A week later, everybody at the Court end of London was talking of poor Mr. Topsparkle, who was stricken with smallpox, a malady which at his age was likely to be fatal, despite the assiduous attendance of fashionable physicians, learned in the latest treatment of this terrible disease.
People talked even more of Mr. Topsparkle's wife, who, with heroic self-abnegation, had insisted upon nursing her husband. She had shut herself up in his room with the sufferer, and never left that tainted atmosphere. She had been inoculated three years before, at Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's entreaty, submitting to the operation rather in sport than in earnest, to please that clever eccentric, whom she loved partly for the lady's own merits, and partly because she was related to Lavendale. She had suffered a slight attack of the disease, which her splendid constitution and high spirits had thrown off as lightly as if it had been but a fit of the vapours. And now, armed by this preparation, she took her seat fearlessly beside her husband's pillow; she ordered the servants in their goings to and fro between the sick-room and the outer world; she watched day and night, and took care that not the slightest detail in the regimen prescribed by the physicians should be neglected. She performed the duties of sick-nurse as one who had a natural genius for the task.
One night, in an interval of consciousness after a period of delirium, Mr. Topsparkle took his wife's hand in his, kissed it, and cried over it, and thanked her feebly for her devotion.
"I never expected that you would be so good to me," he faltered. "I know you never loved me."
"I owe you something for your indulgence," she answered gently. "You rescued me from genteel poverty; you let me waste your money as if it were water; and I have scarcely been grateful. I think it was less my fault than that of the world in which we live. It would have been so unfashionable to be grateful or over-civil to my husband," with a sardonic smile. "But now you are ill, I feel that I may do something to prove that my heart is not the nethermost millstone."
"And when I am dead you will marry Lavendale."
"O, but you are not going to die this bout. You are better to-night. Dr. Chessenden told me this morning there was a change for the better."
"Would I could feel it! But I don't, and I doubt the end is near. And when I am gone you will marry Lavendale."
"He was my first love," she answered gravely: "be assured I shall marry none other."