5
“No,” said the sad-eyed waiter, in reply to Luke’s enquiry. “No, we do not serve the dinner on Sunday night. In Dilborough Sunday night, there is what you call, nothing doing. You can have a nice chop.”
“I hate chops,” said Luke moodily. “All right, get me a chop.”
“The lady who stay here, she have a chop too. She also say she hate chops. You have to wait a little time perhaps, because the chef is out Sunday evening. You wait in the drawing-room. It is very nice. Very comfortable. There is a newspaper of last Friday evening.”
Luke submitted and entered the fly-haunted drawing-room. He sat down with his head in his hands. Mabel’s letter had been characteristically unlike her. Her letters were never in the least bit like herself. That was perhaps their only attraction. It was only in the postscript that he seemed actually to hear her speak.
“Poor Nathan Samuel!” he said to himself. “Poor Moses Nathan Modecai Samuel!”
The door opened and Jona came in, clad in a betrayed-heroine tea-gown. She looked beautiful but tragic.
“Jona,” he cried, springing to his feet.
She shrank back, covering her face with her hands.
“Don’t speak to me,” she said. “Don’t come near me. I’m a leper, a pariah, and an outcast.”
“Oh, look here, hang it all, you can’t, you know. That’s mine. If there’s any lepering to be done, I do that. Outcast? How do you mean outcast?”
“Haven’t you heard?” she said.
“No,” said Luke. “Come and sit on my knee, and tell me all your troubles.”
“I oughtn’t,” she said, but she did.
“You didn’t turn up at Victoria yesterday. Couldn’t you leave your husband?”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “I couldn’t, because I’ve not got a husband. And have never had a husband. One of Bill’s previous wives started to make a fuss, and he made a clean breast of it to me. He’d married in two different names before he married me, and both wives are still living. He went to Brighton on Saturday to marry one more. Because he wants to get his picture, as the peer convicted of trigamy, on the back page of the ‘Daily Mail,’ with the fourth wife inset. So you see what has happened. It was my fault, but that’s how I come to be in the pariah class. Can you bear me any longer?”
“Yes,” said Luke, “you’re not heavy.”
And then the sad-eyed waiter came in without knocking, and they broke away.
“I beg pardon,” said the waiter. “Perhaps I interrupt a little. I come to say the chops is ready. Shall I put the two places close together?”
“Very close together,” said Luke.