A Changed Heart: A Novel

CHAPTER XXXVI.

DRIFTING OUT

In Mrs. Major Wheatly's pretty drawing-room in their new house in Golden Row sat Miss Winnie Rose, the governess. She is dressed in slight mourning, very simple, as becomes a governess, but fitting the small, light figure with exquisite neatness, and she is counting time for Miss Wheatly, who sits strumming out her music-lesson at the piano. Mrs. Wheatly lies on a sofa at the window, dawdling over a novel and looking listlessly at the passers-by, and wishing some one would call. She started up, thinking her mental prayer was granted, as a servant entered with a card. But it was not for her. It was handed to the governess.

"Mr. Blake!" said Miss Rose, hesitatingly. "This cannot be for me, Margaret."

"O yes'm, it is! He requested particularly to see Miss Rose."

"Is it Mr. Blake?" inquired Mrs. Wheatly. "What can he want with you, I wonder?"

Miss Rose smiled as she got up.

"I am sure I don't know. I may go down, I suppose?"

"Oh, certainly, my dear!" said Mrs. Wheatly, yawning. "And ask him if he has heard from his sister lately. Stop your strumming, Louisa, it makes my head ache."

Mr. Blake was sitting in what was called the morning-room, and shook hands with Miss Rose when she came in. But how strangely grave he was! What could he want with her? Her heart fluttered a little as she looked at him.

"My dear young lady!" he began, with an ominously grave face, "it is very serious business that brings me here this morning. Are you quite sure no one can overhear us?"

Awful beginning! The little governess turned pale as she listened.

"No one," she faltered. "What is it you mean, Mr. Blake?"

"My dear," said Mr. Blake, as if he were speaking to a young lady of ten years, "don't look so frightened. I want to ask you a question, and you must pardon me if it sounds impertinent. Is your name, your family-name, really Rose?"

The governess uttered a low cry, and covered her face with both hands.

"I am answered," said Val. "Your name is Henderson – Olive Henderson; and you should be heiress of Redmon, instead of – of the person whose name is Harriet, and who reigns there now. Oh, my dear young lady, how is this? Is there no one in the world to be trusted?"

She rose from her seat suddenly, and sank on her knees at his feet with a gushing sob.

"I have done wrong," she cried, "for all deceit is wrong; and though Rose is my name, it is not my father's. But oh, Mr. Blake! if you only knew all, I don't think you would blame me so much. It was not I who changed it. It has been the name by which I have gone for years, and I could not resume my rightful one without suspicion and explanation that involved the honor of the dead; and so I was silent. No one was wronged by it – no one in the wide world; and I did not think it so very wrong."

She sobbed out as she spoke, in a sudden outbreak of distress. Val stooped kindly and raised her up.

"My dear child, I only doubted you for a moment. You are too good to willfully deceive any one to their harm. But you must calm yourself and listen to me; for right must be done to all. Who is that woman at Redmon? Is she your stepsister?"

The governess's only reply was to clasp her hands piteously.

"Oh, Mr. Blake, what have you done? How have you found this out? Oh, I am so sorry, so very sorry; for you don't know the misery you will make!"

"Misery! Do you mean to yourself?"

"No, no! but to her. Poor Harriet! Oh, Mr. Blake, who can have told you this?"

"Sit down and calm yourself, my dear Miss Rose, and you shall hear all. Do you recollect one day, very shortly after your return here, visiting Miss Henderson at her cottage down the street here?"

"Yes, yes."

"You and she had along conversation in her chamber that day, part of which was overheard. Miss Catty Clowrie was in the house at the time, and she overheard – how, I don't pretend to say; but she heard enough to excite her suspicions that all was not as it should be. She heard you addressed as 'Olly', and heard you call Miss Henderson 'Harriet.' She saw her down on her knees before you, pleading desperately for something, Miss Clowrie could not quite make out what; and she heard you promise to comply with her request, on condition of her paying over to Mrs. Marsh a certain annuity. All this looked very odd, you know; and Miss Clowrie, who is a good deal of an attorney, they tell me, scented a criminal case. She consulted with her father on the subject, and was overheard by her brother Jacob, who is in my office. Jake communicated the story next morning in confidence to Bill Blair, and Bill related it in confidence to me. I cross-questioned Jake, and got out of him all he knew, and then pooh-poohed the story, and told them Catty must have been dreaming. But the annuity was paid, and I suspected the whole thing at once. It was none of my business, however, so I held my tongue; and as Mr. and Miss Clowrie hadn't facts enough to go upon, they held theirs, too, and waited for something to turn up. There is the story to you, Miss Rose; and now why on earth, if you are the true Olive Henderson, have you slaved here as a governess, while you let another, who had no right, usurp your place and wealth?"

The governess lifted her head with some spirit.

"It is no slavery, Mr. Blake! They are very kind to me here, Mr. Blake, and I have every reason to be happy; and Harriet has a right, a strong right, which I never mean to dispute, to possess whatever belongs to me. She is no usurper, for I have made over to her fully and sincerely the legacy bequeathed to Philip Henderson.

"I understand. You are very generous and self-sacrificing, Miss Rose – but still she has no right there, and – " But Miss Rose interrupted, clasping her hands in passionate appeal.

"Oh, Mr. Blake, what are you going to do? Oh, I entreat of you, if you have any regard for me or poor Harriet, not to reveal what you know. Indeed, indeed, I don't want it! What should I do with half that money? I have everything I want, and am as happy as the day is long. Do you think I could ever be happy again if I turned poor Harriet out; do you think I could ever live in that grand place, knowing I had made her miserable for life? Oh, no, Mr. Blake! You are good and kind-hearted, and would not make any one unhappy, I know! Then let things go on as they are; and don't say anything about this?"

"But I cannot, my dear little martyr!" said Val, "and I must speak of it to her, at least, because it is involved in another story she must hear."

"In another story?"

"Yes, Miss Rose – for I suppose I must still call you by that name – in another story, stranger than anything you ever heard out of a novel. A cruel and shameful story of wrong and revenge, that I have come here to tell you this morning, and to which all this has been but the preface."

The governess lifted her pale, wondering face in mute inquiry, and Val began the story Paul Wyndham had related the night before. The brown eyes of the little governess dilated, and her lips parted as she listened, but she never spoke or interrupted him until he had finished. She sat with her clasped hands in her lap, her eyes never leaving his face, her lips apart and breathless.

"So you see, Miss Rose," Val wound up, "in telling that unfortunate girl at Redmon that she is not, and never has been, legally the wife of Paul Wyndham, it is of absolute impossibility to shirk the other story. Had she never falsely possessed herself of that to which she had no claim, this dishonor would have been saved her. She might have been poor, but not disgraced, as she is now."

"Oh, Mr. Blake! what have I heard? Nathalie Marsh alive and here?"

"Not Nathalie Marsh – Nathalie Wyndham. Whatever your stepsister may be, Nathalie at least is his lawful wife!"

"Oh, my poor, poor, Nathalie! And is she really insane – hopelessly insane?"

"Hopelessly, I fear, but she does not look as if her life would last long. She is only the shadow of what she was – a poor, thin, frail shadow.

"And Harriet, who is so proud, what will she say when this is told her? Oh, how could Mr. Wyndham do her such a wrong? It was cruel! it was unmanly!"

"So it was," nodded Val, "and it's not like him, either; for Wyndham is a pretty honorable fellow, as the world goes. But man, even at the best," said Mr. Blake, modestly, thinking of his own short-comings, "is weak, and temptation is strong. I think he is sorry enough for it now – not selfishly sorry, either. And now, Miss Rose, what I want is this. I know you are a sort of unprofessed Sister of Charity where the sick are concerned, and you and poor Natty used to be friends. I want to know if you will come and stay with her for awhile; she hasn't a soul of the female kind but Midge. If Joanna were here, I wouldn't have to trouble you; but in her absence you are the only one I can think of. Of course, her mother must go; but poor Mrs. Marsh is of no more use in a sick room than a big wax doll. She will play propriety while you stay."

"Yes, yes; I will go at once!" exclaimed Miss Rose, starting up in womanly impulsiveness. "Wait one moment while I run and tell Mrs. Wheatly."

"Oh, there's no such hurry! It will do this afternoon, when I will call for you, with Mrs. Marsh. Don't tell Mrs. Wheatly who it is you are going to see, mind – the secret will get out, of course, but we don't want everybody to know it just yet."

"I will not tell. What time will you call?"

"About three. I am going to Redmon now. She ought to know at once!"

"My poor, poor Harriet! Oh, Mr. Blake! She is so proud and sensitive. You will spare her as much as you can?"

Mr. Blake took the two little clasped hands between his own broad palms, and looked down kindly in the pale, pleading face.

"I think I could spare my worst enemy if you pleaded for him, my little friend. Don't be afraid of me, Miss Winnie. I don't think it is in me to strike a fallen foe – and that poor girl at Redmon never injured me. Good-bye, until then!"

Mr. Blake's composure, as we know, was not easily disturbed; but he rang the bell at Redmon with much the same sensation a miserable sufferer from toothache rings at a dentist's door.

Yes, Mrs. Wyndham was in, the servant said, taking the visitor's card and ushering him into the library, where a bright fire blazed, for the lady of Redmon liked fires. Val sat and stared at it, wondering how he would begin his disagreeable task, and how she would take it.

"She's such a flarer anyway!" thought Mr. Blake, "that I dare say she'll fly out at me like a wildcat! What a mess it is! I wish I never had got into it!"

The door opened while he was thinking, and Olive came in. She was dressed in a loose morning negligee, every fold showing how indifferently her toilet had been made. Val saw, too, how pale, and wan, and weary her dark face looked; how hollow, and earthen, and melancholy her large black eyes. She had had her own share of the suffering, and her pride and haughty defiance seemed subdued now.

"Does she know already?" wondered Val; "if not, why does she look like that? Have you been ill, Mrs. Wyndham?" he asked, aloud.

"Oh, no," she said, drearily; "but I have not been out much of late, and so have got low-spirited, I suppose. This wretched autumn weather, too, always makes me dismal."

"How shall I begin?" thought Val, staring moodily in the fire. But the cheering blaze gave forth no answer, and it was Olive herself who broke the ice.

"Has anything happened, Mr. Blake, to make you wear that serious face? Mr. Wyndham – "

She paused – her voice quivering a little. Val looked up.

"Mr. Wyndham is at Rosebush Cottage," he said. "Did you know it?"

"I thought he was. It is three days since he was here."

The tremor was in her voice again.

"What does it mean, at all?" thought Val; "it can't be that she cares for the fellow, surely!"

"Is his mother worse, do you know?" she asked, her spirit rebelling against the question her torturing anxiety forced from her.

"Now it is coming!" thought Val; "bless my soul! but it is hard to get out! It sticks in my throat like Macbeth's amen! Madam," he said, aloud, facing round and plunging into the icy shower-bath at once, "there has been a terrible mistake, which only came to my knowledge last night. A great wrong has been done you by Mr. Wyndham, and it is to inform you of it I have come here to-day."

Her pale face turned blood-red, and then ghastly white.

"You need not tell me," she cried, "I know it! She is not his mother!"

"She is not!" said Val, very much surprised; "but how in the world did you find it out?"

She did not speak. She sat looking at him with a dreadful fixed stare.

"Tell me all," she said; "tell me all! Who is she?"

"She is his wife! I don't think you can know that. He was a married man before he ever saw you here."

A low cry of despair broke from Olive's white lips. This was not what she had expected – at the worst, she had never thought of this.

"His wife!" she cried, "and what, then, am I?"

Val sat dumb. It was not a very pleasant question to answer; and, to tell the truth, he was more than a little afraid of the lightning flashing from those midnight eyes.

"What am I?" she repeated, in a voice almost piercing in its shrillness. "What am I? If she is his wife, what am I?"

"My dear madam, it is a most wicked affair from beginning to end, and you have been most shamefully duped. Believe me, I pity you from the very bottom of my heart."

With a cry that Val Blake never forgot, in its broken-hearted anguish and despair, she dropped down on the sofa, and buried her face among the pillows, as if she would have shut out the world and its miseries, as she did the sight of the man before her.

Mr. Blake, not knowing any panacea for misery such as this, and fearing to turn consoler, lest he should make a mess of it, did the very best thing he could have done, let it alone, and began the story he had to tell. So, lying there in her bitter humiliation, this woman heard that her miserable secret was a secret no longer, and that the pale, silent actress of Mrs. Butterby's lodgings had been Nathalie Marsh, and was now Paul Wyndham's beloved wife. That was the misery – she scarcely heeded, in the supreme suffering of that thought, the discovery of her own trickery and deceit – she only knew that the man she had thought her husband, and who, in spite of herself, she had learned to love, had cruelly and shamefully deceived her. She had never for one poor moment been his wife, never for an instant had a right to his name; she was only the poor despised tool, whom he used at the bidding of the wife he loved. The horrible agony she suffered lying there, and thinking of those things, no human pen can tell – no heart conceive.

Mr. Blake rose up when he finished his narrative, thankful it was over. She had never moved or spoken all the time, but he knew she had heard him, and he paused, with his hand on the door, to make a last remark.