Then, indeed, all were ready enough to
stand aloof; a coach was procured, I know not how, and poor Cornelia
was lifted into it, still unconscious, or only moaning a little. I
could not let the poor young stepmother go with her alone, and no one
else would make the offer, the dread of contagion keeping all at a
distance, after what had passed. At first I think Madame van Hunker
hardly perceived who was with her, but as I spoke a word or two in
English, as we tried to accommodate the inanimate form between us,
she looked up and said: 'Ah! I should not have let you come, Madame!
I do everything wrong. I pray you to leave me!' Then, as I of
course refused, she added: 'Ah, you know not---' and then whispered
in my ear, though the poor senseless girl would scarce have caught
the sound, the dreadful word 'smallpox.' I could answer at once that
I had had it--long, long ago, in my childish days, when my
grandmother nursed me and both my brothers through it, and she
breathed freely, I asked her why she apprehended it, and she told me
that some weeks ago her husband had taken the whole party down to his
pleasure-house in the country, to superintend some arrangement in his
garden, which he wished to make before the frost set in.
He and his daughter Veronica had been ailing for some days, but it
was only on that very morning that tidings had come to the Hague that
the smallpox had, on the very day of their visit, declared itself in
the family of the gardener who kept the house, and that two of his
children were since dead.
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