“That’s true enough,” observed a man who had not yet taken part in the discussion, except to laugh now and then. “But remember, Bootles, if you saddle yourself with the child you will have to go on with it. It will stick to you like a burr, and though we are all ready to accept your word of honor, the world may not be so. If you put the brat out to nurse in the regiment, the story may crop up years hence, just when you least desire or expect it; and, you know, a story—mixed and confused by time and repetition—about a deserted wife may come to have a very ugly sound about it. Now if, as the colonel suggests, you send the child to the workhouse, you wash your hands of the whole business. Then, again, if the brat is brought up in the regiment, with the disadvantage of your protection, what will she be in twenty years’ time? Neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring. Far better the oblivion of pauperism than the distinction among the men of being Captain Ferrers’s—shall we say protégée?”
“Yes, there’s a great deal in that,” Bootles admitted. He had at all times a great respect for Harkness, and profound faith in the soundness of his judgment. He saw at once that any plan of bringing the child up among the married people of the regiment would not do, and yet—the workhouse.
He rose from the table and settled his forage cap upon his head. “I dare say you fellows will laugh at me,” he said, almost desperately, as he pulled the chin-strap over his mustache, “but I can’t condemn that helpless thing to the workhouse—I can’t, and that’s all about it. It seems to me,” he went on, rubbing the end of his whip on the back of a chair, and looking at no one—“it seems to me that the child’s future in this world and the next depends upon the course I take now. And you may laugh at me—I dare say you will,” he said, quite nervously for him—“but I shall get a proper nurse to take charge of it, and I shall keep it myself until some one turns up to claim it—or—or for good.”
“I can’t condemn that helpless thing to the workhouse”
Just then officers’-call sounded, and Bootles made a clean bolt of it, leaving his brother officers staring amazedly at one another. The first of them to make a move was Lacy—the first, too, to speak.
“Upon my soul,” said he, “Bootles is a devilish fine fellow; and, d— it all,” he added, getting very red, and scarcely drawling, in his intense rage of admiration, “if there were a few more fellows in the world like him, it would be a vewry diffewrent place to what it is.”
CHAPTER III.
As soon as Bootles had a spare moment he made his way to the adjutant’s quarters, where he found Mrs. Gray playing with the mysterious baby.