Alice Lauder/Part 2/Chapter 2

ALICE walked home in a very meditative spirit after her visit to these neighbours. The name she had heard accidentally that afternoon woke many slumbering memories, and broke up the calm everyday film of habit as a stone breaks the newly-formed ice on a shallow pool. Ten years ago! Could it be the same Arthur Campbell? Some inward informer betrayed that it was indeed the same; as far as any person can be said to be identical with himself after ten years of changing existence. She tried to divine the circumstances which might bring him to this out-of-the-way spot, and above all she tried to recollect all she had heard of these friends of his since her arrival in Green Street, and of the beautiful hoiden who so openly chattered of his devotion to herself. There was something frank and outspoken in this colonial girl. Alice felt that she would not boast in vain, and that Arthur Campbell had ​probably shown a friendly and open admiration for his fair new friend. “What does it matter?” she asked herself a dozen times in that one hour; but to that question there was no reply. Still those past days started into life, in spite of all her remonstrances with herself, and they appeared with a colour and pattern of their own far more vivid than anything of the present. It sometimes happens, when a panelled picture, long fixed against the wall, is moved away, that one is startled to see the long forgotten colour and gilding of a bygone day as fresh as the hour they were laid on. So it was with that swiftly passing voyage in the “Suez,” whose every little incident rose again with irrepressible distinctness to her mind. Again the air of the tropics blew on her uncovered hair, and the unceasing recitative of the surf boomed again in her ears, and the huge palm-trees creaked and rustled overhead; and strange scarlet blossoms burned like live coals among the green, while the sea breeze, laden with sparkling particles of salt and spray, flowed over the island. And there was another voice besides that of the surf speaking in her ears; but she refused to listen to it, and in hopes of changing the subject she went again and again over all the picturesque details which the gossip of the little place had ​afforded as to its one great subject of interest—the rich, beautiful, erratic cynosure of Green Street eyes—Mrs. Austin. . . . It was generally understood when Lizzie Granby got engaged to Mr. Austin a few years ago, that there was great rejoicing throughout the length and breadth of the clan, which was of no small measure altogether, take it either in cubic feet or superficially. People were a little surprised, it is true, but people always are, and always will be surprised to the end of time over their neighbours’ engagements. The Granbys were naturally very glad to get their orphan niece off their hands. It is not every day that one meets with a devoted, sensible, sandy-whiskered husband with £5,000 a year (and making more every day), for a pretty, penniless girl. Besides, it must be confessed that her relations found her rather a handful. They managed it all, however, extremely well—everybody admitted that. They smiled their calm monumental smile in their own serene way, and smoothed over difficulties, and ignored little outbreaks, and paid the bills once a month, and took carriage exercise—as they called it, although the carriage got far the best of the exercise—at the same hour every afternoon, and dressed for dinner, and had family prayers, and would sooner have died than ​say or do anything which had not been said or done hundreds of times before; and in the end they married Lizzie with all due ceremonial and the most expensive of wedding breakfasts, and all the neighbours admitted it was a very satisfactory settlement, and that they never expected it would turn out so well; adding, in the same breath, that they had foreseen it all from the very beginning.

In those very young days Lizzie Granby was a pretty girl, but she had by no means arrived at her meridian. It was only when she became Mrs. Austin, and passed through the finishing processes of her tailor, photographer, coiffeur, dentist, and society paragraph maker, that she emerged as a fashionable beauty. Mr. Austin took his wife to a handsome establishment in the neighbouring city, and she lost no time in becoming the rage at the colonial metropolis. She was “taken up” at an early stage by the great lady of the place—a lady by no means straitlaced, and of a very different calibre to the severely proper aunts and cousins in Green Street—and who found Lizzie charming just in proportion as she realized the usual Anglican conception of a spirited colonial girl. In a very short time Mrs. Austin’s Greek profile and her slang expressions, her smart tennis and ​smarter dresses, became one of the recognized entertainments at G. House. Strangers were always introduced to her, and she was invariably sent for when any patrician traveller appeared on the scene. In common justice it must be observed that Lizzie always did something for her living—as she herself was fond of remarking—on these occasions, and that she formed an agreeable interlude in the travellers’ pursuit of useful information, or interesting scenery, on the underneath side of the world.

Some of these travellers were very much struck with the profile, and would almost have carried her off, like some beautiful tropical bird, who might be exhibited to the higher circles in London. Others sought to improve her mind; it seemed almost sad that such a lovely head should be given over entirely to the claims of “fast service,” and that the sweet curves of those finely-moulded lips should be employed in making faces at the A. D. C.’s.

But after all, as Lady H——— was wont to observe, if Mr. Austin did not object, surely no one else need do so. The girl was as happy as possible, and really it was keeping her out of mischief to have her round to play with the visitors. There was not the least idea of harm in her, and if she did not enjoy herself at her ​age, when on earth would she do so? One part of this argument, at least, was true: Lizzie certainly enjoyed herself, and there is no greater merit in a habitual visitor. Life was a summerday’s pleasure to her as yet, and she danced on the greensward all day long, while her good little husband paid the piper. She was kind, too, in her own way, and even considerate to him, in return. Sometimes she had the air of bearing with him gently, with his misplaced economies and inconvenient generosities; with his habit of brushing his hat while he talked, and his prim old-fashioned way of always finishing his sentences in the precise grammatical fashion of an elder day. He admired his wife immensely, and was even a little jealous of any possible rival to her place and pinnacle of fashion. He did not always appear by her side in the rapid gyrations of her gaieties, for he possessed neither her untiring digestion nor her youthful activity, but he had unlimited confidence in her judgment, and liked to see her sought after by the most brilliant portion of their little colonial world. To his old-fashioned bourgeois ideas there was something sacred about a title, and when Lizzie went out under the shadow of a coronet it almost seemed as if she were under the protection of the Church. So time ​went on, and every year he grew a little more dry, and precise, and rich, and increased in goods, and his wife became more blooming, more animated, and more sought after. They had no children, and no angel either of life or death came down to trouble the pool, with healing on his wings.

The Austins had a pretty seaside cottage near their relations in Green Street, and coming down to it one Saturday of torrid summer, they found the little place immensely interested about the two ladies who had taken Carr’s corner at the North End. As to Mrs. Damon, she was easily classified. Was not her name written in the sacred books of Debrett? Her husband was a naval officer of distinction; her sister was married to the heir of a dukedom; there was a large fortune coming to them some day, and they always travelled with two servants—a married couple, the man acting as butler, and the wife as lady’s maid and superintendent of the nursery. All this information Green Street possessed as if by instinct, and was quite prepared to admire and even idolize Mrs. Damon as far as she would allow it. It was true that Clare did not altogether look like the ideal daughter of a hundred earls as she pottered about the beach after her children in a waterproof perfectly green with ​age, and her feet protected by a pair of her favourite hygienic shoes. But these were merely the eccentricities of rank, and Green Street had a soul above appearances where the peerage was concerned. The country ladies listened submissively to Clare’s vivid dissertations on the respective merits of liver pills or bronchitis kettles. Nothing could have better proved their unselfish devotion, for if there is one principle a woman will cling to above all others in the general wreck of things, it is to her own particular patent medicines. As a rule, Mrs. Granby would have cheerfully gone to the stake sooner than accept her next-door neighbour’s cure for influenza; but when Mrs. Damon called one day with a bottle of uncanny-looking oily mixture, and fixed her bright unwinking gaze on the youngest Granby girl (a doubtful case of ordinary catarrh), even the Spartan mother had to relax her invariable rule, and accept the prescription. It isn’t every day that an amateur doctor with the courtesy prefix of "Honourable" could be consulted for nothing, and the Granbys felt that much must be forgiven to the sister-in-law of a future duke. But with regard to the younger visitor opinions were somewhat divided in the village. Most of the girls admired Alice, and were quite ready to adopt her at once. “She ​has such lovely eyes, and they have always such a pleading expression, as if she were asking you for something—something you couldn’t give her; and her manner is perfectly fascinating, and her voice and everything are quite different from other girls. It’s quite a study to see her walk, and sit down, and stand up, and hold her head even. I don’t care if she was trained for the stage, and I expect she will be a great artist some day. She gave me the address of her tailor, and I mean to get a grey cloth like hers, only with gold braiding on it, the very first thing.”

This was the summing-up of the younger portion of society, led by Mrs. Austin, who threw herself into this new friendship with her usual headlong energy. The older ladies were more reserved in their approaches, and were not quite sure that they liked their girls to be so much with a young person who had been an actress—or very nearly one. But this opposition only warmed up Mrs. Austin into more decided partisanship. Only one thing puzzled her in her new friend. When the name of the admired globe-trotter friend turned up (as it did at intervals of five minutes on an average in Lizzie’s conversation at this period), Alice Lauder had a way of turning her head away and looking decidedly ​embarrassed at first. Once or twice she wondered if this could be the same Mr. Campbell she used to know long ago. Lizzie could not say; there were hundreds of Campbells all over the shop, and especially in India; but this was one in a thousand, a perfect dear, though rather strict in some things and always blowing her up for using slang. He was delightful; you could not possibly forget him if you ever met him, and he could do anything—tennis or shooting, or even writing blue-books and things. “At least, everyone says he is very clever—and he is so good-looking too! He must have had a good time in India, and he has a capital appointment out there. They say his chief simply couldn’t live without him now; and as for the chieftainess!—Oh, I know these Indian travellers! and I do like to get a shot at a bird on the wing sometimes,” she concluded, throwing herself in the attitude of a sportsman, shutting one eye and imitating the position of a gun with her tennis racquet. There was nothing she could not do with that implement.

Although this enthusiastic commendation of her new friend might lead one to expect a modern edition of the Admirable Crichton, with something added from the Heir of Redclyffe, and a tinge of Lord Burleigh thrown in, still Alice thought she recognized one or two traits in the ​description which belonged to her former fellow-traveller. Often as in the course of the past ten years she had pictured in her thoughts a meeting with him, still she felt strangely reluctant to see him again, now that it seemed inevitable. Like the girl in the visionary poem, she said to herself:

Far different had been her imaginary circumstances. Then she was to be a star, a reigning sovereign, hardly to be recognized as the little Australian student of the “Suez.” Now she would meet him as a failure, out and out, as she repeated to herself. There were one or two circumstances which had softened the fall for her. She was, at all events, a fairly good-looking, well-dressed, popular failure, of independent means; but she could have borne the thought better if he too had also failed, or fallen ever so little out of the race; but no—

she repeated silently; and then in a half rebound she thought of her good professor, so patient, so faithful, so determined not to take “No” for an answer; and besides her professor ​one or two other shades of lover-like mien appeared against the tapestry of memory. Once or twice she had almost been on the point of very nearly feeling a half or quarter or decimal shade of “attachment”—one could not call it anything else—to one or other of these shadows. There was one—a wild-eyed, fair-haired, consumptive Polish student, with a look of genius or insanity (it was hard to say which) stamped on his mobile boy’s features, and whose long musical, spider-like fingers drew out such heartpiercing music from the violin—who now seemed to pursue her with phantasmal pleadings. He always wanted Alice to be the saving of him, but she never could see her way to it. Now, it was evident that Arthur Campbell did not need saving. A man who is always going about the world, making sums on the edges of newspapers (as she recollected his doing), and carrying on Platonic flirtations with pretty married women, could not be much in need of her compassion or interest; and so for the fiftieth time she gave up thinking about it and began to think of something else, with the result that her mind wandered again and again round in the same track, like travellers who lose their way in the forest and return despairingly to the same point they set out from. At last she called up all her ​strength, and she knew she would not call in vain, determined at least to meet him with the spirit and independence of former days, if Fate would not permit her to escape from this ordeal.