There was something that might almost have been called a quarrel
downstairs that night over the new arrival. Ombra was cross, and her
mother was displeased; but Mrs. Anderson had far too strong a sense of
propriety to suffer herself to scold. When she said ‘I am disappointed
in you, Ombra. I have seldom been more wounded than when I came to the
door, and did not find you,’ she had done all that occurred to her in
the way of reproof.
‘But I had a headache, mamma.’
‘We must speak to the doctor about your headaches,’ said Mrs. Anderson;
and Ombra, with something like sullenness, went to bed.
But she was not to escape so easily. Old Francesca had been Ombra’s
nurse. She was not so very old, but had aged, as peasant women of her
nation do. She was a Tuscan born, with the shrill and high-pitched voice
natural to her district, and she had followed the fortunes of the
Andersons all over the world, from the time of her nursling’s birth. She
was, in consequence, a most faithful servant and friend, knowing no
interests but those of her mistress, but at the same time a most
uncompromising monitor. Ombra knew what was in store for her, as soon as
she discovered Francesca, with her back turned, folding up the dress she
had worn in the morning. The chances are that Ombra would have fled, had
she been able to do so noiselessly, but she had already betrayed herself
by closing the door.
‘Francesca,’ she said, affecting an ease which she did not feel, ‘are
you still here? Are you not in bed? You will tire yourself out. Never
mind those things. I will put them away myself.’
‘The things might be indifferent to me,’ said Francesca, turning round
upon her, ‘but you are not. My young lady, I have a great deal to say to
you.’
This conversation was chiefly in Italian, both the interlocutors
changing, as pleased them, from one language to another; but as it is
unnecessary to cumber the page with italics, or the reader’s mind with
two languages, I will take the liberty of putting it in English, though
in so doing I may wrong Francesca’s phrases. When her old nurse
addressed her thus, Ombra trembled--half in reality because she was a
chilly being, and half by way of rousing her companion’s sympathy. But
Francesca was ruthless.
‘You have the cold, I perceive,’ she said, ‘and deserve to have it.
Seems to me that if you thought sometimes of putting a little warmth in
your heart, instead of covering upon your body, that would answer
better. What has the little cousin done, _Dio mio_, to make you as if
you had been for a night on the mountains? I look to see the big
ice-drop hanging from your fingers, and the snow-flakes in your hair!
You have the cold!--bah! you _are_ the cold!--it is in you!--it freezes!
I, whose blood is in your veins, I stretch out my hand to get warm, and
I chill, I freeze, I die!’
‘I am Ombra,’ said the girl, with a smile, ‘you know; how can I warm
you, Francesca? It is not my nature.’
‘Are you not, then, God’s making, because they have given you a foolish
name?’ cried Francesca. ‘The Ombra I love, she is the Ombra that is
cool, that is sweet, that brings life when one comes out of a blazing
sun. You say the sun does not blaze here; but what is _here_, after all?
A piece of the world which God made! When you were little, Santissima
Madonna! you were sweet as an olive orchard; but now you are sombre and
dark, like a pine-wood on the Apennines. I will call you ‘Ghiaccia,’[A]
not Ombra any more.’
‘It was not my fault. You are unjust. I had a headache. You said so
yourself.’
‘Ah, _disgraziata_! I said it to shield you. You have brought upon my
conscience a great big--what you call fib. I hope my good priest will
not say it was a lie!’
‘I did not ask you to do it,’ cried Ombra. ‘And then there was mamma,
crying over that girl as if there never had been anything like her
before!’
‘The dear lady! she did it as I did, to cover your coldness--your look
of ice. Can we bear that the world should see what a snow-maiden we have
between us? We did it for your sake, ungrateful one, that no one should
see----’
‘I wish you would let me alone,’ said Ombra; and though she was
seventeen--two years older than Kate--and had a high sense of her
dignity, she began to cry. ‘If you only would be true, I should not
mind; but you have so much effusion--you say more than you mean, both
mamma and you.’
‘Seems to me that it is better to be too kind than too cold,’ said
Francesca, indignantly. ‘And this poor little angel, the orphan, the
child of the Madonna--ah! you have not that thought in your icy
Protestant; but among us Christians every orphan is Madonna’s child. How
could I love the holiest mother, if I did not love her child? Bah! you
know better, but you will not allow it. Is it best, tell me, to wound
the _poverina_ with your too little, or to make her warm and glad with
our too mooch?--even if it were the too mooch,’ said Francesca, half
apologetically; ‘though there is nothing that is too mooch, if it is
permitted me to say it, for the motherless one--the orphan--the
Madonna’s child!’
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. When it is for your good to be
warm, you will be ice: you will not be able more to help yourself. You
will make love freeze up like the water in the torrent; you will lay it
in a tomb of snow, you will build the ice-monument over it, and then all
you can do will be vain--it will live no more. Signorina Ghiaccia, if
thus you go on, this is what will come to you.’
And with this parting address, Francesca darted forth, not disdaining,
like a mere mortal and English domestic, to shut the door with some
violence. Ombra had her cry out by herself, while Kate sat wondering in
the next room. The elder girl asked herself, was it true?--was she
really a snow-maiden, or was it some mysterious influence from her name
that threw this shade over her, and made her so contradictory and
burdensome even to herself?
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. They put the commonplace flesh-and-blood girl on a
level with her--this Kate, with half-red hair, with shallow, bright
eyes, with all that red and white that people rave about in foolish
books. ‘Kate will be the heroine wherever we go,’ she said, with a
smile, which had more pain than pleasure in it. She was a little
jealous, a little cross, disturbed in her fanciful soul; and yet she was
not heartless and cold, as people thought. The accusation wounded her,
and haunted her as if with premonitions of reproaches to come. It was
not hard to bear from Francesca, who was her devoted slave; but it
occurred dimly to Ombra, as if in prophecy, that the time would come
when she should hear the same words from other voices. Not
Ombra-Ghiaccia! Was it possible? Could that fear ever come true?
Mrs. Anderson, for her part, was less easy about this change in her
household than she would allow. When she was alone, the smiles went off
her countenance. Kate, though she had been so glad to see her, though
the likeness to herself had made so immediate a bond between them, was
evidently enough not the kind of girl who could be easily managed, or
who was likely to settle down quietly into domestic peace and order. She
had the makings of a great lady in her, an independent, high-spirited
princess, to whom it was not necessary to consider the rules which are
made for humbler maidens. Already she had told her aunt what she meant
to do at Langton when she went back; already she had inquired with
lively curiosity all about Shanklin. Mrs. Anderson thought of her two
critics at the Rectory, who, she knew by instinct, were ready to pick
holes in her, and be hard upon her ‘foreign ways,’ and trembled for her
niece’s probable vagaries. It was ‘a great responsibility,’ a ‘trying
position,’ for herself. Many a ‘trying position’ she had been in
already, the difficulties of which she had surmounted triumphantly. She
could only hope that ‘proper feeling,’ ‘proper respect’ for the usages
of society, would bring her once more safely through. When Francesca
darted in upon her, fresh from the lecture she had delivered, Mrs.
Anderson’s disturbed look at once betrayed her.
‘My lady looks as she used to look when the big letters came, saying
Go,’ said Francesca; ‘but, courage, Signora mia, the big letters come no
more.’
‘No; nor he who received them, Francesca,’ said the mistress, sadly.
‘But it was not that I was thinking of--it was my new care, my new
responsibility.’
‘Bah!’ cried Francesca; ‘my lady will pardon me, I did not mean to be
rude. Ah! if my lady was but a Christian like us other Italians! Why
there never came an orphan into a kind house, but she brought a
blessing. The dear Madonna will never let trouble come to you from her
child; and, besides, the little angel is exactly like you. Just so must
my lady have looked at her age--beautiful as the day.’
‘Ah! Francesca, you are partial,’ said Mrs. Anderson, with, however, a
returning smile. ‘I never was so pretty as Kate.’
‘My lady will pardon me,’ said Francesca, with quiet gravity; ‘in my
eyes, _senza complimenti_, there is no one so beautiful as my lady even
now.’
This statement was much too serious and superior to compliment-making,
to be answered, especially as Francesca turned at once to the window, to
close the shutters, and make all safe for the night.