And then there appeared to Kate, coming downstairs, the slight figure of a girl in a black dress—a girl whom, at the first moment, she thought younger than herself. Ombra was not at all like her mother—she was like her name, a shadowy creature, with no light about her—not even in the doubtful face, pale and fair, which her cousin gazed upon so curiously. She said nothing till she had come up to them, and did not quicken her pace in the least, though they were all gazing at her. To fill up this pause, Mrs. Anderson, who was a great deal more energetic and more impressionable than her daughter, rushed to her across the little hall.
‘My darling, are you ill? I know only that could have prevented you from coming to meet your cousin. Here she is, Ombra mia; here we have her at last—my sweet Kate! Now love each other, girls; be as your mothers were; open your hearts to each other. Oh! my dear children, if you but knew how I love you both!’
And Mrs. Anderson cried while the two stood holding each other’s hands, looking at each other—on Kate’s side with violent curiosity; on Ombra’s apparently with indifference. The mother had to do all the emotion that was necessary, with an impulse which was partly love, and partly vexation, and partly a hope to kindle in them the feelings that became the occasion.
‘How do you do? I am glad to see you. I hope you will like Shanklin,’ said chilly Ombra.
‘Thanks,’ said Kate; and they dropped each other’s hands; while poor Mrs. Anderson wept unavailing tears, and old Francesca, in sympathy, fluttered about the new ‘little angel,’ taking off her cloak, and uttering aloud her admiration and delight. It was a strange beginning to Kate’s new life.
‘I wonder, I wonder–’ the new-comer said to herself when she was safely housed for the night, and alone. Kate had seated herself at the window, from whence a gleam of moon and sky was visible, half veiled in clouds. She was in her dressing-gown, and with her hair all over her shoulders, was a pretty figure to behold, had there been any one to see. ‘I wonder, I wonder!’ she said to herself. But she could not have put into words what her wonderings were. There was only in them an indefinite sense that something not quite apparent had run on beneath the surface in this welcome of hers. She could not tell what it was—why her aunt should have wept; why Ombra should have been so different. Was it the ready tears of the one that chilled the other? Kate was not clear enough on the subject to ask herself this question. She only wondered, feeling there was something more than met the eye. But, on the whole, the child was happy—she had been kissed and blessed when she came upstairs; she seemed to be surrounded with an atmosphere of love and care. There was nobody (except Ombra) indifferent—everybody cared; all were interested. She wondered—but at fifteen one does not demand an answer to all the indefinite wonderings which arise in one’s heart; and, despite of Ombra, Kate’s heart was lighter than it had ever been (she thought) in all her life. Everything was strange, new, unknown to her, yet it was home. And this is a paradox which is always sweet.
CHAPTER XII
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,’1 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