A Changed Heart Part 58

"I said I was inexorable, Miss Henderson, and I must repeat it.

Besides," he added, with a slight smile, that showed how credulous he was about the story, "the real heiress, though she might make over the fortune to you, might object to your handing the half of it over to a stranger. No, Miss Henderson, there is only the one alternative--be my wife, or else----"

"Or else you will tell all?"

He did not speak. He stood, quietly waiting his answer--quiet, but very inflexible.

Olive rose up and stood before him.

"Must you have your answer now?" she asked, "or will you not even give me a few hours respite to think it over?"

"As many as you please, Miss Henderson."

"Then you shall have it to-night," she said, with strange, cold calmness. "I promised Miss Blair to go to the theater--you will see me there, and shall have your answer."

Mr. Wyndham bowed, and with a simple "Good morning," walked out of the room. As he shut the door behind him, he felt as though he were shutting Olive Henderson in a living tomb, and he her jailer.

"Poor girl! poor girl!" he was thinking, as he put on his overcoat; "what a villain I must seem in her eyes, and what a villain I am, ever to have consented to this. But it is only retribution after all--one ill turn deserves another."

Paul Wyndham walked to his hotel through the drenching rain and cold sea-wind, and Olive Henderson listened to the tumult of the storm, with another storm quite as tumultuous in her own breast.

The play that night was the "Lady of Lyons." There is only one theater in Speckport, so Mr. Wyndham was not likely to get bewildered in his search. The first act was half over when he came in, and looked round the dress circle, and down in the orchestra stalls. In the glare of the gaslight Olive Henderson looked superb. Never had her magnificent black eyes shone with such streaming l.u.s.ter as to-night, and a crimson glow, quite foreign to her usual complexion, beamed on either cheek--the crimson glow, rouge, worn for the first time in her life; and though she was a New York lady, she had the grace to be ashamed of the paint, and wear a thin black vail over her face. She took her eyes off Mademoiselle Pauline for a moment, to fix them on Mr. Wyndham, who came along to pay his respects, and to find a seat directly behind that of the heiress, but she only bent her head in very distant acknowledgment of his presence, and looked at Pauline again.

The curtain fell on the first act. Miss Henderson was very thirsty--that feverish thirst had not left her yet, and Captain Cavendish went out for a gla.s.s of ice-water. Laura was busy chattering to Mr. Blake, and Paul Wyndham bent forward and spoke to the heiress, who never turned her head.

"I have come for my answer, Miss Henderson," he said; "it is 'Yes,' I know."

"It is 'Yes,' Mr. Wyndham, and, with my consent, take the knowledge that I hate and despise you more than any other creature on the face of the earth."

She never turned while saying this. She stared straight before her at the row of gleaming footlights. The music was croaking out, every one was talking busily, and not one of the young ladies who looked enviously at the beautiful and brilliant heiress, nor the men who worshiped her at a distance, and who hated the young New Yorker for the privilege he enjoyed of talking to her--not one of them all dreamed ever so faintly of that other play being enacted off the stage.

Captain Cavendish came back with the water, the play went on, but I doubt if Olive Henderson heard a word, or knew whether they were playing "Oth.e.l.lo" or the "Lady of Lyons," but none of the others knew that; that serviceable mask, the human face, is a very good screen for the heart.

The play was over, and they were all going out. Mr. Wyndham had not addressed her since, but she knew he was behind her all the time, and she knew nothing else. He was by her side as they descended the stairs, and the cold night-wind struck them on the face. She was leaning on the arm of Captain Cavendish, but how was that conquering hero to know it was for the last time?

"I will have the pleasure of calling on you to-morrow, Miss Henderson,"

he distinctly said, as he bowed an adieu and was lost in the crowd.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

MR. WYNDHAM'S WEDDING.

Captain Cavendish, sitting at the window of his room in the hotel, stared at the red sunset with a clouded face and a gloomy abstraction of manner, that told how utterly its lurid glory was lost upon him.

Captain Cavendish had been sitting there since four in the afternoon, thinking this over and over again, and never able to get beyond it. His day of retribution had come. He was feeling the torture he had so often and so heartlessly made others feel; he was learning what it meant to be jilted in cold blood. Olive Henderson had turned out the veriest, the most capricious, the most heartless of flirts, and Captain Cavendish found himself incontinently snubbed! He had asked for no explanation yet, but the climax had come to-day. He had ridden over to escort the heiress on her breezy morning gallop, and had found Mr. Wyndham just a.s.sisting her into the saddle. She had bowed distantly to him, cut her horse a stinging blow across the neck, and had galloped off, with Paul Wyndham close beside her. Catty Clowrie looked out of the cottage window, and laughed a voiceless laugh, to see the captain's blank consternation.

"t.i.t for tat!" Catty said; "you are getting paid back in your own coin, Captain George Cavendish!"

So, while the fierce red sun blazed itself out in the purple arch, and the big round yellow moon rose up, like another Venus, out of the bluish-black bay, Captain Cavendish sat at his window, telling the same refrain over and over in his mind, as perseveringly as ever any holy monk told the Ave Maria on his rosary:--"What has changed her? what has changed her? what has changed her?"

The moon was high in the sky before he roused himself from his long and somber musing-fit, and, pulling out his watch, looked at the hour.

"Half-past seven," he said; "they were to start at eight, and she promised to go. I shall ask for an explanation to-night."

He rang for his servant, and desired that young man, when he appeared, to fetch him his overcoat. Mr. Johnston brought that garment, and a.s.sisted his master into it, and the captain put on his hat and gloves, and with his cane under his arm (for, of course, as an officer of the British army, it was his duty at all times to carry a cane under his arm), he set off for the cottage of my Lady Caprice.

The whole front of the pretty cottage was in a state of illumination, as he opened the little gate and walked up the gravel path, and men's shadows moved on the curtained windows as he rang the bell. Rosie, with pink ribbons in her hair, and her Sunday dress on, opened the door and showed him into the drawing-room.

"I'll tell Miss Olive you're here," she said; "she is engaged with company just now."

Captain Cavendish said nothing. He walked over to the low chimney-piece, and leaned moodily against it, as Paul Wyndham had done that rainy morning, little better than a week before. He had seen something as he came in that had not tended to raise his spirits. The dining-room door stood half-open, and glancing in as he pa.s.sed, he perceived that Miss Henderson had given a dinner-party, and that the company was still lingering around the table. He saw the Rev. Augustus Tod and his sister--and the Tods were the very cream of Speckport society--Major and Mrs. Wheatly, and Mr. Paul Wyndham. That was all; but he, her betrothed husband, her accepted suitor, had known nothing of it--had never been invited!

Captain Cavendish, leaning against the mantel, listened to the laughter, and pleasant mingling of voices, and the jingling of gla.s.ses in the dining-room, and he could plainly distinguish the musical laughter of Olive, and her clear voice as she talked to her guests. He stood there for upward of half an hour, raging with inward fury, all the more fierce for having to be suppressed. Then he heard the dining-room door open, a rustle of silk in the pa.s.sage, an odor of delicate perfume in the air, and then the drawing-room door opened.

Miss Henderson swept into the room, bowing and smiling as she pa.s.sed him, and sinking gracefully into a low violet-velvet chair, her rosy skirts and misty white lace floating all about her like pink and white clouds, and she looked up at him with the same glance of inquiry she might have given any lout of a fisherman in Speckport, had such a person presumed to call.

"I fear I intrude, Miss Henderson," he said, suppressing, as a gentleman must, his rage. "I did not know there was a dinner-party at the cottage."

"Oh, it is of no consequence," Miss Henderson said, carelessly, toying with her watch and chain; "my guests are all friends, who will readily excuse me. Will you not take a seat, Captain Cavendish?"

"No, Miss Henderson! in a house where I am made to feel I am an intruder I must decline being seated. I believe you promised to join the sailing-party on the bay to-night, but I suppose it is useless to ask you if you are going now."

"Why, yes," in the same careless way, "it is hardly probable I should leave my friends, even for the moonlight excursion. Are you going? I am sure you will have a very pleasant time; the night is lovely."

"Yes," said Captain Cavendish, "I am likely to have a pleasant time, as I have had, you must be aware, all through the past week. If you can spare a few minutes from these very dear friends of yours, Miss Henderson, I should be glad to have an explanation of your conduct."

"Of my conduct?" still in that careless way. "How?"

Captain Cavendish choked down an oath, but there was a subdued fierceness in his voice when he spoke.

"Miss Olive Henderson, has it quite escaped your memory that you are my promised wife? It strikes me your conduct of late has not been altogether in keeping with this fact. Will you have the goodness to explain the contempt, the slights, the strangeness of your conduct?"

"It is very easily explained," Miss Henderson answered, with supreme indifference, which, whether real or a.s.sumed, was very natural. "I have repented that rash promise, and now retract it. I have changed my mind; it is a woman's privilege, Captain Cavendish, and here is your engagement ring."

She drew the little golden circlet off her finger and held it out to him, as she might have returned it to some jeweler who had asked her to purchase it. He did not take it--he only stood looking at her, stunned!

"Olive!"

"I am sorry to give you pain, Captain Cavendish," Miss Henderson replied to that cry, still toying with her chain; "but you know I told you that night I did not love you, so you ought not to be surprised. I suppose it seems heartless, but then I am heartless; so what can you expect."

She laughed to herself a little hard laugh, and looked up at him with coldly-shining eyes. He was white, white even to his lips; for, remember, he loved this woman--this cold-blooded and capricious coquette.

"Olive! Olive!" was all he could cry, and there was nothing but wild astonishment and pa.s.sionate reproach in his voice. There was no room for anger now. He loved her, and it made him a coward, and he faltered and broke down.

Olive Henderson rose up as if to end the interview.