‘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.’