A Changed Heart: A Novel

by May Agnes Fleming

"How do you like it?" she asked, looking at his portrait in front, the deep, thoughtful eyes gazing back at her from the engraving, with the same inscrutable look she knew so well.

"I think it is lovely," said Catty. "I wish I could finish it, but I must get on with my work. Mr. Wyndham must be wonderfully clever; his descriptions set the places before you as if you saw them."

Olive sat down, and began talking to this girl, whom she instinctively disliked, about her husband and her husband's books. Catty, snapping off her thread, asked at last:

"Mr. Wyndham is not at home to-day, is he? I haven't seen him."

"No," said his wife, carelessly, "he has gone over to Rosebush Cottage."

Miss Clowrie gave an unpleasant little laugh.

"Of course he is at Rosebush Cottage! Every one knows Mr. Wyndham never goes anywhere else! If he had a Fair Rosamond shut up there, he could not be fonder of going there. Mr. Wyndham must be very much attached to his mother."

There was a long blank pause after her cruel speech, during which the mistress of Redmon never took the book from before her face. She felt that she was deadly pale, and had sense enough left not to wish Catty Clowrie to see it. She rose up presently, throwing the book on the ground as she did so, and walked out of the porch with such fierce rebellious bitterness in her heart, as never at her worst of misery had she felt before. A Fair Rosamond! Yes, the secret was out! and what a blind fool she must have been not to have seen it before! It was no sickly old mother Paul Wyndham had shut up in Rosebush Cottage, but a fair inamorata. It was she, too, whom they had seen in the grounds the previous night; she who, wearied of her pretty prison without him, and fall of curiosity, doubtless, had come to Redmon. "I was so lonely without you, Paul!"—she remembered the sweet and strangely-familiar voice that had said those words, and the tender caress which had answered them; and she sank down in her jealous rage and despair in her own room, hating herself and all the world. Oh, my poor Olive! Surely retribution had overtaken you, surely judgment had fallen upon you even in this life, for your sins of ambition and pride!

Mrs. Wyndham was not much of a church-goer, but rather the reverse. She had a heathenish way of lolling in her boudoir Sundays, and listening with a dreamy sensuous pleasure to the clashing of bells, and falling asleep when they ceased, and awakening to read novels until dinner-time.

But sometimes she went to the fashionable Episcopal church, and yawned in the face of the Rev. Augustus Tod, expounding the word rather drawlingly in his white surplice, and sometimes she went to the cathedral with Laura Blair. She took the same sensuous, dreamy pleasure in going there that she did in listening to the bells, or in reading Owen Meredith's poetry. She liked to watch the purple, and violet, and ruby, and amber glows from the stained-glass windows on the heads of the faithful; she liked to listen to the grand solemn music of the old church, to inhale the floating incense, and listen to the chanting of the robed priests. And best of all she liked to see the Sisters of Charity glide noiselessly in through some side-door, with vailed faces and bowed heads, and to weave romances about them all the time high mass was going on. Matter-of-fact Catholics about her wondered why Mrs. Wyndham stared so at the Sisters, and it is probable the Sisters themselves would have laughed good-naturedly had they known of the tale of romance with which the dark-eyed heiress invested them. But it was not to look at the nuns—though she did look at them, almost wishing she were one too, and at rest from the great world strife—it was not to look at them she had come to the cathedral to-day, but to listen to a celebrated preacher somewhere from the United States. Laura had told her he was a Jesuit—those terrible Jesuits!—and Olive had almost as much curiosity to see a Jesuit as a nun. So she drove to the cathedral in her carriage, and sat in Mr. Blair's cushioned pew, and watched the people filling the large building, and listened to the grand, solemn strains of the organ touched by the masterly hand; and all listlessly enough. But suddenly her heart gave a quick plunge, and all listlessness was gone. There, coming up the aisle, behind the sexton, was a gentleman and a lady; a gentleman whose step she would have known the wide world over, and a lady she was more desirous of seeing than any other being on earth. It was Mr. Wyndham and his mother, and dozens of heads turned in surprise and curiosity, to look at that hitherto invisible mother. But she was invisible still, at least her face was, for the long black crape vail she wore was so impenetrably thick, no human eyes could pierce it. They saw she was tall and very slender, although she wore a great double black woolen shawl that would have made the slightest girlish form look clumsy and stout. She bent forward slightly as she walked, but the stoop was not the stoop of age—Olive Wyndham saw that. Mr. Wyndham, hat in hand, his mother hanging on his arm, his pale face gravely reverent, entered the pew the sexton indicated, after his mother.