Chapter XIX: A Discovery

Olwen was very busy. For the last fortnight she had devoted herself to the library, and it had been a far more laborious business than she had anticipated. The books seemed to have been snatched from their places, thrown in a pile on the floor, and taken thence and thrust into shelves quite haphazard.

Not only was there no classification, but even the volumes of the different sets were divided, and had to be hunted for.

She had, by dint of steady work, made considerable progress, though still there were rows of books lying on the ground, carefully shielded from dust by newspapers.

This morning the sun was streaming blithely in through all the windows, and the sharp frost made one feel buoyant. Olwen was in vigorous health. Since she left the Palatine Bank she had improved very much in looks. The tints of her face were like a sun-warmed peach, her eyes were bright and clear, and the excellent feeding made her plump, though the exercise she took kept her from growing stout. She sang as she stood upon the library steps, garbed in a blue overall, with duster and feather brush. It seemed to her that all was right with the world.

The upper shelves were devoted to fiction, and she had just hunted out and found the last volume completing a set of Bulwer Lytton. She carried them up to their destined shelf, and was carefully arranging them according to their numbers, when one dropped from her hand into her lap. The leaves fell apart, and a photograph slipped out from between them. Seated upon the top step, she took up the portrait and studied it.

A young lady, with ebullient hair, teeth and a smile. She wore a large feathered hat and a low--generously low--evening dress, with a rose at her bosom and a diaphanous scarf over one shoulder.

"An actress," thought Olwen, and sighed a little pitifully; for the big bistred eyes were wistful, and the lips, so evidently carmined, had a pathetic droop. She turned over the cardboard and saw words scrawled across the back in a thick, heavy hand:

"Ninian, from his Lily."

Beneath this, which was written in ink, the same hand had added something else in pencil: "_Mrs. Ninian Guyse._"

To her own surprise Olwen coloured hotly. She sat down abruptly on the top step, studying the pictured face intently.

"So that was the kind of girl he tried his hand upon last! No wonder I puzzled him! No wonder that he didn't exactly know where he was with me! ... This was Lily Martin! How could they engage such a person? How could they have her in the house? No wonder Sunia said she was not pukka!"

Sitting there, chin on hand, she caught sight of her own reflection in the glass of the opposite cupboards. A small person in a long plain overall, almost childish, nunnishly garbed from throat to foot!

Then again her eyes sought the flamboyant image upon the cardboard.

"From that to this!" she thought, with a curled lip.

Her puzzled eyes, staring out across the room, fell, as they often did, upon the family motto, carved above the Tudor chimneypiece:

"_Guyse ne scait pas se deguyser._"

Like many old mottoes, it seemed ambiguous. Did it mean that, once a Guyse you could not cease to be a Guyse, nor persuade anyone that you were anything else! Or did it mean that any Guyse would scorn to stoop to deception? Or did it mean (as Ninian vowed it did) that a Guyse was such a hopeless fool that any attempt to disguise or mask himself was sure to be found out?

She had herself inclined to the first interpretation. "Once a Guyse always a Guyse" would have been her paraphrase.

Now she looked upon it with a curl of the lip. She was recalling Ninian's telling of the story of Lily Martin. The recital had seemed to her to bear the stamp of truth. To-day her mind had received a nasty jolt.

She and Ninian had come far--very far--since their first meeting. Only last night the question of her remaining at the Pele had been practically decided. Ninian had expounded the rules to her. "If you wanted to leave at the month you should have given warning at the end of a fortnight, Miss. Now you have been here six weeks you will have to give a month's warning; after this month is over we shall engage you annually, as they used to do the farm-hands at Caryngston mid-summer fair."

To this she returned that it seemed better that she should at least remain long enough to finish the library catalogue; and to celebrate that decision Ninian, at supper, had bade Sunia bring a bottle of champagne, in which they all drank each other's health.

Mrs. Guyse on this occasion looked more animated than Olwen had ever seen her; and Sunia, when putting her missee to bed later, had cooed over her like a triumphant mother over a new-born child.

Now this photo lay on her lap, and the sight of it was affecting her strangely.

For weeks past she had hardly given a thought to the warnings of Deb Askwith or Dr. Balmayne. She had _not_ continued to keep Nin at a distance. In truth, this was a difficult feat, when Nin desired to approach; although, looking back, she realised how cautious the approach had been....

... How, exactly, had they reached the stage at which now they stood--the point at which two people have a common stock of jokes, and memories, a common association of ideas--when they turn to each other with a certainty of response, an assurance of mutual understanding?

She could not tell. Ninian, the impertinent boor of the Seven Spears, had become her comrade, she might even say her intimate friend. It was almost like necromancy.

And now there lay before her this flimsy, out-of-date bit of pasteboard, with its costume of four seasons ago, so frail and worthless a thing, yet able to give the lie to her own opinion of Ninian. Here, if looks might be trusted, was a girl of the "cheap" variety, and yet, to judge from her expression, not a vicious girl, not a temptress. She had lived in the house with Ninian for more than a year. Some quality in her expression, in the appeal of the big round eyes, hurt the spirit of the girl who gazed.

He had told her to leave, and she had wept upon his shoulder! ... How many times during her stay at the Pele might she have used his shoulder as a refuge without being repulsed? Olwen shuddered. There was an element of horror in her thoughts.

Was this man using her as a plaything? Did he still think of her as he had done of this predecessor of so different a type?

No wonder that his first impression, when he went to meet his mother's new companion, had been that of disappointment. She had not seemed to promise the kind of sport that he desired. Yet her very aloofness, her snappish, prudish ways, had acted as a lure. She had shown plainly that he did not please her, and he had determined that he would please her. Whether or no he found her attractive, he was resolved that she should so find him. She professed not to be interested, and he became determined to arouse her interest.

How long would it be before the pleasurable novelty of the situation wore off for him? Olwen clenched her small, ineffectual fists. She had been very arrogant, had believed herself so strong that such a man as Ninian Guyse could not matter. Now, all unaware, she found that she had reached a point at which he did matter, more than she cared to think.

Her wounded vanity found some comfort in the reflection that from first to last there had been no love-making. They had become friends upon her own terms. She had, as it were, made the rules. It was now up to her to see that he kept them. Surely she could do this. Yet the revulsion of feeling in her was so strong that she feared it must be apparent to him. She had believed his story of the "Lily Martin affair." In his mouth it seemed to her to bear the stamp of truth. Its disproof was in her hand....

... She recalled Balmayne's curled lips as he said, "So! I see that you are a partisan already!"

The doctor had attended Miss Martin; he knew much more than Olwen could possibly know of the matter. She wished that she had allowed him to tell her his version. It had not seemed to matter then. Now she would give much to have Ninian cleared.

If he and she were on bad terms, she felt that she could not stay at Guysewyke. This certainty gave her to some extent the measure of her own feeling. She caught a glimpse of the long road she had travelled, and saw for an instant the strength of the cobweb bonds which knitted her silently to this uncouth place and its inhabitants.

She sat on, the photo in her hand, lost in these uncomfortable speculations, humped up on the top of the steps, absorbed in gloomy thought.

The distant door swung back to let in a piercing sound of whistling. Nin and Daff precipitated themselves into the room with violence, and the young man shouted gladly:

"There you are, after all! Been looking everywhere for you! My word, you do seem busy!"

She did not change her posture, but turned her gaze down upon him as he stood below, smiling broadly up at her, his teeth gleaming, the sun catching the pale metallic gleam of his eyes, changing from green to shot gold where the iris touched the pupil, and making him look, as she often thought, like an animal. The same sun was shining richly through her own hair, so that she looked down upon him from a halo.

"Seeing that I told you at breakfast that I should be cataloguing all the morning, it's not very complimentary of you to forget it so soon," said she disagreeably.

"Hallo! Got the hump? I should think so, perched up there all these hours! You look like a saint and talk like a shrew! D'you know it's lunch-time?"

"No, I didn't. I've been so busy."

"You looked it as I walked in. You were sound asleep, I believe. Now come along down to me! I'll jump you!"

He stood at the ladder's foot, his arms extended. But yesterday, and she would have jumped into them. To-day she felt that she would rather die.

"Oh, do get out of the way," said she; "you make me nervous. These steps are rickety. Stand aside, please."

"Oh, come, Teacher! Don't go back to last month in that discouraging way! I ain't done nothink fresh, 'ave I? Ain't 'ad the coppers arter me these three weeks, swelp me, I ain't, miss! Tell yer strite, I don't move from this 'ere till I gets yer! Come! Moight as well jump first as lawst!"

"Oh, please, Mr. Guyse"--in worried accents--"don't be silly. Stand on one side and let me come down."

He gave her a long, keen look, then moved aside and stood still, with heightened colour, while she replaced the photo in "The Last Days of Pompeii," rose upright, and deposited the volume in the shelf next its fellow. Then she descended slowly backwards, reached the ground, and shook the dust from her overall before unbuttoning it.

"Are you in earnest? Have I dropped a brick of any kind?" he asked in a totally changed voice, a voice which caused her to feel an insane desire to be friends.

"Oh, no, only one does get so tired of that everlasting ragging," she replied slightingly, moving towards the door.

He moved more quickly than she, and laid his hand upon the iron ring which raised the latch. His colour had faded, and he looked so white that she halted, a little frightened.

"D'you think it's fair?" he began, and broke off. "Sorry you're put out," he then said. "Don't know what it's about. Anyway, it's beastly disappointing. I had come to tell you such jolly good news. The ice is bearing, you know.... I've been over this morning to see."

Surprise stayed her retreat. "Ice? I didn't know there was any water--I mean, any water you could skate on--hereabouts."

"It's some miles away--Hotwells Lough," said he, pronouncing the word as they do in Northumbria--Loff. "Quite near the Roman Wall, you know. The ice is like glass."

Olwen drew a long breath. If she loved one thing it was to skate. From the time when her uncles taught her upon the ornamental water in Bramforth Park to the Christmas holidays when Ben Holroyd had taken her and Gracie some stations up the line to the Great Stang, it had been her greatest winter joy. Need she deprive herself of that joy simply because she had determined, after all, to "keep Muster Nin at a distance"? ... There was not much skating in the neighbourhood, and there would be others there--perhaps Dr. Balmayne.

"Are you thinking of going over?" she asked.

"Not to-day; it's too far. If we go we ought to start to-morrow morning after an early breakfast, and take our lunch with us."

"Near the Roman Wall?" said she, waveringly.

"Quite near, really. Near the best bit of all."

"Well," said Olwen, half relenting, "we'll hear what Madam says. I must just run and wash my hands."

With these words she disappeared and hastened up the newel stair. Nin stood motionless for some seconds after her departure; then, softly closing the door, he ran up the ladder steps, passed his hand along the shelf, and took down "The Last Days of Pompeii.'"

The book fell open in his hand and he saw the photo. He stared at it as in a passion of disgust. Then he took it up hesitatingly and turned it over. His brows contracted into a portentous frown as he saw the inscription. His mouth puckered itself into a whistle, as if of sharp surprise.

"The devil!" he said. "Oh, the devil!"