CHAPTER XIV.
‘YOU HAVE BUT TO SAY THE WORD.’
Mr. Smolendo was in his glory. In the words of his friends and followers he was coining money. He was a man to be cultivated and revered. A man for whom champagne suppers or dinners at Richmond were as nothing; a man for whom it was easier to lend a five-pound note than it is for the common ruck of humanity to advance half-a-crown. Flatterers fawned upon him, intimate acquaintances hung fondly upon him, reminding him pathetically that they knew him twenty years ago, when he hadn’t a sixpence, as if that knowledge of bygone adversity were a merit and a claim. A man of smaller mind might have had his mental equilibrium shaken by all this adulation. Mr. Smolendo was a man of granite, and took it for what it was worth. When people were particularly civil, he knew they wanted something from him.
‘The lessee of a London theatre is not a man to be easily had,’ he said; ‘he sees human nature on the ugliest side.’
Christmas had come and gone, the New Year was six weeks old, and Mr. Smolendo’s prosperity continued without abatement. The theatre was nightly crowded to suffocation. There were morning performances every Saturday. Stalls and boxes were booked a month in advance.
‘La Chicot is a little gold mine,’ said Mr. Smolendo’s followers.
Yes, La Chicot had the credit of it all. Mr. Smolendo had produced a grand fairy spectacle, in which La Chicot was the central figure. She appeared in half-a-dozen costumes, all equally original, expensive, and audacious. She was a fountain of golden water, draped exclusively in dazzling golden fringe, a robe of light, through which her finely-sculptured form flashed now and then, as the glittering fringe parted for an instant, like a revelation of the beautiful. She was a fishwoman in a scanty satin kirtle, scarlet stockings, and a high cap of finest Brussels lace. She was a bayadère, a debardeur, a wood nymph, an odalisque. She did not dance as she danced before her accident, but she was as beautiful as ever, and a trifle more impudent. She had learnt enough English to speak the lines of her part, and her accent gave a charm and a quaintness to the performance. She sang a comic song with more chic than melody, and was applauded to the echo. The critics told her she had ascended to a higher grade in the drama. La Chicot told herself that she was the greatest woman in London, as well as the handsomest. She lived in a circle of which she herself was the centre. The circumference was a ring of admirers. There was no world beyond.
Something to this effect she told her fellow lodger, Mr. Desrolles, one grey afternoon in February, when he dropped in to beg a glass of brandy, in order to stave off one of those attacks he so often talked about. She was always particularly friendly with the ‘Second Floor,’ as it was the fashion of the house to call this gentleman. He flattered and amused her, fetched and carried for her, and sometimes kept her company when she was in too low spirits to drink alone.
‘My good creature, you oughtn’t to live in such a hole as this. Upon my soul, you ought not,’ said Desrolles with an air that was half-protection, half-patronage.
‘I know I ought not,’ replied La Chicot. ‘There is not an actress in Paris who would not call me stupid as an owl for my pains.Que diable, I sacrifice myself for the honour of a husband who mocks himself of me, who amuses himself elsewhere, and leaves me to fret and pine alone. It is too much. See then, Desrolles, it may be that you think I boast myself when I tell you that one of the richest men in London is over head and ears in love with me. See, here are his letters. Read them, and see how much I have refused.’
She opened a work-basket on the table, and from a chaos of reels of cotton, tapes and buttons, and shreds and patches, extracted half-a-dozen letters, which she tossed across the table to Desrolles.
‘Do you leave your love-letters where your husband might so easily find them?’ asked Desrolles, wonderfully.
‘Do you suppose he would give himself the trouble to look at them?’ she cried scornfully. ‘Not he. He has so long left off caring for me himself, that he never supposes that anybody else can fall in love with me. Help yourself to that cognac, Monsieur Desrolles. It is the only safe drink in this miserable climate of yours; and put some coals on the fire,mon bonhomme. I am frozen to the marrow of my bones.’
La Chicot filled her glass by way of setting a good example, and emptied it as placidly as if the brandy had been sugar and water.
Desrolles looked over the letters she had handed him. They all went to the same tune. They told La Chicot that she was beautiful, and that the writer was madly in love with her. They offered her a carriage, a house in Mayfair, a settlement. The offers rose in value with the lapse of time.
‘How have you answered him?’ asked Desrolles, curious and interested.
‘Not at all. I knew better how to make myself valued. Let him wait for his answer.’
‘A man must be very hard hit to write like that,’ suggested the gentleman.
La Chicot shrugged her statuesque shoulders. She was lovely even in her more than careless attire. She wore a long loose dressing-gown of scarlet cashmere, girdled with a cord and tassels, which she tied and untied, and twisted and untwisted in sheer idleness. Her massy hair was rolled in a great rough knob at the back of her head, ready to escape from the comb and slide down her back at the slightest provocation. The dead white of her complexion showed like marble against the scarlet robe, the dense hair showed raven black above the pale brow and large luminous eyes.
‘Is he as rich as he pretends to be?’ asked La Chicot, thoughtfully swinging the heavy scarlet tassel, and lazily contemplating the fire.
‘To my certain knowledge,’ said Mr. Desrolles, with an oracular air, ‘Joseph Lemuel is one of the wealthiest men in London.’
‘I don’t see that it much matters,’ said La Chicot, meditatively. ‘I like money, but so long as I have enough to buy what I want, it’s all that I care about, and I don’t like that grim-looking Jew.’
‘Compare a house in Mayfair with this den,’ urged Desrolles.
‘Where is Mayfair?’
Desrolles described the neighbourhood.
‘A wilderness of dull streets,’ said La Chicot, with a contemptuous shrug. ‘What is one street better than another? I should like a house in the Champs Elysées—a house in a garden,dazzling white, all over flowers, with big, shining windows, and a Swiss stable.’
‘A house like a toy,’ said Desrolles. ‘Well, Lemuel could buy you one as easily as I could buy you a handful of sugar plums. You have but to say the word.’
‘It is a word that I shall never say,’ exclaimed La Chicot, decisively. ‘I am an honest woman. And then, I am too proud.’
Desrolles wondered whether it was pride, virtue, or rank obstinacy which made La Chicot reject such brilliant offers. It was not easy for him to believe in virtue, masculine or feminine. He had not travelled by those paths in which the virtues grow and flourish, but he had made intimate acquaintance with the vices. Since a certain interview with La Chicot’s husband, in which he had promised to keep a paternal eye upon the lady, Mr. Desrolles had wound himself completely into the wife’s confidence. He had made himself alike useful and agreeable. Though she kept her wealthy adorer at arm’s length, she liked to talk of him. The hothouse flowers he sent her adorned her table, and looked strangely out of place in the tawdry, littered room, where yesterday’s dust was generally left to be swept away to-morrow.
One thing La Chicot did not know, and that was that Mr. Desrolles had made the acquaintance of her admirer, and was being paid by Mr. Lemuel to plead his cause.
‘You seem to be better off than you used to be, my friend,’ she said to him one day. ‘Unless I deceive myself, that is a new coat.’
‘Yes,’ answered the man of the world, without blushing. ‘I have been dabbling a little on the Stock Exchange, and have had better luck than usual.’
Desrolles stirred the heaped-up coals into a blaze, and filled himself a third glass of cognac.
‘It’s as fine as a liqueur,’ he said, smacking his lips. ‘It would be a sin to dilute such stuff. By the way, when do you expect your husband?’
‘I never expect him,’ answered La Chicot. ‘He goes and comes as he chooses. He is like the wandering Jew.’
‘He is gone to Paris on business, I suppose!’
‘On business or pleasure. I neither know nor care which. He earns his living. Those ridiculous pictures of his please both in London and Paris. See here!’
She tossed him over a crumpled heap of comic papers, English and French. Her husband’s name figured in all, affixed to the wildest caricatures—scenes theatrical and Bohemian, sketches full of life and humour.
‘To judge from those you would suppose he was rather a cheerful companion,’ said La Chicot, ‘and yet he is more dismal than a funeral.’
‘He vents all his cheerfulness on his wood blocks,’ suggested Desrolles.
Of late Jack Chicot had been a restless wanderer, spending very little of his life in the Cibber Street lodging. There was not even the pretence of union between his wife and him, and there never had been since La Chicot’s recovery. They were civil to each other, for the most part; but there were times when the wife’s tongue grew bitter, and her evil temper flashed out like a thin thread of forked lightning cleaving a dark summer sky. The husband was always civil. La Chicot could not exasperate him into retaliation.
‘You hate me too much to lose your temper with me,’ she said to him one day in the presence of thelandlady; ‘you are afraid to trust yourself. If you gave way for a moment you might kill me. The temptation would be too strong for you.’
Jack Chicot said never a word, but stood with his arms folded, smiling at her, heaven knows how bitterly.
One day she stung him into speech.
‘You are in love with some other woman,’ she cried. ‘I know it.’
‘I have seen a woman who is not like you,’ he answered with a sigh.
‘And you are in love with her.’
‘For her unlikeness to you? That would be a charm, certainly.’
‘Go to her. Go to your ——’
The sentence ended in a foul epithet—one of the poison-flowers of Parisian argot.
‘The journey is too long,’ he said. ‘It is not easy to travel from hell to heaven.’
Jack Chicot had been once to the Prince Frederick Theatre since his wife’s return to the stage. He went on the first night of the grand spectacular burlesque which had brought Mr. Smolendo so much money. He sat looking on with a grave, unchanging face, while the audience around him grinned in ecstasy; and when La Chicot asked his opinion of the performance, he openly expressed his disgust.
‘Are not my costumes beautiful?’ she asked.
‘Very. But I should prefer a little less beauty and a little more decency.’
The rest of the audience were easier to please. They saw no indecency in the dresses. No doubt they saw what they had paid to see, and that contented them.
Never had woman more of her own way than La Chicot after that wonderful recovery of hers. She went where she liked, drank as much as she liked, spent every sixpence of her liberal salary on her own pleasure, and was held accountable by no one.Her husband was a husband only in name. She saw more of Desrolles than of Jack Chicot.
There was only one person who ever ventured to reprove or expostulate with her, and that was the man who had saved her life, at so large a sacrifice of time and care. George Gerard called upon her now and then, and spoke to her plainly.
‘You have been drinking again,’ he would say, while they were shaking hands.
‘I have had nothing since last night, when I took a glass of champagne with my supper.’
‘You mean a bottle; and you have had half a bottle of brandy this morning to correct the champagne.’
She no longer attempted to deny the impeachment.
‘Well, why should I not drink?’ she exclaimed, defiantly. ‘Who cares what becomes of me?’
‘I care: I have saved your life once, against long odds. You owe me something for that. But I cannot save you if you make up your mind to drink yourself to death. Brandy is a slow suicide, but for a woman of your temperament it’s as certain as prussic acid.’
Upon this La Chicot would dissolve in maudlin tears. It was a pitiful sight, and wrung the student’s heart. He could have loved her so well, would have tried so hard to save her, had it been possible. He did not know how heartless a piece of beautiful clay she was. He put down her errors to her husband’s neglect.
‘If she had been my wife, she might have been a very different woman,’ he said to himself, not believing the innate depravity of anything so absolutely beautiful as La Chicot.
He forgot how fair some poisonous weeds are, how beautiful the scarlet berries of the nightshade look when they star the brown autumn hedges.
So La Chicot went her way triumphantly. There was no danger to life or limb for her in the new piece—no perilous ascent to the sky borders. She drank as much brandy as she liked, and, so long as she contrived to appear sober before the audience, Mr. Smolendo said nothing.
‘I’m afraid she’ll drink herself into a dropsy, poor thing,’ he said compassionately one day to a friend at the Garrick Club. ‘But I hope she’ll last my time. A woman of her type could hardly be expected to draw for more than three seasons, and La Chicot ought to hold out for another year or so.’
‘After that, the hospital,’ said his friend.
Mr. Smolendo shrugged his shoulders.
‘I never trouble myself about the after-career of my artists,’ he answered pleasantly.