Orphan Bride

by Sara Seale

  “If she has any sense, she’ll stay where she is until it does,” remarked Emily.

  “But she hasn’t any sense,” said Julian, and added with sudden tenderness: “No sense at all, poor little scrap.”

  Homer put on his old deer-stalking cap and his Burberry and went out into the fog. He seemed to be gone a long time, and presently Julian ceased his restless tapping on the window-pane and said in a frayed, taut voice:

  “I can’t stand this any longer. I’m going out after her.”

  Emily made a gesture of dismay.

  “Julian, it’s madness! You’ll be much too slow and probably crock up that leg of yours for good and all on the moor, and then we’ll have to send a search-party for you.”

  “I can’t stay here doing nothing. The whole thing’s my fault, really. If I hadn’t—Don’t worry, Aunt Emily. I’ll stick to the track and keep calling, just on chance,” Julian said, and she did not try to stop him again, but hoped with his enforced slowness the men would catch up with him before he had got very far, and turn him back.

  It was Julian who found her, quite near home. If they had stood at the gate and shouted, she must have heard.

  Julian, making his slow and painful way over the rough ground, called at intervals and thought he heard an answering whimper, but all sound was confused.

  It was some while until she answered, and then a little voice almost under his feet quavered: “W-who is it?” He stood quite still, trying to pierce the fog with eyes which were already strained and stinging.

  “Jennet! Where are you? It’s Julian.”

  “I’m here,” the little voice wailed. “And I’ve lost the path.”

  “Are you hurt? Can you come to me?”

  “No, I’m not hurt, but I can’t see you.”

  “Try to follow my voice. If I leave the track we shall both be lost.”

  There was a pause, and something rustled quite near at hand, then her voice said apologetically:

  “I c-can’t. I’m afraid to move.” She could hear quite clearly his answering grunt of exasperation.

  “All right. Stay where you are and try and guide me,” he called, and feeling cautiously with his stick he turned in the direction of her voice.

  Almost at once he found her, wet and shivering, crouched in a clump of bracken, and she gave a little cry of fright as his stick touched her. He could see her now, her thin frock clinging to her slight body like a wet rag, her hair limp and straight about her scared face. The hours of anxiety, the slow, painful progress along the track were too much for him, and he took her by the shoulders and shook her thoroughly.

  “You crazy little fool!” he said angrily. “Giving us all such a fright! Why on earth couldn’t you have shouted? You’re quite near home.”

  Her teeth chattered, partly from cold and fright, partly from his rough handling.

  “I didn’t know,” she said. “I thought I was miles away, and—and then I heard the bell, and I didn’t dare move.”

  “Why didn’t you answer when I called”

  “I—I thought you were a convict.”

  He gave her another shake.

  “Really, Jennet! I said you had no sense, and by heaven, you haven’t! How do you suppose, a convict would have known your name?”

  She began to tremble.

  “I don’t know. I was scared. Oh, Julian, don’t pounce,” she whimpered, and began to cry.

  His anger left him, and he felt instead a new, strange tenderness which made him gather her close into his arms.

  “Don’t cry,” he said gently. “You’re safe now, and I promise I won’t pounce. It was all my fault anyhow.”

  But her tears were now the tears of relief. She could not stop crying.

  “It wasn’t,” she said. “You didn’t understand, and I couldn’t explain.”

  “Well, never mind. I did understand, and I’m sorry you’ve missed your friend so much. I expect that’s what got my goat, really.” He stroked the wet head pressed so close against his breast.

  “No, it wasn’t that. That’s what you didn’t understand.”

  “No? What was it, then?”

  But she sighed and could not tell him. She was so tired, and he so strangely different. Peace and a sense of home-coming filled her and she rested against his breast, and her tears ceased.

  “It’s like the song,” she said.

  “The song?” Her forehead was burning despite her chilled body, and he wondered if she was a little lightheaded.

  “ ‘No man shall uncomfort thee.’ The last verse,” she said. “That’s what I’ve always thought it meant, but not you—never you. The fawn was part of it, too—that’s why I minded so when it was broken.”

  He laid a hand for a moment on her forehead.

  “Don’t try and puzzle it out now,” he said, feeling a little anxious. “We must try and find our way back and get you into a hot bath. You won’t be afraid to move now I’m with you, will you?”

  She drew away out of his arms.

  “No,” she said, and a violent fit of shivering took her. “I’m not afraid now.”

  Homer was back with his search-party when they got back and Mrs. Dingle stood at the door giving instructions. When she saw Jennet, she hugged her, crying:

  “You poor little toad! You’m leakin’ wet! I’m sorry I broke your old china trade, but, there, ’tes done, and what’s broke can’t be mended, leastways not often.”

  Jennet began to cry again.

  “And you won’t really leave?” she sobbed.

  “Of course I won’t leave,” Mrs. Dingle asserted with mock indignation. “There’s no woman on the moor but me would stay in this mazed house for long, come to that.”

  Julian thanked and paid the men for their trouble, and Mrs. Dingle took them off to the kitchen for tea and pasties. Emily came hurrying to the door and drove Jennet inside.

  “Really, Jennet,” she said, “for one usually so tractable, you’ve caused a lot of trouble. Homer trudging to the village and back at his age, and Julian with his leg. You should have come back the moment you saw fog coming up, as I’ve told you many times before. Rushing out of the house on a day like this with no coat just because of a little upset—”

  “Not now, Aunt Emily,” Julian said quietly, “Whisky, hot milk and bed at once. I think she’s got a chill.”

  Most of the night he sat up with Jennet, stoking the fire, and listening to her disjointed little sentences which sometimes made sense to him, but more often did not. By the morning he looked worn out with pain, but Jennet was sleeping, and the bright marks of fever had faded.

  “She’ll do till the doctor comes,” he said, looking down at the bed with weary but still watchful eyes. “We should have got him out last night, somehow, despite that damned fog. I’m rather afraid of pneumonia.”

  “Go and rest,” Emily said gently. “There’s nothing more you can do, and I think she’s going to be all right. Humans are very like dogs. Sleep and warmth soon put them right.”

  Old Dr. Smale came after breakfast, stated that his patient had narrowly missed pneumonia, but once the effects of shock and a bad chill had worn off, she would soon be about again.

  “She’s run down—needs a change, I should say,” he told Emily. “Ought to meet more young people. She’s mopey.”

  “But there’s no serious trouble, is there?” asked Julian, frowning.

  “None at all. Just run down as I said,” the doctor answered brusquely, and turned back to Emily. “Get her away for a bit. You’re very isolated out here. Give her some interest—let her train for a job or something just to give her occupation.

  “Well, Jennet’s future is really settled,” began Emily brightly, and Julian broke in smoothly:

  “I think Doctor Smale is probably right. She needs a change.”

  The doctor shot him a look as if he would have liked to have said: “What the devil’s it got to do with you?” He did not like Julian, whom he considered a high-handed and arrogan
t young man, and if he had not long ago dismissed him as a cold fish, he would have suspected that he had been upsetting the girl by making love to her.

  He addressed himself entirely to Emily, ignoring Julian, gave instructions and wrote prescriptions, and bustled off saying he would look in after a couple of days.

  “Keep her quiet,” he flung back over his shoulder. “I seem to remember my patient had a slight upset before when this young man was staying in the house.”

  “Hates my guts, doesn’t he?” grinned Julian as they watched the doctor hurry to his car. “That was a nasty parting crack of his. I believe he thinks I have designs on the child!”

  Emily smiled, then looked tired. The situation did not always seem as simple as it had at first appeared to her.

  “Where will you send her?” she asked. She had long ago given up the pretence that it was she who made plans for Jennet.

  “Well, I think it’s probably a good time for that postponed visit to London,” Julian replied. “Jeremy will be back in town in a week or so, and he can start the sittings. Aunt Emily, does she ever talk about that young man?”

  “What young man?” Emily looked bewildered. “Jennet doesn’t know any young men.”

  “That young boy she picked up on the moor.”

  Emily laughed.

  “That boy! No, never. I imagine she’s forgotten him.” Julian traced a pattern on the carpet with his stick.

  “I wonder if I made a mistake in forbidding that friendship,” he said slowly. “I wonder if I made a mistake in isolating her so much.”

  Emily looked at him oddly. It was unlike Julian to have doubts about anything.

  “Well,” she said uncertainly, “she will have to stand on her own feet one of these days. You can’t keep her wrapped in cotton-wool for ever.”

  He looked up.

  “I can keep her in cotton-wool, as you call it, until I marry her,” he said.

  “And then?”

  “And then—well, things will be different,” he said obscurely.

  Emily glanced at him curiously.

  “What put the boy into your head again?” she asked. “That was all so long ago, and never really amounted, to anything.”

  “Something she said about that china atrocity that got broken, but I think I jumped to the wrong conclusion,” Julian replied. “She talked a lot last night about the ornament being a symbol, and about a song called ‘Searching for Lambs’ that she sings sometimes. But she never talked about the young man. Well, I think I’ll go and sleep for the rest of the day, Aunt Emily. Call me if I’m wanted.” She watched him leave the room and heard the slow, painful drag of his foot on the stairs. It had been a gruelling twenty-four hours for him, but, curiously enough, pain had not made him irritable.

  Jennet awoke from her sleep and lay in that pleasant lassitude which is the aftermath of a high temperature.

  The fog had lifted, but no sun shone, and staring at the fire, she imagined herself back on that other occasion when she had lain in the tester bed and Julian had sat beside her. Then it had been April, Frankie was still a painful memory, and she had nearly thrown a plate of spinach at Julian.

  So much and yet so little had happened since then. She and Julian had had those queer conversations in the orchard, their companionship had grown and dwindled according to his moods. Sometimes the gap widened so that she stood far off, a child waiting for chiding or approval. Sometimes, as yesterday, it was so narrow that she felt she could leap across into certainty and understanding.

  She and Julian ... she and Julian ... how everything returned to that. Never, she thought, had any one lived so solitary a life, dependent on one person, and one person only. Yesterday she had lain against his breast, and he was not Julian, but some other stranger who was yet no stranger. To-day he would look at her with critical eyes and she would be a child again, awkward and tongue-tied.

  Emily looked in at seven with a hot drink. “Time for temperatures and medicine,” she said, shaking up the bottle vigorously. “How do you feel?”

  “Much better, thank you. My headache’s nearly gone. Aunt Emily, I want to say I’m sorry for making a fuss—about the fawn, I mean.”

  “Yes, well—” Emily sounded non-plussed. She never had been sure what all the storm was about. “It was all a little misunderstanding. Mrs. Dingle is sorry, too.”

  “And she’s not leaving, is she?”

  “No, she’s not leaving, though, I must say, Jennet, if she had it would all have been a little unnecessary, wouldn’t it? But there, the weather had been trying for all of us, and Julian, though he doesn’t realize it, doesn’t always make things easy in the house.”

  “Where is he?” asked Jennet.

  “Sleeping, I hope,” said Emily briskly. “Don’t you know he sat up with you nearly all night?”

  “Did he?”

  Jennet’s impressions of the night were confused. She remembered someone stoking the fire, and stroking her forehead when the pain was bad. Well, of course, Julian understood about pain. She should have known those firm, authoritative fingers were his.

  Emily glanced at her sharply, mistaking confusion for indifference.

  “I don’t think you probably realize what a strain you put Julian to,” she remarked a little severely. “He looked positively grey this morning.”

  “Oh ...” It was a soft little sound full of compassion and a child-like wonder.

  “I hope,” continued Emily with a severity she did not really feel, “you don’t go upsetting Julian. You owe him a great deal of consideration, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.” She smiled suddenly. “I don’t mean to upset him, but he does pounce so, and then it’s often too late to explain.”

  Emily looked at her suspiciously. Surely the child wasn’t laughing at Julian?

  “Well, you’d better not talk any more. You’re looking flushed. Good night, my dear. H you want anything, just ring your little hand-bell.”

  “Good night, Aunt Emily, and please say good night to Julian for me.”

  But Julian came himself to say good night.

  He stood by the bed, leaning on his stick in his familiar attitude, and rested a cool hand on her forehead.

  “Head better tonight?” he asked.

  “Much better. Aunt Emily says you stayed up with me all night,” Jennet said. “It was very good of you.”

  He smiled.

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “I remember someone stroking my head. It was wonderful.”

  “The pain was bad last night, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. Yes, it was.”

  Her eyes seemed much too big for her face and the delicate skin still bore the dark smudges of exhaustion.

  “Pain can be hell, can’t it?” he said simply, so that she was able to say a little timidly.

  “And you—your leg. Was it bad today?”

  “So-so,” he replied non-committally, but he did not shy away from her compassion as upon those other occasions.

  “I wish,” she said shyly, and caught his hand, “I could do something for you, too.”

  He looked at her, a little at a loss for a reply, then he gave her fingers a squeeze and gently covered her hands with the sheet.

  “Perhaps you can—some day,” he said, and straightened his back. “Well, go to sleep now. I’m off to bed myself. Good night.”

  “Good night, Julian, and thank you.”

  They were pleasant days of drifting, those days upstairs in the room which was now so familiar. Julian wandered in and out, and often she slept while he sat and read and woke to find him watching her, his book on his knee.

  One day he went up to London for the night, and returned with a neatly packed parcel which he tossed on to the bed. Inside the wrappings, carefully padded with cotton-wool, was a beautiful little model of a fawn in blown-glass.

  “Not, I’m afraid, in any way a substitute for the other,” he said, “but I hope the symbolic, mantle will attach itself just the same
.”

  Jennet lifted the fawn to the light, holding it with careful fingers. No, it was scarcely a substitute. It was the most exquisite and fragile thing she had ever seen. It was not Frankie’s fawn, but it might still be a symbol, a symbol she would recognize one day.”

  “It’s perfectly beautiful,” she said with awe. “Thank you so very much,” she went on. “Did you up to London especially to get it?”

  “Not really. I had various matters to attend to,” he answered casually. He seemed pleased and in some queer way relieved that she liked his present, but he never asked her anything more about the china fawn, and perhaps she could not have explained if he had.

  He brought her messages from Luke and Piggy and told her they were both looking forward to seeing her in London.

  “In London?” she asked, her thin cheeks flushing.

  “You haven’t forgotten you’re to be painted by one of our most eminent artists, have you?”

  “No. I thought you had.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “I told you we would wait for the autumn. Now old Smale has recommended a change, so it all fits in very well.”

  She gave a little wriggle of excitement.

  “So you like the idea, do you?” Julian remarked. “Been stuck out here on the moor too long?”

  “Oh, it isn’t that,” said Jennet quickly, “but I love the town and—and people round me and—I can’t explain.”

  He grinned at her.

  “There are all sorts of things you can’t explain, aren’t there, my foundling?” he said.

  He had never called her that before and it gave her an odd sensation, as though he had gone to the Battersea Dogs’ Home and bought her for five shillings.

  “I’ve arranged everything with Piggy who’ll have you as a P.G. and keep an eye on you when I’m not there to do it myself,” he continued. “There’s going to be no gallivanting with unauthorized persons, mind, and you’ll have plenty to do. I promised you good singing lessons, didn’t I? With Jeremy’s sittings and odd concerts and things, you’ll be pretty busy.”

  “Yes,” said Jennet. “And will I do anything else?”