‘Well,’ cried the manager, radiant, ‘a screaming success. There’s money in it. I shall run this three hundred nights.’
‘I don’t like that ascent of my wife’s. I hear that the man who works the machinery is a drunkard.’
‘My dear fellow, these men all drink,’ answered Smolendo, cheerfully. ‘But Roberts is a treasure. He’s always sober in business.’
Again Jack tried the effect of remonstrance with his wife, just as vainly as before.
‘If you weren’t a fool you would make Smolendo give me an extra five pounds a week on account of the danger, instead of worrying me about it,’ she said.
‘I am not going to make the safety of your life a question of money,’ he answered; and after this there was no more said between them on the subject of the coral bower, but that speech of the scene-shifter’s haunted Jack Chicot.
‘When she is drunk.’ The memory of that speech was bitter. Though his wife’s habits had long been patent to him, it was not the less galling to think that everyone—the lowest servant in the theatre even—knew her vices.
Towards the end of April, Chicot and his wife had a serious quarrel. It arose out of a packet which had been left at the stage door for the dancer—a packet containing a gold bracelet, in a morocco case, bearing the name of one of the most fashionable and expensive jewellers at the West End. There was nothing to show whence the offering came; but on a narrow strip of paper, nestling under the massive gold band, there was scrawled in a mean little, foreign-looking hand:—
‘Homage to genius.’
La Chicot carried the gift home in triumph and exhibited it to her husband, clasped upon her round white arm, a solid belt of gold, flat, wide, and thick, like a fetter, severely simple, an ornament for the arm of a Greek dancing-girl.