The Rosary | Page 7

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!"
CHAPTER III
THE SURPRISE PACKET
The sun-dial pointed to half past four o'clock. The hour of silence
appeared to be over. The birds commenced twittering; and a cuckoo, in
an adjacent wood, sounded his note at intervals.
The house awoke to sudden life. There was an opening and shutting of
doors. Two footmen, in the mulberry and silver of the