As she received the missive she lifted her eyes, suffused, but full of hope, to his, and said:--
"G.o.d grant you the heart to do it, sir, and bless you."
The man laughed. Her eyes fell, she blushed, and, saying not a word, turned toward the door and had reached the threshold when the officer called, with a certain ringing energy:--
"Mrs. Richling!"
She wheeled as if he had struck her, and answered:--
"What, sir!" Then, turning as red as a rose, she said, "O sir, that was cruel!" covered her face with her hands, and sobbed aloud. It was only as she was in the midst of these last words that she recognized in the officer before her the sharper-visaged of those two men who had stood by her in Broadway.
"Step back here, Mrs. Richling."
She came.
"Well, madam! I should like to know what we are coming to, when a lady like you--a palpable, undoubted lady--can stoop to such deceptions!"
"Sir," said Mary, looking at him steadfastly and then shaking her head in solemn a.s.severation, "all that I have said to you is the truth."
"Then will you explain how it is that you go by one name in one part of the country, and by another in another part?"
"No," she said. It was very hard to speak. The twitching of her mouth would hardly let her form a word. "No--no--I can"t--tell you."
"Very well, ma"am. If you don"t start back to Milwaukee by the next train, and stay there, I shall"--
"Oh, don"t say that, sir! I must go to my husband! Indeed, sir, it"s nothing but a foolish mistake, made years ago, that"s never harmed any one but us. I"ll take all the blame of it if you"ll only give me a pa.s.s!"
The officer motioned her to be silent.
"You"ll have to do as I tell you, ma"am. If not, I shall know it; you will be arrested, and I shall give you a sort of pa.s.s that you"d be a long time asking for." He looked at the face mutely confronting him and felt himself relenting. "I dare say this does sound very cruel to you, ma"am; but remember, this is a cruel war. I don"t judge you. If I did, and could harden my heart as I ought to, I"d have you arrested now. But, I say, you"d better take my advice. Good-morning! _No, ma"am, I can"t hear you!_ So, now, that"s enough! Good-morning, madam!"
CHAPTER LIII.
TRY AGAIN.
One afternoon in the month of February, 1862, a locomotive engine and a single weather-beaten pa.s.senger-coach, moving southward at a very moderate speed through the middle of Kentucky, stopped in response to a handkerchief signal at the southern end of a deep, rocky valley, and, in a patch of gray, snow-flecked woods, took on board Mary Richling, dressed in deep mourning, and her little Alice. The three or four pa.s.sengers already in the coach saw no sign of human life through the closed panes save the roof of one small cabin that sent up its slender thread of blue smoke at one corner of a little badly cleared field a quarter of a mile away on a huge hill-side. As the scant train crawled off again into a deep, ice-hung defile, it pa.s.sed the silent figure of a man in b.u.t.ternut homespun, spattered with dry mud, standing close beside the track on a heap of cross-tie cinders and fire-bent railroad iron, a gray goat-beard under his chin, and a quilted homespun hat on his head.
From beneath the limp brim of this covering, as the train moved by him, a tender, silly smile beamed upward toward one hastily raised window, whence the smile of Mary and the grave, unemotional gaze of the child met it for a moment before the train swung round a curve in the narrow way, and quickened speed on down grade.
The conductor came and collected her fare. He smelt of tobacco above the smell of the coach in general.
"Do you charge anything for the little girl?"
The purse in which the inquirer"s finger and thumb tarried was limber and flat.
"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 pa.s.sed 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, pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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:--
"Alice Sevier Witchlin"!"
The husband threw a quick glance toward his wife; but she avoided it and called Mary"s attention to the sunset as seen through the opposite windows. Mary looked and responded with expressions of admiration, but was visibly disquieted, and the next moment called her child to her.
"My little girl mustn"t talk so loud and fast in the cars," she said, with tender pleasantness, standing her upon the seat and brushing back the stray golden waves from the baby"s temples, and the brown ones, so like them, from her own. She turned a look of amused apology to the gentleman, and added, "She gets almost boisterous sometimes," then gave her regard once more to her offspring, seating the little one beside her as in the beginning, and answering her musical small questions with composing yeas and nays.
"I suppose," she said, after a pause and a look out through the window,--"I suppose we ought soon to be reaching M---- station, now, should we not?"
"What, in Tennessee? Oh! no," replied the gentleman. "In ordinary times we should; but at this slow rate we cannot nearly do it. We"re on a road, you see, that was destroyed by the retreating army and made over by the Union forces. Besides, there are three trains of troops ahead of us, that must stop and unload between here and there, and keep you waiting, there"s no telling how long."
"Then I"ll get there in the night!" exclaimed Mary.
"Yes, probably after midnight."
"Oh, I shouldn"t have _thought_ of coming before to-morrow if I had known that!" In the extremity of her dismay she rose half from her seat and looked around with alarm.
"Have you no friends expecting to receive you there?" asked the lady.
"Not a soul! And the conductor says there"s no lodging-place nearer than three miles"--
"And that"s gone now," said the gentleman.
"You"ll have to get out at the same station with us," said the lady, her manner kindness itself and at the same time absolute.
"I think you have claims on us, anyhow, that we"d like to pay."
"Oh! impossible," said Mary. "You"re certainly mistaking me."
"I think you have," insisted the lady; "that is, if your name is Richling."