“Ah,” sighed the landlady, “you don’t know how much you’ve lost. Her Lady Macbeth is as fine as Mrs. Siddons’s.”
“Did you ever see Mrs. Siddons?”
“No, but I’ve heard my mother talk about her. She couldn’t have been greater in the part than Mrs. Rawber. You should go and see her some night. She’d make your flesh creep.”
“And a respectable old party, I suppose,” suggested Jack Chicot.
“As regular as clockwork. Church every Sunday morning and evening. No hot suppers. Crust of bread and cheese and glass of ale left ready on her table against she comes home—lets herself in with her key—no sitting up for her. Chop and imperial pint of Guinness at two o’clock, when there ain’t no rehearsal, something plain and simple that can be kept hot on the oven top, when the rehearsal’s late. She’s a model lodger. No perquisites, but pay as regular as the Saturday comes round, and always the lady.”
“Ah,” said Jack, “that’s satisfactory. How about upstairs? I suppose you’ve another pattern of commonplace respectability on your second floor?”
The landlady gave a faint cough, as if she were troubled with a sudden catching of the breath, and her eyes wandered absently to the window, where she seemed to ask counsel from the grey October sky.
“Who are your upstairs lodgers?” asked Jack Chicot, repeating his inquiry with a shade of impatience.
“Lodgers? No, sir. There’s only one gentleman on my second floor. I have never laid myself out for families. Children are such mischievous young monkeys, and always tramping up and down stairs, or endangering their lives leaning out of winder, or leaving the street door open. And the damage they do the furniture! Well, nobody can understand that except them as have passed through the ordeal, No, sir, for the last six years I haven’t had a child across my threshold.”
“I wasn’t inquiring about children,” said Mr. Chicot, “I was asking about your upstairs lodger.”
“He’s a single gentleman, sir.”
“Young?”
“No, sir; middle-aged.”
“An actor?”
“No, sir. He has nothing to do with the theatres.”
“What is he?”
“Well, sir, he is a gentleman—everyone can see that—but a gentleman as has run through his property. I should gather from his ways that he must have had a great deal of property, and that he’s run through most of it. He is not quite so regular in his payments as I could wish—but he does pay—and he’s very little trouble, for he’s often away for a week at a time, the rent running on all the same of course.”
“That would hardly matter to him if he doesn’t pay it,” said Chicot.
“Oh, but he does pay, sir. He’s dilatory, but I get my money. A poor widow like me couldn’t afford to lose by the best of lodgers.”
“What is the gentleman’s name?”
“Mr. Desrolles.”
“That sounds like a foreign name.”
“It may, sir, but the gentleman’s English. I haven’t in a general way laid myself out for foreigners,” said the landlady, with a glance at La Chicot, “though this is rather a foreign neighbourhood.”
The lodgings were taken, and Jack Chicot and his wife began a new phase of existence in London. The life lacked much that had made their life in Paris tolerable—the careless gaiety, the brighter skies, the Bohemian pleasures of the French city—and Jack Chicot felt as if a dense black curtain had been drawn across his youth and all its delusions, leaving him outside in a cold, commonplace world, a worn-out, disappointed man, old before his time.
He missed the gay, happy-go-lucky comrades who had helped him to forget his troubles. He missed the drives in the leafy wood, the excursions to suburban dining-houses, the riotous suppers after midnight, all the merry dissipations of his Parisian life. London pleasures were dull and heavy. London suppers meant no more than eating and drinking, too many oysters and too much wine.
Mr. Smolendo’s expectations were fully realised. La Chicot made a hit at the Prince Frederick. Those flaming posters under every railway arch and on every hoarding in London were not in vain. The theatre was crowded nightly, and La Chicot was applauded to the echo. She breathed anew the intoxicating breath of success, and she grew daily more insolent and more reckless, spent more money, drank more champagne, and was more eager for pleasure, flattery, and fine dress. The husband looked on with a gloomy face. They were no longer the adoring young couple who had walked away arm in arm from the Mairie, smiling and happy, to share their wedding dinner with the chosen companions of the moment. The wife was now only affectionate by fits and starts, the husband had a settled air of despondency, which nothing but wine could banish, and which, like the seven other spirits, returned with greater power after a temporary banishment. The wife loved the husband just well enough to be desperately jealous of his least civility to another woman. The husband had long ceased to be jealous, except of his own honour.
Among the frequenters of the Prince Frederick there was one who at this time was to be seen there almost nightly. He was a man of about five-and-twenty, tall, broad-shouldered, with strongly marked features, and the eye of a hawk, a man whose clothes were well worn, and whose whole appearance was slovenly, yet who looked like a gentleman; evidently uncared for, possibly destitute, but however low he might have sunk, a gentleman still.
He was a medical student, and one of the hardest workers at St. Thomas’s—a man who had chosen his profession because he loved it, and whose love increased with his labour. Those who knew most about him said that he was a man destined to make his mark upon the age in which he lived. But he was not a man to achieve rapid success, to distinguish himself by a happy accident. He went slowly to work, sounded the bottom of every well, took up every subject as resolutely as if it were the one subject he had chosen for his
