Chapter II: Olwen at Home

The large family of the Reverend James Wilson had been brought up on the fringes of Dartmoor. His income there was, however, of so inadequate a nature, in view of his domestic requirements, that when the question of education demanded heroic measures, he accepted the living of Gratfield, a very large town in the industrial Midlands--a post for which both his temperament and his habit of life hitherto made him singularly ill-fitted.

Of his seven children, four were girls. They were fine creatures, with white limbs, blonde hair, complexion of cream and roses. Their natures were placidly bovine, except during that brief period in which a girl's own sense of her own beauty and the power it bestows kindles in her a fictitious vivacity, and nature, for her own purposes, lends a charm which is incredibly fugitive.

The young ladies made quite a sensation upon their arrival in Gratfield. Not long before, Madoc Innes, a clever young Welsh journalist, had bought the _Gratfield Courier_ and settled in the place. He was handsome on a small scale, and passed for rich--drove good horses, smoked expensive cigars, and was much in demand in a society where such young men are rare.

The sight of Clara Wilson at a ball set his Celtic blood on fire. Her Juno-like loveliness made so powerful an appeal to his senses that the limits of her mind or the faults of her disposition did not enter the question. She was stupid, and she was essentially Philistine, but he shut his eyes to it until too late. They were married, and he committed his first enormity by the purchase of a little old Elizabethan farm up on the moor outside Gratfield, planning to drive to his work each day.

Clara detested the place. She had had as much of moors and heather in her childhood as would last her all her life. What she desired was shops and fine clothes, plenty of company, the chance to show off and be admired. For these things she had married, and not for love of Madoc, with whose tastes she had no sympathy, and whose disposition she would have disliked had she ever given a thought to the subject.

After the blind fashion of a man in love, the young husband felt that he had not won his wife's devotion long before he consciously admitted anything of the kind. He began by spoiling her outrageously, giving her all she craved, in the vain hope that gifts might propitiate her and incline her to a more favourable--one might say a more interested--attitude towards himself.

Unhappily, a year or two after the marriage his rising fortunes underwent a sharp change.

Being a Welshman, he was a violent partisan, and his knowledge of the temper and prejudices of the North was very imperfect. He attacked a certain public character, and found himself up against a stone wall of implacable hostility. A costly libel action left him a ruined man. He being thus deprived of what had been his sole asset in his wife's eyes, their lack of unity became at once nakedly apparent.

He had plenty of courage and belief in himself. He took his wife and baby girl to London, where he got work on a big "daily," and hoped for better things.

Clara, however, had no forgiveness for him. She had married with one object, that of being well off; and her failure was more sharply accentuated in her eyes by the fact that Ethel, her next sister, had made a conquest of George Whitefield, only son and heir of the richest mill-owner in Gratfield.

Hopelessly out of sympathy, the Innes pair drifted wider and wider apart. The discovery of his wife's indifference warped Madoc's unstable temperament. Miserable at home, he consoled himself elsewhere. They ran continually into debt, there was even an execution in the house. Scenes grew frequent and even violent, At last, when Olwen was about seven years old, her father disappeared completely, leaving behind an envelope, addressed to his wife, containing a hundred pounds in bank-notes.

Clara, her beauty gone, broken in health, soured in temper, returned, with her little daughter, to her father's rectory.

She came at an unlucky turn in the family fortunes.

It had long been apparent that twenty years of sloth in a tiny parish, in a mild and balmy climate, had permanently unfitted the Rev. James Wilson for strenuous work and the rushing life of a big town. After a struggle, hopeless from the first, against his constitutional inertia, and the growing dissatisfaction of his parishioners, he was stricken down by severe illness. His return to health was seriously retarded by the sad climax of Clara's marriage, and the failure of his sons to do anything to lighten his burden of undone work and unpaid bills.

At this point his old college offered him the living of St Agnes, Bramforth, about fifty miles further north. It was a depressing district, semi-suburban, semi-industrial, with an 1850 church, pew-rented, and a fluctuating congregation. The income was, however, as good as that of his present cure, and the work less than half. About twelve months after the flight of Madoc Innes, and fifteen years before that Christmas when Olwen decided that the bank was intolerable, the family migrated to Bramforth, and Mr. Wilson, with the assistance of a curate, thankfully lapsed into the stagnation which suited him.

Olwen's mother was at this time an invalid. Three years later a prominent surgeon diagnosed serious internal trouble. She underwent an operation, failed to rally from the shock, and died a few days later.

The two younger Miss Wilsons, Maud and Ada, did not marry. Perhaps they looked too high, for while in Gratfield they had not been without admirers. They were, however, still single, and had borne with fine unselfishness their share in the strain on the meagre family resources involved by the necessity of supporting Clara and Clara's child.

Olwen's memory of her father was vivid. In fact, she often thought that the first seven years of her life had left a mark far deeper than those that followed. She was always striving, in an unformed, eager way, to arrive at the truth concerning the breach between her parents. Her mother remained in her memory as mostly fretful and complaining, uncertain in temper, dissatisfied and uncontrolled. She knew now that Mrs. Innes was a deeply wronged woman; yet she could not escape the bias of mind produced by the fact that she herself owed every hour of happiness as a child to her father. She remembered him as invariably sweet-tempered and gay--as a constant companion, more like a contemporary--liable as herself to incur the sudden and capricious wrath of the mistress of the house.

His upbringing had been cosmopolitan, his parents having lived much abroad. To adapt himself to the Wilson standpoint had been from the first impossible. The laborious etiquette of the provinces was a matter of which he could never grasp the importance. That his wife's happiness should depend upon such things as card-cases, "At Home" days, late dinner, or a "drawing-room suite" was to him unthinkable.

Olwen remembered best of all their habit of escaping together. They went to remote corners of Hampstead Heath or Battersea Park, or, if he were in funds, to the Thames, where they took a boat. They spent long days in make-believe, with a packet of picnic lunch, and a few pence for their omnibus ride home through the magic dusk of London. His faculty for story-telling was endless, and one romance, especially dear, went on in sections from week to week, and was entitled: "Story of the Dandy Lion and his four friends, the Pale Policeman, the Cheery Churchwarden, the Sad Sweep, and the Tremendous Tramp." An illustration of this group of friends was one of her few mementoes of her vanished boon companion.

From him, too, she heard the tales of the Mabinogion, the "Romance of Kiluch and Olwen"--whence came her own name, so severely condemned by the Wilson family--the "Romance of Enid and Geraint," and so on.

This all made it hard for her to apportion the blame between the sundered pair. At the Vicarage, of course, all the guilt was heaped on Madoc Innes. She supposed this to be in fact just. His temperament may have been charming but his principles were apparently all wrong. She saw only part. Yet as she grew older she found herself concentrating more and more upon her mother's share in the debacle.

That Clara Innes was unable either to sympathise with or to understand her husband was the result presumably of her limitations, and these, one would suppose, she could not help. Not until Olwen read her "Pilgrim's Progress" and learned, with a sudden shock, that Ignorance was thrust down into hell, did it occur to her that Ignorance is a crime, since it is a thing one may remedy if one chooses.

Grumbling, one grants, is not a sin. To fail in sympathy to your husband is hardly a sin. To make his home uncomfortable is not a sin, that is, not of the sort called deadly. But to be unfaithful to your wife is a direct breach of a commandment. Therefore, in the Wilson code, Clara was innocent and her husband criminal. To his other crimes he added wife desertion, which is a matter for the police courts. Clara had never done anything in her life which could conceivably have landed her in the police court. It was all very puzzling. When Olwen had spent time, as she often did, in considering the subject, she usually found that she ended by wishing that her father had taken her with him when he fled. She felt sure they could have been happy together.

In her heart she knew herself for her father's daughter, and from the Wilson point of view wholly alien. It was typical of them that they should so dislike her name, for no reason but because they had never heard it before. The name of Owendolen, just as Welsh, and more high-falutin in sound, was quite popular in Bramforth, because Owendolen was in fairly common use. Olwen was different, and she was usually called "Ollie" in hopes that the casual acquaintance might suppose her baptismal name to be Olive, a name which, mysteriously enough, was under no ban.

Her defaulting father had made no sign, and sent no message upon the occasion of his wife's death. It was tacitly assumed that he was either dead or had gone to some remote quarter of the globe, where he was living most probably under an alias.

For nearly three years now Olwen had been self-supporting. At first her post at the bank had possessed that elfin charm with which most novelties are gilded when one is in one's teens. Life itself is then a romance, the mere act of coming out into the streets on a fine morning may be the beginning of endless adventure.

Now the monotony had killed the novelty. Her father's restless blood stirred and demanded relief. She felt almost desperate as she let herself into the Vicarage and pushed her streaming umbrella into the untidy receptacle.

A lowered jet of gas burned dimly in the hall. Yet by its light she could descry a letter upon the hall table, addressed "Miss O. Innes, St. Agnes Vicarage, Bramforth."

An answer to her advertisement at last! A way of escape from the bank or its alternative, Ben and the linoleumed villa!

Snatching it up, she hurried away to her own room, to enjoy the excitement of reading it.

On the threshold of that sanctuary she paused. It was in a state of upheaval. There was no bedding on the bedstead, no carpet on the floor. Instantly she remembered that her room was being cleaned for the reception of Marjorie Whitefield, and that she herself was to "double up" with Aunt Maud during the period of invasion.

Ashamed of her own feeling of acute distaste, she turned and went slowly along the passage.

Aunt Maud was washing her hands for supper, and the subdued kindness with which she welcomed her niece and showed her how she had taken things out of drawers and bestowed them as well as she could during the girl's absence, made Olwen vexed at her own irritation.

Aunt Maud was very fond of "Ollie." She turned wistfully to the only young creature left remaining in the shabby old Vicarage. She lingered now, to explain in detail every point in her successful "packing of them all in." It was her part to superintend the housework while her elder sister did the catering, an arrangement which, on the whole, worked well.

Olwen strove with courage and some success to make her interest seem real. The way in which a certain hole in the dining-room carpet had been triumphed over, and the report that the re-enamelling of the bath was a complete success, were things of deep importance to Aunt Maud, and it would have been brutal to snub her.

When at last she went downstairs, there were but five minutes before the supper bell, but curiosity would no longer be denied. Olwen sat down on the bed with the letter in her hand, enjoying the delights of speculation before opening it. It was addressed in a very pretty hand, and bore the postmark of a part of England noted for fine scenery.

"Suppose," thought Olwen, whose suppositions leaned always to the romantic, "that I hold my destiny in my hand at this moment?"

Excuse enough, in all conscience, for some dallying with the anticipation!

However, at last the envelope was broken and the letter lay under her eyes:

"Dulley Vicarage.

"Mrs. Jones, having seen Miss O. Innes's advt, thinks the post she can offer might be suitable. She is in want of a lady to live in the house and help in the training of her children, five in number.

"A servant is kept, but Miss I. would be asked to make herself generally useful. Her secretarial training would be very useful to Mr. Jones in copying out his sermons and conducting his correspondence. If Miss I. has a typewriter of her own, Mrs. Jones would have no objection to her bringing it with her. She would be treated in all respects as one of the family, and Mrs. Jones would give a pound a month pocket money, as to her own daughter."

For a moment Olwen gripped the letter in her young fist as if she wished its writer were there instead. Then her sense of humour triumphed. Bursting into hearty laughter, she crushed the impertinence into a ball and tossed it into the fender.

"Well," she mused, "I think that is the limit! And there is my sole reply to an advertisement which cost me five shillings!"

Fiercely she brushed the thick mane of dun-coloured hair that shaded to gold. "And I thought my destiny lay in that envelope!" she whispered quite fiercely. Her eyes seemed to blaze. They were pale grey eyes, made beautiful by noticeably fine lashes, which, with her eyebrows, were too dark for such fair hair. She was not going to be discouraged. She would write to London, to a first-class agency, and pay whatever fee they demanded. To go to London would be to escape from Ben.

She laughed and sighed both at once. Aunt Maud would have liked her to marry Ben--poor Aunt Maud, who knew nothing of the discontent which had grown up within the daughter of Madoc Innes. She had feared it in Ollie's early girlhood--had watched for signs of it. But by degrees she had reached the comforting conviction that Olwen inherited from her Wilson relatives too good a strain of steady devotion to duty to be troubled by her father's vagabond instincts.

She loved Olwen, and confided in her. Olwen loved her, but never reciprocated the confidences. Aunt Maud might have inferred much from the circumstance, but she belonged to a type which does not draw inferences.