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!"