“You’re a good soul, Nanse,” muttered Mr. Miles down in his throat in the pauses between bolting mouthfuls of bacon. “Come and have your supper with me, lass, and I’ll kiss you again as soon as I have finished.”
Mr. and Mrs. Miles had no thought save of disposing of Prince to the landlord of the Hare and Hounds the first thing next morning, though they gave him, as a matter of course also, the scraps of their supper and leave to sleep at their hearth.
But the new day brought new ideas. Little Freddy—named proudly for Nanse’s little master in the last situation she had filled—fell sick in the night, and was still ill and cross in the morning when Nanse rose to light the fire and prepare the breakfast. Mr. Miles, who kept the child while the mother was thus engaged, thought to divert the boy, and partly succeeded, by drawing his attention to the strange bow-wow which daddy had brought home while Freddy was asleep last night.
“You had better leave the brute all the morning, Miles, since Freddy is so taken with him,” suggested the anxious mother. “Pretty dear! he has left off crying to watch the dog. I suppose the creature will be quiet enough if nobody meddles with him, and I shall take care that neither Freddy nor Louie teases him. You will be in and out, and you can take the dog away at dinner-time quite as well as now. Perhaps the child will be better then.”
When the dinner hour came the child was not better, but worse, lying listlessly with flushed face and heavy eyes, which, however, still lightened a little as they followed the entrancing apparition of the dog. Mr. and Mrs. Miles could not bear to remove the solace of their sick child, and hour by hour and day by day the departure of Prince was deferred.
In this period of probation I am glad to say that Prince’s conduct was irreproachable. As Nanse fed the dog regularly, that the child, who could not eat himself, might have the pleasure of seeing the dog eat, and with a faint hope that Freddy might be induced to follow the “doggie’s” example, Prince was not exposed to the temptation of hunger, which had already proved too much for his virtue. For that matter he had not stolen in private houses, his depredations had been committed in shops, and his dulness was in his favour at this epoch, as it did not suggest an analogy between Nanse’s little larder and the regions from which he had been wont to pick and steal.
Then it was found true here, as elsewhere, that if there is any lingering remnant of good in the rudest, most brutalised man or dog, a helpless little child will call it forth. Prince, as a rule, hated fondling, but he had some experience of children. Though Jack had been twice Freddy’s age when he appropriated the dog—a strong puppy in the street, Jack had always possessed, more or less, small brothers and sisters, with whom Prince had been on friendly, familiar terms. Prince knew, therefore, that fondlings and sundry other liberties—such as clutching him round the neck, or pulling him by the tail—must be put up with from senseless little children, although no dog of spirit would stand them for a moment from grown-up, rational people.
Prince sat like patience on a monument, and permitted Freddy to stroke his bristly hair backwards with hot little hands, or to hold on by his ears, without uttering one note of protest, till Mrs. Miles cried out of her full heart to her husband, “Miles, let us keep the dog ourselves; we’re not so hard up or so near that we’ll miss his bite. We’ve had no cat since poor Kitty was took in the rabbit warren. He may earn something for his living if he can be got to go out and do a turn at ratting for a neighbour at a time. Anyway, he can always watch your dinner till you’re ready, when you carry it with you to your place of work; and he is good to the child. I feel as if dear little Freddy will get well again, and that the dog may bring luck to the house, though he came to it at an unlucky time.”
Of course, and very properly, Mr. Miles laughed and scouted at Prince’s bringing luck; and it was not in consequence of any such vain womanish superstition, but because families like Mr. Miles’ are tolerably sure on the whole, and in spite of troubles, to rise in the social scale—just as families like poor Jack’s are as certain to decline, that the occupants of the cottage did begin to prosper from the hour that Prince crossed their threshold.