Ombra

“ It was a warm, soft, balmy Summer evening; the world seemed almost to hold its breath in the mere happiness of being, as if a movement, a sigh, would have broken the spell. Mrs. Anderson put up her hair (which was still pretty hair, and worth the trouble) , and arranged her ribbons, and was about to draw round her the light shawl which Francesca had dropped on her shoulders, when all at once she saw Ombra coming through the garden alone. Ombra alone! ”

“ People in our position cannot have a life all to ourselves. We have our duties to society; and I have my duty to you, Ombra. Do you think I could be so selfish as to keep you altogether to myself, and never let you see the world, or have your chance of choosing some one who will take care of you better than I can?’
‘Please don’t,’ said Ombra. ‘I am quite content with you; and there is not much at Shanklin that can be called society or the world.’
‘The world is everywhere,’ said Mrs. Anderson, with dignity. ”

“ Oh! Ombra, I am so sorry! Tell me what it is!’ cried wistful Kate.
‘It is temper,’ cried Ombra, after a pause, with a sudden outburst of sobs. ‘There, that is all; now leave me to myself, after you have made me confess. It is temper, temper, temper—nothing! I thought I had not any, but I have the temper of a fiend, and I am trying to struggle against it. Oh! for heaven’s sake, let me alone!’
Kate took away her arm, and withdrew herself humbly, with a grieved and wondering pain in her heart. Ombra with the temper of a fiend! Ombra repulsing her, turning away from her, rejecting her sympathy! ”

“ Nature has decked her so. I suppose I never, at my best, was anything like that.’
Ombra had improved very much since their arrival in Florence. Her fretfulness had much abated, and there was no envy in this sigh.
‘At your best, Ombra! My foolish darling, do you think your best is over?’ said the mother, with a smile.
‘I mean the bloom,’ said Ombra. ‘I never had any bloom—and Kate’s is wonderful. I think she gives a pearly, rosy tint to the very air. I was always a little shadow, you know!’
‘You will not do yourself justice,’ cried Mrs. Anderson. ‘Oh! Ombra, if you only knew how it grieves me! ”

“ No one would, in reality, have been less disposed than Ombra to give up a woman’s—a lady’s privileges. To go forth into the world unattended, without the shield and guard of honour, which her semi-foreign education made doubly necessary to her, would have seemed to the girl the utmost misery of desolation. ”

“ At least there had been concealment; and was it really, truly the good of Ombra and Kate, or some private arrangement with Uncle Courtenay, that was in her aunt’s mind. This suggestion came suddenly into her very heart, wounding her as with an arrow; and from that day, though sometimes lessening and sometimes deepening, the cloud upon Ombra’s face came back. But as she grew less amiable, she grew more powerful. ”

“ For Ombra was not aware that she had been christened by a much more sober name. She stood as Jane Catherine in the books of the Leghorn chaplain—a conjunction of respectable appellatives which could not have any sinister influence. I doubt, however, whether she would have taken any comfort from this fact; for it was pleasant to think of herself as born under some wayward star—a shadowy creature, unlike common flesh and blood, half Italian, half spirit. ‘How can I help it?’ she said to herself. The people about her did not understand her—not even her mother and Francesca. ”

“ Ombra was a good musician, and Kate, who had no great faculty that way, got up and practised every morning, waking the early echoes, and getting anything but blessings from her idol, whose bed was exactly above the piano on the next floor. Ombra was a great linguist, by dint of her many travels, and Kate sent unlimited orders for dictionaries and grammars to her uncle, and began to learn verbs with enthusiasm. She had all the masters who came from London to Miss Story’s quiet establishment, men whose hours were golden, and whom nobody but an heiress could have entertained in such profusion ”

“ Anderson was an impressionable woman, and though she resented her neighbour’s interference, she acted upon her advice. She took Ombra into her arms that evening, when they were alone, in the favourite hour of talk which they enjoyed after Kate had gone to bed.
‘My darling!’ she said, ‘I want to speak to you. Mr. Sugden has taken to coming very often—we are never free of him. Perhaps it would be better not to let him come quite so much.’
‘I don’t see how we can help it,’ said Ombra, calmly; ‘he is dull, he likes it; and I am sure he is very inoffensive. ”

“ The others made no objection; they acquiesced with a calmness which perhaps scarcely satisfied Ombra. Mrs. Anderson declared openly that she missed the visitors much; and Kate avowed, without hesitation, that the boys were fun, and she was sorry that they were gone. But the chances are that it was Ombra who missed them most, though she professed to be rather glad than otherwise. ‘They were a nuisance, interrupting one whatever one was doing. Boys at that age always are a nuisance,’ she said, with an air of severity, and she returned to all her occupations with an immense deal of seriousness. ”

“ The little feminine party brightened up, as women do brighten always under the fresh and exhilarating influence of that breath from outside which only ‘the boys’ can bring. Soon Mrs. Anderson, and even Ombra herself, adopted that affectionate phrase—to throw another delightful, half-delusive veil over all possibilities that might be in the future. ”

“ Lady Caryisfort was a woman of the world. She would not be so shocked as good Mrs. Hardwick would be; and then she could have no prejudice in the matter, and no temptation to betray poor Ombra’s secret. Poor Ombra! Kate was not one of those people who can dismiss an offender out of their mind as soon as his sin is proved. All kinds of relentings, and movements of pity, and impulses to help, came whispering about her after the first shock. To be sure Ombra had her mother to protect and care for her, and how could Kate interfere, a young girl? ”

“ He is not as he used to be; he has begun to talk of work, and all sorts of nonsense. But to-day he will not come, and there is nothing more to be said. It is humbling to me to see how I suffer without him; but I hope you will try to put up with me by myself for one day.’
‘Oh! I cannot think what Bertie means by it. It is too provoking!’ said Ombra, with a clouded countenance; and when they got into the street their usual order of march was reversed, and Ombra fell behind with Kate, whose mind was full of a very strange jumble of feeling, such as she could not explain to herself. ”

“ But she did not feel for Ombra’s mother in these perplexing circumstances. She was angry with Ombra. It was the girl’s fault, she felt, that she was thus dangerous to other women’s boys. Why should she, a creature of no account, turn the heads of the young men? ‘She is not very pretty, even—not half so pretty as her cousin will be, who is worth thinking of,’ she said, in her vexation. Any young man would have been fully justified in falling in love with Kate. But Ombra, who was nobody! ”

“ So Ombra thought; perhaps a girl of higher mind, or more generous heart, would not have done so—but it is hard to take a wide or generous view of life at nineteen, when one thinks one has thrown away all that makes existence most sweet. ”

“ Ombra made no reply; she shrugged her shoulders, and began to let down her hair out of its bands—the worst of the storm was over.
But Francesca had reserved herself for one parting blaze, ‘And know you, my young lady, what will come to you, if thus you proceed in your life?’ she said. ‘When one wanders too mooch on the snowy mountains, one falls into an ice-pit, and one dies. It will so come to you. You will grow colder and colder, colder and colder. ”

“ This made at once the sweetest, most pleasant link between them; it bound them together by Nature’s warm and visible bond. They were both proud of this tie, which could be seen in their faces, which they could not throw off nor cast away.
But after the ferry was crossed—when they were drawing near Shanklin—a silence fell upon both. Kate, with a quite new-born timidity, was shy of inquiring about her cousin; and Mrs. Anderson was too doubtful of Ombra’s mood to say more of her than she could help. She longed to be able to say, ‘Ombra will be sure to meet us,’ but did not dare. ”

“ One is the same as another to her. I wish I had that happy disposition. How strange it is that people should be so different! What would kill me would scarcely move her—would not cost her a tear.’
‘Ombra, I am not so sure——’
‘Oh! but I am sure, mamma. She does not understand how things can matter so much to me. She wonders—I can see her look at me when she thinks I don’t notice. She seems to say, “What can Ombra mean by it?—how silly she is to care!”’
‘But you have not taken Kate into your confidence?’ said Mrs. Anderson, in alarm. ”

“ Do you never think?’
‘Yes,’ said Kate, with a meekness she never showed but to Ombra, ‘a great deal sometimes. But I can’t on such a morning. There seems nothing in all the world but sunshine and primroses, and the air is so sweet! Come up to the top of the cliff, and try how far you can see. ”

“ Anderson.
‘Because he happens to have been born Sir Herbert’s son; no thanks to him,’ said Ombra, with disdain. ‘And most likely, when he is a great landed proprietor he will do nothing worth noticing. The other is more interesting to me; he at least has his own way to make.’
‘I wonder what poor Bertie will do?’ said Kate, with her grandmother air. ‘I should not like to see him a clergyman. What Ombra says is very true, auntie. When one is a great Squire, you know, one can’t help one’s self; one’s life is all settled before one is born. ”

“ Anderson was chilly, and had placed her chair in front of the fire.
‘She is no more a shadow than we all are,’ said Ombra. ‘When the light comes, that vast apparition will disappear, and she will be herself. Kate, don’t you see the parable? We are all stolen out of ourselves, made into ghosts, till the light comes.’
‘I don’t understand parables,’ said Kate.
‘I wish you did this one,’ said Ombra, with a sigh, ‘for it is true.’ And then there was silence for a time, a silence which Kate broke by saying,
‘There is the new moon. ”

“ All this makes a wonderful difference in the way people receive a downfall. Ombra had been thunderstruck at first at her own recklessness, and the wounds she had given; but now a certain irritation possessed her, inflaming all the sore places in her mind, and they were not few. She was walking up and down, thinking what she would do, what she would say, how she would no longer be held in subjection, and forced to consider Kate’s ways and Kate’s feelings, Kate this and that. ”

“ Ombra is quite well; she is always pale,’ said Mrs. Anderson. ‘We have come rather on account of my niece—not for her health, but because she had never seen anything out of her own country. We think it right that she should make good use of her time before she comes of age.’
‘Oh! will she come of age?’ said Lady Barker, with a glance of laughing curiosity. She decided that the pretty girl at the window, who had two or three times broken into the conversation, was a great deal too pretty to be largely endowed by fortune ”

“ CHAPTER XXVII. Long after Kate’s little bedchamber had fallen into darkness, the light still twinkled in the windows of the Cottage drawing-room. The lamp was still alight at midnight, and Ombra and her mother sat together, with the marks of tears on their cheeks, still talking, discussing, going over their difficulties.
‘I could bear him to go away,’ Ombra had said, in her passion; ‘I could bear never to see him again. Sometimes I think I should be glad. Oh! I am ashamed—ashamed to the bottom of my heart to care for one who perhaps cares no longer for me! if he would only go away ”

“ When one has a child, and such a child as our Ombra——’
‘My dear Francesca, we must not be prejudiced,’ said Mrs. Anderson. ‘Ombra is very sweet to you and me; and I think she is very lovely; but Kate is more beautiful than she is—Kate has such a bloom. I myself admire her very much—not of course so much as—my own child.’
‘If the Signora had said it, I should not have believed her,’ said Francesca. ‘I should be sorry to show any want of education to Madame, but I should not have believed her. Mademoiselle Katta is good child—I love her—I am what you call fond; but she is not like our Ombra. ”

“ Sugden was regarding both, a mist seemed to roll away from the scene. How different the girl’s aspect was now!—soft with a dewy brightness in her eyes, and a voice that trembled with some concealed agitation; and there was a glow upon Bertie’s face, which made him handsomer. ‘My cousins are breaking their hearts over your going,’ he said.
‘Oh, no fear of their hearts!’ said Ombra, lightly; ‘they will mend. If the Cottage is let, the new tenants will probably be gayer people than we are, and do more to amuse their neighbours. ”

“ Anderson, though she was a high-spirited woman, and did not relish the idea of deriving consequence entirely from the little girl whom she had brought up, had yet that philosophy which more or less is the accompaniment of experience, and knew that it was much better to accept the inevitable graciously, than to fight against it. And if anything could have neutralised the wound to her pride, it would have been the ‘pretty manners’ of Lady Caryisfort, and the interest which she displayed in Ombra. Indeed, Ombra secured more of her attention than Kate did—a consoling circumstance. ”