CHAPTER VIII
ADDED PEARLS
The days which followed were golden days to Jane. There was nothing
to spoil the enjoyment of a very new and strangely sweet experience.
Garth's manner the next morning held none of the excitement or
outward demonstration which had perplexed and troubled her the
evening before. He was very quiet, and seemed to Jane older than she
had ever known him. He had very few lapses into his seven-year-old
mood, even with the duchess; and when someone chaffingly asked him
whether he was practising the correct deportment of a soon-to-be-
married man,
"Yes," said Garth quietly, "I am."
"Will she be at Shenstone?" inquired Ronald; for several of the
duchess's party were due at Lady Ingleby's for the following week-
end.
"Yes," said Garth, "she will."
"Oh, lor'!" cried Billy, dramatically. "Prithee, Benedict, are we to
take this seriously?"
But Jane who, wrapped in the morning paper, sat near where Garth was
standing, came out from behind it to look up at him and say, so that
only he heard it "Oh, Dal, I am so glad! Did you make up your mind
last night?"
"Yes," said Garth, turning so that he spoke to her alone, "last
night."
"Did our talk in the afternoon have something to do with it?"
"No, nothing whatever."
"Was it THE ROSARY?"
He hesitated; then said, without looking at her: "The revelation of
THE ROSARY? Yes."
To Jane his mood of excitement was now fully explained, and she
could give herself up freely to the enjoyment of this new phase in
their friendship, for the hours of music together were a very real
delight. Garth was more of a musician than she had known, and she
enjoyed his clean, masculine touch on the piano, unblurred by slur
or pedal; more delicate than her own, where delicacy was required.
What her voice was to him during those wonderful hours he did not
express in words, for after that first evening he put a firm
restraint upon his speech. Under the oaks he had made up his mind to
wait a week before speaking, and he waited.
But the new and strangely sweet experience to Jane was that of being
absolutely first to some one. In ways known only to himself and to
her Garth made her feel this. There was nothing for any one else to
notice, and yet she knew perfectly well that she never came into the
room without his being instantly conscious that she was there; that
she never left a room, without being at once missed by him. His
attentions were so unobtrusive and tactful that no one else realised
them. They called forth no chaff from friends and no "Hoity-toity!
What now?" from the duchess. And yet his devotion seemed always
surrounding her. For the first time in her life Jane was made to
feel herself FIRST in the whole thought of another. It made him seem
strangely her own. She took a pleasure and pride in all he said, and
did, and was; and in the hours they spent together in the music-room
she learned to know him and to understand that enthusiastic beauty-
loving, irresponsible nature, as she had never understood it before.
The days were golden, and the parting at night was sweet, because it
gave an added zest to the pleasure of meeting in the morning. And
yet during these golden days the thought of love, in the ordinary
sense of the word, never entered Jane's mind. Her ignorance in this
matter arose, not so much from inexperience, as from too large an
experience of the travesty of the real thing; an experience which
hindered her from recognising love itself, now that love in its most
ideal form was drawing near.
Jane had not come through a dozen seasons without receiving nearly a
dozen proposals of marriage. An heiress, independent of parents and
guardians, of good blood and lineage, a few proposals of a certain
type were inevitable. Middle-aged men--becoming bald and grey; tired
of racketing about town; with beautiful old country places and an
unfortunate lack of the wherewithal to keep them up--proposed to the
Honourable Jane Champion in a business-like way, and the Honourable
Jane looked them up and down, and through and through, until they
felt very cheap, and then quietly refused them, in an equally
business-like way.
Two or three nice boys, whom she had pulled out of scrapes and set
on their feet again after hopeless croppers, had thought, in a wave
of maudlin gratitude, how good it would be for a fellow always to
have her at hand to keep him straight and tell him what he ought to
do, don't you know? and--er--well, yes--pay his debts, and be a sort
of mother-who-doesn't scold kind of person to him; and had caught
hold of her kind hand, and implored her to marry them. Jane had
slapped them if they ventured to touch her, and recommended them not
to be silly.
One solemn proposal she had had quite lately from the bachelor
rector of a parish adjoining Overdene. He had often inflicted
wearisome conversations upon her; and when he called, intending to
put the momentous question, Jane, who was sitting at her writing-
table in the Overdene drawing-room, did not see any occasion to move
from it. If the rector became too prosy, she could surreptitiously
finish a few notes. He sank into a deep arm-chair close to the
writing-table, crossed his somewhat bandy legs one over the other,
made the tips of his fingers meet with unctuous accuracy, and
intoned the opening sentences of his proposition. Jane, sharpening
pencils and sorting nibs, apparently only caught the drift of what
he was saying, for when he had chanted the phrase, "Not alone from
selfish motives, my dear Miss Champion; but for the good of my
parish; for the welfare of my flock, for the advancement of the work
of the church in our midst," Jane opened a despatch-box and drew out
her cheque-book.
"I shall be delighted to subscribe, Mr. Bilberry," she said. "Is it
for a font, a pulpit, new hymn-books, or what?"
"My dear lady," said the rector tremulously, "you misunderstand me.
My desire is to lead you to the altar."
"Dear Mr. Bilberry," said Jane Champion, "that would be quite
unnecessary. From any part of your church the fact that you need a
new altar-cloth is absolutely patent to all comers. I will, with the
greatest pleasure, give you a cheque for ten pounds towards it. I
have attended your church rather often lately because I enjoy a
long, quiet walk by myself through the woods. And now I am sure you
would like to see my aunt before you go. She is in the aviary,
feeding her foreign birds. If you go out by that window and pass
along the terrace to your left, you will find the aviary and the
duchess. I would suggest the advisability of not mentioning this
conversation to my aunt. She does not approve of elaborate altar-
cloths, and would scold us both, and insist on the money being spent
in providing boots for the school children. No, please do not thank
me. I am really glad of an opportunity of helping on your excellent
work in this neighbourhood."
Jane wondered once or twice whether the cheque would be cashed. She
would have liked to receive it back by post, torn in half; with a
few wrathful lines of manly indignation. But when it returned to her
in due course from her bankers, it was indorsed P. BILBERRY, in a
neat scholarly hand, without even a dash of indignation beneath it;
and she threw it into the waste-paper basket, with rather a bitter
smile.
These were Jane's experiences of offers of marriage. She had never
been loved for her own sake; she had never felt herself really first
in the heart and life of another. And now, when the adoring love of
a man's whole being was tenderly, cautiously beginning to surround
and envelop her, she did not recognise the reason of her happiness
or of his devotion. She considered him the avowed lover of another
woman, with whose youth and loveliness she would not have dreamed of
competing; and she regarded this closeness of intimacy between
herself and Garth as a development of a friendship more beautiful
than she had hitherto considered possible.
Thus matters stood when Tuesday arrived and the Overdene party broke
up. Jane went to town to spend a couple of days with the Brands.
Garth went straight to Shenstone, where he had been asked expressly
to meet Miss Lister and her aunt, Mrs. Parker Bangs. Jane was due at
Shenstone on Friday for the week-end.
