“Et cette dame?” she queried. “Cette anglaise? Qu est-ce qu’elle me veut? Elle est ta maîtresse, hein? Femme mariée, eh? Et toi, avec ton petit air Sainte-Nitouche, va! I’ll tell you what: give me some money, fifty francs, to buy medicines, to pay a doctor. Come on! Fifty francs—it isn’t much.”
“Yes, it is, my dear,” I retorted. “It’s a jolly lot, as you know very well. But still, if you prefer the part, when you might have the whole, that is your affair; and so I’m going to give it to you. Only, mind, this will begin and end the whole transaction. We give you fifty francs, but we will never give you another penny.” Then I smuggled a fifty-franc note into her pretty little hand,—smuggled it, so that the waiters and the other consommateurs shouldn’t see.
But Zizi was troubled by no such false shame. She smoothed the note out, and held it up to the light, scrutinising it rigorously. Having satisfied herself that it wasn’t a counterfeit, she crammed it into a small silver purse, closed the purse with a snap, and buried it in an occult female pocket. At last she turned her face towards mine, and said, “T’es bon, toi. That will bring you luck. Kiss me.” I suggested that the café was rather too public a place for kissing. The fifty-franc note radiated its genial warmth throughout her small frame, and she quite “chippered up,” and laughed and chatted with me very pleasantly. “Why do you never come to see me,—since we live in the same house?” she was good enough to ask. And she tried to pump me, in a naughty insinuating way, about Elinor, her benefactress.
But Zizi was launched upon her descent into Avernus. Her cough got worse and worse; her cheeks grew hollow, her whole face dragged-looking; her figure lost its elasticity. She took to rouge and powder, and introduced falsetto notes into her toilet. With her failing health, her friends began to fail her too: coughs and fevers and eyes unnaturally bright are disturbing elements, and put a strain on friendship. She had to seek for new ones, and was to be met with a good deal in the Boulevards. Whenever she spied Elinor and me on her horizon, she bore down upon us, and begged for money: and she was always spying us, always turning up; it seemed as if she must have dogged our footsteps. Thus you cast your bread upon the waters, and it comes back to you in the fulness of time. She was French, as I have remarked before: but she showed no discretion, and no respect for places or occasions. Not infrequently, therefore, her familiar hailings of us were embarrassing. By and by she acquired a light-hearted habit of entering the Vachette, ordering what she would, and leaving it to be scored to my account; and I had to remonstrate. At last she found out Elinor’s address, and called upon her. But Elinor was going to London the next day; so nothing came of that. This was in December; and early in the same month Zizi began to keep her room. She was probably very ill; she coughed perpetually. She coughed a good deal when it wasn’t necessary, and only racked without relieving her poor chest, to say nothing of her neighbours’ nerves. I used to urge her to control her cough, not to cough when she could help it; but self-control of any sort was beyond her tradition; and she would always cough at the slightest impulse. Once in a great while, if she was a little better, and the weather favoured, she would put on her rouge and her finery, and go out,—to “pécher à la ligne,” as she expressed it. Then, on her re-entrance, I would hear forlorn attempts at song and laughter, which would inevitably end in long, pitiful fits of coughing.
And now it is all over; Zizi is dead; and I am as much shocked as if the event were inconsequent and unexpected, as if she hadn’t been coughing her life out steadily these three months past. Ah, well, the difficulty is to reconcile one’s idea of Zizi with anything not vain and hollow and make-believe, with anything natural and sincere; and death is so hideously natural, so horribly sincere. For the first time since her birth, I dare say, she has done a sincere thing, a real thing,—she has died!
THE PRODIGAL FATHER.
His wife had died some five and twenty years before, leaving him with an infant son upon his hands; and she had made him promise that the boy should be brought up as a “good American.”
He, poor man, was a desperately bad one. The very word, for instance, as he pronounced it, forgot to rhyme with hurricane; and, lest anybody should be disposed to look indulgently upon the said offence, I hasten to add that he persistently sounded the e in clerk unlike the i in dirk. Besides (the homeliness of the detail may be forgiven to its significance), he suffered his nose, as an instrument for the communication of ideas, to sink into disuse and atrophy.