A Changed Heart: A Novel

by May Agnes Fleming

Olive Wyndham turned suddenly upon her, and grasped her arm, with a violence that made Laura cry out with pain.

"Laura Blair!" she cried, with passionate fierceness in her voice, "if ever you say a word of what you have seen to-night, I will kill you!"

With which remark, Mrs. Wyndham walked away, stepped through the library window, and into the house. She was in the drawing-room when poor Laura ventured in, sitting at the piano, enchanting her guests with some new and popular music, but with a face that had blanched to a sickly white. She might play, she might talk, she might laugh and dance, but she could not banish that frozen look from her face; and her friends, looking at her, inquired anxiously if she was ill; no, she said she was not ill; but she had been out in the grounds a short time before, and had got chilled—that was all.

Half an hour later, Mr. Wyndham re-appeared in the drawing-room, with a calm face that hid his secret guilt well. Some of the people were already beginning to depart, and his absence was unknown to all save two. Once he spoke to his wife, remarking on her paleness, and telling her she had fatigued herself dancing; and she had laughed strangely and answered, yes, it had been a delightful evening all through, and she had never enjoyed herself so much. And then she was animatedly bidding the last of her guests good-night, and the lights were fled, the garlands dead, and the banquet-hall deserted. And Paul Wyndham bade her good night, and left her alone in her velvet robes and diamond necklace, and splendid misery, and never dreamed that he was found out.

Mr. and Mrs. Wyndham did not meet again until Sunday. The next day, Friday, the young author had gone over to Rosebush Cottage with his MSS. and fishing-rod, and there spent the rest of the week. The dissipation at Redmon, the constant round of dressing, and visiting, and party-giving, knocked him up, he told Val Blake, and unfitted him for work; and, at the cottage, he could recruit, and smoke, and get on with his writing.

Speckport saw Mrs. Wyndham driving, and riding, and promenading through its streets, that day and the next, beautifully dressed and looking beautiful, but Speckport never once dreamed of the devouring jealousy that had eaten its way to her inmost heart, and must hitherto be added to her other tortures. Yes, Olive Wyndham was jealous, with the fierce jealousy of such natures as hers—and your dark women can be jealous of your fair women with a vengeance. And as real jealousy without love is simply an impossibility, the slow truth broke upon Olive Wyndham that she had grown to love her husband.

How it had come about, Heaven only knows; she had honestly done her best to hate him. But that mischievous little blind god, flying his arrows at random, had shot one straight to her haughty heart. This, then, was the secret of all her anxiety and watchfulness, though she had never suspected it—she might have been a long time in suspecting it, but for the discovery made in the grounds that night. She loved him who would never love her. She knew him indifferent to herself; but while she thought him equally indifferent to every one else, she had not cared much; but now, but now! Who was this woman who had stepped between her and the man to whom she was married?

Who was she? who was she? she asked herself the miserable question a hundred times a minute—she could think of nothing else—but she never could answer it. In all Speckport she could not fix upon any one she knew Paul Wyndham was likely to address such words as she had heard to. How their memory thrilled her—those tones so full of passionate love—it made her grind her teeth to think of them.

"If I had her here, whoever she is," she thought, "I could tear the eyes out of her head, and send her back to him streaming blood! Oh, who can she be? who can she be?"

It was Catty Clowrie who first changed the course of her ideas, and set her off at a new tangent. Catty was sewing at the villa; and, as Mrs. Wyndham, in her miserable restlessness, wandered from room to room, she came at last to a pleasant vine-grown glass porch at the back of the house, where Miss Clowrie sat stitching away in the afternoon sunshine. An open book lay beside her, as if she had just been reading, and Olive saw it was Mr. Wyndham's volume of travels. She took it up with a strange contradictory feeling of tenderness for the insensate thing.