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!