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.