"We're not there!" cried Mrs. Brill.
"No," Lazarus explained; "but we pick up father here. We must appear to arrive together."
Ere the horrified pair could protest, he opened the door, sprang out, and pushed inside a stout, rubicund man with a festal rose in his holiday coat, but a miserable, shamefaced look in his eyes. Lazarus took his seat ere a word could be spoken. The cab rolled on.
"Good-morning, Esther," he muttered. "I offered you Get."
"Silence!" cried Salvina, as if she had been talking to the little girls. "How dare you speak to her?" She held her mother's hand and felt the pulse beating madly.
"You old serpent—" began Mrs. Brill hotly.
"Mother!" pleaded Salvina; "not a word; he doesn't deserve it."
"In Jerusalem I could have two wives," he muttered. But no one replied.
The four human beings sat in painful silence, their knees touching. The culprit shot uneasy, surreptitious glances at his wife, so radiant in jewels and finery and with so Kitty-like a complexion. It was as if he saw her freshly, or as if he were shocked—even startled—by her retaining so much joy of life despite his desertion of her. Fortunately the strange drive only lasted a few minutes. The bridegroom's wedding-party passed into the synagogue through an avenue of sympathetic observers.
Mr. Brill had no part to play in the ceremony. The honours were carried off by Mr. Jonas, who stalked in slowly, with the bride on his arm, and a new green shade over his left eye. The rival father hovered meekly on the outskirts of the marriage-canopy amid a crowd of Jonases. Salvina stationed herself and her mother on the opposite border of the canopy, and throughout bristled, apprehensive, prohibitive, fiery, like a spaniel guarding its mistress against a bull-dog on the pounce. The bull-dog indeed was docile enough; avoiding the spaniel's eye, and trailing a spiritless tail. But the creature revived at the great wedding-feast in the hall of a hundred covers, and under the congratulations and the convivial influences tended to forget he was in disgrace. The bridegroom's parents were placed together, but Salvina changed seats with her mother, and became a buffer between the twain, a non-conducting medium through which the father could not communicate with the mother. With the latter she herself maintained a continuous conversation, and Mr. Brill soon found it more pleasant to forget his troubles in the charms of Mrs. Jonas, his other neighbour.