Chapter 29

MOLLY AT COURT

If any of us, going to dress quietly in an ordinary bedroom, were told: "It is the last time you will have just that amount of comfort, that degree of luxury, to which you have been accustomed; it is the last time you will have your evening clothes put out for you; the last time your things will be brushed; the last time hot water will be brought to your room; the last time that your dressing-gown will have come out of the cupboard without your taking it out"--we might have an odd mixture of sensations. We might be very sad--ridiculously sad--and yet have a sense of being braced, a whiff of open air in the mental atmosphere.

Edmund Grosse did not expect in future to draw his own hot water, or put out his own dressing-gown, but he did know that he had come to the last night of having a valet of his own, the last night in which the perfect Dawkins, who had been with him ten years, would do him perfect bodily service. Everything to-night was done in the most punctilious manner, and it seemed appropriate that this last night should be a full-dress affair.

Sir Edmund was going to Court (the first Court held in May), and his deputy lieutenant's uniform was laid on the bed. Edmund might not have taken the trouble to go, but a kindly message from a very high place as to his troubles had made him feel it a more gracious response to do so. The valet was a trifle distant, if any shade of manner could have been detected in his deferential attitude towards his master. Dawkins was not pleased with Sir Edmund; he felt that his ten years of service had been based on a delusion; he had not intended to be valet to a ruined man. Happily he had been careful. He had not trusted blindly to Providence, and, with a rich result from enormous wages and perquisites, and an excellent character, he could face the world with his head high, whereas Sir Edmund--well, Sir Edmund's position was very different. Sir Edmund had let himself be deceived outrageously, and what was the result?

Edmund was as particular as usual about every detail of his appearance. It would have been an education to a young valet to have seen the ruined man dressed that evening.

Next day Dawkins was to leave, and the day after that the flat was to be the scene of a small sale. The chief valuables, a few good pictures, and some very rare china, had already gone to Christie's. The delicate _pâte_ of his beloved vases had seemed to respond to the lingering farewell touch of the connoisseur's fingers. Edmund was trying to secure for some of them homes where he might sometimes visit them, and one or two of his lady friends were persuading their husbands that these things ought to be bought for love of poor Edmund Grosse. Edmund was quite ready to press a little on friendship of this sort, being fully conscious of its quality and its duration. For the next few weeks he would be welcomed with enthusiasm--and next year?

But all the same there was that subconscious sense of bracing air--something like the sense of climax in reaching a Northern station on a very hot day. We may be very hot, perhaps, at Carlisle or Edinburgh, but it is not the climate of Surrey.

Edmund mounted the stairs at Buckingham Palace with a certain unconscious dignity which melted into genial amusement at the sight of a pretty woman near him evidently whispering advice to a fair _débutante_. The girl was not eighteen, and her whole figure expressed acute discomfort.

"Keep your veil out of the way," her mother warned her.

"I've had two dreadful pulls already; I'm sure my feathers are quite crooked. Oh! mother, there's Sir Edmund Grosse; he will tell me whether they are crooked. You never know."

"I could see if you would let me get in front of you," murmured her mother.

"But you can't possibly in this crowd. Oh! how d'ye do, Sir Edmund; have I kept my veil straight?"

"Charming," said Edmund, with a low bow. The child really looked very pretty, though rather like a little dairymaid dressed up for fun, and her long gloves slipped far enough from the shoulders to show some splendidly red arms.

"Charming," he said again in a half-teasing voice. "Only I don't approve of such late hours for children."

It amused him that this was one of the presentations that would be most noted in the papers, and this funny, jolly little girl would probably gain a good deal of knowledge and lose a great deal more of charm in the next three months.

Walking by the mother and daughter, he had come close to the open doors of a long gallery, and stood for a moment to take in the picture. It was not new to him, but perhaps he felt inclined to the attitude of an onlooker to-night, and there was something in this attitude slightly aloof and independent. Brilliant was the one word for the scene; a little hard, perhaps, in colouring, and the women in their plumes and veils were too uniform to be artistic. There was too much gold, too much red silk, too many women in the long rows waiting with more or less impatience or nervousness to get through with it. The scene had an almost crude simplicity of insistence on fine feathers and gilding the obvious pride of life. Yet he saw the little fair country girl near him look awe-struck, and he understood it. For a fresh imagination, or for one that has, for some reason, a fresh sensitiveness of perception, the great gallery, the wealth of fair women, the scattered men in uniform, the solemn waiting for entrance into the royal presence, were enough. And there really is a certain force in the too gaudy setting. It blares like a trumpet. It crushes the quiet and the repose of life. It shines in the eye defiantly and suddenly, and at last it captures the mind and makes the breath come quickly, for, like no other and more perfect setting to life, it makes us think of death. It is too bald an assertion of the world and all its works and all its pomps, not to challenge a rebuke from the grisly tyrant.

Edmund had not analysed these impressions, but he was still under their power when he turned to let others pass, for the crowd was thickening. And as he did so, a little space was opened by three or four ladies turning round to secure places for some friends on the long seats against the walls.

Across this space he saw a woman, whom, for a moment only, he did not recognise. It was a tall figure in white satin with a train of cloth of silver thrown over her arm. There was nothing of the nervous _débutante_ in the attitude, nor was there the half-truculent self-assertion of the modern girl. When people talked afterwards of her gown and her jewels, Edmund only remembered the splendour of her pearls, and when he mentioned them, a woman added that the train had been lined with lace of untold value. What he felt at the time was the enormous triumph of the eyes. Grey eyes, full of light, full of pride. He did not ask himself what was the excuse for this "haughty bearing," and the old phrase, which has now sunk from court manners into penny novelettes, was the only phrase that seemed quite a true one.

Why did she stand so completely alone? It made no difference to this sense of loneliness that she received warm greetings in the crowd, or that Lady Dawning was fidgeting and maternal. Evidently (and he was amused at the combination) she was going to present her cousin, John Dexter's daughter. Did she remember now how she had advised Mrs. Carteret to hide Molly from the public eye?

But Molly's figure was always to remain in his mind thus triumphant without absurdity, and thus alone in a crowd. The blackness of her hair had a strange force from the white transparent veil flowing over it, and a flush of deep colour was in the dark skin. Edmund had several moments in which to look at her and to realise that Molly was walking in a dream of greatness. The little country girl he had seen just now had been brought up to hear kindly jokes about Courts and their ways; not so Molly. To her it was all intensely serious and intensely exciting. Could he have known the chief cause of the intense emotion that filled Molly's slight figure with a feverish vitality would he have believed that she was happy? And yet she was, for no pirate king running his brig under the very nose of a man-of-war ever had more of the quintessence of the sense of adventure than Molly had, as Lady Dawning led her, the heiress of the year, into the long gallery.

For one moment she saw Edmund Grosse, and she looked him full in the face very gravely. She did not pretend not to know him; she let him see the entirely genuine contempt she felt for him, and she meant him to understand that she would never know him again.