CHAPTER XIV.
‘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.’