Dr. Bentzen was exultant; at last it was his fortune to win the battle with that stiffnecked inflammation.
Then Madam Speckbom could be still no longer, and there was a great scandal. Miss Falbe had to step out of the institution’s directorate where she had perhaps been secretly disliked already; Dr. Bentzen was in a rage, and little Elsie, herself, had to suffer on account of her new bright eyes.
But Madam Speckbom took the child home with her then—partly because she was well-to-do and good-hearted, partly because Elsie’s bright eyes were a testimony for her of her skill as an oculist; and finally, she used the child to tease Dr. Bentzen with.
He could never go by the Ark—and his road lay by it many times a day—but Madam Speckbom would seize the child, set her up in the window, and thump her on the neck, so she would bow to the doctor. And when she could get him to look in with his malicious grin, Madam Speckbom would shake her six curls in triumph and give Loppen a piece of candy.
As she grew up, Elsie became a fine, slender girl—blonde and a little pale, but still healthy.
She was sprightly and nimble, and had a way of her own of keeping herself and everything about her neat and orderly. But when Madam Speckbom began to try to have her wash, scour, sew, and “be of use,” Loppen showed herself utterly incapable. She “felt bad” here and there, and all Madam’s good counsel and bitter scoldings were without result.
Madam Speckbom was, as I have said, a wise woman too. She very well understood that disease which came exactly on scrubbing days, and always disappeared, as if by magic Sunday morning. But when she saw that the ailment in this case came up in an incurable form, she confined herself to shaking her curls and mumbling something about “that accursed, aristocratic blood.”
But the sick were fond of Loppen, although indeed she was not a faithful or sacrificing nurse. But if she only went through the room or thrust her head in at the door, it was as if their pains and weariness were lightened; and Madam Speckbom fully appreciated what a share of her cures she owed to Loppen’s merry laughter.
For it was laughter unlike all other laughter that was ever heard in Noah’s Ark. It could steal up the stairs and down into the cellar, through the keyhole to the sick, and right into men’s hearts, so that some became very tender and others had to laugh with her. But every one of them would give whatever you will, to hear Loppen laugh.
And she laughed free at everything and nothing. She had red lips and white sound teeth; but her eyes shone over all—they were Madam Speckbom’s pride, for the learned doctor had quite “given them up.”