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.