<SPAN name="chap08"></SPAN>
<h3> CHAPTER VIII </h3>
<h3> ADDED PEARLS </h3>
<p>The days which followed were golden days to Jane. There was nothing to
spoil the enjoyment of a very new and strangely sweet experience.</p>
<p>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,</p>
<p>"Yes," said Garth quietly, "I am."</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>"Yes," said Garth, "she will."</p>
<p>"Oh, lor'!" cried Billy, dramatically. "Prithee, Benedict, are we to
take this seriously?"</p>
<p>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?"</p>
<p>"Yes," said Garth, turning so that he spoke to her alone, "last night."</p>
<p>"Did our talk in the afternoon have something to do with it?"</p>
<p>"No, nothing whatever."</p>
<p>"Was it THE ROSARY?"</p>
<p>He hesitated; then said, without looking at her: "The revelation of THE
ROSARY? Yes."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"I shall be delighted to subscribe, Mr. Bilberry," she said. "Is it for
a font, a pulpit, new hymn-books, or what?"</p>
<p>"My dear lady," said the rector tremulously, "you misunderstand me. My
desire is to lead you to the altar."</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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