A Changed Heart Part 62

"Writing is such a bore," Olive said, drearily. "I hate writing. Is that the carriage waiting up there?"

"Yes," said Laura; "and how did you enjoy your travel? You look pale and tired."

"I am tired to death," Mrs. Wyndham said, impatiently, "and I have not enjoyed myself at all. Every place was stupid, and I am glad to be home!

Do let us get out of this mob, Mr. Wyndham!"

Mr. Wyndham had paused for a moment to give some directions about the baggage, and his wife addressed him so sharply that Laura stared. Laura noticed during the homeward drive how seldom she spoke to her husband, and how cold her tone always was when she addressed him. But Mr. Wyndham did not seem to mind much. He talked to Laura--and Mr. Wyndham knew how to talk--and told her about their travels, and the places they had been, and the people they had met, and the adventures they had encountered.

"Olive reigned Lady Paramount wherever we went," he said, smiling (he never called her Mrs. Wyndham or "my wife," always Olive). "Our tour was a long succession of brilliant triumphs for her."

Olive merely shrugged her shoulders disdainfully, and looked at the swelling meadows as they drove along Redmon road. A beautiful road in summer time, and the Nettleby cottage was quite lost in a sea of green verdure, sprinkled with red stars of the scarlet-runners. Ann Nettleby stood in the door as they drove by in a cloud of dust--in that doorway where pretty Cherrie used to stand, pretty, flighty little Cherrie, whom Speckport was fast learning to forget.

And Redmon! Could Mrs. Leroy have risen from her grave and looked on Redmon, she might well have stared aghast at the magical changes. A lovely little villa, with miniature peaks and turrets, and a long piazza running around it, and verdant with climbing roses and sweetbrier. A sloping velvety lawn, on which the drawing-room and dining-rooms windows opened, led from the house to the avenue; and fair flower-gardens, where fountains played in marble basins, and bees and b.u.t.terflies disported in the September suns.h.i.+ne, spread away on all sides. Beyond them lay the swelling meadows, the dark woods; and, beyond all, the s.h.i.+ning sea aglitter in the summer suns.h.i.+ne. The groom came up to lead away the horse, and Mrs. Hill, in a black silk dress and new cap, stood in the doorway to receive them. The dark, sunless face of Olive lit up and became luminous for the first time as she saw all this.

"How pretty it is, Laura!" she said. "I am glad I am home."

The servants were gathered in the hall to welcome their master and mistress as they entered arm-in-arm. The upholsterer had done his work well, the drawing-room was one long vista of splendor, the dining-room almost too beautiful for eating in, and there was a conservatory the like of which Speckport had never seen before. Mrs. Wyndham had a suite of rooms, too--sleeping-room, dressing-room, bath-room, and boudoir--all opening into one another in a long vision of brightness and beauty, and there was a library which was a library, and not a mockery and a delusion, and was lined with books from floor to ceiling. Speckport had been shown the house, and p.r.o.nounced it perfection.

Olive Wyndham forgot her languor and weariness, and broke out in her old delighted way as she went through it.

"How beautiful it all is!" she cried, "and it is all mine--my own! I am going to be happy here--I will be happy here!"

Her black eyes flashed strangely upon her husband walking by her side, and the hand clenched, as if she defied Fate from henceforth.

"I hope so," Paul Wyndham said, gravely. "I hope, with all my heart, you may be happy here."

Laura looked from one to the other in silent wonder. Mr. Wyndham turned to her as they finished the tour of the house.

"I suppose Rosebush Cottage is hardly equal to this, Miss Laura? Have you been there lately?"

"Yes," said Laura. "Val and I--he stops with us now, you know--went through it last week. The rooms are very pretty, and the garden is one wilderness of roses; and Midge reminds me of Eve in Eden, only there is no Adam."

"And Midge does not exactly correspond with our ideas of our fair first mother," laughed Mr. Wyndham. "I must go there to-morrow and see the place. Will you come, Olive?"'

"No, thank you," she said, coldly. "Rosebush Cottage has very little interest for me."

Again Laura stared.

"Why is she so cross?" she thought. "How can she be cross, when he seems so kind? How soon do you expect your mother, Mr. Wyndham?" she said aloud.

"This is Friday--I shall leave on Monday morning for New York to fetch her."

There was an announcement that dinner was ready, and nothing more was said of Mr. Wyndham's mother. He rode over to Rosebush Cottage early next morning, attended only by a big Canadian wolf-hound, of which animals he had brought two splendid specimens with him, and told Midge he was going to leave him as guardian of the premises. Before he left the cottage, he called Midge into the pretty drawing-room, and held a very long and very confidential interview with her, from which she emerged with her ruddy face blanched to the hue of a sheet. Whatever was said in that long conversation, its effect was powerful on Midge; for she remained in a dazed and bewildered state for the rest of the day, capable of doing nothing but sitting with her arms folded on the kitchen-table, staring very hard at vacancy with her little round eyes.

Mr. Wyndham departed for New York on Monday morning, taking the other big dog, Faust, with him. Mrs. Wyndham took his departure with superb indifference--it was nothing to her. John, the coachman, was of as much consequence in her eyes as the man she had promised to love, honor, and obey. She did not ask him when he was coming back--what was it to her if he never came?--but he volunteered the information. "I will be back next week, Olive," he said. "Good-bye." And Olive had said good-bye, icily, and swept past him in the hall, and never once cast a look after him, as he drove down the long avenue in the hazy September suns.h.i.+ne.

The house-warming at Redmon could not very well come off until Mr.

Wyndham's return; and the preparations for that great event being going on in magnificent style, and Olive eager for it to take place, she was not sorry when, toward the close of the following week, she learned her husband had returned. It was Miss McGregor who drove up to the villa to make a call, and related the news.

"The boat got in about two o'clock, my dear Mrs. Wyndham," Jeannette said, "and Mr. Wyndham and his mother came in her. I chanced to be on the wharf, and I saw them go up together, and enter a cab and drive off. I am surprised they are not here."

"They drove to Rosebush Cottage, I presume," Olive said, rather haughtily. "Everything is in readiness for Mrs. Wyndham there."

"What is she like, Jeannette?" asked Laura, who was always at Redmon, familiarly. "I suppose she was dressed in black?"

"Yes," Miss McGregor said, "she was dressed in black, and wore a thick black vail over her face, and they had driven off before any one had time to speak to them. No doubt, she would be present at the house-warming, and then they could call on her afterward."

But Mrs. Wyndham, Senior, did not appear at the house-warming; and society was given to understand, very quietly, by Mr. Wyndham, that his mother would receive no callers. Her health forbade all exertion or excitement, it appeared. She seldom, if ever, crossed her own threshold, from week's end to week's end; and it was her habit to keep her room, and she did not care to be disturbed by any one. Her health was not so very poor as to require medical attendance; but Mr. Wyndham owned she was somewhat eccentric, and he liked to humor her. Speckport was quite disappointed, and said it thought Mr. Wyndham's mother was a very singular person, indeed!

CHAPTER x.x.x.

VERY MYSTERIOUS.

The house-warming at Redmon was such a house-warming as Speckport never saw before; for, as Mr. Blake with his customary good sense remarked, "When Mrs. P. Wyndham did that sort of thing, she did do it." In the luminous darkness of the September evening, the carriages of the guests drove through the tall iron gates up the back avenue, all aglow with red, and blue, and green lamps, twinkling like tropical fireflies among the trees. The whole front of the beautiful villa blazed with illumination, and up in the gilded gallery the musicians were filling the scented air with delicious melody. It was not Redmon, this; it was fairy-land; it was a scene out of the Arabian Nights, and the darkly-beautiful lady in ruby velvet and diamonds, welcoming her friends, was the Princess Badelbradour, lovely enough to turn the heads of a brigade of poor Aladdins. Society went through the house that night, and had the eyes dazzled in their heads by the blinding radiance of light, and the glowing coloring and richness of all. The ladies went into raptures over Mrs. Wyndham's rooms, and the literary people cast envious eyes over the book-lined library, with its busts of poets, and pictures of great men, dead and gone. There was a little room opening off this library that seemed out of keeping in its severe plainness with the magnificence of the rest of the house--a bare, severe room, with only one window, looking out upon the velvety sward of the lawn at the back of the villa; a room that had no carpet on the floor, and very little furniture, only two or three chairs, a baize-covered writing-table, a leather-covered lounge under the window, a few pictures of dogs and horses, a plaster head of John Milton, a selection of books on swinging shelves, a bureau, a dressing-table, a lavatory, a shaving-gla.s.s, and a sofa-bedstead. Except the servants' apartments, there was nothing at all so plain as this in the whole house; and when people asked what it was, they were told by Mrs. Hill, who showed the house, that it was Mr. Wyndham's room. Yes, this was Mr. Wyndham's room, the only room in that house he ever entered, save when he went to dinner, or when visitors required his presence in the drawing-room or library. His big dog Faust slept on a rug beside the table, his canaries sung to him in their cages around the window, he wrote in that hard leathern armchair beside the green-baize table, he lay on that lounge under the open window in the golden breeze of the September weather, and smoked endless cigars; late into the night his lamp glimmered in that quiet room; and when it went out after midnight, he was sleeping the sleep of the just on the sofa-bedstead. The servants at Redmon talked, as servants will talk, about the palpable estrangement between master and mistress, about their never meeting, except at dinner, when there always was company; for Mrs. Wyndham breakfasted in the boudoir and Mr. Wyndham never ate luncheon. He was quite hermit-like in his habits, this pale, inscrutable young author--one gla.s.s of wine sufficed for him--he was out of bed and at work before the stable-boys or scullery-maids were stirring, and his only extravagance was in the way of cigars. From the day he had married Olive Henderson until this, he had never asked or received one stiver of her money; he had more than sufficient of his own for his simple wants and his mother's, and had Olive been the hardest virago of a landlady, she could hardly have brought in a bill against him, even for board and lodging, for he more than repaid her for both. He was always courteous, genial, and polite to her--too polite for one spark of her affection; always deferring to her wishes, and never attempting in the smallest iota to interfere with her caprices, or thwart her desires, or use his husbandly authority. She was in every way as much her own mistress as she had ever been; so much so that sometimes she wondered, and found it impossible to realize that she was really married. No, she was not married; these two had never been united either in heart or desire; they were bound together by a compact never mentioned now. What had he gained by this marriage? Olive sometimes wonderingly asked herself. He told her, or as good as told her, he wanted her for her money; but now that money was at his disposal, and he never made use of it. What had he married her for?

"How proud you must be of your husband, Mrs. Wyndham!" other women had said to her, when abroad; and sometimes, in spite of herself, a sharp pang cut to the center of her haughty heart at the words. Why, these very women had as much right to be proud of him, to speak to him, to be near him, as she had. Proud of him! She thought she had cause to hate him, she was wicked enough to wish to hate him, but she could not.

Neither could she despise him; she might treat him as coldly as she pleased, but she never could treat him with contempt. There was a dignity about the man, the dignity of a gentleman and a scholar, that a.s.serted itself, and made her respect him, as she never had respected any other man. Once or twice a strange thought had come across her; a thought that if he would come to her and tell her he was growing to love her, and ask her not to be so cruelly cold and repellent, she might lay her hand on his shoulder with the humility of a little child, and trust him, and yield herself to him as her friend and protector through life, and be simply and honestly happy, like other women. But he never did this; his manner never changed to her in the slightest degree. She had nothing to complain of from him, she had every cause to be grateful for his kindness and clemency. And so she shut herself up in her pride, and silenced fiercely her mutinous heart, and sought happiness in costly dress and jewelry, and womanly employment, and incessant visiting, and party-giving, and receptions and money-spending--and failed miserably.

Was she never to be happy? She had everything her heart could desire--a beautiful house, servants to attend her, rich garments to wear, and she fared sumptuously every day; but for all that, she was wretched. I do not suppose Dives was a happy man. There is only one receipt in this wide world for happiness, believe me, and that is goodness. We may be happy for a brief while, with the brief happiness of a lotus-eater; but it cannot last--it cannot last! and the after-misery is worse than anything we ever suffered before. Olive Henderson had said she would be happy, she had tried to compel herself to be happy; and thought for a few poor minutes, sometimes, when she found herself the belle of some gay party, dancing and laughing, and reigning like a queen, that she had succeeded. But "Oh, the lees are bitter, bitter!" Next day she would know what a ghastly mockery it had all been, and she would watch Paul Wyndham, mounted on his pony, with his dog behind him, riding away to his mother's cottage, with a pa.s.sionately rebellious and bitter heart, and wonder if he or any one else in the wide world would really care if they found her lying on the floor of her costly boudoir, stark and dead, slain by her own hand.

Paul Wyndham appeared to be very fond of his mother, if he was not of his wife. He rode over to Rosebush Cottage every day, rain or s.h.i.+ne, and sometimes staid there two or three days together.

Mr. Wyndham's mother, for all her age and her ill-health, could play the piano, it seemed. People going past Rosebush Cottage had often heard the piano going, and played, too, with masterly skill. At first, it was thought to be Mr. Wyndham himself, who was quite a musician, but they soon found out the piano-playing went on when he was known to be at Redmon. Olive heard all this, and, like Speckport, would have given a good deal to see Mr. Wyndham's mother; but she never saw her. She had asked him, carelessly, if his mother would come to the house-warming, and he had said "No, she never went out;" and so the house-warming had come off without her.

There was one person present on that occasion whom Speckport was surprised to see, and that was Captain Cavendish. Captain Cavendish had received a card of invitation, and, having arrayed himself in his uniform, made his appearance as a guest, in the house he once hoped to call his own. Those floating stories, whispered by the servants, and current in the town, of the cold disunion between husband and wife, had reached him, and delighted him more than words can tell. After all, then, she had loved him! Doubtless she spent her nights in secret weeping and mourning for his loss, fit to tear her black hair out by the roots, in her anguish at having lost him. He was very late in arriving at Redmon, purposely late; and he could imagine her straining her eyes toward the drawing-room door, her heart throbbing at every fresh announcement, and turning sick with disappointment when she found it was not he. Would she betray any emotion when she met him? Would her voice falter, her eyes droop, her color rise, or her hand turn cold in his own?

Oh, Captain Cavendis.h.!.+ you might have spared yourself the trouble of all these conjectures. Not one poor thought had she ever given you; not once had your image crossed her mind, until you stood bowing before her; and then, when she spoke to you, every nerve was as steady as when, an instant later, she welcomed old Squire Tod. Her eyes were following furtively another form, nothing like so tall, or stately, or gallant as your own, Captain Cavendish; another form that went in and out through the crowd--the form of her husband, who welcomed every one with a face infinitely kind and genial, who found partners for forlorn damsels, who stopped to talk courteously to neglected wall-flowers, and who came to where his wife stood every now and then, and addressed her as any other gentleman in his own house might address his wife, showing no sign of coldness or disunion on his part, at least.

Captain Cavendish was disappointed, and all Speckport with him. Where was the cold neglect on Mr. Wyndham's part, they had come prepared to see and relish? where the haughty disdain of the neglected and resentful wife? They were calmly polite to one another, and what more was required? As long as Mr. Wyndham did not beat her, or Mrs. Wyndham showed no sign of intending to elope with any other man, Speckport could see no reason why it should set them down as other than a very well-matched couple.

It was noticeable that Mr. Wyndham that night paid rather marked attention to one of the lady guests present; but as the lady wore black bombazine and c.r.a.pe, a widow's cap, and was on the frosty side of fifty, no scandal came of it. The lady was poor Mrs. Marsh, who had come, nothing loth, and who simpered a good deal, and was fluttered and flattered to find herself thus honored by the master of Redmon.

"Her story is a very sad one, Olive," he said; "I am glad you settled that annuity upon her; it does you credit."

Olive said nothing; but a dark red streak flushed across her face--a burning glow of shame. She was thinking of Mrs. Major Wheatly's governess--what would Paul Wyndham say of that pale little girl if he knew all? Mrs. Wyndham had repeatedly invited Miss Rose to Redmon; and Miss Rose had come two or three times, but never when there was company.

Mr. Wyndham led Mrs. Marsh in to supper, and sat beside her, and filled her plate with good things, and talked to her all through that repast.

His wife, sitting between Major Wheatly and the Rev. Augustus Tod, still watched him askance, and wondered what he could find to say to that insipid and faded nonent.i.ty, who simpered like a school-girl as she listened to him. But shortly after conducting Mrs. Marsh back to the ballroom, and seeing her safely seated at a card-table, he disappeared, and was nowhere to be seen. Every one was so busy dancing, and flirting, and card-playing, that his absence was quite unnoticed--no, not quite, his wife had observed it. It was strange the habit she had insensibly contracted, of watching this man, for whom she did not care--or persuaded herself she did not--of listening for his voice, his step, and feeling better satisfied, somehow, to see him in the room. Where had he gone to? What was he doing? How could he be so rude as to go and leave their guests? She grew distrait, then fidgety, then feverishly and foolishly anxious to know what he could be about, and who he was with; and gliding un.o.bserved from the crowded ballroom, she visited the dining-room, the library, peeped into his own room, which she never condescended to enter; all in vain. Mr. Wyndham was nowhere to be seen.

"It is very strange!" said Mrs. Wyndham to herself, knitting her black brow--always her habit when annoyed. "It is most extraordinary conduct!

I think he might show a little more attention to his guests."

The library windows opened on the velvet lawn, and were opened now to their widest extent, to admit the cool night air. She stepped out into the pale starlit night, her rich ruby velvet dress and starry diamonds glowing dimly in the luminous darkness. As she walked across the lawn, glad to be alone for a moment, a figure all in white flew past her with a rush, but not before she had recognized the frightened face of Laura Blair.

"Laura!" she said, "is it you? What is the matter?"