FLORENCE altogether was full of pleasant novelty to the young traveller. To find herself living up two pair of stairs, with windows overlooking the Arno, and at a little distance the quaint buildings of the Ponte Vecchio, was as great a change as the first change had been from Langton-Courtenay to the little Cottage at Shanklin. Mrs. Anderson’s apartment on the second floor of the Casa Graziana was not large. There was a drawing-room which looked to the front, and received all the sunshine which Florentine skies could give; and half a mile off, at the other end of the house, there was a grim and spare dining-room, furnished with the indispensable tables and chairs, and with a curious little fireplace in the corner, raised upon a slab of stone, as on a pedestal. It would be difficult to tell how cold it was here as the Winter advanced; but in the salone it was genial as Summer whenever the sun shone. The family went, as it were, from Nice to Inverness when they went from the front to the back, for their meals. Perhaps it might have been inappropriate for Miss Courtenay of Langton-Courtenay to live up two pair of stairs; but it was not at all unsuitable for Mrs. Anderson; and, indeed, when Lady Barker, who was Mrs. Anderson’s friend, came to call, she was much surprised by the superior character of the establishment. Lady Barker had been a Consul’s daughter, and had risen immensely in life by marrying the foolish young attaché, whom she now kept in the way he ought to go. She was not the Ambassadress, but the Ambassadress’s friend, and a member of the Legation; and, though she was now in a manner a great lady herself, she remembered quite well what were the means of the Andersons, and knew that even the terzo piano of a house on the Lung-Arno was more than they could have ventured on in the ancient days.
‘What a pretty apartment,’ she said; ‘and how nicely situated! I am afraid you will find it rather dear. Florence is so changed since your time. Do you remember how cheap everything used to be in the old days? Well, if you will believe me, you pay just fifteen times as much for every article now.’
‘So I perceive,’ said Mrs. Anderson. ‘We give a thousand francs for these rooms, which ought not to be more than a hundred scudi—and without even the old attraction of a pleasant accessible Court.’
Lady Barker opened her eyes—at once, at the fact of Mrs. Anderson paying a thousand francs a month for her rooms, and at her familiar mention of the pleasant Court.
‘Oh, there are some very pleasant people here now!’ she said; ‘if your young ladies are fond of dancing, I think I can help them to some amusement. Lady Granton will send you cards for her ball. Is Ombra delicate?—do you still call her Ombra? How odd it is that you and I, under such different circumstances, should meet here!’
‘Yes—very odd,’ said Mrs. Anderson; ‘and yet I don’t know. People who have been once in Italy always come back. There is a charm about it—a——’
‘Ah, we didn’t think so once!’ said Lady Barker, with a laugh. She could remember the time when the Andersons, like so many other people compelled to live abroad, looked upon everything that was not English with absolute enmity. ‘You used to think Italy did not agree with your daughter,’ she said; ‘have you brought her for her health now?’
‘Oh no! Ombra is quite well; she is always pale,’ said Mrs. Anderson. ‘We have come rather on account of my niece—not for her health, but because she had never seen anything out of her own country. We think it right that she should make good use of her time before she comes of age.’
‘Oh! will she come of age?’ said Lady Barker, with a glance of laughing curiosity. She decided that the pretty girl at the window, who had two or three times broken into the conversation, was a great deal too pretty to be largely endowed by fortune; and smiled at her old friend’s grandiloquence, which she remembered so well. She made a very good story of it at the little cosy dinner-party at the Embassy that evening, and prepared the good people for some amusement. ‘A pretty English country girl, with some property, no doubt,’ she said. ‘A cottage ornée, most likely, and some fields about it; but her aunt talks as if she were heiress to a Grand Duke. She has come abroad to improve her mind before she comes of age.’
‘And when she goes back there will be a grand assemblage of the tenantry, no doubt, and triumphal arches, and all the rest of it,’ said another of the fine people.
‘So Mrs. Vice-Consul allows one to suppose,’ said Lady Barker. ‘But she is so pretty—prettier than anything I have seen for ages; and Ombra, too, is pretty, the late Vice-Consul’s heiress. They will far furore—two such new faces, and both so English; so fresh; so gauche!’
This was Lady Barker’s way of backing her friends; but the friends did not know of it, and it procured them their invitation all the same, and Lady Granton’s card to put on the top of the few other cards which callers had left. And Mrs. Anderson came to be, without knowing it, the favourite joke of the ambassadorial circle. Mrs. Vice-Consul had more wonderful sayings fastened upon her than she ever dreamt of, and became the type and symbol of the heavy British matron to that lively party. Her friend made her out to be a bland and dignified mixture of Mrs. Malaprop and Mrs. Nickleby. Meanwhile, she had a great many things to do, which occupied her, and drove even her anxieties out of her mind. There was the settling down—the hiring of servants and additional furniture, and all the trifles necessary to make their rooms ‘comfortable;’ and then the dresses of the girls to be put in order, and especially the dress in which Kate was to make her first appearance.
Mrs. Anderson had accepted Mr. Courtenay’s conditions; she had acquiesced in the propriety of keeping silent as to Kate’s pretensions, and guarding her from all approach of fortune-hunters. There was even something in this which was not disagreeable to her maternal feelings; for to have Kate made first, and Ombra second, would not have been pleasant. But still, at the same time, she could not restrain a natural inclination to enhance the importance of her party by a hint—an inference. That little intimation about Kate’s coming of age, she had meant to tell, as indeed it did, more than she intended; and now her mind was greatly exercised about her niece’s ball-dress. ‘White tarlatane is, of course, very nice for a young girl,’ she said, doubtfully, ‘it is all my Ombra has ever had; but, for Kate, with her pretensions——’
This was said rather as one talks to one’s self, thinking aloud, than as actually asking advice.
‘But I thought Kate in Florence was to be simply your niece,’ said Ombra, who was in the room. ‘To make her very fine would be bad taste; besides,’ she added, with a little sigh, ‘Kate would look well in white calico. Nature has decked her so. I suppose I never, at my best, was anything like that.’
Ombra had improved very much since their arrival in Florence. Her fretfulness had much abated, and there was no envy in this sigh.
‘At your best, Ombra! My foolish darling, do you think your best is over?’ said the mother, with a smile.
‘I mean the bloom,’ said Ombra. ‘I never had any bloom—and Kate’s is wonderful. I think she gives a pearly, rosy tint to the very air. I was always a little shadow, you know!’
‘You will not do yourself justice,’ cried Mrs. Anderson. ‘Oh! Ombra, if you only knew how it grieves me! You draw back, and you droop into that dreamy, melancholy way; there is always a mist about you. My darling, this is a new place, you will meet new people, everything is fresh and strange. Could you not make a new beginning, dear, and shake it off!’
‘I try,’ said Ombra, in a low tone.
‘I don’t want to be hard upon you, my own child; but, then, dear, you must blame yourself, not any one else. It was not his fault.’
‘Please don’t speak of it,’ cried the girl. ‘If you could know how humbled I feel to think that it is that which has upset my whole life! Ill-temper, jealousy, envy, meanness—pleasant things to have in one’s heart! I fight with them, but I can’t overcome them. If I could only “not care!” How happy people are who can take things easily, and who don’t care!’
‘Very few people do,’ said Mrs. Anderson. ‘Those who have command of themselves don’t show their feelings, but most people feel more or less. The change, however, will do you good. And you must occupy yourself, my love. How nicely you used to draw, Ombra! and you have given up drawing. As for poetry, my dear, it is very pretty—it is very, very pretty—but I fear it is not much good.’
‘It does not sell, you mean, like novels.’
‘I don’t know much about novels; but it keeps you always dwelling upon your feelings. And then, if they were ever published, people would talk. They would say, “Where has Ombra learned all this? Has she been as unhappy as she says? Has she been disappointed?” My darling, I think it does a girl a great deal of harm. If you would begin your drawing again! Drawing does not tell any tales.’
‘There is no tale to tell,’ cried Ombra. Her shadowy face flushed with a colour which, for the moment, was as bright as Kate’s, and she got up hurriedly, and began to arrange some books at a side-table, an occupation which carried her out of her mother’s way; and then Kate came in, carrying a basket of fruit, which she and Francesca had bought in the market. There were scarcely any flowers to be had, she complained, but the grapes, with their picturesque stems, and great green leaves, stained with russet, were almost as ornamental. A white alabaster tazza, which they had bought at Pisa, heaped with them, was almost more effective, more characteristic than flowers.
‘I have been trying to talk to the market-women,’ she said, ‘down in that dark, narrow passage, by the Strozzi Palace. Francesca knows all about it. How pleasant it is going with Francesca—to hear her chatter, and to see her brown little face light up! She tells me such stories of all the people as we go.’
‘How fond you are of stories, Kate!’
‘Is it wrong? Look, auntie, how lovely this vine-branch looks! England is better for some things, though. There will still be some clematis over our porch—not in flower, perhaps, but in that downy, fluffy stage, after the flower. Francesca promises me everything soon. Spring will begin in December, she says, so far as the flowers go, and then we can make the salone gay. Do you know there are quantities of English people at the hotel at the corner? I almost thought I heard some one say my name as I went by. I looked up, but I could not see anybody I knew.’
‘I hope there is nobody we know,’ cried Ombra, under her breath.
‘My dear children,’ said Mrs. Anderson, with solemnity, ‘you must recognise this principle in Italy, that there are English people everywhere; and wherever there are English people, there is sure to be some one whom you know, or who knows you. I have seen it happen a hundred times; so never mind looking up at the windows, Kate—you may be sure we shall find out quite soon enough.’
‘Well, I like people,’ said Kate, carelessly, as she went out of the room. ‘It will not be any annoyance to me.’
‘She does not care,’ said Ombra—‘it is not in her nature. She will always be happy, because she will never mind. One is the same as another to her. I wish I had that happy disposition. How strange it is that people should be so different! What would kill me would scarcely move her—would not cost her a tear.’
‘Ombra, I am not so sure——’
‘Oh! but I am sure, mamma. She does not understand how things can matter so much to me. She wonders—I can see her look at me when she thinks I don’t notice. She seems to say, “What can Ombra mean by it?—how silly she is to care!”’
‘But you have not taken Kate into your confidence?’ said Mrs. Anderson, in alarm.
‘I have not taken any one into my confidence—I have no confidence to give,’ said Ombra, with the ready irritation which had come to be so common with her. The mother bore it, as mothers have to do, turning away with a suppressed sigh. What a difference the last year had made on Ombra!—oh! what a thing love was to make such a difference in a girl! This is what Mrs. Anderson said to herself with distress and pain; she could scarcely recognise her own child in this changed manifestation, and she could not approve, or even sympathise with her, in the degree, at least, which Ombra craved.