“All, well, you see, Captain Ferrers,” said the adjutant’s wife, with a smile, “it is rather inconvenient sometimes to have a character for great kindness of heart. I should say you are the greatest favorite in the regiment, and, naturally enough, the officers speak of it sometimes in society. ‘Oh, Bootles is this, and Bootles is that;’ ‘Bootles wouldn’t turn a dog from his door;’ ‘Bootles would share his last sixpence with a poor chap who was down,’ and so on. I have heard, Captain Ferrers, of your emptying your pockets to divide among three poor tramps who had begged no more than a pipe of tobacco. I have heard of your standing up for”—with a deeper smile—“the poor devils of casuals; and if I hear it, why not others? why not the mother of this child?”
“True. But I think you all overrate my character,” Bootles replied, modestly. “You know I don’t go in for being saintly at all.”
“That is just it. If you did you would have no more influence than Major Allardyce, whom every one laughs at. But you don’t; you are one of themselves, and yet you will always help a man who is down; you will do any unfortunate creature a good turn. Oh, I hear a good deal, though you choose to make light of it. And you know, Captain Ferrers, we are not told that the good Samaritan made a great spluttering about what he did; but the professional saints, the priest and the Levite, passed by on the other side.”
“You are very complimentary,” Bootles said, blushing a little; “much more than I deserve, I’m sure. The fellows”—laughing at the remembrance—“were much less merciful. Then about the child. Dawson suggests sending it to the police-station, the colonel to the workhouse; and one means the other, of course.”
Mrs. Gray caught the child to her breast with a cry of dismay, and Bootles went on:
“Yes, I feel as you do about it. I can’t do it, and that’s all about it. It would be on my conscience all my life. Besides, some day the mother might come back for it, and though of course, as the colonel says, there is no claim upon me, yet, if for the sake of a few pounds I had turned the poor little beggar adrift, ruined its life—why I simply couldn’t face her, and that’s all about it. And besides that, Mrs. Gray, I have a lurking suspicion that the letter is genuine, and that it was not written to or intended for me. It reads to me like the letter of a woman who was desperate.”
“Yes, a woman must have been desperate indeed to willingly part with such a child as that,” said Mrs. Gray, smoothing the gold baby curls.
“So I think, for nature is nature all the world over,” Bootles answered. “And besides, to tell you the honest truth, there is a resemblance in the child to some one I knew once—”
“Yes?” eagerly.
“Oh no, not that! She is dead. She was engaged to a fellow I knew, desperately fond of him, and he—jilted her.”