Orphan Bride

by Sara Seale

  He looked at her sharply.

  “Why on earth should it? You call Luke by his Christian name without any fuss, and you can scarcely go on addressing me as Cousin Julian when we’re married.”

  She looked up swiftly, showing him a startled face, and he smiled a little grimly. “You hadn’t forgotten that was they general idea, had you?”

  She blinked.

  “No, I hadn’t forgotten,” she said. It was only such a surprise to hear him mention it at all. “Julian, if I wrote a letter to Sparks and Spicer, would Milly get it?”

  He got up from his chair, and stood leaning on his stick, slightly turned away from her.

  “I’d rather you didn’t write,” he said briefly.

  “Why not?”

  “For obvious reasons. You saw what sort she was.”

  “You mean you’d be ashamed of her,” she said in a small voice.

  He gave a gesture of exasperation.

  “Of course I’m not ashamed of her. She’s all very well in her place, but not a suitable friend for you, now.”

  “I spent sixteen years of my life with her and others like her,” said Jennet slowly.

  “I daresay you did, but those days are past.” He turned suddenly and looked down at her with hard eyes. “Once and for all, Jennet, I don’t want you to have any further connection with the orphanage. You’re living in quite a different world now, and no good can be served by keeping up these old attachments. I don’t want you to write to Milly, and if you come to London again you are not to go and see her, understand?”

  She lowered her eyes, and the flush faded.

  “Yes, Cou—Julian,” she said.

  He smiled at her reassuringly.

  “Now go and make yourself tidy before Jeremy arrives.”

  CHAPTER N I N E

  Driving down with Julian the next day, Jennet reviewed the evening and found much that was unexpected in it.

  She and Julian and old Jeremy Pritchard had dined in leisurely fashion, while Jennet, contributing little to the conversation, listened with pleasure to the two men talking. Julian seemed at ease with Jeremy, and despite the difference in their ages they were evidently old friends. The old man still stared at her with his keen, observant eyes, but she did not mind his stare now that she knew he was a painter.

  “And you, my dear,” he said to her suddenly, “wouldn’t you rather be dining somewhere gay with a nice young man, instead of here with two quiet bachelors?”

  “No,” she said with grave surprise, “I don’t think I would, although—” she glanced with faint apology at Julian—“I never have, so perhaps I can’t really judge.”

  Jeremy shook back his shock of white hair and exclaimed:

  “A-ha! Don’t tell me that in these modern times, Julian, you have managed to preserve that rarity of all rarities, a young girl sheltered from sophistication?”

  Julian smiled, then his eyes as they rested for a moment on Jennet were grave.

  “Yes, I think I have,” he said.

  Jeremy cocked an eyebrow.

  “And you think you will keep her like this?”

  The lines about Julian’s mouth deepened.

  “Yes, I think so,” he said. “She’s my aunt’s ward, you know.”

  “Yes,” said Jeremy with a twinkle, “I’d heard,” and reaching for his brandy glass with long sensitive fingers, added softly: “Pygmalion.”

  Jennet’s eyes widened in anticipation.

  “Will you tell, me the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, Mr. Pritchard?” she asked, and Julian began to cut a cigar with some care.

  “Pygmalion was a sculptor who created a beautiful statue,” began Jeremy, delighted at such a receptive audience. “He became so enchanted with his work that he fell in love with his creation, only, you see, Galatea was a thing of stone or marble. He had fashioned her, but he could not breathe life into her.”

  “Oh ...” Her lips were parted, and her high forehead wrinkled with perplexity. She was thinking of Luke’s queer remark: “It’s uncomfortable work being a statue, isn’t it?”

  “And did he—did she come alive?” she asked anxiously. But Jeremy, warming his glass between his shapely hands, smiled tantalizingly and replied:

  “Julian, no doubt, will tell you the rest of the story one day.”

  “My old friend likes to tease,” Julian said, looking up for the first time. “You mustn’t take him too seriously. Jeremy, some more coffee?”

  As he spoke the doorbell rang abruptly, and Luke’s voice could be heard demanding admission.

  “Hello! What are you doing here?” Julian enquired as he let him in. “I thought you were doing the town with the boring Cleo.”

  “She’s not really boring, my dear fellow—it just depends on your point of view,” Luke said, patting Jennet absently on the head. “But she seemed to get more and more difficult as the day progressed, and finally stood me up and went off with another party.” Julian poured him a drink and gave him a cigar. “Thanks. Incidentally, the boring Cleo has no great opinion of you, come to that. She told Jennet that you had become a boor, and the nice child upped and defended you in no uncertain terms.”

  “Did you, Jennet?” said Julian, looking surprised. “That was very charming of you.”

  “But she is very charming. I told her so only today,” said Luke.

  He flung himself into a chair, and Julian drew the curtains, and switched on the lights.

  “Do you still sing, Jennet?” Luke asked idly.

  “A little.”

  “Sing for us now. She really has a charming voice, Jeremy.”

  “Delightful,” said Jeremy, rubbing his hands together. “You really have been clever, Julian.”

  Jennet glanced enquiringly at Julian. He nodded, then went to the piano.

  “What shall I sing?” she asked him, but Luke answered: “Sing that plaintive little song you sang the first time I met you. Something about true lovers’ breasts.”

  “ ‘Searching for Lambs’?” said Jennet, and hesitated.

  “Yes, that’s it. ‘Searching for Lambs.’ ”

  She was aware of Julian looking at her with an odd little smile, but he said nothing, and began to play the opening bars. She went and stood beside him in the circle of light spilled by the lamp at his elbow, and without further protest, started to sing. Jeremy, from his place in the shadows, watched her intently, but she had forgotten him. Frankie was lying in the heather was a picture which rose instantly to her mind, but it was a picture that was less clear and sharp than before, and the pain was the nebulous hurt of the unobtainable.

  They were silent for a moment when she had finished, then Jeremy leaned forward out of the shadows and said:

  “I’d like to paint her, Julian.”

  Julian looked up in surprise.

  “Would you, Jeremy?” he said. “That’s a great honor.”

  Luke grinned at Jennet and remarked: “I told you so. Now you know why he stared.”

  Jennet could think of nothing to say, and Jeremy crossed to the piano and took her chin in gentle fingers, turning her face up to the light.

  “If I can catch the expression as she was singing,” he murmured. “Those words have a special significance for you, haven’t they, my dear.”

  Jennet, bewildered, stammered that she didn’t know, and Julian observed with a grin:

  “You should feel very flattered, Jennet. Jeremy is very choosey about his sitters. Many a disconsolate young lady has had to take her fashionable face to another artist.”

  Luke yawned.

  “What are we going to do to-morrow? If you’re loth to hit the high spots, Julian, I’m very willing to take your orphan off your hands.”

  Julian shut the piano and got to his feet.

  “We’re driving back to Pennycross tomorrow,” he said. “It seems rather a waste.to spend the week-end in London.”

  Luke grimaced.

  “All very well for you, you live here. But what about the child?” />
  “The child as you call her is quite content to go home, aren’t you, Jennet,” Julian said firmly. “Besides, if Jeremy is really serious about painting her, she’ll have to come up for a bit, later on. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I ought to run her back to Piggy’s flat. It’s getting late.”

  “Don’t trouble,” said Luke, getting up. “I’m going myself. I’ll drop her in at Piggy’s.”

  “All right. Thanks,” said Julian, turning back to Jeremy. “Run and get your things, Jennet. I’ll call for you about eleven o’clock to-morrow and we’ll have lunch on the way.”

  Piggy was waiting up when they got back, and she greeted Luke with typical bluntness.

  “How you find time for all this gadding when you have work to do passes my comprehension,” she said. “But writers are mostly dilettantes—it’s not a serious occupation.”

  Luke’s eyes twinkled.

  “Oh, come now, Piggy, why so harsh?” he protested. “I write two novels a year and a flock of magazine articles. But both Julian and I are still in the schoolroom in your eyes, aren’t we?”

  “Julian at least has grown up,” she retorted.

  “Grown up much too much, if you ask me,” said Luke, pulling Jennet’s hair. “He’s starting out governessing on his own now. This poor child’s kept well under his thumb.”

  “How absurd you are,” laughed Jennet, and Piggy folded up her crochet and looked at her watch.

  “Well, be off now. We both must go to bed,” she said briskly.

  “There’s not a hoot of difference to choose between you and Cousin Julian,” grinned Luke, and took himself off.

  “He’s nice, isn’t he?” said Jennet.

  Piggy sniffed.

  “He has charm,” she admitted. “Did Julian’s injury trouble him much today?”

  “I think it did. We did such a lot of walking,” said Jennet.

  Piggy looked at her, and the light flashed on her pince-nez.

  “You realize it’s possible he may lose his leg?” she said casually.

  Jennet straightened, and her eyes were suddenly enormous.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered. “Oh, no, Piggy!”

  “Well, possibly it would be better than going on like this,” Piggy said prosaically. “He’s seldom out of pain, you know. Now, hurry off to bed, dear. I have your milk all ready.”

  She was thinking of all this as Julian’s car ate up the miles, and he himself beside her, looked straight ahead, his hat pulled over his eyes, and spoke very little. But she was used to his long silences now, and they no longer worried her. She thought he probably worried inordinately about his leg, not at the pain which at times made him so irritable, but at the possibility of losing it altogether, and she knew with a certainty which she could not explain that he would mind that more than the pain. To lose a limb, to be incomplete, would deal his fagged pride the final blow. They came to Penny-St.-Mary late in the afternoon, and as Julian drove through the village and on to the house, Jennet felt she had been away a long time. At Pennycross everything was just the same. The dogs rushed yapping from the house, just as they had that dark November day, and Jennet had a queer impression of going back to what she was eight months ago. Emily came out on to the porch, saying:

  “Back so soon? I thought Jennet was staying several days and we didn’t expect you at all, Julian.”

  “There was nothing to stop in town for, so I thought I’d drive the child down,” Julian replied, and added with a twinkle: “I hope I haven’t upset Mrs. Dingle’s arrangements.”

  “Of course not,” said Emily briskly. “Did you enjoy it all, Jennet? Julian, you look tired. Is that a new hat, Jennet? I must find Homer and get him to shut the dogs up.”

  She did not really expect any answers to her questions, and vanished into the orchard, leaving them to find their own way into the house.

  “Dear Aunt Emily,” Julian laughed, picking up the luggage, “Nothing ever changes at Pennycross.”

  At supper, Jennet plied Homer with questions. Had the bees swarmed? Were there any fresh foals on the moor? Had the new gardening catalogue come?

  “My dear child, you talk as though you have been away for weeks instead of only forty-eight hours. You can’t expect any changes in that short space of time,” Emily said.

  Julian smiled.

  “But there have been changes for Jennet—even in forty-eight hours,” he said with unusual perception. “She’s been rather a success, Aunt Emily. Luke dancing attendance, and Jeremy Pritchard wanting to paint her.”

  Emily looked mildly surprised.

  “Jeremy Pritchard wants to paint her?” she said, eyeing Jennet with polite astonishment. “That’s rather an honor, isn’t it?”

  “Exactly what I told her, but it takes a lot to impress our orphan,” said Julian. “Well, if I like it, I shall buy it.”

  Emily raised her eyebrows.

  “At five hundred guineas?”

  “If I like it,” repeated Julian, and became aware of Jennet’s shocked stare. “Don’t you think you’re worth five hundred guineas?” he asked with mock surprise, but she shook her head, and was dumb. For the first time she realized that she had not given old Jeremy his due, and she continued to stare at Julian, amazed and rather alarmed that he should be prepared to pay such a preposterous sum on her account.

  “She’ll have to come up to London for a few weeks for the sittings,” Julian was saying. “It’s not a bad notion. She needs clothes, and we can see about some more singing lessons—you’d like that, wouldn’t, you, Jennet? She can stay with Piggy, and we’ll see if we can’t give her some sort of a time. What do you say, Jennet?”

  She looked at Julian a little doubtfully. Something had changed him and made him for the moment a little more like Luke.

  “It sounds wonderful,” she said shyly.

  But it was many weeks before Jennet made her return visit to London. Julian’s new treatment kept him permanently in town, and it was some time before they saw him again. Jennet, slipping back into the old routine, accepted her solitude again and was grateful for the long summer days. Her skin grew faintly golden as the weeks went by, and her slight frame filled out so that even Mrs. Dingle exclaimed:

  “My! You’re a woman now, Miss Jennet, a credit to Pennycross and no mistake. ’Tes wonderful what the good moor air will do for weaklings.”

  But Jennet knew it was not only the moor air. She was as conscious as any of them of the change in herself, less, she thought, a visible change than something inexplicable that was happening to her, inside.

  She wrote to Julian as she always had, difficult little letters which tried to express her awakening consciousness, but which failed because she got no reply. It did not now need Emily’s hints and Homer’s gentle reminders to keep her debt of gratitude to Julian fixed in her mind. For all his strangeness, he was the one companion she had known intimately for months, and she was grateful to him.

  When he came to Pennycross again at the beginning of July, he observed the change in her, aware now of the maturity which showed itself in brief flashes when she forgot to be self-conscious with him.

  Jennet watched him with grave awareness, conscious both of his new regard and his stubborn refusal to meet her growing maturity on common ground.

  But he was less inclined to sharpness than he had been, and it was too hot for serious argument. In the sudden heat-wave which had enveloped the country, life seemed suspended and the days drifted. It was too hot to do anything but idle in the orchard. Heat lay over the moor in a shimmering haze, but there was coolness and the drowsy murmur of Homer’s bees and Julian seemed relaxed and more free from pain than usual. He liked to sit and watch Jennet lying in the grass, and observe the unchildlike stillness of her face. Watching her thus, he would wonder who her parents had been, and what bitter twist of fate had condemned such a child to an orphanage.

  “Are you never curious about your parentage?” he asked her once.

  She looked surprised.


  “I don’t think so. You see, being an orphan is such a matter of habit, and one’s parentage can’t possibly matter in an orphanage.”

  He was a little non-plussed at her reply and said with some sharpness:

  “Well, it should matter. Breeding is important.”

  She smiled, but her eyes remained closed.

  “If it matters to you, you shouldn’t have come to an orphanage to make your choice,” she said gently.

  “One up to you, Miss Prim,” he answered a little ruefully. “I didn’t think I was a snob.”

  “Didn’t you?” She sounded very polite. “But then, no one does. I think it’s a form of snobbishness to try and mould someone to your own pattern.”

  His eyes behind the dark glasses were a little startled. “I should have called it a form of egotism. Is that what I’m doing to you?”

  “That’s why you brought me here, isn’t it?” she said without resentment.

  He moved abruptly in his chair.

  “Yes, I admit it,” he said hardly. “My only other attempt at selecting a partner was not a success. I still think this system is perfectly logical and workable, and if one admits the system, then an orphanage was a logical place in which to look—don’t you agree?”

  She curved one bare arm round her head.

  “Oh, yes, the only place, I should think, but Milly or Katy Green wouldn’t have suited you at all.”

  He laughed.

  “I seem to remember you once tried to persuade me to take you back and change you for Katy Green. I’m glad to hear you’ve altered your mind. Open your eyes and look at me, Jennet. You’re happy, aren’t you?”

  Obediently she opened her eyes, but his were still hidden. She could say these things to him, when she could not see the expression of his eyes, but at the same time it was disconcerting not to know when he was watching her and when he was not.

  “You’re happy, aren’t you?” he repeated, and she looked faintly surprised. It was the first time that she remembered him actively concerned with her feelings.

  “Oh, yes,” she replied tranquilly, and wondered what exactly his definition of happiness would be.

  He was content with her answer. Indeed, he thought, she would have been a strange child if she had not been happy. If it had not been for him, she would most likely have been earning her living as a shop girl by this time.