Evelyn Byrd

“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 BOOKWRITTEN FOR DOROTHY AND NOBODY ELSEPreface

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

I DON’T know where I was born. I reckon it must have been somewhere in Virginia, because, when I first saw you and heard you speak, I felt as if I had got back home again after a long stay away. Your voice and the way you pronounced your words seemed so natural to me that I think the people about me when I was a child must have talked in the same way. You know how quickly I fell into the Virginia way of speaking. That was because it all seemed so natural to me.

So I think I must have been born in Virginia. At any rate I had a black mammy. I remember her very well. She was very, very big – taller than a tall man, and very broad across her back. I know that, because she used to get down on the floor and let me ride on her back, making believe she was a horse.

Her name was Juliet. When I read about Romeo and Juliet years afterward, I remember laughing at Shakespeare for not knowing that Juliet was big and strong and black. That must have been while I was still a little child, or I should have understood better. Besides, I remember where I was when I read the play, and I know I was only a little child when I was there.

That is all I remember about my life in Virginia, if it was in Virginia that I was born. There must have been other people besides Juliet around me at that time, but I do not remember anything about them. I cannot recall what kind of a house we lived in; but I do remember playing on a beautiful lawn under big trees. And I recollect that there were a great many squirrels there, just as there are in the trees in your Wyanoke grounds. It is strange, isn’t it, that I should remember the squirrels and not the people? But perhaps that is because I used to feed the squirrels and play with them, and one day one of them bit me painfully. I must have been treating it badly.