Evelyn Byrd

Evelyn was pale and trembling. Kilgariff saw that it was difficult for her to stand, so, taking her hand, he said: —

“Let us sit; I have a long story to tell.” Whether purposely or not, he continued to hold her hand after they were seated. Whether consciously or not, she permitted him to do so, without protest. He went on: —

“There was only one other way to accomplish my purpose. It was and still is my wish that everything I have in the world shall be yours when I die. You are the woman I love, and though I have no right to say so to you now, my love for you is the one supreme passion of my life – the first, the last, the only one. Pardon me for saying that, and please forget it, at least for the present. I have relatives, but they are worse than dead to me, as you shall hear presently. I would rather destroy everything I have by fire or flood than allow one cent of it to pass into their unworthy hands. Enough of that. Let me go on.

“There was only one way in which I could carry out my purpose, and that was the one I adopted. I could not consult you about it or ask your permission, for that would have been indeed to affront you in precisely the way in which you now tell me I have affronted you. It would have been to ask you to accept a money gift at my hands while I yet lived. I intended, instead, to give you all I possess, only after my death and in effect by my will or its equivalent. I did not intend you to be embarrassed by any knowledge of my act, until a bullet or shell should have laid me low. Now I want you to speak, please. I want you to say that you understand, and that you forgive me.”

“I understand,” she said; “there is nothing to forgive; but now that I know your purpose, I cannot permit it. You must cancel those papers.”

“Does it make no difference that I have told you I love you, and that I should entreat you to be my wife if I were free to do so?”

“I do not see,” she replied, “that that makes a difference.”

“Do not decide the matter now, wait!” he half entreated, half commanded. “Let me finish what I have to say. Let me tell you why I must do this thing. Wait!”

He paused for a moment, as if collecting his thoughts. Then he told her his life-story, omitting nothing, concealing nothing, palliating nothing. That done, he went on: —

“You understand now why I was driven to the course I have adopted with you. You understand that as an honourable man I could not ask you for love, leaving you in ignorance of the fact that I am under a conviction of felony. My sentence is at an end, of course, and I cannot be rearrested, inasmuch as I am officially adjudged to be dead. But that makes no difference in my duty. I could not honourably reveal my love to you until you should know the facts. I do not now ask you to accept my wrecked life and to forget the facts that have wrecked it. I have no right to ask so great a sacrifice at your hands. I ask only that you shall permit me to regard you as the woman I love, the woman I should have sought to make my wife if I had been worthy. I ask your permission so to arrange my affairs, or so to leave them as already arranged, that at my death all that I have will pass into your hands. You can never know or dream or imagine how I love you, Evelyn. Surely it is only a little thing that I ask of you.”

As he delivered this passionate utterance, Kilgariff threw his arm around the girl’s waist, and for a moment held her closely. She let her head rest upon his shoulder, and did not resist or resent his impulse when he kissed her reverently upon the forehead.

But an instant later, she suddenly realised the situation, and quickly sprang to her feet, he rising with her and facing her with strained nerves and eyes fixed upon her own, sternly but caressingly.

Evelyn Byrd was not given to tears, and for that reason the drops that now trickled down her cheeks had far more meaning to Kilgariff than a woman’s tears sometimes have for a man.

For a time, she looked him full in the face, not attempting to conceal her tears even by brushing them away. She simply let them flow, as an honest expression of her emotion.

Finally she so far composed herself as to speak.

“Owen Kilgariff,” she said – it was the first time she had ever so addressed him – “Owen Kilgariff, you have dealt honestly with me; I want to deal honestly with you. If I were worthy of your love, I should rejoice in it. As it is, this is the greatest calamity of my life. You do not know – but you shall. There are reasons that forbid me to accept the love you have offered – peremptory reasons. You shall know them quickly.”

With that she glided out of the room, and Owen Kilgariff was left alone.

XXXI

THE LAST FLIGHT OF EVELYN

EVELYN went for a few minutes to her room. There she bathed her eyes; for like all women, she was ashamed of the tears that did her honour by attesting the tender intensity of her womanhood.

That done, she went to the laboratory, where she found Dorothy at work. To her she said: —

“Please let me have my book. I want Mr. Kilgariff to read it.”

Dorothy asked no explanation. She needed none. She went at once and fetched the manuscript. Evelyn took it and returned to the parlour, where she placed it in Kilgariff’s hands.

“Please read that, carefully,” she said. “Then you will understand.”

“If you mean,” he replied, “that anything this manuscript may reveal concerning your past life can lessen my love for you, you are utterly wrong, and the reading is unnecessary. If you wish only that I shall know you better, and more perfectly understand the influences that have made you the woman you are, I shall be glad to read every line and word that you have written.”

“Please read it.” That was all she said, and she instantly left the room.

Five minutes later she told Dorothy she wanted the carriage.

“I want to go to Warlock,” she said, “on a little visit to Mrs. Pegram. Oh, Dorothy! you understand.”

“Yes, dear,” answered Dorothy, “I understand. It is rather late to start to Warlock. It is a thirty-mile drive. But I’ll give you Dick for your coachman, and there is a moon. Dick is quite a military man now, and he knows what a forced march means. He’ll get you to Warlock in time for a late supper.”

Dick drove like a son of Jehu. After the manner of the family negro in Virginia, he shrewdly conjectured what was in the wind; and when he put up his horses at Warlock before even the regular supper was served, he said to the stableman: —

“I reckon mebbe Mas’ Owen Kilgariff’ll want stablin’ here for a good horse to-morrow, an’ purty soon in de mawnin’ at dat.”

XXXII

THE END OF IT ALL

DICK was right. Kilgariff read nearly all night, and finished Evelyn’s book in the small hours of the morning. Then he slept more calmly than he had done at any time during recent weeks.

At six o’clock he went to the kitchen and negotiated with Aunt Kizzey, the cook, for an immediate cup of coffee. Then he mounted the war-horse that had brought him to Wyanoke – sleek and strong, now, and full of gallop – and set off for Warlock plantation.

When he got there, the nine o’clock breakfast was just ready, but he had luckily met Evelyn in a strip of woodland, where she was walking in spite of the snow that lay ankle-deep upon the ground. Dismounting, he said to her: —

“I have read your book from beginning to end, Evelyn. I have come now for your answer to my question.”

“What question?” she asked, less frankly than was her custom.

“Will you be my wife?”

“Yes – gladly,” she said, “if my story makes no difference.”

“It makes a great difference,” he responded. “It tells me, as nothing else could, what a woman you are. It intensifies my love, and my resolution to make all the rest of your life an atonement to you for the suffering you have endured.”

The next day Evelyn cut short her visit to Warlock and returned to Wyanoke. At the same time Kilgariff went back to Petersburg to bear his part in the closing scenes of the greatest war of all time.

Grant was already in possession of the Weldon Railroad. With his limitless numbers, he had been able to stretch his line southward and westward until his advance threatened the cutting off of the two other railroads that constituted Richmond’s only remaining lines of communication southward. Lee’s small force, without hope of reinforcement, had been stretched out into a line so long and so thin that at many points the men holding the works stood fully a dozen yards apart.

Still, they held on with a grim determination that no circumstance could conquer.

They perfectly knew that the end was approaching. They perfectly knew that that end could mean nothing to them but disaster. Nevertheless, they stood to their guns and stubbornly resisted every force hurled against them. With heroic cheerfulness, they fought on, never asking themselves to what purpose. Throughout the winter they suffered starvation and cold; for food was scarce, and of clothing there was none.

Surely the spectacle was one in contemplation of which the angels might have paused in admiration. Surely the heroism of those devoted men was an exhibition of all that is best in the American character, a display of courage which should be for ever cherished in the memory of all American men.

When the spring came, and the roads hardened, Grant delivered the final blow. Sherman had cut the Confederacy in two by his march to the sea, and was now, in overwhelming force, pushing his way northward again, with intent to unite his army with Grant’s for Lee’s destruction.

Then Grant concentrated a great army on his left and struck a crushing blow. Lee withdrew from Richmond and Petersburg, and made a desperate endeavour to retreat to some new line of defence farther south.

The effort was foredoomed to failure. It ended in the surrender at Appomattox of a little fragment of that heroic Army of Northern Virginia which had for so long stood its ground against overwhelming odds, and so manfully endured hunger and cold and every other form of suffering that may befall the soldier.

It was during that last retreat that Kilgariff and Evelyn met for the first time since they had plighted troth, and for the last time as mere man and woman, not husband and wife.

Kilgariff, a brigadier-general now, had been ordered to take command of the guns defending the rear. By night and by day he was always in action. But when the line of march passed near to Wyanoke, he sent a messenger to Evelyn, bearing a note scrawled upon a scrap of paper which he held against his saddle-tree, in lieu of a desk. In the note he wrote simply: —

Come to me, wherever I am to be found. I want you to be my wife before I die. You have courage. Come to me – we’ll be married in battle, and the guns shall play the wedding march.

Evelyn responded to the summons, and these two were made one upon the battlefield, with bullets flying about their heads and rifle shells applauding.

The ceremony ended, Evelyn rode away to Wyanoke to await the end. A week later Owen Kilgariff joined her there.

“We are beginning life anew,” he said, “and together.”

“Yes,” she answered, “and at last I have nothing to fear.”

THE END

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