A Changed Heart: A Novel

by May Agnes Fleming

Mr. Darcy hesitated over this last cruel passage, and felt inclined to leave it out; but he did not, and there was a suppressed murmur of indignation from every lip on hearing it.

Poor Mrs. Marsh was catching her breath in hysterical gasps, and being fanned and sprinkled with cold water, and the palms of her hands slapped by Miss Jo and the two married ladies. And still the vailed figure at the window sat rigidly there, uttering no cry, shedding no tears.

There are griefs too deep for words, too intense for tears, when we can only sit in mute and stony despair, while the world reels under our feet, and the light of the sun is blackness. To Nathalie Marsh, the loss of fortune was the loss of everything—brother, lover, home, happiness—the loss of all to which she had looked forward so long, for which she had endured so much. And now, she sat there, like a figure carved in ebony; and only for the ghastly pallor of her face in the indistinct glimpses of it they could catch through the vail, could they tell that she even heard.

It was Val Blake who again broke the silence that followed the reading of the will.

"I protest against this will!" he indignantly cried. "It is unjust and ungrateful! You should never have produced it, Mr. Darcy. You should have read the former will."

"You are jesting, Mr. Blake! While regretting as much as you can possibly do this unfortunate change, my duty is sacred, and by this will we must abide. Mrs. Marsh seems very ill; I think she had better be conveyed home."

No one ventured to speak to Nathalie, her unnatural manner awed them; but when her mother was supported from the room, and she arose to follow, good natured Miss Jo was beginning a homily on resignation, and on its being all for the best, perhaps, in the end. Her brother, however, cut her short with very little ceremony, and handed Miss Marsh in after her mother, and seating himself by the coachman, they started off rapidly. He might have spared himself the trouble; good Miss Jo might have preached for an hour, and Nathalie would not have heard one word of it. She sat looking straight before her, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, conscious of nothing, save only that dull and dark despair at her heart. Midge, who had come with them in the carriage, waited on Mrs. Marsh, and cried quietly all the way, bestowing anything but blessings on the memory of her late mistress.

Mr. Blake assisted both ladies into the house when they reached Cottage Street. Mrs. Marsh, who was very ill and in a state of hysterics, he carried in his arms and laid on the sofa. Nathalie entered the parlor, closed the door, and, still wearing her bonnet and mantle, sat down by the window that looked out on the blurred and misty street. She had flung back her vail, and in her white and ghastly face and dilated violet eyes you could read a waiting look. Nathalie was waiting for one, who, by some secret prescience, she knew would soon come.

Doctor Leach entered the cottage soon after their return, prescribed for Mrs. Marsh, and departed again. Had he been able to minister to a mind diseased, he might have prescribed for Nathalie, too; but that not coming within his pharmacopœia, he left without seeing her.

It was dusk when he for whom she waited came. The dull wet day was ending in a duller and wetter evening, and the tramp, tramp of the long-roaring waves on the shore made a dull bass for the high, shrill soprano shrieks of the wind. The lamps were flaring through the foggy twilight in the bleak streets, when Captain Cavendish, in a loose overcoat, and bearing an umbrella, wended his way to that house of mourning. He had not been two hours in Speckport, but he had heard all that had transpired. Was there one in the town, from the aristocratic denizens of Golden Row and Park Lane to the miserable dwellers in filthy back-alleys and noisome water-side streets, that did not know, and were not discussing these unhappy events with equal gusto? The robbery and murder of Mrs. Leroy, the inquest, the sentence and imprisonment of Charley Marsh, the will, and the disinheriting of Nathalie, all were as well known in the obscurest corner of Speckport as in that unhappy home to which he was going.