“No, ma’am.”
It was not the customary official negative; a tawdry benevolence of face went with it, as if to say he did not charge because he would not; and when Mary returned a faint beam of appreciation he went out upon the rear platform and wiped the plenteous dust from his shoulders and cap. Then he returned to his seat at the stove and renewed his conversation with a lieutenant in hard-used blue, who said “the rebel lines ought never to have been allowed to fall back to Nashville,” and who knew “how Grant could have taken Fort Donelson a week ago if he had had any sense.”
There were but few persons, as we have said, in the car. A rough man in one corner had a little captive, a tiny, dappled fawn, tied by a short, rough bit of rope to the foot of the car-seat. When the conductor by and by lifted the little Alice up from the cushion, where she sat with her bootees straight in front of her at its edge, and carried her, speechless and drawn together like a kitten, and stood her beside the captive orphan, she simply turned about and pattered back to her mother’s side.
“I don’t believe she even saw it,” said the conductor, standing again by Mary.
“Yes, she did,” replied Mary, smiling upon the child’s head as she smoothed its golden curls; “she’ll talk about it to-morrow.”
The conductor lingered a moment, wanting to put his own hand there, but did not venture, perhaps because of the person sitting on the next seat behind, who looked at him rather steadily until he began to move away.
This was a man of slender, commanding figure and advanced years. Beside him, next the window, sat a decidedly aristocratic woman, evidently his wife. She, too, was of fine stature, and so, without leaning forward from the back of her seat, or unfolding her arms, she could make kind eyes to Alice, as the child with growing frequency stole glances, at first over her own little shoulder, and later over her mother’s, facing backward and kneeling on the cushion. At length a cooky passed between them in dead silence, and the child turned and gazed mutely in her mother’s face, with the cooky just in sight.
“It can’t hurt her,” said the lady, in a sweet voice, to Mary, leaning forward with her hands in her lap. By the time the sun began to set in a cool, golden haze across some wide stretches of rolling fallow, a conversation had sprung up, and the child was in the lady’s lap, her little hand against the silken bosom, playing with a costly watch.
The talk began about the care of Alice, passed to the diet, and then to the government, of children, all in a light way, a similarity of convictions pleasing the two ladies more and more as they found it run further and further. Both talked, but the strange lady sustained the conversation, although it was plainly both a pastime and a comfort to Mary. Whenever it threatened to flag the handsome stranger persisted in reviving it.
Her husband only listened and smiled, and with one finger made every now and then a soft, slow pass at Alice, who each time shrank as slowly and softly back into his wife’s fine arm. Presently, however, Mary raised her eyebrows a little and smiled, to see her sitting quietly in the gentleman’s lap; and as she turned away and rested her elbow on the window-sill and her cheek on her hand in a manner that betrayed weariness, and looked out upon the ever-turning landscape, he murmured to his wife, “I haven’t a doubt in my mind,” and nodded significantly at the preoccupied little shape in his arms. His manner with the child was imperceptibly adroit, and very soon her prattle began to be heard. Mary was just turning to offer a gentle check to this rising volubility, when up jumped the little one to a standing posture on the gentleman’s knee, and, all unsolicited and with silent clapping of hands, plumped out her full name:—