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!"
