Part 6

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

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

S. COOPER, Adj’t-general, Richmond.

DEAR SIR:—

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

Yours truly,

EVELYN BYRD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he did not explain.

VIII

SOME REVELATIONS OF EVELYN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dorothy made no response to that.

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

Again Dorothy sat silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The girl flushed crimson. Presently she answered:—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you mean?”

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

“Go on, I am interested.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why, little Mis’, you don’ know—”

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