But upon the occasion of Pauline Lucas’s marriage to Dudley Leicester, in the rustle of laces, the brushing sound of feet upon the cocoa-nut matting, to the strains of the organ, and the “honk” of automobiles that, arriving, set down perpetually new arrivals, the dog Peter pursued no investigations. Neither, indeed, did Mr. Grimshaw, for he was upon ground absolutely familiar. He was heard to be asked and to answer: “Where did Cora Strangeways get her dresses made?” with the words: “Oh, she gets them at Madame Serafine’s, in Sloane Street. I waited outside once in her brougham for nearly two hours.”
And to ladies who asked for information as to the bride’s antecedents, he would answer patiently and gently (it was at the very beginning of the winter season, and there were present a great many people “back from” all sorts of places—from the Rhine to Caracas)——
“Oh, Pauline’s folk are the very best sort of people in the world. Her mother was army, her father navy—well, you all know the Lucases of Laughton, or you ought to. Yes, it’s quite true what you’ve heard, Mrs. Tressillian; Pauline was a nursery governess. What do you make of it? Her father would go a mucker in South American water-works because he’d passed a great deal of his life on South American stations and thought he knew the country. So he joined the other Holy Innocents—the ones with wings—and Pauline had to go as a nursery governess till her mother’s people compounded with her father’s creditors.”
And to Hartley Jenx’s croaking remark that Dudley Leicester might have done himself better, Grimshaw, with his eyes upon the bride, raised and hardened his voice to say:
“Nobody in the world could have done better, my good man. If it hadn’t been Dudley, it would have been me. You’re come to the wrong shop. I know what I’m talking about. I haven’t been carting Yankees around ruins; I’ve been in the centre of things.”
Hartley Jenx, who estimated Dudley Leicester at five thousand a year and several directorates, estimated Grimshaw at a little over ten, plus what he must have saved in the six years since he had come into the Spartalide money. For it was obvious that Grimshaw, who lived in rooms off Cadogan Square and had only the smallest of bachelor shoots—that Grimshaw couldn’t spend anything like his income. And amongst the guests at the subsequent reception, Hartley Jenx—who made a living by showing Americans round the country in summer, and by managing a charitable steam-laundry in the winter—with croaking voice, might at intervals be heard exclaiming:
“My dear Mrs. Van Notten, my dear Miss Schuylkill, we don’t estimate a girl’s fortune here by what she’s got, but by what she’s refused.” And to the accentuated “My’s!” of the two ladies from Poughkeepsie he added, with a singular gravity:
“The bride of the day has refused sixty thousand dollars a year!”
So that, although the illustrated papers lavishly reproduced Pauline’s pink-and-white beauty, stated that her father was the late Commodore Lucas, and her mother a daughter of Quarternion Castlemaine, and omitted the fact that she had refused twelve thousand a year to many seven and a few directorates, there were very few of those whom Grimshaw desired to have the knowledge that did not know this his tragedy.
On the steps of the church, Robert Grimshaw was greeted by his cousin, Ellida Langham, whose heavily patterned black veil, drooping hat of black fur, and long coat all black with the wide black sleeves, enhanced the darkness of her coal-black eyes, the cherry colour of her cheeks, and the rich red of her large lips. Holding out her black-gloved hand with an odd little gesture, as if at the same time she were withdrawing it, she uttered the words: