Steve gasped.
“Left!” he cried. “Not quit? Not gone for good?”
“For his own good, I should say. Finds himself better off away from it all, if you ask me. But ’adn’t you reelly heard, Mr. Dingle? God bless my soul! I thought it was public property by now, that little bit of noos. Why, Mr. Winfield ’asn’t been living with us for the matter of a week or more.”
“For the love of Mike!”
“I’m telling you the honest truth, Mr. Dingle. Two weeks ago come next Saturday Mr. Winfield meets me in the ’all looking wild and ’arassed—it was the same day there was that big thunder-storm—and he looks at me, glassy like, and says to me: ‘Keggs, ’ave my bag packed and my boxes, too; I’m going away for a time. I’ll send a messenger for ’em.’ And out he goes into the rain, which begins to come down cats and dogs the moment he was in the street.
“I start to go out after him with his rain-coat, thinking he’d get wet before he could find a cab, they being so scarce in this city, not like London, where you simply ’ave to raise your ’and to ’ave a dozen flocking round you, but he don’t stop; he just goes walking off through the rain and all, and I gets back into the house, not wishing to be wetted myself on account of my rheumatism, which is always troublesome in the damp weather. And I says to myself: ‘’Ullo, ’ullo, ’ullo, what’s all this?’
“See what I mean? I could tell as plain as if I’d been in the room with them that they had been having words. And since that day ’e ain’t been near the ’ouse, and where he is now is more than I can tell you, Mr. Dingle.”
“Why, he’s at the studio.”
“At the studio, is he? Well, I shouldn’t wonder if he wasn’t better off. ’E didn’t strike me as a man what was used to the ways of society. He’s happier where he is, I expect.”
And, having summed matters up in this philosophical manner, Keggs drained his glass and cocked an expectant eye at Steve.