Маргарет Олифант
Ombra
CHAPTER LVI
This incident passed as all incidents do, and the blank of common life returned. How short those moments of action are in existence, and how long are the dull intervals—those intervals which count for nothing, and yet are life itself! Bertie Hardwick went away only after sundry unsuccessful efforts on the part of his family to unite the party from the Hall with that at the Rectory. Mrs. Hardwick would willingly, very willingly, have asked them to dinner, even after the disappointment of discovering that they did not mean to ask Bertie. She was stopped, however, by a very commonplace hindrance—where was she to find gentlemen enough on short notice to balance all those three ladies? Mr. Hardwick, Bertie, and Edith’s betrothed made the tale correct to begin with—but three more gentlemen in a country parish on two days’ notice! It was impossible. All that Mrs. Hardwick could do was to ask, deprecatingly, that the ladies would come to a family dinner, ‘very quiet,’ she said; ‘you must not suppose I mean a party.’ Mrs. Anderson, with her best and most smiling looks, accepted readily. ‘But Ombra is not very well,’ she said; ‘I fear I must ask you to excuse her. And dear Kate has such a bad cold—she caught it walking across the park the other evening to old Stokes the keeper’s cottage.’
‘To old Stokes!’ cried Mrs. Hardwick. ‘Why, my Bertie was there too.’ And she added, looking grave, after that burst of radiance, ‘The old man was a great favourite with everybody. We all go to see him.’
‘So I hear,’ said Mrs. Anderson, smiling; and next day she put on her best gown, poor soul! and went patiently down to the Rectory to dinner, and made a great many apologies for her girls. She did not enjoy it much, and she had to explain that the first chill of England after Italy had been too much for Kate and Ombra. ‘We had lived in the Isle of Wight for some years before,’ she added, ‘so that this is almost their first experience of the severity of Winter. But a few days indoors I hope will make them all right.’
Edith Hardwick could not believe her eyes when, next day, the day before Bertie left, she saw Miss Anderson walking in the park. ‘Do you think it possible it was not true?’ she and her sister asked each other in consternation; but neither they, nor wiser persons than they, could have determined that question. Ombra was not well, nor was Kate. They were both disturbed in their youthful being almost beyond the limits of self-control. Mrs. Anderson had, in some respects, to bear both their burdens; but she said to herself, with a sigh, that her shoulders were used to it. She had borne the yoke in her youth, she had been trained to bear a great deal, and say very little about it. And so the emotion of the incident gradually died away, growing fainter and larger in the stillness, and the monotony came back as of old!
But, oh! how pleasant the monotony of old would have been, how delightful, had there been nothing but the daily walks, the daily talks, the afternoon drives, the cheerful discussions, and cheerful visits, which had made their simple life at Shanklin so sweet! All that was over, another cycle of existence had come in.
I think another fortnight had elapsed since Bertie’s visit, and everything had been very quiet—and the quiet had been very intolerable. Sometimes almost a semblance of confidential intercourse would be set up among them, and Ombra would lean upon Kate, and Kate’s heart melt towards Ombra. This took place generally in the evening, when they sat together in the firelight before the lamp was brought, and talked the kind of shadowy talk which belongs to that hour.
‘Look at my aunt upon the wall!’ Kate cried, one evening, in momentary amusement. ‘How gigantic she is, and how she nods and beckons at us!’ Mrs. 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. I must go and look at her.’
Not through the glass, dear—it is unlucky,’ said Mrs. Anderson; but Kate took no notice. She went into the inner room, and watched the new moon through the great window. A cold, belated, baby moon, looking as if it had lost its way somehow in that blue waste of sky. And the earth looked cold, chilled to the heart, as much as could be seen of it, the tree-tops cowering together, the park frozen. She stood there in a reverie, and forgot about the time, and where she was. The bustle behind her of the lamp being brought in did not disturb Kate, and seeing her at the window, the servant who came with the lights discreetly forbore to disturb her, and left the curtains undrawn. But, from what followed, it was evident that nobody else observed Kate, and she was still deep in her musings, when she was startled, and brought to instant life, by a voice which seemed to ring through the room to her like a trumpet-note of defiance.
‘Mother, this cannot go on!’ Ombra cried out all at once. ‘If it lasts much longer I shall hate her. I shall want to kill her!’
‘Ombra!’
‘It is true, I shall want to kill her! Oh! not actually with my hands! One never knows what one could do till one is tempted. Still I think I would not touch her. But, God help us, mother, God help us! I hate her now!’
‘God help you, indeed, my unhappy child!’ cried her mother. ‘Oh! Ombra, do you know you are breaking my heart?’
‘My own was broken first,’ cried Ombra; and there was a ferocious and wild force in what she said, which thrilled through and through the listener, now just beginning to feel that she should not be here, but unable to stir in her great horror and astonishment. ‘My own was broken first. What does it matter? I thought I could brave everything; but to have him sent here for her sake—because she would be the most fit match for him! to have her come again between him and me–’
‘She never came between him and you—poor Kate!—she never thought of him. Has it not been proved that it was only a fancy? Oh! Ombra, how ungrateful, how unkind you are to her!’
‘What must I be grateful for?’ cried Ombra. ‘She has always been in my way, always! She came between you and me. She took half away from me of what was all mine. Would you hesitate, and doubt, and trouble, as you do, if it were not for Kate? She has always been in my way! She has been my enemy, not my friend. If she did not really come between him and me, then I thought so, and I had all the anguish and sorrow as if it had been true. And now he is to be sent here to meet her—and I am to put up with it, he says, as it will give us means of meeting. But I will not put up with it!’ cried Ombra, her voice rising shrill with passion—‘I cannot; it is asking too much. I would rather not meet him than meet him to be watched by Kate’s eyes. He has no right to come here on such a pretence. I would rather kill her—I would rather never see him again!’
‘Oh! Ombra, how can you tell who may hear you?’ cried her mother, putting up her hand as if to stop her mouth.
‘I don’t care who hears me!’ said Ombra, pale and sullen.
And then there was a rustle and movement, and both started, looking up with one impulse. In the twilight right beyond the circle of the lamplight, white as death, with a piteous gaze that neither could ever forget, stood Kate. Mrs. Anderson sprang to her feet with a cry; Ombra said not a word—she sat back in her chair, and kept her startled eyes upon her cousin—great dilated eyes, awakened all in a minute to what she had done.
‘Kate, you have heard what she has said?’
‘Yes, I have heard it,’ she said, faintly. ‘I did not mean to; but I was there, and I thought you knew. I have heard everything. Oh! it does not matter. It hurts at present, but it will go off after a while.’
She tried to smile, and then she broke down and cried. Mrs. Anderson went to her and threw her arms around her; but Kate put her aunt gently away. She looked up through her tears, and shook her head with the best smile she could muster.
‘No, it is not worth while,’ she said,—‘not any more. I have been wrong all the time. I suppose God did not mean it so. I had no natural mother or sister, and you can’t get such things except by nature. Don’t let us say any more about it,’ she added, hastily brushing the tears from her eyes. ‘I am very sorry you have suffered so much on my account, Ombra. If I had only known– And I never came between you and anyone—never dreamt of doing it—never will, never—you may be sure of that. I wanted my aunt to love me—that was natural—but no one else.’
‘Kate, I did not mean it,’ faltered Ombra, her white face suddenly burning with a blush of passionate shame. She had never realised the meanness of her jealousies and suspicions till this moment. Her mother’s remonstrances had never opened her eyes; but in a moment, in this anguish of being found out, she found out herself, and saw through her cousin’s eyes, as it were, how contemptible it all was.
‘I think you meant it. I don’t think you could have spoken so had you not meant it,’ said Kate, with composure. And then she sat down, and they all looked at each other, Mrs. Anderson standing before the two girls, wringing her hands. I think they realised what had happened better than she did. Her alarm and misery were great. This was a quarrel between her two children—a quarrel which it was very dreadful to contemplate. They had never quarrelled before; little misunderstandings might have arisen between them, but these it was always possible to smooth down; but this was a quarrel. The best thing to do, she felt, was that they should have it out. Thus for once her perception failed her. She stood frightened between them, looking from one to another, not certain on which side the volcano would burst forth. But no volcano burst forth; things had gone too far for that.
As for Kate, she did not know what had come over her. She had become calm without knowing how. All her agitation passed away, and a dead stillness succeeded—a stillness which made her afraid. Two minutes ago her heart and body had been tingling with darts of pain. She had felt the blow everywhere—on her head, which ached and rung as if she had been struck—on her heart, which seemed all over dull pain—even in her limbs, which did not feel able to support her. But now all had altered; a mysterious numbness crept from her feet up to her heart and her head. She did not feel anything; she saw Ombra’s big, startled eyes straining at her, and Mrs. Anderson, standing by, wringing her hands; but neither the one nor the other brought any gleam of feeling to her mind.
‘It is a pity we came here,’ she said, slowly—‘a great pity, for people will discuss everything—I suppose they always do. And I don’t know, indeed, what is best; I am not prepared to propose anything; all seems dark to me. I cannot go on standing in Ombra’s way—that is all I know. I will not do it. And perhaps, if we were all to think it over to-night, and tell what we think to-morrow morning–’ she said, with a smile, which was very faint, and a strong indication to burst forth instead into tears.
‘Oh! my darling!’ said Mrs. Anderson, bewildered by this extraordinary calm.
Kate made a little strange gesture. It was the same with which she had put her aunt away. ‘Don’t!’ she said, under her breath. She could bear what Ombra had said after the first astonishing outburst, but she could not bear that caressing—those sweet names which belong only to those who are loved. Don’t! A touch would have made her recoil—a kiss would have driven her wild and raving, she thought. This was the horror of it all—not that they had quarrelled, but that they had pretended to love her, and all the time had been hating her—or, at the best, had been keeping each other up to the mark by thought of the gratitude and kindness they owed her. Kindness and gratitude!—and yet they had pretended to love.
‘Perhaps it is better I should not say anything,’ said Ombra, with another flush, which this time was that of rising anger. ‘I ought not to have spoken as I did, but I make no apologies—it would be foolish to do so. You must form your own opinion, and nothing that I could say would change it. Of course it is no excuse to say that I would not have spoken as I did had I known you were there.’
‘I did not mean to listen,’ said Kate, colouring a little. ‘You might have seen me all the time; but it is best to say nothing at all now—none of us had better speak. We have to get through dinner, which is a pity. But after that, let us think it over quietly—quite quietly—and in the morning we shall see better. There is no reason,’ she said, very softly, ‘why, because you do not feel for me as I thought you did, we should quarrel; for really there is nothing to quarrel about. One’s love is not in one’s own gift, to be bestowed as one pleases. You have been very kind to me—very kind.’
‘Oh! Kate—oh! my dear child, do you think I don’t love you? Oh! Kate, do not break my heart!’
‘Don’t, aunt, please,’ she said, with a shiver. ‘I don’t feel quite well, and it hurts me. Don’t—any more—now!’
CHAPTER LVII
That was the horrible sting of it—they had made believe to love her, and it had not been true. Now love, Kate reflected (as she went slowly to her room, feeling, somehow, as if every step was a mile), was not like anything else. To counterfeit any other emotion might be pardoned, but to counterfeit love was the last injury anyone could do you. Perhaps it was the wound to her pride which helped the wound to her affections, and made it so bitter. As she thought it all over, she reflected that she had, no doubt, accepted this love much too easily when she went first to her aunt’s charge. She had leapt into their arms, as it were. She had left them no room to understand what their real feelings were; she had taken it for granted that they loved her. She writhed under the humiliation which this recollection brought her. After all it was not, perhaps, they who were in the wrong, but she who had insisted on believing what they had never taken much pains to persuade her of. After all, when she came to think of it, Ombra had made no pretence whatever. The very first time they met, Ombra had repulsed her—she was honest, at least!
To be sure, Mrs. Anderson had been very caressing, but that was her nature. She said dear and darling to every child that came in her way—she petted everybody. Why, then, should Kate have accepted her petting as any sign of special love? It was herself that had been a vain fool, all along. She had taken it for granted: she had assumed it as necessary and certain that they loved her; and they, embarrassed by this faith, had been reluctant to hurt her feelings by undeceiving her; this was how it was. What stings, what tortures of pride and pain, did she give herself as she thought these things over! Gradually she pulled down all the pleasant house that had sheltered her these four—nearly five long years. She plucked it down with her hands. She laid her weary head on her little sofa beside the fire in her room, and watched the flickering shadows, and said to herself that here she was, back in the only home that belonged to her, alone as she had been when she left it. Four cold walls, with so much furniture, new unknown servants, who could not love her—who did not even know her; a cold, cold miserable world outside, and no one in it to whom it would make the difference of a meal or a night’s rest, whether she lived or died. Oh, cold, terrible remorseless fate! back again in Langton-Courtenay, which, perhaps, she ought never to have left, exactly in the same position as when she left it. Kate could not find any solace in tears; they would not come. All her youth of heart, her easy emotions, her childish laughing and crying, were gone. The sunshine of happiness that had lighted up all the world with dazzling lights had been suddenly quenched. She saw everything as it was, natural and true. It was like the sudden enlightenment which came to the dreamer in fairy-land; shrivelled up all the beautiful faces, turning the gold into dross, and the sweetness into corruption.
How far these feelings were exaggerated and overdone, the reader can judge. The spectator, indeed, always sees how much too far the bent bow rebounds when the string is cut, and how far the sufferer goes astray in disappointment and grief, as well as in the extravagances of hope. But, unfortunately, the one who has to go through it never gets the benefit of that tranquilising knowledge. And to Kate all that she saw now seemed too real—more real than anything she had known before—and her desertion complete. She lay on her sofa, and gazed into the fire, and felt her temples beating and her eyes blazing, but could not cry to relieve herself. When Maryanne came upstairs to light her mistress’s candles, and prepare her dress for dinner, she shrieked out to see the flushed face on the sofa-pillow.
‘I have a headache—that is all. Don’t make a fuss,’ cried poor Kate.
‘Miss Kate, you must be going to have a fever. Let me call Mrs. Anderson—let me send for the doctor,’ cried the girl, in dismay. But Kate exerted her authority, and silenced her. She sent her downstairs with messages that she had a headache, and could not come down again, but was going to bed, and would rather not be disturbed.’
Late in the evening, when Mrs. Anderson came to the door, Maryanne repeated the message. ‘I think, ma’am, Miss Kate’s asleep. She said she was not to be disturbed.’
But Maryanne did not know how to keep this visitor out. She dared not oppose her, as she stole in on noiseless foot, and went to the bedside. Kate was lying with all her pretty hair in a mass on the pillow, with her eyes closed, and the flush which had frightened Maryanne still on her face. Was she asleep? Mrs. Anderson would have thought so, but for seeing two big teardrops just stealing from her closed eyelashes. She stooped over and kissed her softly on the forehead. ‘God bless you, my dear child, my dear child!’ she whispered, almost wishing she might not be heard; and then stole away to her own room, to the other child, much more tumultuous and exciting, who awaited her. Poor Mrs. Anderson! of all the three she was the one who had the most to bear.
Ombra was pacing up and down the large bed-room, so luxurious and wealthy, her breath coming quick with excitement, her whole frame full of pulses and tinglings of a hundred pains. She, too, had gone through a sharp pang of humiliation; but it had passed over. She was not lonely, like Kate. She had her mother to fall back upon in the meantime; and even failing her mother, she had some one else, another who would support her, upon whom she could lean, and who would give her moral sacking and sympathy. 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. She was sorry she had said what she did—that she could avow without hesitation. She had not meant to hurt her cousin, and of course she had not meant really that she hated her, but only that she was irritated and unhappy, and not in a position to choose her words. Kate was rich, and could have whatever she pleased; but Ombra had nothing but the people who loved her, and she could not bear any interference with them. It was the parable of the ewe-lamb over again, she said to herself; and thus was exciting herself, and swelling her excitement to a higher and higher pitch, when her mother went in—her mother, for whom all this tempest was preparing and upon whom it was about to fall.
‘You have been to see her, mamma! You never think of your own dignity! You have been petting her, and apologising to her!’
‘She is asleep,’ said Mrs. Anderson, sitting down, and leaning her head on her hand. She did not feel able for any more contention. Kate, she felt sure, was not really asleep, but she accepted the semblance, that no more might be said.
Ombra laughed, and, though the laugh sounded mocking, there was a great deal of secret relief in it.
‘Oh! she is asleep! Did not I say she was no more than a child? She has got over it already. When she wakes up she will have forgotten all about it. How excellent those easy-going natures are! I knew it was only for the moment. I knew she had no feelings to speak of. For once, mama, you must acknowledge yourself in the wrong!’
And Ombra sat down too, with an immense weight lifted from her mind. She had not owned it even to herself, but the relief was so great that she felt now what her anxiety had been. ‘Little foolish thing,’ she said, ‘to be so heroical, and make such a noise—’ Ombra laughed almost hysterically—‘and then to go to bed and fall asleep, like a baby! She is little more than a baby—I always told you so, mamma.’
‘You have always been wrong, Ombra, in your estimation of Kate, and you are wrong now. Whether she was asleep or not, I can’t say; she looked like it. But this is a very serious matter all the same. It will not be so easily got over as you think.’
‘I don’t wish it to be got over!’ cried Ombra. ‘It is a kind of life I cannot endure, and it ought not to be asked of me—it is too much to ask of me. You saw the letter. He is to be sent here, with the object of paying his addresses to her, because she is an heiress, and it is thought he ought to marry money. To marry—her! Oh! mamma! he ought not to have said it to me. It was wicked and cruel to make such an explanation.’
‘I think so too,’ said Mrs. Anderson, under her breath.
‘And he does not seem to be horrified by the thought. He says we shall be able to meet– Oh! mother, before this happens let us go away somewhere, and hide ourselves at the end of the earth!’
‘Ombra, my poor child, you must not hide yourself. There are your rights to be considered. It is not that I don’t see how hard it is; but you must not be the one to judge him harshly. We must make allowances. He was alone—he was not under good influence, when he wrote.’
‘Oh! mother, and am I to believe of him that bad influences affect him so? This is making it worse—a thousand times worse! I thought I had foreseen everything that there could be to bear; but I never thought of this.’
‘Alas! poor child, how little did you foresee!’ said Mrs. Anderson, in a low voice—‘not half nor quarter part. Ombra, let us take Kate’s advice. La nuit porte conseil—let us decide nothing to-night.’
‘You can go and sleep, like her,’ said Ombra, somewhat bitterly. ‘I think she is more like you than I am. You will say your prayers, and compose yourself, and go to sleep.’
Mrs. Anderson smiled faintly. ‘Yes, I could have done that when I was as young as you,’ she said, and made no other answer. She was sick at heart, and weary of the discussion. She had gone over the same ground so often, and how often soever she might go over it, the effect was still the same. For what could anyone make of such a hopeless, dreary business?
After all, it was Ombra, with all her passion, who was asleep the first. Her sighs seemed to steal through the room like ghosts, and sometimes a deeper one than usual would cause her mother to steal through the open doorway to see if her child was ill. But after a time the sighs died away, and Mrs. Anderson lay in the darkness of the long Winter night, watching the expiring fire, which burned lower and lower, and listening to the wind outside, and asking herself what was to be the next chapter—where she was to go and what to do. She blamed herself bitterly for all that had happened, and went over it step by step and asked herself how it could have been helped. Of itself, had it been done in the light of day, and with consent of all parties, there had been no harm. She had her child’s happiness to consider chiefly, and not the prejudices of a family with whom she had no acquaintance. How easy it is to justify anything that is done and cannot be undone! and how easy and natural the steps seem by which it was brought about! while all the time something keeps pricking the casuist, whispering, ‘I told you so.’ Yes, she had not been without her warnings; she had known that she ought not to have given that consent which had been wrung from her, as it were, at the sword’s point. She had known that it was weak of her to let principle and honour go, lest Ombra’s cheek should be pale, and her face averted from her mother.
‘It was not Ombra’s fault,’ she said to herself. ‘It was natural that Ombra should do anything she did; but I who am older, who know the world, I should have known better—I should have had the courage to bear even her unhappiness, for her good. Oh, my poor child! and she does not know yet, bad as she thinks it, half of what she may have to bear.’
Thus the mother lay and accused herself, taking first one, and then the other, upon her shoulders, shedding salt tears under the veil of that darkness, wondering where she should next wander to, and what would become of them, and whether light could ever come out of this darkness. How her heart ached!—what fears and heaviness overwhelmed her! while Ombra slept and dreamed, and was happy in the midst of the wretchedness which she had brought upon herself!
