of us who—I mean to all who care for you, all to whom your death would bring sorrow or to whom your living might be of benefit. Above all it belongs to our country and our cause. You recognise that fact in being a soldier. No; I reckon your life is not your own to do with as you please. It is cowardly in you to think in that way, just as it is cowardly for one to commit suicide because he is in trouble out of which death seems the only way of escape, or the easiest way. So please never let yourself think in that way again.”

“I will try not to,” he replied, looking at his lecturer with undisguised admiration.

“Now, while I had, myself, no right to say whether or not you should read those papers, and while it was not my privilege to protect you against any distress they might bring to you, I still have a good deal of apprehension lest their reading shall needlessly wound you. I am going to make a suggestion, therefore, which I hope you will take in good part.”

“I am ashamed of myself,” answered Evelyn, “for making you feel in that way. I am ashamed of what I said to you—though it was all true and necessary—and of the way in which I said it. I wish I could explain why I did it, why it hurt me so when you tried to conceal something from me. My outbreak has hurt you, and almost humiliated you, I reckon, and I don’t like to think of you being hurt and humiliated. It is good and generous of you to try, as you have done, to spare me. Believe me when I tell you that I feel it to have been so. I cannot explain, and it vexes me that I must not. Won’t you believe that?”

“I believe anything you say, and everything you say. Indeed, it is more than belief that I feel when you tell me anything; it is a conviction of actual and positive knowledge. And now I very much want you to believe me when I say that it was not your ‘outbreak,’ as you call it, that hurt and humiliated me. It was only my consciousness of my own presumptuous impertinence that hurt. I have nothing to forgive in you; and my own fault I cannot forgive.”

There were tears in Evelyn’s eyes as the strong and generous man who had been so careful of her said this, shielding her even now by taking all blame upon himself, just as he had shielded her long before by keeping his own person between her and the bullets that were raining about them. For the moment the old childlike simplicity came into her bearing. She advanced, took Kilgariff’s hand, and said:—

“Let’s forget all about it, please. You have always been good to me.”

Then the dignity came back, and, resuming her seat, she said:—

“You were going to offer a suggestion. I should like to hear it. I am sure it is meant for my advantage.”

“It is only this: I have a haunting fear that your father—”

“He was not my father,” the young woman broke in, speaking the words quite as if they had borne no special significance. “But go on, please.”

Kilgariff almost lost the thread of his thought in his astonishment at this sudden statement. He went on:—

“Well, then, the man Campbell, or whatever his real name was. I have a haunting fear that he has prepared those papers for the purpose of wounding and insulting you. He was capable of any malice, any malignity, any atrocity. He may have put into these papers falsehoods that you will be the better for not reading. On the other hand, the papers may be innocent of any such purpose, and it may even be of the utmost importance that you should know their contents. I venture to suggest that you yourself do what I had no right to do; namely, ask Dorothy to examine the packet and tell you whether or not it is well for you to read the papers. You love her and trust her, and her judgment is unfailing, I might almost say infallible. This is only a suggestion, of course. I have no right to press it.”

Evelyn sat silent, holding the packet in her hands and nervously turning it over. At last she arose and took a few steps toward the doorway. Then, turning about, she said:—

“If it were necessary for any one to read the papers and advise me concerning them, I should ask _you_, Colonel Kilgariff, to stand as my friend and counsellor in the matter. But it is not necessary. _I already know what is in the papers._”

She turned instantly and entered the house, leaving Kilgariff alone in the porch.

XXIII

A LESSON FROM DOROTHY

FOR ten days after the surgical operation, Kilgariff lay abed, his head, neck, and shoulders held rigidly immovable by a wooden framework devised for that purpose. Otherwise than as regarded the wound, he seemed perfectly well, and the wound itself healed satisfactorily under Arthur Brent’s skilful treatment.

In his constrained position it was impossible for the wounded man to hold a book before his eyes, and so, to relieve the tedium of his convalescence, Dorothy read to him for several hours each day.

He had vaguely hoped, without formulating the thought, that Evelyn would render him this service, as she had done during his first illness. But this time she came not. Every day—until the success of the operation was fully assured, she inquired anxiously concerning his condition; but at no time did she visit him, or ask to do so. When at last Arthur so far relaxed the mechanical restraints that Kilgariff was able to sit below stairs in the porch when the weather permitted, and before a “great, bearded fire” in the hallway if it were too cool out of doors—for the autumn was now advanced—he was sorely disappointed to learn that Evelyn was no longer at Wyanoke. She had somewhat suddenly decided to stay at Branton, for a week or ten days, as the guest of Edmonia Bannister.

All this set Kilgariff thinking, and the thinking was by no means comfortable. Did Evelyn’s course mean indifference on her part? It would have given him some pain to believe that, but it would have relieved him greatly. In that case, he might go away and never come back, without fear of any harm to her or any wrong-doing on his own account. In that case, the problem that so sorely vexed him would be completely solved.

Certainly that was the outcome of the matter which he was bound to hope for. Yet the very suggestion that such might be the end of it all distressed him more than he had thought that any possible solution of the difficulty could do.

But, in fact, Owen Kilgariff knew better. When he recalled what had gone before, he could not doubt the interpretation of Evelyn’s avoidance of him, and this thought troubled him even more than the other. It brought back to him all the perplexities of that problem with which he had been so hopelessly wrestling ever since that morning at the stables.

What should he do? What could he do? These questions were insistent, and he could give no answer to them. At one moment his old thought of a parity of disability came back to him—the thought that as she was the daughter of a gambling adventurer, the obligation on his part not to seek her love or win it might not be altogether binding. But then flashed into his mind a memory of her words:—

“He was not my father.”

That excuse, then, no longer availed him. He could no longer—and yet, and yet. The more he thought, the more difficult he found it to accept the hopelessness of the case or make up his mind to take himself out of Evelyn’s life. Yet that, he confidently believed, he would instantly do if he could satisfy himself that it was not already too late for Evelyn herself to welcome such an outcome.

One morning he opened his mind to Dorothy on the subject, and got a moral castigation for his pains. The gear that had restrained his movements had been completely removed by that time, and Kilgariff was contemplating an almost immediate return to his post on the lines at Petersburg.

“I am sorely troubled, Dorothy,” he began. “I am going away two or three days hence, and I wish I could go without seeing Evelyn again.”

“Oh, I can easily manage that,” answered she, with a composure and a commonplaceness of tone which seemed inscrutable to her companion. She took his remark quite as a matter of course, treating it as she might had he merely said:—

“I should like to leave my horse here.”

It was not an easy conversational situation from which to find a way out. Obviously it was for him to make the next remark, and he could not think what it should be. Possibly Dorothy intended that he should be perplexed. At any rate, she manifestly did not intend to help him out of his difficulty.

Presently he found the way out of it for himself—the only way that Dorothy would have tolerated. That is to say, he became perfectly frank with her.

“I want to talk with you about that,” he said, “if I may. I am much troubled; and while I have no right to call upon you for any sort of help, I feel that it may clear my mind simply to tell you all about the matter.”

“I will listen with pleasure,” she said, quite coldly.

Then he blurted out the whole story. He told her—as he need not have done, for she was not a woman for nothing—of the intensity of his love for Evelyn; of the purpose he had cherished to conceal his state of mind from its object, and suffer in silence a love which he felt himself honourably bound not to declare. Then, with some difficulty, he told her of the scene at the stables, and of all that had followed: he explained how these things had bred a fear in his mind that it was already too late for him simply to go away, saying nothing.

Dorothy did not help him in the least in the embarrassment he necessarily felt in suggesting that perhaps the girl loved him already. On the contrary, she sat silent during the recital; and when it was ended she said, very coldly, and with a touch of severity in her manner:—

“If I correctly understand you, you are of opinion that Evelyn has fallen in love with you without being asked. It is perhaps open to you to cherish a belief of that kind, but is it quite fair to the young woman concerned for you to make a statement of that kind to me—either directly or by implication?”

“Of course I didn’t mean that—” stammered Kilgariff; but, instead of accepting his protest, Dorothy mercilessly thrust him through with another question:—

“Might I ask what you did mean, then?”

Kilgariff did not answer at once. It was impossible to escape the relentless logic of Dorothy’s question. It was equally impossible to turn Dorothy by so much as a hair’s breadth away from the truth she sought. Gentle as she was, forbearing as it was her nature to be, she was utterly uncompromising in her love of truth. Moreover, in this case she was disposed to be the more merciless in her insistence upon the truth for the reason that Kilgariff had blunderingly offended the dignity of her womanhood. She held his assumption concerning Evelyn’s state of mind and heart to be an affront to her sex, and she was not minded to let it pass without atonement.

In his masculine way, Kilgariff had many of Dorothy’s qualities. He shared her love of absolute truthfulness, and his courage was as resolute as her own. He met her, therefore, on her own ground. After a moment’s pause, he said:—

“I suppose I did mean what you say; and yet I meant it less offensively than you assume. I frankly acknowledge my fault in speaking to you of the matter. I had no right to do that, even with you. I was betrayed into it by the exceeding perplexity of the situation. I was wrong. I ask your forgiveness.”

“That is better,” responded Dorothy. “I fully believe you when you say you did not mean to do an unmanly thing. For the rest, I cannot see that your situation is at all a perplexing one, except as you needlessly make it so.”

“I confess I do not understand you,” replied Kilgariff, “and yet I cannot explain my difficulty in understanding without in effect repeating my error and emphasising it. I should be rejoiced to know that there is no foundation for the fears that I have been entertaining without any right to entertain them.”

“Are you sure of that? Would you really rejoice to know that Evelyn Byrd’s sentiments toward you are only those of friendship?”

“I believe so. It would involve a good deal of distress to me, of course; but I count the other consideration as supreme. It would enable me to feel that I am privileged to go away from here carrying my burdens on my own back and allowing no straw’s weight to fall upon the shoulders of the only woman in the world that I ever loved or ever shall.”

Dorothy made no reply in words. Instead, she turned her great, brown eyes full upon him and looked at him for the space of twenty seconds, in a way that brought a flush to his face. Then, still making no direct reply to anything he had uttered, she said:—

“I am very greatly displeased with you, Owen Kilgariff. And I am very greatly disappointed.”

She rose to withdraw, but Kilgariff stopped her, and with eager earnestness demanded:—

“Why, Dorothy?”

“I do not wish to explain.”

“But you must. It is my right to demand that. If you go away after saying that, and without explaining what you mean, you will do me a grievous injustice—and you hate injustice.”

“Perhaps I ought not to have said precisely what I did. I ought to have remembered that you are morbid; that by your brooding you have wrought yourself into a diseased condition of mind. When you recover, you will understand clearly enough that it is every honest man’s privilege to woo where his heart directs. He must woo honestly, of course, but the honest wooing of a man is no wrong and no insult to a maid. Only a morbid self-consciousness like your own could imagine otherwise.”

“Then you would wish me to—”

“I wish nothing in the case. I have said all that I shall say. If I have spoken severely, it has been because I have little patience with your diseased imaginings. I don’t think I like you very well just now.”

She left him to think.

XXIV

EVELYN’S BOOK

LATE that day, came a letter and a parcel from Evelyn to Dorothy. In the letter the girl wrote:—

I am going to stay here at Branton for two or three more days. That is because I do not want to be with you while you are reading the book I have written for you. Two or three days will be enough for the reading. Then I am going back to Wyanoke. I have been over to the hospital camp every morning, so I don’t need to tell you that I am perfectly well.

I am sending the book by the boy who is to carry this. Please read it within two days, so that I may go home to Wyanoke. You know how much I love you, so I needn’t put anything about that in this letter. But Edmonia sends her love, and so does Mrs. Pegram. What a dear she is! She wants me to call her ‘Agatha,’ and I’m beginning to do so. But I would like it better if she would let me say ‘Cousin Agatha’ instead. Somehow that seems more like what I feel.

I reckon Colonel Kilgariff will be going back to Petersburg about now. If he hasn’t gone yet, please give him my regards and good wishes. I hope he won’t get himself wounded again.

Dorothy faithfully delivered Evelyn’s peculiarly reserved message to Kilgariff, whereupon the young gentleman declared his purpose of returning to Petersburg on the third day following, that being the earliest return that Arthur, as his surgeon, would permit.

“But I shall call at Branton to see Evelyn first,” he added. This brought a queer look into Dorothy’s eyes, but whether it was a look of pleasure, or of regret, or of simple surprise, he could not make out. “After all,” he thought, “it doesn’t matter. I have decided to take this affair into my own hands. And they shall be strong hands too—not weak and irresolute, as they have been hitherto.”

Before opening the manuscript, Dorothy sent off a young negro to Branton, with a little note to Evelyn, in which she wrote:—

I shall not read a line of what you have written until I have told you how much gratified I am that you have wanted in this way to tell me about yourself. It means much to me that you wish to tell me those things, whatever they may be, that concern you. Another thing I want to say to you before reading your manuscript, and that is that no matter what it may reveal, I shall love and cherish you just the same. You remember what I said to you once—that I _know you_, and that no fact or circumstance of the past can in the least alter my feelings toward you. Be very sure of that. Now I am going to read your manuscript.

She began the task at once. This is what she read:—

EVELYN’S BOOK

WRITTEN FOR DOROTHY AND NOBODY ELSE

Preface

I AM going to tell you all about myself in this book, Dorothy—or at least all that I know. I have wanted to tell you, ever since you began being so good to me, and I began to love you. I reckon you won’t like some of the things I must tell, but I can’t help that: I must tell you all of them anyhow, because it is right that I should. I couldn’t tell you so long as I thought I had sworn not to. Now that you have explained to me about a parole, I am going to do it. But I am going to put it in writing, because I can tell it better that way. And besides, I might forget some things if I tried to tell them all with my tongue. And there are some of the things which you may want to read about more than once, so as to make up your mind about them.

Now that is all of the preface.

Chapter the First