‘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 the landlady; ‘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.