The Rosary
Chapter II
Introduces The Honourable Jane
The only one of her relatives who practically made her home with the duchess
was her niece and former ward, the Honourable Jane Champion; and this consisted
merely in the fact that the Honourable Jane was the one person who might invite
herself to Overdene or Portland Place, arrive when she chose, stay as long as
she pleased, and leave when it suited her convenience. On the death of her
father, when her lonely girlhood in her Norfolk home came to an end, she would
gladly have filled the place of a daughter to the duchess. But the duchess did
not require a daughter; and a daughter with pronounced views, plenty of
back-bone of her own, a fine figure, and a plain face, would have seemed to her
Grace of Meldrum a peculiarly undesirable acquisition. So Jane was given to
understand that she might come whenever she liked, and stay as long as she
liked, but on the same footing as other people. This meant liberty to come and
go as she pleased; and no responsibility towards her aunt's guests. The duchess
preferred managing her own parties in her oven way.
Jane Champion was now in her thirtieth year. She had once been described, by
one who saw below the surface, as a perfectly beautiful woman in an absolutely
plain shell; and no man had as yet looked beneath the shell, and seen the woman
in her perfection. She would have made earth heaven for a blind lover who, not
having eyes for the plainness of her face or the massiveness of her figure,
might have drawn nearer, and apprehended the wonder of her as a woman,
experiencing the wealth of tenderness of which she was capable, the blessed
comfort of the shelter of her love, the perfect comprehension of her sympathy,
the marvellous joy of winning and wedding her. But as yet, no blind man with
far-seeing vision had come her way; and it always seemed to be her lot to take a
second place, on occasions when she would have filled the first to infinite
perfection.
She had been bridesmaid at weddings where the charming brides,
notwithstanding their superficial loveliness, possessed few of the
qualifications for wifehood with which she was so richly endowed.
She was godmother to her friends' babies, she, whose motherhood would have
been a thing for wonder and worship.
She had a glorious voice, but her face not matching it, its existence was
rarely suspected; and as she accompanied to perfection, she was usually in
requisition to play for the singing of others.
In short, all her life long Jane had filled second places, and filled them
very contentedly. She had never known what it was to be absolutely first with
any one. Her mother's death had occurred during her infancy, so that she had not
even the most shadowy remembrance of that maternal love and tenderness which she
used sometimes to try to imagine, although she had never experienced it.
Her mother's maid, a faithful and devoted woman, dismissed soon after the
death of her mistress, chancing to be in the neighbourhood some twelve years
later, called at the manor, in the hope of finding some in the household who
remembered her.
After tea, Fraulein and Miss Jebb being out of the way, she was spirited up
into the schoolroom to see Miss Jane, her heart full of memories of the "sweet
babe" upon whom she and her dear lady had lavished so much love and care.
She found awaiting her a tall, plain girl with a frank, boyish manner and a
rather disconcerting way as she afterwards remarked, of "taking stock of a body
the while one was a-talking," which at first checked the flow of good Sarah's
reminiscences, poured forth so freely in the housekeeper's room below, and
reduced her to looking tearfully around the room, remarking that she remembered
choosing the blessed wall-paper with her dear lady now gone, whose joy had been
so great when the dear babe first took notice and reached up for the roses. "And
I can show you, miss, if you care to know it just which bunch of roses it were."
But before Sarah's visit was over, Jane had heard many undreamed-of- things;
amongst others, that her mother used to kiss her little hands, "ah, many a time
she, did, miss; called them little rose- petals, and covered them with kisses."
The child, utterly unused to any demonstrations of affection, looked at her
rather ungainly brown hands and laughed, simply because she was ashamed of the
unwonted tightening at her throat and the queer stinging of tears beneath her
eyelids. Thus Sarah departed under the impression that Miss Jane had grown up
into a rather a heartless young lady. But Fraulein and Jebbie never knew why,
from that day onward, the hands, of which they had so often had cause to
complain, were kept scrupulously clean; and on her birthday night, unashamed in
the quiet darkness, the lonely little child kissed her own hands beneath the
bedclothes, striving thus to reach the tenderness of her dead mother's lips.
And in after years, when she became her own mistress, one of her first
actions was to advertise for Sarah Matthews and engage her as her own maid, at a
salary which enabled the good woman eventually to buy herself a comfortable
annuity.
Jane saw but little of her father, who had found it difficult to forgive her,
firstly, for being a girl when he desired a son; secondly, being a girl, for
having inherited his plainness rather than her mother's beauty. Parents are apt
to see no injustice in the fact that they are often annoyed with their offspring
for possessing attributes, both of character and appearance, with which they
themselves have endowed them.
The hero of Jane's childhood, the chum of her girlhood and the close friend
of her maturer years, was Deryck Brand, only son of the rector of the parish,
and her senior by nearly ten years. But even in their friendship, close though
it was, she had never felt herself first to him. As a medical student, at home
during vacations, his mother and his profession took precedence in his mind of
the lonely child, whose devotion pleased him and whose strong character and
original mental development interested him. Later on he married a lovely girl,
as unlike Jane as one woman could possibly be to another; but still their
friendship held and deepened; and now, when he was rapidly advancing to the very
front rank of his profession, her appreciation of his work, and sympathetic
understanding of his aims and efforts, meant more to him than even the signal
mark of royal favour, of which he had lately been the recipient.
Jane Champion had no close friends amongst the women of her set. Her lonely
girlhood had bred in her an absolute frankness towards herself and other people
which made it difficult for her to understand or tolerate the little
artificialities of society, or the trivial weaknesses of her own sex. Women to
whom she had shown special kindness — and they were many — maintained an
attitude of grateful admiration in her presence, and of cowardly silence in her
absence when she chanced to be under discussion.
But of men friends she had many, especially among a set of young fellows just
through college, of whom she made particular chums; nice lads, who wrote to her
of their college and mess-room scrapes, as they would never have dreamed of
doing to their own mothers. She knew perfectly well that they called her "old
Jane" and "pretty Jane" and "dearest Jane" amongst themselves, but she believed
in the harmlessness of their fun and the genuineness of their affection, and
gave them a generous amount of her own in return.
Jane Champion happened just now to be paying one of her long visits to
Overdene, and was playing golf with a boy for whom she had long had a rod in
pickle on this summer afternoon when the duchess went to cut blooms in her
rose-garden. Only, as Jane found out, you cannot decorously lead up to a
scolding if you are very keen on golf, and go golfing with a person who is
equally enthusiastic, and who all the way to the links explains exactly how he
played every hole the last time he went round, and all the way back gloats over,
in retrospection, the way you and he have played every hole this time.
So Jane considered her afternoon, didactically, a failure. But, in the
smoking-room that night, young Cathcart explained the game all over again to a
few choice spirits, and then remarked: "Old Jane was superb! Fancy! Such a drive
as that, and doing number seven in three and not talking about it! I've jolly
well made up my mind to send no more bouquets to Tou-Tou. Hang it, boys! You
can't see yourself at champagne suppers with a dancing-woman, when you've walked
round the links, on a day like this, with the Honourable Jane. She drives like a
rifle shot, and when she lofts, you'd think the ball was a swallow; and beat me
three holes up and never mentioned it. By Jove, a fellow wants to have a clean
bill when he shakes hands with her!"