"Where is everybody?" she asked, in a voice rendered natural by effort.
M. Binet reared his great head and turned upon her eyes that were blood-injected. He scowled, blew out his thick lips and made harsh noises in his throat. Yet he took stock of her, so graceful and comely and looking so completely the lady of fashion in her long fur-trimmed travelling coat of bottle green, her m.u.f.f and her broad hat adorned by a sparkling Rhinestone buckle above her adorably coiffed brown hair. No need to fear the future whilst he owned such a daughter, let Scaramouche play what tricks he would.
He expressed, however, none of these comforting reflections.
"So you"re back at last, little fool," he growled in greeting. "I was beginning to ask myself if we should perform this evening. It wouldn"t greatly have surprised me if you had not returned in time. Indeed, since you have chosen to play the fine hand you held in your own way and scorning my advice, nothing can surprise me."
She crossed the room to the table, and leaning against it, looked down upon him almost disdainfully.
"I have nothing to regret," she said.
"So every fool says at first. Nor would you admit it if you had. You are like that. You go your own way in spite of advice from older heads.
Death of my life, girl, what do you know of men?"
"I am not complaining," she reminded him.
"No, but you may be presently, when you discover that you would have done better to have been guided by your old father. So long as your Marquis languished for you, there was nothing you could not have done with the fool. So long as you let him have no more than your fingertips to kiss... ah, name of a name! that was the time to build your future.
If you live to be a thousand you"ll never have such a chance again, and you"ve squandered it, for what?"
Mademoiselle sat down.--"You"re sordid," she said, with disgust.
"Sordid, am I?" His thick lips curled again. "I have had enough of the dregs of life, and so I should have thought have you. You held a hand on which to have won a fortune if you had played it as I bade you. Well, you"ve played it, and where"s the fortune? We can whistle for that as a sailor whistles for wind. And, by Heaven, we"ll need to whistle presently if the weather in the troupe continues as it"s set in. That scoundrel Scaramouche has been at his ape"s tricks with them. They"ve suddenly turned moral. They won"t sit at table with me any more." He was spluttering between anger and sardonic mirth. "It was your friend Scaramouche set them the example of that. He threatened my life actually. Threatened my life! Called me... Oh, but what does that matter? What matters is that the next thing to happen to us will be that the Binet Troupe will discover it can manage without M. Binet and his daughter. This scoundrelly b.a.s.t.a.r.d I"ve befriended has little by little robbed me of everything. It"s in his power to-day to rob me of my troupe, and the knave"s ungrateful enough and vile enough to make use of his power.
"Let him," said mademoiselle contemptuously.
"Let him?" He was aghast. "And what"s to become of us?"
"In no case will the Binet Troupe interest me much longer," said she. "I shall be going to Paris soon. There are better theatres there than the Feydau. There"s Mlle. Montansier"s theatre in the Palais Royal; there"s the Ambigu Comique; there"s the Comedie Francaise; there"s even a possibility I may have a theatre of my own."
His eyes grew big for once. He stretched out a fat hand, and placed it on one of hers. She noticed that it trembled.
"Has he promised that? Has he promised?"
She looked at him with her head on one side, eyes sly and a queer little smile on her perfect lips.
"He did not refuse me when I asked it," she answered, with conviction that all was as she desired it.
"Bah!" He withdrew his hand, and heaved himself up. There was disgust on his face. "He did not refuse!" he mocked her; and then with pa.s.sion: "Had you acted as I advised you, he would have consented to anything that you asked, and what is more he would have provided anything that you asked--anything that lay within his means, and they are inexhaustible. You have changed a certainty into a possibility, and I hate possibilities--G.o.d of G.o.d! I have lived on possibilities, and infernally near starved on them."
Had she known of the interview taking place at that moment at the Chateau de Sautron she would have laughed less confidently at her father"s gloomy forebodings. But she was destined never to know, which indeed was the cruellest punishment of all. She was to attribute all the evil that of a sudden overwhelmed her, the shattering of all the future hopes she had founded upon the Marquis and the sudden disintegration of the Binet Troupe, to the wicked interference of that villain Scaramouche.
She had this much justification that possibly, without the warning from M. de Sautron, the Marquis would have found in the events of that evening at the Theatre Feydau a sufficient reason for ending an entanglement that was fraught with too much unpleasant excitement, whilst the breaking-up of the Binet Troupe was most certainly the result of Andre-Louis" work. But it was not a result that he intended or even foresaw.
So much was this the case that in the interval after the second act, he sought the dressing-room shared by Polichinelle and Rhodomont.
Polichinelle was in the act of changing.
"I shouldn"t trouble to change," he said. "The piece isn"t likely to go beyond my opening scene of the next act with Leandre."
"What do you mean?"
"You"ll see." He put a paper on Polichinelle"s table amid the grease-paints. "Cast your eye over that. It"s a sort of last will and testament in favour of the troupe. I was a lawyer once; the doc.u.ment is in order. I relinquish to all of you the share produced by my partnership in the company."
"But you don"t mean that you are leaving us?" cried Polichinelle in alarm, whilst Rhodomont"s sudden stare asked the same question.
Scaramouche"s shrug was eloquent. Polichinelle ran on gloomily: "Of course it was to have been foreseen. But why should you be the one to go? It is you who have made us; and it is you who are the real head and brains of the troupe; it is you who have raised it into a real theatrical company. If any one must go, let it be Binet--Binet and his infernal daughter. Or if you go, name of a name! we all go with you!"
"Aye," added Rhodomont, "we"ve had enough of that fat scoundrel."
"I had thought of it, of course," said Andre-Louis. "It was not vanity, for once; it was trust in your friendship. After to-night we may consider it again, if I survive."
"If you survive?" both cried.
Polichinelle got up. "Now, what madness have you in mind?" he asked.
"For one thing I think I am indulging Leandre; for another I am pursuing an old quarrel."
The three knocks sounded as he spoke.
"There, I must go. Keep that paper, Polichinelle. After all, it may not be necessary."
He was gone. Rhodomont stared at Polichinelle. Polichinelle stared at Rhodomont.
"What the devil is he thinking of?" quoth the latter.
"That is most readily ascertained by going to see," replied Polichinelle. He completed changing in haste, and despite what Scaramouche had said; and then followed with Rhodomont.
As they approached the wings a roar of applause met them coming from the audience. It was applause and something else; applause on an unusual note. As it faded away they heard the voice of Scaramouche ringing clear as a bell:
"And so you see, my dear M. Leandre, that when you speak of the Third Estate, it is necessary to be more explicit. What precisely is the Third Estate?"
"Nothing," said Leandre.
There was a gasp from the audience, audible in the wings, and then swiftly followed Scaramouche"s next question:
"True. Alas! But what should it be?"
"Everything," said Leandre.
The audience roared its acclamations, the more violent because of the unexpectedness of that reply.
"True again," said Scaramouche. "And what is more, that is what it will be; that is what it already is. Do you doubt it?"
"I hope it," said the schooled Leandre.
"You may believe it," said Scaramouche, and again the acclamations rolled into thunder.
Polichinelle and Rhodomont exchanged glances: indeed, the former winked, not without mirth.
"Sacred name!" growled a voice behind them. "Is the scoundrel at his political tricks again?"