Chapter XXX: The Incredible Truth

It did not take long for Olwen to reach the study. Her whole self was nothing but one huge mark of interrogation as she went into her grandfather's presence. Her eagerness was even enhanced by her desperate dread. She felt that she might be going to receive the wigging of her life. What tales had Ninian told of her or himself?

The old man was not seated, but pacing his room in evidently great perturbation. As he turned to face her, she saw that his usually parchment-coloured face was quite red. He eyed her with a peculiar stare which struck terror to her heart.

"But he can't do anything to me," she said to herself. "I have got father now--somebody to stand up for me!"

"My dear, how are you?" was the vicar's pacific opening. "I was sorry to be out when you arrived yesterday, but, when I came in, your aunt said she thought you had better not be disturbed."

"I don't feel very well yet, thank you, Grandfather, but I am well enough to hear what you have to say."

He eyed her apprehensively. "I--I wonder," said he, shuffling across the room once more. Then, turning, he sat down at his desk as though resolved upon controlling his nerves. He cleared his throat. "Be seated, my dear," he said quite solicitously. His faded eyes dwelt upon her as she obeyed his behest. "I have--er--just had a visitor."

"Yes. Mr. Guyse. I saw him come," she replied as naturally as she could.

"Yes. H'm! You and he have seen a good deal of each other?"

"We have. It was winter, and the Pele is not at all a large house."

"How did he strike you, I wonder? But perhaps such a question is merely futile. We must come to the main point--the surprising, I may say the extraordinary information which this young man has just given me. My dear, you must prepare yourself for--for something in the nature of a shock."

"Oh, Grandfather, please, please tell me! Is it abou--about Mr. Guyse?"

"Well, in part--in part it is. Very painful, very distressing, of course ... but in the main it concerns you, my dear, you and your father, my poor son-in-law, Madoc Innes."

She sat like a stone. "My father!" she whispered. "He--he is worse. Ah, don't say he is--dead?"

The vicar bowed his head. His hands were playing with a cablegram which lay upon the table before him.

"He is dead," he said. "This message arrived for you after you had left the Pele yesterday morning. Mr. Guyse brought it to me, because he feared, in the state of your health, he ought not to give it to you under the circumstances. He thought you should be safe at home when the news was broken. Er--your aunt forwarded you a letter from New York, which she thought was from your father, some days ago?"

She found her voice with a sob. "Yes! He said he was coming--sailing in the _Stupendous_. I was to go to Liverpool to meet him. That was partly why I hurried home. Oh, don't say he is dead; don't say I shall never see him!"

"My dear, you must calm yourself sufficiently to allow me to proceed. The most surprising part of the story is still to be told. I have seldom been so completely taken aback as by the news Mr. Guyse has just given me."

"Mr. Guyse! What does he know about father?"

"Ah, my dear, that is the point. That--is--the point. He did not know poor Madoc himself, but it seems that his twin brother knew him very well indeed."

"Wolf!" cried the girl bewildered. "Wolf knew my father!"

"Intimately. They were in Alaska together. They went to Klondyke together. Your father had the most astonishing good fortune. He struck an oil well when he was looking for gold. It was in the very place where it was most wanted. He managed to keep it quiet until he had bought up all the land he required, and then turned it into a company. He died--your father died--a millionaire, my dear."

He handed over the cablegram, and she took it in her hands.

"Regret Madoc Innes died yesterday. Wire at once permanent address to Ware and Shuckton, solicitors, 536 West Forty-ninth Street, New York City."

Olwen faced the old man with a blank stare. She had thus far drawn no inference at all.

"The--er--the Guyse family is, I gather, greatly impoverished?" went on the vicar presently. She assented, still bewildered.

"Yes. The brother in London was in regular correspondence with your father, and knew he was desperately ill. In fact, he knew that he could not live long. While he was staying at the Pele for a few days' vacation at Christmas, they saw quite by chance your advertisement in the daily paper. The name of Innes struck the young man, for he knew well of your existence, having heard your father speak of you. He knew that poor Madoc had not been in communication with you for years--that he had willed all his fortune to you, that he meant to claim you when he returned to England, but that his state of health made it unlikely that he would ever reach this country. Your first letter, in which you signed your name in full, made him certain that he was right. The name of Olwen was so uncommon. He suggested to his brother that they should offer you a post in the family, that the elder Mr. Guyse should--er--secure your affections, and that you should become engaged under the impression that nothing was known of your fortune."

The girl to whom he spoke uttered a choked cry. She rose from her seat, made for the window as if to open it, stopped half-way, dropping on her knees before a big chair, on which her head fell, while she shook with helpless sobbing.

So this--_this_ was the truth, the incredible, undreamed-of truth!

She had been picturing one kind of infamy for Ninian, when all the time it was something different, but just as contemptible. He was nothing more exalted than a fortune-hunter--a mean, hypocritical fortune-hunter.

There had been a deliberate plot, to which, of course, both Madam and the ayah had been parties. To get her there, to pet her and make much of her, and later, when she proved harder to manage than they had anticipated, and time was running short, to entrap her, to persuade her that she had no choice but to make the marriage which had all along been planned....

"Oh!" she thought, "I shall go mad! This is more than I can endure!"

Her grandfather, in much distress, vainly begged her to be calm.

"I must ring for one of your aunts," he said at last; and this threat enabled her to control herself.

"No, no, don't do that," she gasped, swallowing her tears. "I am going to be sensible, I will try and face it. You see, it is so dreadful, so wild, so mad--and it is all coming at once!"

"It is most natural that you should feel emotion, dear child. I myself hardly know what to say or to think," replied the old man, wiping away a tear. "Such a change of fortune is enough to stagger the strongest head."

"Clever plan of theirs, wasn't it?" she muttered, with an irony whose effect was marred by tears. "Seems quite a pity they just did not bring it off." (Oh, Ninian, Ninian, why did you confess? Why must you roll yourself in the mire like this!)

"It was, as you may imagine, with great difficulty that the young man brought himself to speak to me on such a subject. He did so because he said you had refused to hear him, and he wished me to inform you of the facts. He seems to have had scruples from the first. But there were heavy pecuniary liabilities, concerning which he was not very explicit. However, I gather that as the days passed his natural good feeling began to get the upper hand. You were so unsuspecting, you were being cajoled and hoodwinked.... In short, he came by degrees to feel that he could not bear it, and that the dishonourable plot ought to be made known to you----"

"It was probably more policy than honour that suggested that course," she sneered. "If my father came over, he knew he would be found out."

"Well, there is that view of the subject," said the vicar doubtfully. "They did know, of course, that it must come out sooner or later. Had you been actually married, I suppose there would have been no help for it. I think," he added with hesitation, "yes, I do really think that the young man was heartily ashamed of himself."

"I trust he was," said Olwen with trembling lips. "Think; Grandfather, suppose he had succeeded! I am young and inexperienced. Suppose he had made me care desperately--what then?"

He looked at her with solicitude.

"That, of course, would have been most regrettable. However, all's well that ends well, and he will never trouble you again."

Standing in the window, her face turned from him, she repeated the words blankly. "He will never trouble me again? ... I suppose not. Oh, how I wish that he had been caught in his own net! If I had been a different girl, tall and beautiful and fascinating! If I could have made him wild for me, and then--then found out this, so that I could punish him, make him suffer, as I am suffering now!"

This outburst was beyond the scope of the old cleric, who sat peering with weak eyes upon a passion that passed him by.

"Is--is Mr. Guyse still in Bramforth?" she asked at length.

"No. I understand that he made his visit to me so early because he had to catch a train. He has gone back to Guysewyke."

Over! It was indeed over. In all her thoughts of Ninian she had not suspected him of playing the hypocrite with her. Now she saw it all, in the fierce light of her grandfather's bald words. He had played a part with her--pretended he liked her, pretended he was eager for her society.... As time went on, he must have seen that what was all jest to him was earnest to her. He had begun to feel some stirring of remorse. "I wish to God I had never seen you! ... I'm damned if I marry the child!"

How easy of interpretation now were those words which had been so puzzling!

How nearly she had fallen a prey!

It seemed as if Providence had intervened to save her, as if some power greater than herself had nerved her to that midnight flight, and spared her the humiliation of hearing from the lips of the man she loved the cruel fact that he had meant to marry her for her money.

He had gone back to Guysewyke.

And Wilfrid, handsome, debonair Wilfrid, had been privy to all this. He, who knew her father well, had kept silence on that head. Together he and Ninian had planned to net a fortune. How very nearly they had succeeded!

She summoned up a picture of Wolf, standing in the damp, tree-shaded road, coaxing her so gently back to the car, luring her so plausibly to return to her prison.

He had not succeeded. Ah, God be praised for that! She was here, at Bramforth, bruised, half killed, but safe! Oddly enough she had at the moment a glimpse into the soul of Madam--the other heiress who had been lured into a loveless marriage by a former Ninian Guyse! She pictured herself, dull, faded, embittered, listless, while the man who did not love her passed lightly on his way.

From that she was saved--at least she was saved from that!

"He was as deep in debt as I in love; he only wanted my fortune.... He said I expected too much." ... She seemed to hear the very tones of the dry, lifeless voice.

"I think," said the vicar's quavering voice, "that you should try to turn your thoughts a little from this young man to the startling news he brought. It seems--though it is hard, indeed, to realise--that you are not only wealthy, my child, but enormously wealthy. It"--he broke off with a nervous little laugh. "Such a thing has not happened before in our family. I will confess that it has shaken me."

Olwen came out from her own trouble and faced, as it were, suddenly her fortune from a new standpoint. She saw it no longer as the devilish thing which had tempted Nin to pretend that he loved her, but as a weapon of power, something that should enable her to repay to the family who had mothered her for so long some part of their unselfish performance of duty.

"Oh, Grandfather!" she cried, springing to her feet. She ran to him, flung her arms about him, and broke down into laughing and tears. "To be able to make you comfortable, to give you all you want ... and the aunts! Those wonderful aunts! They shall come out into the sunshine; the people who have patronised them shall come begging favours! Oh, Grandfather, it is true, you are sure it is true? We are not making any terrible mistake?"

"I feel sure that it is true. Mr. Guyse brought me this paper to read."

He laid before her an American newspaper, containing a long paragraph upon "The Glen Olwen Oil-King, Madoc Innes."

"Madoc returns a millionaire to the old country. Left home without a fiver. Left something that cost him more. His only daughter, Miss Olwen Innes. Romance of the gold-seeker. Miss Olwen knows nothing of the pile that awaits her."

So it ran.

"It appears that Mr. Guyse's brother wrote recently to your father telling him that you were staying with his mother at the Pele--speaking as though your coming there had been accidental. That accounts, so Mr. Guyse thinks, for the fact that the New York lawyers sent the cable to the Pele direct."

"Oh, they planned it well, didn't they? But somehow I escaped the snare," said the girl a little wildly. She sprang to her feet, ran to the door, opened it, and cried aloud for her aunts. They came in, their faces expressing consternation in every line.

"Olwen, you ought to be in bed, you look half crazy, child; let me take your temperature!"

The heiress flew upon undemonstrative Aunt Ada, locking her vigorous young arms about her. "Take anything you like!" she cried, "for I owe you everything I have or am! Oh, Aunt Maud, Aunt Maud! Do you remember how we played at fancying we were rich, chose our house in Gainsley Park, furnished it with our favourite things out of the best shops, chose our Daimler or our Rolls-Royce, and went off together for a tour in Italy? Well, we'll do it! We'll do it all! We'll do more than ever our poor little starved imaginations dared to think of! You shall do just exactly as you like, my dears, from this moment for the rest of your lives!"

"Is she crazy? In a high fever," cried Aunt Maud apprehensively, lifting the burnished locks to gaze anxiously upon the wound beneath.

The vicar got to his feet. He trembled, as his gnarled hands rested upon the sheet of soiled blotting-paper on his desk.

"It's true, my dears, she is not crazy. Madoc Innes is dead and has left her more money than she will know what to do with."