The prevailing afflictions of Mrs. Quinine, however, were neuralgia, and “a general debility of the system”—indeed, she was always suffering from her “poor poor nerves;” and though subject to the greatest depression of spirits in the presence of her husband, (for that gentleman seldom remonstrated with her, but she burst into a flood of tears, and declared he was “throwing her back,”) still, before company, she was always lively enough, excepting when the visitors made tender inquiries after her health, and then no one certainly could be more severely afflicted.
Nor was the “debility” under which the lady laboured less eccentric in its nature, for though it prevented her taking any exercise in the open air—but in a carriage or on horseback—still, when an invitation came to a dance, it in no way interfered with her polking in an “extremely low” dress half the night through.
Mr. Quinine was an eminent painter of “still-life;” and though his braces of partridges on canvas, and his dead hares, and his grapes and pine-apples “in oil” were highly admired, and fetched large sums, it was nevertheless as much as he could do to pay the physician’s fees by his game and fruit pieces. While his wife was breakfasting or supping off her dainties in bed, or “doing” the elegant and interesting invalid in white cambric on the sofa in the front room, or riding out in the Park, he, (poor man!) was painting away for dear life in his studio at the back of the house. This the clever little artist (for he stood but five foot five in his high-heeled Wellingtons) did without a murmur; for, truth to say, he doated on his dear Blanche, and strove, by making “studies” of the “birds” prescribed by Doctor Twaddles before they were cooked for his wife’s dinner, somehow or other to lessen the expenses of “the housekeeping;” for not one of the Doctor’s delectable dietetic prescriptions was ever sent to Covent Garden or Leadenhall Market to be “dispensed,” but the economic Quinine was sure to use it as a model before administering it to the patient.
But even if the little man had felt inclined to raise his voice against the course pursued, he would immediately have had the united battery of Twaddles and Blanche opened against him; and while the lady overpowered him with tears, the Doctor would have impressed upon him, in the most solemn manner, that unless Mrs. Quinine could be allowed to enjoy the greatest tranquillity of both mind and body, and be assured the gratification of her slightest wish, it was beyond the highest talent in the kingdom to undertake to say what distressing event might happen.
The opening of the Great Exhibition had operated almost as magically upon the nerves of the susceptible Mrs. Quinine, as an invitation to a Thé Dansante. Her bronchitis, and the “short hacking cough” which accompanied it, had almost disappeared under the influence of the delicious pâte de Guimauve, prescribed by Doctor Twaddles; the lady’s neuralgia had been dissipated by her steel medicine (and she had swallowed enough of that metal in her time to have admitted of being cut up into “magnum bonum” pens for the million); the “weak state of her nerves” no longer required the carriage-way in front of her house to be strewn with straw, nor the iron-hand of the street-door knocker to be embellished with a white kid glove; for the lady had grown suddenly “so much better,” that on requesting permission of Doctor Twaddles to visit the Exhibition, she declared that she felt herself quite equal to the task of exploring even its “five miles of galleries.”
Doctor Twaddles did not hesitate to confess himself delighted at the favourable change that had so evidently set in, saying it was due solely to the wonderful constitution of Mrs. Quinine; but, like a prudent man, he wished to “see how matters went on” for a short time, before he became a consenting party to her walking out—a thousand little things as he said might happen to throw her back again.
The consequence was that the lady made up her mind to take the Doctor by surprise at his next visit, and not only to be ready in the sitting-room to receive him when he called, but to be able to say that she had breakfasted down stairs, and felt herself in no way fatigued with the exertion.
Accordingly, Mrs. Quinine, for the first time since the coronation of Her Majesty Queen Victoria—when she had been obliged to be down in Parliament-street by six in the morning—had risen at daybreak. She had dressed herself with great care, so that she might be able to make the most favourable impression upon Twaddles. She had put on a clean white cambric robe-de-chambre, and left off applying the baby’s powder to her complexion; she had, moreover, such a delicate tinge of pink upon her cheeks, that it was difficult to say how the colour had got there in so short a space of time. Yesterday, she was as pale as if she had been white-washed—to-day, her cheeks were as pinky as the inner lining of a shell. Whether the change arose from the contrast of her white dress, or from the absence of the wonted “violet powder,” or whether from the faintest touch of the hare’s-foot that her prying maid had once discovered secreted in the lower tray of her dressing-case, must for ever remain one of those mysteries of the toilet that it is base presumption in Man to seek to unravel. Suffice it, Mrs. Quinine, even in her severest illness, never looked better; and as she left her bed-room, and gave a parting glance at herself in the long cheval-glass, she smiled with inward satisfaction at the appearance she made on her sudden restoration to health.
Now as the lady was slowly descending the stairs on her way to the breakfast room, Mr. Christopher Sandboys was rapidly mounting to an upper apartment, whither he had been directed by Mrs. Fokesell as the only convenient place where he could cleanse his face, hands, and clothes, from the dust of the “half-ton” of coals, in which he and the partner of his bosom had been almost smothered.