In the dining-room, paramount over all other objects, was enshrined the portrait of the departed goddess, a medallion in a frame of velvet and gold. La Chicot well remembered wondering, to see so little beauty in that celebrated face—a small oval face, grey eyes, a nondescript nose, a wide mouth. Intelligence and a winning smile were the only charms of that renowned beauty. Cosmetiques and Wörth had done all the rest. But then the dead and gone courtesan had been one of the cleverest women in France. La Chicot made no allowance for that.
“I am ten times handsomer,” she told herself, “and yet I shall never keep my own carriage.”
She had often brooded over the difference between her fate and that of the woman whose house, and horses, and carriages, and lap dogs and jewels she had seen, the sale of which had made a nine days’ wonder in Paris. She thought of that dead woman tonight as she sat with the mirror in her hand admiring the diamonds and her beauty, while Jack Chicot was doing his best to forget her in his Bohemian club hear the Strand. She remembered all the stories she had heard of that extinguished luminary—her arrogance, her extravagance, the abject slavery of her adorers, her triumphal progress through life, scornful and admired.
It was not the virtuous who despised her, but she who despised the virtuous. Honest women were the chosen mark for her ridicule. People in Paris knew all the details of her brazen, infamous life. Very few knew the history of her deathbed. But the priest who shrived her and the nursing sister who watched her last hours could have told a story to make even Frivolity’s hair stand on end.
“It was a short life, but a merry one,” thought La Chicot. “How well I remember her the winter the lake in the Bois was frozen, and there was skating by torchlight! She used to drive a sledge covered all over with silver bells, and she used to skate dressed in dark red velvet and sable. The crowd stood on one side to let her pass, as if she had been an empress.”
Then her thoughts took another turn.
“If I left him, he would divorce me and marry that other woman,” she said to herself. “Who is she, I wonder? Where did he see her? Not at the theatre. He cares for no one there. I have watched him too closely to be deceived in that.”
Then she half filled a tumbler with brandy, and flavoured it with water, in order to delude herself with the idea that she was drinking brandy and water; and then, lapsing into a state of semi-intoxication—a dreamy, half-consciousness, in which life, seen hazily, took a brighter hue—she flung aside her mirror, and threw herself half-dressed upon the bed.
Jack Chicot, who had taken to coming home long after midnight, slept on a sofa in the little third room, where he worked. There was not much chance of his seeing the jewels. He and his wife were as nearly parted as two people could be, living in the same house.
La Chicot contemplated the diamonds, and abandoned herself to much the same train of thought, for several nights; and now came the last night of the week which Mr. Lemuel had allowed for reflection. Tomorrow she was to give him his answer.
He was waiting for her at the stage-door when she came out. Desrolles, her usual escort, was not in attendance.
“Zaïre, I have been thinking, of you every hour since last we spoke together,” Joseph Lemuel began, delighted at finding her alone. “You are as difficult to approach as a princess of the blood royal.”
“Why should I hold myself cheaper than a princess?” she asked, insolently. “I am an honest woman.”
“You are handsomer than any princess in Europe,” he said. “But you ought to compassionate an adorer who has waited so long and so patiently. When am I to have your answer? Is it to be yes? You cannot be so cruel as to say no. My lawyer has drawn up the deed of settlement. I only wait your word to execute it.”
“You are very generous,” said La Chicot, scornfully, “or very obstinate. If I run away with you and my husband gets a divorce, will you marry me?”
“Be faithful to me, and I will refuse you nothing.”
He went with her to the door of her lodgings for the first time, pleading his cause all the way, with such eloquence as he could command, which was not much. He was a man who had found money all powerful to obtain everything he wanted, and had seldom felt the need of words.
“Send me a messenger you can trust at twelve o’clock tomorrow, and if I do not send you back your diamonds—’
“I shall know that your answer is yes. In that case you will find my brougham waiting at a quarter-past seven o’clock tomorrow evening at the corner of this street, and I shall be in the brougham. We will drive straight to Charing Cross, and start for Paris by the mail. It will be too dark for anyone to notice the carriage. What time do you generally go to the theatre?”
“At half-past seven.”
“Then you will not be missed till you are well out of the way. There will be no fuss, no scandal.”
“There will be a tremendous fuss at the theatre,” said La Chicot. “Who is to take my place in the burlesque?”
“Anyone. What need you care? You will have done with burlesque and the stage forever.”
“True,” said La Chicot.
And then she remembered the Student’s Theatre in Paris, and how her popularity had waned there. The same
