Orphan Bride (11 page)

But Jennet was certainly not indifferent. Julian’s personality was too forceful and, at times, too uncomfortable for that. His interest often alarmed her more than his indifference, and she felt gauche and tongue-tied and thoroughly inadequate. There were times when she could see he was in pain and then she would experience that old desire to comfort and help. But she had learnt not to help him, even in small things. He preferred to fetch and carry for himself, and he expected no pity. He never mentioned his
future plans, but he said to her once:

“You will have to try and match your steps to mine, I
’
m afraid.”

It was a reminder of the future, and she understood now why he would not let her lea
r
n dancing, why Emily’s suggestion of riding had not been encouraged, and why games, even if she had known any young people with whom to play them, had never been thought of.

Julian, because he was conscious of failure, went through a period of intense irritability, when he found fault more, often than he praised, and defeated his own purpose by his unintentional snubs. He treated Jennet like a child, alternating between kindness and critical impatience, and
because he never showed her the inner workings of his own mind, he knew little or nothing of hers.

He continued to try to teach her to drive, but the results were so disastrous to both of them that he gave it up and arranged for her to have proper instruction from a Plymouth school of motoring after he had gone back
to
London. He discussed books and world af
f
airs with her, and even superintended her singing practice. By the end of the fortnight, she began to feel driven, and her face wore a harassed expression which drew protest from Emily.

“You’re driving her too hard, Julian,” she told him.
“If you’re not careful the, girl will think of you only as a tutor and never as a husband. Her face is beginning to look quite pinched, and she’s not eating nearly so well as when you first came.”

Julian looked startled.

“I haven’t meant to drive the poor child,” he said remorsefully. “I thought I was putting in a good
job of work. She’s so suggestible in many ways that I forget it may not always be easy.”

Emily shook her head.

“This moulding of another’s character to suit yourself
can be dangerous,” she said shrewdly. “Take c
are
that you don’t leave her none of her own.”

Julian changed his tactics. He left her alone as regards her studies, but concentrated instead on her health.
Emily’s remark had worried him, and he saw for himself that the girl was thinner, and that her eyes looked bigger than ever. He insisted on extra milk and earlier hours and,
he
watched like a hawk at meal-times to see that she finished
every mouthful.

Jennet soon thought that this kind of supervision wa
s
even worse and she began to dread, meals.

The climax came one evening at supper. Emily had heaped her plate with spinach, and try as she would,
she could not finish it.

“Eat up, dear, we’re waiting,” Emily said.

Jennet put down her fork.

“You gave me too much, Aunt Emily,” she said in a defeated voice.

Julian leant across the table.

“Nonsense!” he said. “Spinach is good for you. Finish it up like a good girl.”

Jennet raised her eyes to his.

“I won’t eat it,” she said clearly.

Julian’s eyebrows shot up and he looked amused.

“Dear me!” he said, “I wouldn’t have dared say that to my nurse when I was a small boy. Come along, child, make an effort.
”

She suddenly got to her feet and picked up the plate of spinach, and for one moment Julian thought she was going to throw it at him.

“I won’t eat it, do you hear?” she cried, and her face was quite white. “That’s all you are—a nurse, a governess. Eat your spinach, do your lessons, clean your nails! I’m not a child, do you hear? I’m seventeen and you treat me as if I was seven.”

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 to
o
k one look at the exhausted, white little face and tol
d
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
v
ittals 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
w
ry 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
o
n 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
o
n 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 c
h
arity 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
i
mpatience 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 pe
o
ple. 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.”

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.

T
o Jen
n
et 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 mu
c
h 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.

S
he 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.”

H
e 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 tr
y
and remedy that.”

T
here 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.