“I should rather hope I would not,” replied Cradock, looking grand.
“Oh, I did not know. I beg your pardon, Iʼm sure. I would go myself, only Sally is out, and the boy gone home ever so long ago. I beg your pardon, Iʼm sure, Mr. Newman; I thought you were so good–natured.”
“Mrs. Ducksacre,” said Cradock, “you utterly misunderstand me. I replied to the form of your sentence, perhaps, rather than to its meaning. What I meant was, that I should rather hope I would not think it below me to go home with this little dear. If I could suppose it any disgrace to me, I should deserve to be kicked by your errand–boy all round this shop, Mrs. Ducksacre; and I am surprised you misunderstand me so. Why, I know this little girl well; and her name is Louisa Jupp.”
“Tiss Loo,” said the little child, standing up on tiptoe, and spreading out her arms to Cradock. All the children loved him, as the little ones at Nowelhurst would run after Mr. Rosedew. Children are even better judges of character than dogs.
“Why, you poor little soul,” said Crad, as he seated her on his strong right arm with her little cheek to his, and she drew a thousand straws of light through her lashes from the gas–jet, which she had never yet been so close to, “how hot and dry your lips are! I hope you are not taking the—sickness”—he was going to say “fever,” but feared to frighten Loo.
“Mother fray,” cried the small girl, proud of the importance accruing to her, “Loo dot wever; Irishers dot bad wever on the foor below mother. Loo det nice thins, and lay abed, if me dot the wever.”
“Put the poor childʼs things, whatever they are, in a basket, Mrs. Ducksacre. How odd her little legs feel! And a shillingʼs worth of grapes, if you please, in a bag by themselves. Hereʼs the money for them. You know Iʼll bring back the basket. But the bags donʼt come back, do they?”
“No, sir, of course not. Half–a–crown a gross for the small ones, with the name and the cross–handle basket, and the cabbage and carrots, sir. Sixpence more for cornopean–pattern with a pineapple, and grapes and oranges. But lor, sir, the cornopean” [cornucopiæ] “would frighten half our customers. The basket–pattern pays better for an advertisement than to get them back again, even if parties would bring them, which I knows well they never would, sir.”
Then Cradock set forth with the child on his arm, his coat thrown over his shoulders, and the best shillingʼs worth of foreign grapes—Mrs. Ducksacre never bought English ones—and the best three farthingʼs worth of potatoes and onions that was made that day by any tradesman in any part of London, not excluding “them low costers,” as the Ducksacre firm expressed it.
Little Loo Juppʼs sore throat proved to be, as Cradock feared it would, the first symptom of scarlet fever; and the young man had the pleasure—one of the highest and purest pleasures which any man can have—of saving a human life. He watched that trembling flame of life, and fostered it, and sheltered it, as if “the hopes of a nation hung”—as the penny–a–liners love to say of some babe not a whit more valuable—upon its feeble flicker. He hired another room for her, where the air was purer; he made the doctor attend to the case, which at first that doctor cared little to do; he brought her many a trifling comfort; in a word, he waited upon her so that the old women of the court called him thenceforth “Nurse Newman.”