"Madam, my purse is at your service," exclaimed Topsparkle eagerly, taking out a well-filled pocket-book, and selecting a couple of bank-notes. "Here is a trifling sum which will enable you to pay your neighbour and leave a surplus for some future transactions of the same kind, or for another hood like that which becomes you so admirably. Pray, never hesitate to call upon me for any petty assistance of this kind."
The fair Coralie cooed her thanks with a gentle murmuring as of a wood-pigeon, and ventured so far as to imprint her rosy lips upon her benefactor's lean hand, a kiss which Mr. Topsparkle received as a compliment, although he stealthily wiped his hand with his cambric handkerchief the next minute.
"And you say that my poor Louis is odd at times," he said caressingly. "I hope he does not drink?"
"I think not, sir. There is a terrible deal of drinking goes on in our house, but I doubt if my husband is ever the worse for liquor. But he has strange fits sometimes of a night, cannot sleep, or sleeps but for five minutes at a time, and then starts up from his bed and walks up and down the room, saying that he is haunted, haunted by the souls he has ruined. He says there is a ghost in thishouse."
"Indeed," cried Mr. Topsparkle, looking around him, and assuming his airiest manner, "and yet I do not fancy this looks like the habitation of ghosts. There are no cobwebs festooning the walls, no bats and owls flitting across the ceiling, no dirt, decay, or desolation."
"Nay, sir, it is a splendid house, full of beautifulest things. Yet I have heard my husband on those sleepless nights of his when he has talked more to himself than to me—I have heard him say that he has rushed out of this house at twilight with the cold sweat pouring down his face."
"Then, my dear lady, I fear there is no room to doubt that your husband has taken to drink. The symptoms you depict are precisely those of a drunkard's disease known to all medical men. The sleepless nights—the imagination of ghosts and phantoms—the cold sweat—these are as common and as plain as the pustules that denote smallpox or the spots that indicate scarlet fever. If your husband does not drink openly, be assured he drinks deep in secret. You had better get him away from London. What say you to returning to your native country?"
Mrs. Fétis shrugged her shoulders with a doubtful air. She often talked rapturously of La Belle France, raved of her sunny south, that gracious city of Périgord where she had been born and reared to the age of fifteen. Yet for all the common purposes of life she had liked London a great deal better.
"There is nothing I should love so much," she protested. "But 'twould be madness to leave a house in which we have sunk all our means and our labour with the hope of getting our reward by a competence in our old age. Indeed, sir, we could not afford to leave Poland Street."
"Not if you were amply provided for elsewhere?" asked Topsparkle.