Orphan Bride

by Sara Seale

  Julian sat quietly watching her.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “I could go on and on and on,” she shouted. “I know I’m ungrateful. I know I owe you even this—this beastly spinach, but you haven’t an idea how I work inside, what I think, what I feel.”

  “Don’t shout, dear, and put that plate down,” remarked Emily calmly.

  “Better let her throw it at me, then she’ll feel better,” said Julian.

  Jennet made a sudden gesture with the plate and Julian instinctively ducked, then she put it down with a bang.

  “I wish you’d never picked me! I wish I was back in the orphanage, chilblains and all! At least we didn’t get enough food there to make us sick at the sight of it,” she said, and bursting into tears, ran violently from the room.

  “Well,” said Julian, flicking a crumb from his napkin, “I hope that’s cleared the air.”

  Jennet was very sick for most of the night. Such an outburst was so foreign to her that it took her a long time to recover the balance of strained nerves and an overloaded stomach, and when Mrs. Dingle called her in the morning, she took one look at the exhausted, white little face and told her to stay where she was.

  “Vomiting all night and who’s to wonder with all this nagging and stuffing,” she told Emily indignantly. “She looks fair mazed, poor little toad, and like as not she’s off her vittals for good. Mr. Julian, being a man, knows no better, but I’m surprised at you, missus.

  Julian grinned at his aunt’s discomfited face, but he told her she had better send for the doctor to be on the safe side.

  Mrs. Dingle snorted.

  “ ’Tes no doctor wanted! Leave her be and you stop this fussing, Mr. Julian.”

  “That’s enough, Mrs. Dingle,” Emily said with dignity. “You had better go and straighten Miss Jennet’s room if the doctor’s coming. It doesn’t look as if it’s been dusted for a week.”

  “And how do you think I can get around all the rooms with only one pair of hands?” retorted Mrs. Dingle. “With it Mr. Julian in the house, I’m too mazed getting the food punctual to bother with old cleaning trade, and so ’tes.”

  She flounced upstairs, and Julian said with wry grimace: “I’ve been here too long, evidently. It’s time I took myself off for all concerned.”

  The doctor came and went, pronounced his patient healthy enough apart from a system thoroughly upset, and recommended a tonic and complete rest for a couple of days.

  After lunch, Julian went up and saw Jennet. He stood by the bed, leaning on his stick, and his eyes twinkled.

  “Well,” he said, “you seem to have worked it out of your system in more ways than one! How do you feel?”

  She turned her head on the pillow and looked at him with embarrassment. There had been plenty of time in which to consider how rude and ungrateful she had been to Julian.

  “Better,” she said. “I’m awfully sleepy. Cousin Julian—I’m very sorry I was so rude.”

  He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

  “I preferred it to ‘Yes, Cousin Julian,’ ” he told her with humor. “Though I did expect a plate of spinach in the face any minute!”

  She looked ashamed.

  “It was awful of me.”

  “It’s a pity you didn’t do it long ago. We might have, understood each other better then,” he said, and seemed about to add something further when he saw her blink, drowsy with sleep.

  “This room feels cold,” he said brusquely. “I’ll get Mrs. Dingle to light a fire. Go to sleep, Jennet, and I’ll come back later.”

  She heard his lame foot dragging slowly along the passage, then sleep claimed her. She smiled at Frankie’s china fawn, and snuggled down among the pillows.

  CHAPTER S E V E N

  Julian came back after tea and wandered round the room glancing at her few personal belongings.

  “You should have a decent toilet set—brushes and things,” he remarked idly. “One of those pink enamel affairs, or blue perhaps ... Is this china atrocity a leftover from Aunt Emily’s youthful collection?”

  “No, it’s mine. I don’t think it’s an atrocity.”

  He turned fro in his contemplation of the fawn at the hurt note in her voice, and said with new gentleness: “Neither it is. I’ve probably lost my eye for knick-knacks. There are none in my flat.”

  He came and sat on the side of the bed and surveyed her thoughtfully.

  “This visit of mine hasn’t been very successful, I’m afraid,” he said, watching the firelight play across her face, softening the sharp contours to delicate planes and shadows.

  “It’s my fault,” she said shyly. “I get nervous when you pounce, but I’m not really ungrateful.”

  “I don’t know that I want you to be grateful,” he said slowly.

  “Oh, but I should be—I am,” she told him quickly. “It was one of the first things we were taught at Blacker’s—be grateful to charity, for charity feeds you.”

  He looked up, startled.

  “What a dreadful maxim!” he exclaimed. “I hope you don’t think of me as charity, Jennet.”

  She wriggled a little against the pillows.

  “I suppose I do,” she said, but added hastily: “But you needn’t mind, Cousin Julian. Charity is the first of the virtues, Matron always said.”

  “But I do mind.” Julian’s dark eyes were grave. “Tell me, Jennet, did you really mean it when you said you wished you were back in the orphanage?”

  She looked at the blazing fire, the discarded tea-tray with its fine, delicate china and Julian, kindly and somehow different, sitting on the side of her bed.

  “No, of course not,” she said with a sigh, “no one in their senses could.”

  “But you missed it for a long time, didn’t you?” he said with belated perception.

  She looked at him apologetically.

  “I missed the others—someone, to talk to and laugh with,” she said.

  “Can’t you talk to me?” For a moment the old impatience was in his voice.

  She hesitated.

  “I don’t know what to say to you.”

  The impatience was still there.

  “Well, tell me about yourself—about the orphanage—all those funny stories you told to Luke ages ago—remember?”

  Yes, she remembered. But Luke had been different: He had invited confidences and his laughter had been sympathetic. She did her best to entertain Julian, but the orphanage jokes did not sound so funny and his reception of them was grave rather than amused.

  “It’s pathetic, really,” he said once, and looked at her with troubled eyes.

  “Oh, no,” she laughed, “we weren’t a bit pathetic, only, rather scrubbed and chilblainy, with a crude sense of humor.”

  He thought of his own childhood which had been so happy until his home had broken up, and he reflected that he had been less prepared than Jennet to meet disaster when it came.

  “You have more philosophy than I had at your age,”’ he said. “Is it the orphanage or is it yourself that’s taught you to accept life?”

  She looked at him with surprise. “I don’t know,” she replied. “It’s so much easier to accept. One’s own feelings don’t make much difference in an orphanage. You see, charity children don’t have rights like other people. It’s perfectly sensible really.”

  He got up and walked over to the fireplace, and stood with his back to her, prodding the wood with his stick.

  “Every human being has rights,” he said a little roughly, and he was thinking of his own as much as hers. The rights Kitty had denied him, a wife, a home, children. This child would not deny him. He had taken her from charity and although he might have become charity himself, she would not fail him.

  He turned and his eyes, as they rested on her, lost their hardness.

  “You’re a good little thing,” he said, and smiled. “And I must try and remember you’re seventeen and not seven. I must also remember not to stuff—either with spinach or improvement.”
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  She looked at him gravely.

  “If you could remember not to pounce, too,” she suggested tentatively.

  He laughed.

  “That’s rather more difficult. I’m afraid I must be the pouncing kind, but I’ll try, and if I do, you just pounce back, like you did yesterday.”

  “Yes, Cousin Julian,” she said doubtfully.

  They kept her in bed for another couple of days to make sure she rested, and Julian spent a great deal of his time with her. He would sit in the easy chair by the fire, smoking his pipe, sometimes talking, and sometimes staring into the flames in a friendly silence.

  To Jennet these last days of his uncomfortable visit brought a marked change. Listening to his rather harsh voice and watching the play of firelight on his face, she knew again that fleeting desire to lay her affections at the feet of the only person to whom she seemed to matter. Julian was not her choice, but his was the only companionship she knew. She was bound to him by more subtle ties than those of charity, and even if she would, she could not break away.

  She was a good listener, and often, as he talked, she felt he was speaking to himself as much as to her.

  “Do you miss that young man?” he asked her suddenly, after a long silence.

  She looked up, startled, from her knitting. It was the first time he had alluded to Frankie.

  “No,” she said briefly. Of Frankie and the children she would not speak. They were gone, and the pain of that last meeting was a thing not to be remembered.

  “H’m,” grunted Julian, and glanced at her a little curiously. Perhaps it was as well he had scotched that affair. He smiled at her industry. “Still persevering with that atrocity?” he said. “I’m afraid I’ll never wear it, you know.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said placidly. “It was Aunt Emily’s idea, anyway.”

  He looked a little piqued.

  “It ought to be your idea to knit sweaters for your Cousin Julian,” he retorted.

  She grinned.

  “You’d be much too fussy to wear anything I’d made, even if it was the right color,” she told him, and he raised his eyebrows.

  “Am I fussy?”

  “Very,” she said calmly. “Dogs’ hairs on your trousers and things.”

  He laughed.

  “Well, who wants dogs’ hairs on their trousers and things? I call that being fastidious, and it’s not a bad thing to be, Miss Jennet Brown.”

  She looked at him gravely.

  “Then you shouldn’t have gone to an orphanage for a—for a—” she said, and faltered.

  “For a wife?” he completed for her. “But then, you see, I was being fastidious when I picked you. The other four were not at all reluctant.”

  “Were you?” she asked, and remembered Lilly saying: “You were always different from the others. I can see why he chose you.”

  He shifted in his chair, easing his bad leg.

  “I’m going back to town to-morrow,” he said. “I won’t be coming down again for a bit. Think you’ll miss me?”

  She considered gravely.

  “Yes, I think I will,” she said with faint surprise.

  He grinned.

  “That’s very right and proper and I like your careful consideration before replying. Go on writing to me, please.”

  She shook back her hair.

  “But you never answer,” she protested. “It makes it so difficult.”

  He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

  “Yes, I suppose it does,” he said. “I must try and remedy that.”

  There was a message for her in Julian’s next letter to Emily, and by the same post there arrived a charming silver and enamelled toilet set for her dressing table, but he still did not write to her, and she resumed her regular, unacknowledged little notes which were so difficult to compose.

  It was May before they saw him again, and summer had come early to the moor. Jennet, wearing cotton frocks and discarding stockings, was acquiring a faint tan, and in the light evenings she roamed the moors alone and was content.

  Once again she met Julian as she ran home along the old coffin-track, the evening sun full in her face. He watched her as he had done before, aware that each fresh meeting brought a change. She was growing up fast, and he realized with a start that she was no longer plain. There was a strange, ardent quality about her that wag very moving. No, she was not plain, his orphan.

  The sun was in her eyes as she ran and she did not see him, and he held out his stick as a bar across her path, waiting for the expected change in her face at the sight of him. But it did not come. She stopped, grasping his stick in both hands and for a moment the face she raised to him was alive with welcome and expectant pleasure.

  “Oh!” she said, “Cousin Julian! I didn’t know you were coming.”

  He stood looking down at her, appraising her with an observant eye.

  “I only decided at the last minute, and sent a wire,” he said absently. “You’re getting quite brown, Jennet. It suits you.”

  “It’s a long time since you’ve been down,” she said, walking slowly beside him back to the house. “Is—is your leg any better?”

  “Much the same, I’m afraid,” he said shortly, then asked her how she had been getting on with her driving lessons.

  “Oh, very well, I think,” she replied quickly. “Mr. Banks says I can drive quite well now and am perfectly safe. He was a very good teacher.”

  “One in the eye for me;” said Julian with a grin. “I take it from that that the gentleman doesn’t pounce.”

  She laughed, and slipped a hand through his arm with a natural, confiding gesture which was new to him.

  “No, he doesn’t,” she said, “and he said that no one ought to be taught to drive by members of their own family.”

  “Does he indeed?” Julian remarked. “I hope that doesn’t apply to all branches of knowledge! So you’ve adopted us at last, have you, Jennet? We are now members of your own family?”

  She looked up at him and her eyes were clear and untroubled.

  “You’re all the family I’ve got,” she told him simply. Because he was moved, he drew his arm sharply away, and she clasped her hands behind her, and edged a little apart, conscious of an impertinence in touching him. Listening to him exchanging news with Emily over a supper, she wondered what sort of life he led when he was away from them. His casual remarks were seldom revealing, and although he appeared to have many acquaintances, his friends seemed very few. Only Luke Fenton’s name was spoken with a warmth and frequency which betrayed his feelings, and women were rarely mentioned at all. He seemed to listen a great deal to music and go occasionally to the theatre, but his pursuits were serious rather than gay, and Jennet wondered if he ever went to, parties, or gave them in that luxurious flat on the Embankment. Somehow, she did not feel he was gay, and she remembered Mrs. Dingle remarking that he was a man old before his time. “And all the fault of that accident,” she said. “ ’Tes a thing a woman can’t understand, the pride and bitterness of the maimed, for to a woman their men don’t change because they lose a leg or an arm.”

  But for Kitty, Jennet thought, Julian had changed, and—she did not want him any longer. For perhaps the first time, she realized a little of what that blow must have meant to him, and pity filled her, and the old desire to comfort. She tried to imagine him as he must have been in those early years, young, active and very much in love, but she could not. It seemed impossible to think of Julian giving himself wholly to any human being.

  Yet he could be tender. Sometimes he would speak to her or touch her with a gentleness that, surprised and moved her, and then she would have the impulse to say:

  “Tell me what you are really like—what you felt and were before you became shut up inside yourself.” But she never could.

  Now that the fine weather had come he visited them most weekends. He seemed glad to get away from the noise and heat of London, and seemed content to sit in the orchard smoking his pipe and listening
to the drowsy murmur of Homer’s bees, while Jennet lay in the long grass beside his chair reading a book. Sometimes he would spoil things by demanding a critical analysis of what she was reading, or firmly substitute one book for another which he considered more improving, but more often he was content to sit relaxed, without talking, watching the trees’ dappled shadows move across her serious face as she read.

  Emily, on her way to and from the kennels, often watched them, thinking they were an odd couple, and wondering if Julian ever spoke to the girl of their future life together. Emily was not introspective or much given to flights of imagination, but it did sometimes cross her mind that Jennet, if she thought about it at all, might view this marriage to a comparative stranger with trepidation.

  But it was easy for Jennet not to dwell on such a far distant fact as her marriage with Julian, for he never mentioned it. When she considered it at all it was not in any personal light. Julian was the person to whom she owed most allegiance, and whatever his plans for her, it seemed only fitting and natural that she should adapt herself to them.

  He would imply in many ways the trend of his intentions.

  “Later on, I’ll take you to hear good music. You must learn to appreciate the good from the bad and discuss it intelligently...”

  “We must travel. There is much companionship in visiting fresh places together...”

  “Learning to swim and to ride is a waste of time. Neither accomplishment will be any use to you...”

  “You must keep up your singing. Later, we’ll find a good teacher for you.”

  He often made her sing for him, bringing down new songs for her to learn for him. But although he asked her, she would not sing “Searching for Lambs.”

  “Why not?” he asked her curiously. “It used to be your favorite.”

  “I don’t care for it any more,” she replied.

  “Nonsense!” he said with the old impatience. “Find the music. I’d like to hear it again.”

  “I don’t know where it is. I must have mislaid it.”

  “Well, I can play it without music. Come along.” Her face remained mute.