Ombra

by Mrs. Oliphant

‘Going away?’ he said, in a strange, dull, feelingless way. ‘Ah! for six months—I beg your pardon—I am a little confused. I have just heard some—some bad news. Did you say going away?’

‘I am so sorry,’ said Kate, faltering, ‘so very sorry. I hope it is not anything I have said——’

‘You have said?’ he answered, with a dull smile, ‘oh, no! I have had bad news, and I am a little upset. You are going away? It is sudden, is it not?—or perhaps you thought it best not to speak. Shanklin will look odd without you,’ he went on, looking at her. He looked at her with a vague defiance, as if daring her to find him out. He tried to smile; his eyes were very lacklustre and dull, as if all the vision had suddenly been taken out of them; and his very attitude, as he stood, was feeble, as if a sudden touch might have made him fall.

‘Yes,’ said Kate, humbly, ‘I am sorry to leave Shanklin and all my friends; but my uncle wishes it for me, and as Ombra is so poorly, we thought it might do her good.’

‘Ah!’ he said, drawing a long breath; and then he added hurriedly, ‘Does she like it? Does she think it will do her good?’

‘I don’t think she likes it at all,’ said Kate, ‘she is so fond of home; but we all think it is the best thing. Good-bye, Mr. Sugden. I hope you will come and see us. I must go home now, for I have so much to do.’

‘Yes, thanks. I will come and see you,’ said the Curate. And then he walked on mechanically—straight on, not knowing where he was going. He was stunned by the blow. Though he knew very well that Ombra was not for him, though he had seen her taken, as it were, out of his very hands, there was a passive strength in his nature which made him capable of bearing this. So long as no active step was taken, he could bear it. It had gone to his heart with a penetrating anguish by times to see her given up to the attentions of another, receiving, as he thought, the love of another, and smiling upon it. But all the while she had smiled also upon himself; she had treated him with a friendly sweetness which kept him subject; she had filled his once unoccupied and languid soul with a host of poignant emotions. Love, pain, misery, consolation—life itself, seemed to have come to him from Ombra. Before he knew her, he had thought pleasantly of cricket and field-sports, conscientiously of his duties, piteously of the mothers’ meetings, which were so sadly out of his way, and yet were supposed to be duty too.

But Ombra had opened to him another life—an individual world, which was his, and no other man’s. She had made him very unhappy and very glad; she had awakened him to himself. There was that in him which would have held him to her with a pathetic devotion all his life. It was in him to have served the first woman that woke his heart with an ideal constancy, the kind of devotion—forgive the expression, oh, intellectual reader!—which makes a dull man sublime, and which dull men most often exhibit. He was not clever, our poor Curate, but he was true as steel, and had a helpless, obstinate way of clinging to his loves and friendships. Never, whatever happened, though she had married, and even though he had married, and the world had rolled on, and all the events of life had sundered them, could Ombra have been to him like any other woman; and now she was the undisputed queen and mistress of his life. She was never to be his; but still she was his lady and his queen. He was ready to have saved her even by the sacrifice of all idea of personal happiness on his own part. His heart was glowing at the present moment with indignant sorrow over her, with fury towards one of the Berties—he did not know which—who had brought a mysterious shadow over her life; and yet he was capable of making an heroic effort to bring back that Bertie, and to place him by Ombra’s side, though every step he took in doing so would be over his own heart.

All this was in him; but it was not in him to brave this altogether unthought-of catastrophe. To have her go away; to find himself left with all life gone out of him; to have the heart torn, as it were, out of his breast; and to feel the great bleeding, aching void which nothing could fill up. He had foreseen all the other pain, and was prepared for it; but for this he was not prepared. He walked straight on, in a dull misery, without the power to think. Going away!—for six months! Which meant simply for ever and ever. Where he would have stopped I cannot tell, for he was young and athletic, and capable of traversing the entire island, if he had not walked straight into the sea over the first headland which came in his way—a conclusion which would not have been disagreeable to him in the present state of his feelings, though he could scarcely have drowned had he tried. But fortunately he met the Berties ere he had gone very far. They were coming from Sandown Pier.

‘Have you got the yacht here?’ he asked, mechanically; and then, before they could understand, broke into the subject of which his heart and brain were both full. ‘Have you heard that the ladies of the Cottage are going away?’