‘I don’t believe it’s sense, Mrs. Bitters; I believe it’s only an inward craving. She feels that low in her inside that the brandy’s a relief to her.’
‘Have they set her leg yet?’
‘Lord love you, Mrs. Bitters, it’s a compound fracture, and the swelling ain’t begun to go down. They’ve got a perfessional nurse from one of the hospitals, and she’s never left off applying cooling lotion, night or day, to keep down the inflammation. The doctor hasn’t left the house since it happened.’
‘Is it Mr. Mivart?’
‘Lor, no; it’s quite a stranger; a young man that’s just been walking the orspital, but they say he’s very clever. He was at the Prince Frederick when it happened, and see it all; and helped to bring her home, and if she was a duchess he couldn’t be more careful over her.’
‘Where’s the husband?’ asked Mrs. Bitters.
‘Away in the country, no one knows where, for she hasn’t sense to tell ’em, pore lamb. But from what Mrs. Evitt tells me, they was never the happiest of couples.’
‘Ah!’ sighed Mrs. Bitters, with an air of widest worldly experience, ‘dancers and such like didn’t ought to marry. What do they want with ’usbands, courted and run after as they are? Out every night too, like Tom cats. ’Ow can they make a ’ome ’appy?’
‘I can’t say as I ever thought Mr. Chicot ’ad a ’appy look,’ assented the shoemaker’s wife. ‘He’s got a way of walking with his eyes on the ground and his hands in his pockets, as if he didn’t take no interest in life.’
Thus, and in various other manners, was the evil fate of La Chicot discussed in Cibber Street and the surrounding neighbourhood. Everybody was interested in her welfare. If she had been some patient domestic drudge, a devoted wife and mother, the interest would have been mild in comparison, the whole thing tame and commonplace. But La Chicot—whose name was on the walls in capitals three feet high, whose bold, bright face smiled on the foot passenger at every turn in the road—La Chicot was a personage, and whether she was to draw the lot of life or death from fate’s mysterious urn was a public question.