Evelyn Byrd. Eggleston George Cary
great commander was deeply impressed. Here was a young enlisted man whose conduct in action had been so conspicuously gallant and capable as to attract favourable mention from two corps commanders within a brief period of three or four days. General Lee officially recommended that a captain’s commission should be issued at once to a man so deserving of promotion and so fit to command.
The document did not reach Kilgariff until a fortnight later, after Arthur Brent had sent him to Wyanoke for treatment and careful nursing. Kilgariff took the commission in his enfeebled hands and carefully read it through, seeming to find some species of pleasure in perusing the formal words with which he was already familiar. Across the sheet was written in red ink: —
This commission is issued in accordance with the request of General R. E. Lee, commanding, in recognition of gallant and meritorious conduct in battle.
That rubric seemed especially to please the sick man. For a moment it brought light to his eyes, but in the next instant a look of trouble, almost of despair, overspread his face.
“Send it back,” he said to Evelyn, who was watching by the side of the couch that had been arranged for him in the broad, breeze-swept hall at Wyanoke. “Send it back; I do not want it.”
Ever since Kilgariff’s removal to the house of the Brents, Evelyn had been his nurse and companion, tireless in her attention to his comfort when he was suffering, and cheerily entertaining at those times when he was strong enough to engage in conversation.
“You know, it was he who took me out of the burning house,” she said to Dorothy, by way of explanation, not of apology; for in the innocent sincerity of her nature, she did not understand or believe that there can ever be need of an apology for the doing of any right thing.
For one thing, she was accustomed to write the brief and infrequent letters that Kilgariff wished written. These were mostly in acknowledgment of letters of inquiry and sympathy that came to him from friends in the army.
Usually he dictated the notes to her, and she wrote them out in a hand that was as legible as print and not unlike a rude print in appearance. At first glance her manuscript looked altogether masculine, by reason of the breadth of stroke and the size of the letters, but upon closer scrutiny one discovered in it many little peculiarities that were distinctly feminine.
Kilgariff asked her one day: —
“Who taught you to write, Evelyn?”
“Nobody. Nobody ever taught me much of anything till I came to live at Wyanoke.”
“How, then, did you learn to read and write, and especially to spell so well?”
The girl appeared frightened a bit by these questions, which seemed to be master keys of inquiry into the mystery of her early life. Kilgariff, observing her hesitation, said quickly but very gently: —
“There, little girl, don’t answer my ‘sick man’s’ questions. I didn’t mean to ask them. They are impertinent.”
“No,” she said reflectively, “nothing that comes from you can be impertinent, I reckon,” – for she was rapidly adopting the dialect of the cultivated Virginians. “You see, you took me out of that house afire, and so you have a right – ”
“I claim no right whatever, Evelyn,” he said, “and you must quit thinking about that little incident up there on the Rapidan.”
“Oh, but I can never quit thinking about that. You were great and good, and oh, so strong! and you did the best thing that ever anybody did for me.”
“But I would have done the same for a negro.”
“But you didn’t do it for a negro. You did it for me. So you see I am right about it. Am I not?”
“I suppose so. Your logic is a trifle lame, perhaps, but your heart is right. Never mind that now.”
“But I want to tell you all I can,” the girl resumed. “You see, I can’t tell you much, because I don’t know much about myself, and because they made me swear. But I can answer this question of yours. I don’t know just how I learned to read. I reckon somebody must have taught me that when I was so little that I have forgotten all about it. Anyhow, I don’t remember. But after I had read a good many books, there came a time when I couldn’t get any books, except three that I was carrying with me. That was when I was a little boy, and – ”
“A little boy? A little girl, you mean.”
“No, I mean a little boy, but I mustn’t tell you about that, only I have already told you that once I was a little boy. It slipped out, and you must forget it, please, for I didn’t mean to say it. I wasn’t really a boy, of course, but I had to wear a boy’s clothes and a boy’s name. Never mind that. You mustn’t ask me about it. As I was saying, when I grew tired of reading my three books over and over again, I decided to write some new ones for myself. The only trouble was that I had never learned to write. That didn’t bother me much, because I had seen writing and had read a little of it sometimes; so I knew that it was just the same as print, only that the letters were made more carelessly and some of them just a little differently in shape. I knew I could do it, after a little practice. I got some eagle’s quills from – ” here the girl checked herself, and bit her lip. Presently she continued: —
“I got some eagle’s quills from a man who had them, and I made myself some pens. I had some blank-books that had been partly written in at the – well, partly written in. But there wasn’t any ink there, so I made myself some out of oak bark and nutgalls, ‘setting’ the colour with copperas, as I had seen the people at the – well, as I had seen somebody do it in that way. It made very good ink, and I soon taught myself how to write. As for the spelling, I tried to remember how all the words looked in the books I had read, and when I couldn’t remember, I would stop writing and look through the three books I still had till I came upon the word I wanted. After that, I never had any trouble about spelling that word.”
“I should imagine not,” said Kilgariff. “But did you succeed in writing any books for yourself?”
“Yes, two of them.”
“What were they about?”
“Well, in one of them I wrote all I could remember about myself; they got hold of that and threw it into the fire.”
“Who did that?”
“Why – well, the people I was with – no, I mustn’t tell you about them. In another of my books I wrote all I had learned about birds and animals and trees and other things. I reckon I know a good deal about such things, but what I wrote was only what I had learned for myself by seeing so much of them. You see, I was alone a good deal then, except for the wild creatures, and I got pretty well acquainted with them. Even here, where they never knew me, I can call birds or squirrels to me out of the trees, and they soon get so they will come to me even without my calling them.”
“Is that book in existence still?” asked Kilgariff, with manifest eagerness.
“I reckon so, but maybe not. I really don’t know. Anyhow, I shall never see it again, of course, and nobody else would care for it.”
“Oh, yes, somebody else would. I would give a thousand dollars in gold for it at this moment.”
“Why, what for? It was only a childish thing, and besides I had never studied about such things.”
“Listen!” interrupted Kilgariff. “Do you know where science comes from, and what it is? Do you realise that absolutely every fact we know, of the kind we call scientific, was originally found out just by somebody’s looking and listening as you did with your animals and birds and flowers? And the persons who looked and listened and thought about what they saw, told other people about them in books, and so all our science was born? Those other people have put things together and given learned names to them, and classified the facts for convenience, but the ones who did the observing have always been the discoverers, the most profitable workers in science. Audubon was reckoned an idle, worthless fellow by the commonplace people about him, because he ‘wasted his time’ roaming about in the woods, making friends of the wild creatures and studying their habits. But