Orphan Bride (26 page)

“Well, we’ll see. Come with me now, and I’ll find somewhere for you to sleep tonight.”

The next two days passed wit
h a dream-like qu
ality
for
Jennet. The other girls accepted her incuriously, as life in an institution is al
wa
ys accepted. There were many who remembered her as the orphan who had been adopted and gone to live in riches, but that, too, was an old story, and probably untrue.

No, there was no going back. Had she not herself said to Julian: “I don’t think one ought to find the way back.
One ought to find the way forward.” She had changed.

Despite herself she had changed and gone forward, and on the second morning she knew it, waking in her narrow bed long before it was light, her face wet with tears. She had been dreaming of Pennycross, and she lay in the darkness, the harsh rough sheet under her chin, remembering
...

The bell clanged loudly, insistently, and Jennet rose with the rest. There was no need to get up at six, Matron had told her, no need to put
a
n her apron and help with the younger children. But habit was strong, and she could no more have disobeyed the warning bell than she could have disobeyed Emily’s instructions to stop in bed.

She was superintending the mid-morning, break in the babies’ play-room when an older girl put her head round the door and told Jennet she was wanted in the Visitors’ Room.

“The Visitors’ Room?” Her eyes widened. “Who?”

The other girl shook her head stolidly.

“
I dunno. Matron sent me.”

Matron
... Then Jennet
remembered. It was Friday. The board of directors were meeting in the afternoon. Matron had said they would want to question her.

The long corridor leading to the Visitors’ Room had just been newly waxed and she slipped a little as she hurried
down it.

She knocked on the door and entered, closing it behind her, and a familiar voice remarked:

“Well, Jennet, are you ready to come home?”

Julian stood in the middle of the room, leaning on his stick, and surveying her unsmilingly, just as he had done a year ago, almost to the day. There was no sign of Matron.

Jennet leant against the door
,
the knob still under her fingers, staring at him, and her face went white.

“Haven’t you anything to say to me?”

She licked her lips.

“I—I didn’t expect you. I asked Matron not to
—
”

“Not to give you away? But you see, Matron, admirable woman, considered it her duty to wire Aunt Emily, who in turn wired me.
”
He limped across to her, and flipped her apron with his stick.

“Every time you get out of my sight, Jennet, you collect some extraordinary garment,” he said. “What is it?”

“An apron. We—they all wear them.”

“Do they indeed. Take it off.”

With the old obedience, she undid the apron and stood nervously pressing it into neat grey folds.

“That’s better,” he said, and asked again with quiet casualness:
“
Are you ready to come home?”

She was defeated. He would always defeat her.

“Yes,” she heard herself saying with a little sigh. “Yes, Julian.
”

He smiled suddenly and sat down on the arm of a chair. “Before we go,” he said, “I want to have a little talk with you. I want you to understand that when we leave here, you are free to do whatever you choose
.
You can stay on with Piggy, or you can go back to Pennycross and stop with Aunt Emily until you’ve decided what you want to do with your life. I myself will be going away next month—perhaps for some little time. Remember that Pennycross is your home now, just as much as if you had been born there and lived there always. But whatever you decide to do, it’s your decision and no one will try and influence you.
”

The color came flooding into her face.

“But your—your plans
—
” she began, but he interrupted her.

“I have no plans—only the wish to see you happy.” He smiled at her. “I was wrong, wasn’t I, Jennet, and you were right? You can’t run other people’s lives, mould other people’s characters. No one has that right. I’ve given up
any sort of claim I thought I might have on you.”

She felt the tears prick her eyelids.

“I—I don’t know what to say,” she stammered. “It—it will seem so queer not to have you telling me what to do.”

He avoided her eyes and traced patterns on the bare boards with his stick.

“
You’ll get used to it.”

She watched his averted profile, and was hurt by the change she saw there.

“You look ill,” she said impulsively, and there was pain in her voice.

He looked up, and his eyes were grave. “It’s been an anxious few days,”
he told her gently, but it was the only rebuke he gave her.

She wanted to go to him, to put her arms round him and tell him whatever he wanted of her, that she would do. He had given her release, but she would always be bound to him in some small corner of her heart.

He got to his feet.

“Well, fetch your things,” he said abruptly. “There’s nothing more to wait for. Oh, before I forget it, Piggy asked me to give you this.”

He took a letter from his wallet and handed it to her.

“Piggy? What’s in it?”

“I’ve no idea. Probably a note to assure you of her welcome in c
a
se you felt too ashamed of yourself. Put it in your bag. You can read it in the car.”

He turned away and began to limp across the room, and she noticed how much more his foot seemed to be dragging. She hesitated a moment longer, conscious of something she wanted to say to him, then she left the room, quietly closing the door.

Upstairs in the empty dormitory she read Piggy’s note.

Piggy had written:

“
...
I do not suppose that Julian will tell you that he is to go into the nursing home next month for his final operation. I think he has told no one but me. It means a good deal to him this time as I understand they must then decide whether or not to take the leg off.

I shall look forward to seeing you back, dear. It was always a maxim in my schoolroom that the real test of affection is to give up voluntarily that which you most desire. Considering the happiness of another before your own is the true mark of devotion, however it may be disguised
...
”

J
ennet sat very still, at first unable to think of anything but the ordeal ahead of Julian. No, he would not tell her. He was afraid of pity. He was, perhaps, afraid of all emotion, save the familiar one of anger...

She read the letter again, and, the pedantic, rather pointless phrases of the last page repeated themselves in her head in a strange, persistent pattern.
The real test of affection is to give up voluntarily
...
Julian had given her up voluntarily
...
that which
y
ou most desire
...
but Julian
...
but Julian did not desire...

Color flooding her face, she seized her hat and coat and handbag and ran out of the dormitory.

Julian had been inspecting the Founder’s portrait, but he turned at her entrance. He looked at her in silence as she stood just inside the doorway, her coat trailing beside her on the floor.

“
Julian—” she said, and paused.

There was the vast width of the room between them, and she was reminded of that other occasion when she had been afraid to cross it on account of the clatter her clumsy shoes made on the bare boards.

“Why don’t you want to marry me?” She had to rais
e
her voice to reach him, and he replied:

“Is this a shouting match? Come over here.”

She advanced a little across the floor.
“Why don’t you want to marry me?” she repeated
. “
Is it because it’s a true mark of devotion?”

He leant rather heavily on his stick and remained
where he was.

“It sounds a funny sort of reason,” he remarked.

Jennet moved a little more.

“It’s a test of affection to give up something which you
most desire
—
”

“Indeed?”

“And considering the happiness of an
o
ther before your own is the true mark of de
v
otion, however much it’s disguised.”

He looked at her oddly, and the lines about his mouth deepened.

“
Where have you suddenly acquired these extraordinary-sounding platitudes?”

“Never mind. Have you given up your plans for me
because they didn’t work after all, or because
—
”

“Really, Jennet, I don’t think we’ll discuss it.”

“—or because—” she covered quite a large area of floor —“you found you—you cared for me enough to want me
to be happy?”

“Would that make any difference to you?” he asked
quietly.

“Yes, yes, it would.” There was not a great amount of space between them now. “You see, the reason I ran away was the reason I couldn’t finish the song. I wanted—I wanted—oh, Julian, do make it easy for me.”

He shifted his weight on to his other leg.

“What do you want me to say?” he asked her a little
harshly. “That I love you and we’ll live happily ever
after?”

“Yes,” she said a little breathlessly, “that would do.”

He moved abruptly, retreating a little against the wall. “No, I won’t have that,” he said. “You’re young, with whole clean climbs that need a sound body to match them.
I never had any right to expect you to slow down your pace to mine.”

The room was very quiet.

“If it’s your leg,” she said shyly, “you needn’t mind. It only makes me—fonder.”

She saw the knuckles whiten on the handle of his stick, and he cried as once before:

“I don’t want pity. That’s the last thing that must be between you, and me.”

She said gently:

“But compassion isn’t pity. Compassion is one of the great truths. Without it you can’t have understanding or affection or—or love. I remember Mrs. Dingle once saying that the pride and bitterness of the maimed was a thing no woman could understand, because to a woman her man didn’t change because he lost a leg o
r
an arm. And it’s true, Julian, and that isn’t pity, it’s love.”

For a long moment he stood watching her with eyes that were suddenly hungry, but he could not speak, and suddenly she was afraid of him no longer.

“Oh, Julian, you’re so stubborn
!
” she cried, and dropping her belongings in a heap on the floor, she sprang across the rest of the space between them and flung both ar
m
s round his neck. “If—if you pounce on me now, I’ll cry all over you.”

Fo
r a moment he resisted her, then his arms closed roun
d
her, holding her against his breast in one convulsive, prote
c
tive movement.

“Y
ou must show me the way, my foundling,” he said at last,
his
black head bent to hers. “You must show me the way
t
o your own wisdom and—infinite compassion.”

Above their heads, Benjamin Emanuel Blacker looked down with a disapproving eye, and as if aware of him, they glanced up, and Jennet put out her tongue at him.

“If you ever do that to me when I’m the Great and Good Founder of the Jennet Brown Orphanage, I’ll take you across my knee,” said Julian severely.

She looked up at him swiftly.

“Oh, Julian, are you
really going to? An orphanage that’s a real home?”

He touched her ardent face tenderly.

“I think so. It will be something
to do that’s unaffected by the state of my health, and I have an idea that I owe a pretty large debt to orphans.”

“The Jennet Brown Orphanage,” she said slowly. “That sounds wonderful.”

“And,” said Julian with returning severity, “I’ll also take you across my knee if you ever run away from me again—do you hear?”

She gave him a smile of untroubled sweetness.

“I’ll never want to,” she said, and he replied gravely:

“I hope you never will. I was so stupid, Jennet, with my half-baked theories—and then I had to go and fall in love with you, and that served me right.”

“Yes, it did, didn’t it?” she agreed sedately, and picked up her hat from the floor and held it up.
“Oh, Julian! My hat!” One of them had trodden in the middle of the crown.

“Throw it out of the window,” said Julian promptly. “I’ll buy you another when we get to town.”

Still a little shocked, Jennet tossed it away, as twice before she had done at his bidding, and together they watched it whirl blithely across the playground In the November wind, coming at last to rest on a statue of the Founder.

“Let’s go,” said Julian.