The Rosary
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.