The Cloven Foot

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 fish-woman in a scanty satin kirtle, scarlet stockings, and a high cap of finest Brussels lace. She was a bayadere, 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 particular 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 workbasket 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 Élysées⁠—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