Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘That was a week ago,’ said Celia. Surely you saw the account of the accident in this morning’s Times. There was nearly a column about it.’

  ‘I did not look at the Times. Mr. Sampson and I started early this morning for a long round. What was this accident?’

  ‘Oh, quite too dreadful,’ exclaimed Celia. ‘It made my blood run cold to read the description. It seems that the poor thing had to go up into the flies, or the skies, or something, hooked on to some moveable irons — a kind of telescopic arrangement, you know.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ said Treverton.

  ‘Well, of course that would be awfully jolly as long as it was safely done, for she must look lovely floating upwards, with the lime-light shining on her; but it seems the man who had the management of the iron machine got tipsy, and did not know what he was doing, so the irons were not properly braced together, and just as she was near the top the thing gave way and she came down headlong.’

  ‘And was killed?’ asked John Treverton breathlessly.

  ‘No, she was not killed on the spot, but her leg was broken — a compound fracture, I think they call it, and she was hurt about the head, and the paper said she was altogether in a very precarious state. Now I have noticed that when a newspaper says that a person is in a precarious state, the next thing one hears of that person is that he or she is dead; so that I shouldn’t at all wonder if La Chicot’s death were in the evening papers.’

  ‘What a loss to society,’ sneered Edward Clare. ‘I think you are the most ridiculous girl in the world, Celia, to interest yourself in people who are as far off your groove as if they were the inhabitants of the moon.’

  ‘Homo sum,’ said Celia, proud of a smattering of Latin, the crumbs that had fallen from her brother’s table, ‘and all the varieties of mankind are interesting to me. I should like to have been a dancer myself, if I had not been a clergyman’s daughter. It must be an awfully jolly life.’

  ‘Delightful,’ exclaimed Edward, ‘especially when it ends abruptly through the carelessness of a drunken scene shifter.’

  ‘I must say good-night and good-bye,’ said John Treverton to Laura. ‘I have my portmanteau to pack ready for an early start to-morrow morning. Indeed, I am inclined to go by the mail to-night. It would save me half a day.’

  ‘The mail leaves at a quarter-past ten. You’ll have to look sharp if you travel by that,’ said Edward.

  ‘I’ll try it, at any rate.’

  ‘Good-night, Mr. Treverton,’ said Laura, giving him her hand.

  The lively Celia was not going to let him depart with so cold a farewell. He was a man, and as such, eminently interesting to her.

  ‘We’ll all walk to the gate with you,’ she said, ‘it will be better for us than sitting yawning here, watching the bats skimming across the flower beds.’

  They all went, and it happened somehow, to John Treverton’s tremulous delight, that Laura and he were side by side, a little behind the other two.

  ‘I am sorry you are obliged to leave so soon,’ said Laura, anxious to say something vaguely civil.

  ‘I should go away more happy than I can tell you, if I thought my going could make you sorry.’

  ‘Oh, I did not mean in such a particular sense,’ she said, with a little laugh. ‘I am sorry for your own sake that you have to leave the country, just when it is so lovely, and to go back to smoky London.’

  ‘If you knew how I hate that world of smoke and all foul things, you would pity me with the uttermost compassion your kind heart can feel,’ he answered, very much in earnest. ‘I am going from all I love to all I detest; and I know not how long it may be before I can return; but if I should be able to come quickly will you promise me a kindly welcome, Laura? Will you promise to be as glad of my return as I am sorry to go to-night.’

  ‘I cannot make any such bargain,’ she said, gently, ‘for I cannot measure your sadness tonight. You are altogether a mysterious person. I have not even begun to understand you. But I hope you may come back soon, when our roses are in bloom and our nightingales are singing, and if their welcome is not enough for you I will promise to add mine.’

  There was a tender playfulness in her tone which was unspeakably sweet to him. They were quite alone, in a part of the carriage drive where the trees grew thickest, the shadow of chestnut leaves folding them round, the low breath of the evening wind whispering in their ears. It was an hour for tender avowals, for unworldly thoughts.

  John Treverton took Laura’s hand, and held it unreproved.

  ‘Tell me that you do not hate the memory of my cousin Jasper because of that absurd will,’ he said.

  ‘Could I hate the memory of one who was so good to me, the only father I ever knew?’

  ‘Say then that you do not hate me because of my cousin’s will.’

  ‘It would be very unchristianlike to hate you for an act of which you are innocent.’

  ‘No doubt, but I can imagine a woman hating a man under such circumstances. You take away your hand. Yes, I feel convinced that you detest me.’

  ‘I took away my hand because I thought you had forgotten to let it go,’ said Laura, determined not to be too serious. ‘Will it really make you more satisfied with yourself if I tell you that I heartily forgive my adopted father for his will?’

  ‘Infinitely.’

  ‘And that, in spite of our ridiculous position towards each other, I do not quite — hate you.’

  ‘Laura, you are making me the happiest of men.’

  ‘But I am saying very little.’

  ‘If you knew how much it is to me. A world of hope, a world of delight, an incentive to high thoughts and worthy deeds, a regeneration of body and soul.’

  ‘You are talking wildly.’

  ‘I am wild with gladness. Laura, my love, my darling.’

  ‘Stop,’ she said, suddenly, turning to him with earnest eyes, very pale in the dim light, now completely serious. ‘Is it me or your cousin’s estate you love? If it is the fortune you think of let there be no stage play of love-making between us. I am willing to obey your cousin — as I would have obeyed him living, honouring him and submitting to him as a father — but let us be true and loyal to each other. Let us face life honestly and earnestly, and accept it for what it is worth. Let us be faithful friends and companions, but not sham lovers.’

  ‘Laura, I love you for yourself and yourself only. As I live that is the truth. Come to me to-morrow penniless, and tell me that Jasper Treverton’s will was a forgery. Come to me and say, “I am a pauper like yourself, John, but I am yours,” and see how fond and glad a welcome I will give you. My dearest, I love you truly, passionately. It is your lovely face, your tender voice, yourself I want.’

  He put his arm round her, and drew her, not unwilling, to his breast, and kissed her with the first lover’s kiss that had ever crimsoned her cheek.

  ‘I like to believe you,’ she said softly, resting contentedly in his arms.

  This was their parting.

  CHAPTER VIII. ‘DAYS THAT ARE OVER, DREAMS THAT ARE DONE.’

  THERE was excitement and agitation in Cibber Street, Leicester Square, that essentially dramatic, musical, and terpsichorean nook in the great forest of London. La Chicot had narrowly escaped death. It had been all but death at the moment of the accident. It might be absolute death at any hour of the night and day that followed the catastrophe. At least this is what the inhabitants of Cibber Street told each other, and they were one and all as graphic and as full of detail as if they had just left La Chicot’s bedside.

  ‘She has never stirred since they laid her in her bed,’ said the shoemaker’s wife, at the dingy shop for ladies’ boots, two doors from the Chicot domicile; ‘she lies there like a piece of wax-work, pore thing, and every five minutes they takes and wets her lips with a feather dipped in brandy; and sometimes she says “more, more,” very weak and pitiful!’

  ‘That looks as if she was sensible, at any rate,’ answered the good woman’s gossip, a letter
of lodgings at the end of the street.

  ‘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 ‘us-bands, 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.

  It had been as the scene-shifter had shrewdly prophesied. She had been drunk, and the stage-carpenter had been drunk, and the result had been calamity. There had been a perennial supply of champagne in La Chicot’s dressing-room during the last week, thanks to the liberality of an anonymous admirer, who had sent a three-dozen case of Rœderer, pints — fascinating little gold-tipped bottles that looked as innocent as flowers or butterflies. La Chicot had an idea that a pint of champagne could hurt nobody. Of a quart she opined, as the famous glutton did of a goose, that it was too much for one and not enough for two.

  She naturally suspected that the anonymous champagne came from the unknown giver of the bracelet, but she was not going to leave the case unopened on that account. It was very pleasant to have an admirer who gave so freely and asked nothing. Poor fellow! It would be time enough to snub him when he became obtrusive. In the meanwhile she accepted his bounty as unquestioningly as she received the gifts of all-bounteous nature — the sun that warmed her, the west wind that fanned her cheek, the wallflowers and primroses at the street corners that told her spring was abroad in the land.

  Yet she was a woman, and, therefore, naturally curious about her nameless admirer. Her splendid eyes roamed among the faces of the audience, especially among the gilded youth in the stalls, until they alighted on a countenance which La Chicot believed likely to be the one she sought. It was a face that watched her with a grave attention she had seen in no other countenance, though all were attentive — a sallow face, of a Jewish type, black eyes, an almost death-like pallor, a firmly-moulded mouth, the lips too thick for beauty, black hair, smooth and sleek.

  ‘That is the man,’ La Chicot said to herself, and he looks inordinately rich.’

  She stole a glance at him often after this, and she always saw the same expression in the pallid Israelitish face, an intensity she had never seen in any other countenance.

  ‘C’est un home à parvenir,’ she told herself, ‘si ça était guerrier il aurait vainçu un monde, comme Napoleon.’

  The face fascinated her somehow, or, at all events, it made her think of the man. She drank his champagne with greater gusto after this, and on the night after her discovery, the weather being unusually sultry for the season, she drank two bottles in the course of her toilet. When she went down to the wings, glittering with silvery tinsel, clad in a cloud of snowy gauze, she could hardly stand; but dancing was a second nature with her, and she managed to get through her solos without disgrace. There was a certain wildness, an extra audacity, a shade too much of that peculiar quality which the English call ‘go,’ and the Trench call ‘chic,’ but the audience at the Prince Frederick liked extremes, and applauded her to the echo.

  ‘By Jove, she’s a wonderful woman,’ exclaimed Mr. Smolendo, watching her from the prompter’s entrance. ‘She’s a safe draw for the next three seasons.’

  Ten minutes afterwards came the ascent through the coral caves. The ironwork creaked, groaned, trembled, and then gave way. There was a shrill scream from the dancer, a cry of horror from the men at the wings, and La Chicot was lying in the middle of the stage, a confused heap of tumbled gauze and silver, silent and unconscious, while the green curtain came down with a run.

  It was late on the night after the accident when Jack Chicot came home. He found his wife lying in a dull stupor, as the gossips had described her, life sustained by the frequent administration of brandy. The woman was as near death as she could be without being ready for her grave. A stranger was sitting by her bedside when Jack went into the room, a young man with a gravity of face and manner which was older than his years. The nurse was on the other side of the bed, applying a cooling lotion to La Chicot’s burning forehead. The leg had been successfully set that afternoon, by one of the cleverest surgeons in London, and was suspended in a cradle, tinder the light coverlet.

  Jack went to the bedside, and bent over the motionless figure, and looked at the dull white face.

  ‘My poor Zaïre, this is bad,’ he murmured, and then he turned to the stranger, who had risen and stood beside him. ‘You are the doctor, I suppose?’

  ‘I am the watch-dog, if you like. Mr. Smolendo would not trust my inexperience with so delicate an operation as setting the broken leg. It was a terrible fracture, and required the highest art. He sent for Sir John Pelham, and everything has been done well and successfully. But he allowed me to remain as surgeon in charge. Your wife’s state is perilous in the extreme. I fear the brain is injured. I was in the theatre when the accident happened. I am deeply interested in this case. I have lately passed my examination creditably, and am a qualified practitioner. I shall be glad if you will allow me to attend your wife — under Pelham, of course, It is not a question of remuneration,’ the young man added hurriedly. ‘I am actuated only by my professional interest in Madame Chicot’s recovery.’

  ‘I have no objection to my wife’s profiting by your generous care, provided always that Sir John Pelham approves your treatment,’ answered Chicot, in a calmer tone than George Gerard expected from a man who had just come home after a week’s absence to find his wife in peril of death. ‘Do you think she will recover?’

  This question was asked deliberately, with intense earnestness. Gerard saw that the eyes which looked at him were watching for the answering look in his own eyes, waiting as for the sentence of doom.

  That look set the surgeon wondering as to the relations between husband and wife. A minute ago he had wondered at Chicot’s coldness — a tranquility that seemed almost indifference. Now the man was all intensity. What did the change mean?

  ‘Am I to tell you the truth?’ asked Gerard.

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘Remember I can give you only my opinion. It is an obscure case. The injury to the brain is not easily to be estimated.’

  ‘I will take your opinion for what it is w
orth. For God’s sake be candid.’

  ‘Then in my opinion the chances are against her recovery.’

  Jack Chicot drew a long breath, a strange shivering sigh, which the surgeon, clever as he was, knew not how to interpret.

  ‘Poor thing!’ said the husband, after a brief silence, looking down at the dull, blank face, ‘and three years ago she and I came out of the Maine very happy, and loving each either dearly! C’est dommage que c’est si passager,ça.’

  These last words were spoken too low for Gerard to hear. They were a brief lament over a love that was dead.

  ‘Tell me about the accident,’ said Jack Chicot sitting down in the chair Gerard had vacated, ‘You were in the theatre, you say. You saw it all.’

  ‘I did, and it was I who picked your wife up. I was behind the scenes soon enough for that The panic-stricken wretches about were afraid to touch her.’

  Gerard told everything faithfully. Jack Chicot listened with an unchanging face. He knew the worst that could be told him. The details could make little difference.

  ‘I said just now that in my opinion the chances were against your wife’s recovery,’ said Gerard, full of earnestness, ‘but I did not say the case was hopeless. If I thought it were I should not be so anxious to undertake the care of your wife. I ask you to let me watch her because I entertain the hope — a faint hope at present, I grant — of curing her.’

  Jack Chicot gave a little start, and looked curiously at the speaker.

  ‘You must be tremendously in love with your profession, to be so anxious about another man’s wife?’ he said.

  ‘I am in love with my profession. I have no other mistress. I desire no other!’

  ‘Well, you may do all you can to snatch her from the jaws of death,’ said Chicot. ‘Let her have her chance, poor soul. That is only fair. Poor butterfly! Last night the star of a crowded theatre, the focus of every eye; to night to lie thus, a mere log, living and yet dead. It is hard.’