Alice Lauder/Part 2/Chapter 6

LOOK here, I’m getting tired of this sitting still business. I vote we shut up shop and have the money returned at the doors—don’t you?”

“Oh, pray don’t move, Princess! Don’t yawn, I do beg of you! You will spoil the whole pose, and I was getting you in so splendidly this time.”

In a vine-trellised corner of her wide veranda Mrs. Austin was gracefully “composed” with a high-backed Old English chair, a tapestry curtain, and a gauzy mass of pale sea-green drapery twisted mysteriously round her shoulders and falling loosely over her bare arms. Campbell was standing by an easel rapidly sketching her profile in coloured chalks. He had already made a dozen attempts, but none of them were quite satisfactory. There was Mrs. Austin as a Newhaven fishwife, half-length; head and shoulders in Greek costume, time of Iphigenia; Gains​borough hat and feathers; fancy sketch of Ruth with a wheatsheaf on her head as she “stood in tears amid the alien corn.” There was a touch of nature and a gleam of talent in them all, but they could not escape from the merry, careless, defiant glance of her eye, or the laughter-loving curl of her finely-cut lips. It was no use to pretend to tragedy; whatever character, or rather costume, it pleased her to assume for the moment, even as Niobe herself, she could never avoid looking “cheeky,” and Campbell began to perceive with an artist’s despair that he could not transmute this quality into the pensive intensity of high art. He thought the fault was in his own hand, and tried in vain other lights, other systems, but he was not artist enough to add the look of soul to the canvas which he vaguely felt was missing in his model.

In point of fact, fortune had dealt unfairly by Lizzie in giving her the empty compliment of prosperous idleness for a wedding gift. Her natural bent was simple and domestic to a fault. She would have been in her element keeping house, bustling, marketing, managing with a small income and a large family, as so many of her sisters were doing, bemoaning their fate all the time. Her head and fingers were clever and capable; she could do anything with her hands, ​but she did not know what to do with herself. She ought to have been one of those comely, buxom matrons who may be seen any Sunday in any country town all over the world, marshalling her little flock to church, arrayed in spotless clothing and shining rosy cheeks; or perhaps helping to keep shop on the boulevards, trim-aproned, tight-laced, with a bright eye for the main chance; or ordering her dairymaids about in some red-tiled, rose-curtained homestead in Devonshire.

Lizzie was wasted on a large establishment. Her servants never permitted her to practise those domestic arts in which she could so easily have surpassed them. She dare not so much as make her own dresses; even the “natural piety” of nursing the sick, or bringing up children, seemed denied by fate. Something was wanting in her life as in her beauty, and in her simple way she was a femme incomprise amidst all the surroundings of wealth and amusement. All the more wildly she rushed into the distractions of society and the brotherly companionship of admiring young men. She was not naturally inclined to be “fast”—far from it. Yet she got into the way of rumour and gossip out of very light-heartedness, as persistently as the old woman and the dog run ​across the racecourse just as the horses are coming out.

“I can’t manage it, Princess,” he said at last, in a despairing tone. This royal term of address he had adopted out of a choice of pet names used by Mrs. Austin’s intimes, and in preference to “Aunt Lizzie,” “Lady Racquet,” and “Bright-eyes,” which were the favourite noms de guerre in her inner circle. “You ought to go Home and get your portrait done by one of the great stars. Millais would be delighted to paint your head. It is too good to be wasted on a wretched amateur like me.”

“Oh, I couldn’t be bothered to sit still all the time. I am as tired as a cat now, and haven’t got a kick left, I believe.”

“But you must not say that when you go to England, you know. Some people do, of course; but it isn’t good form, and I don’t like to hear you talk nothing but slang.”

“Why, what must I say?” inquired Lizzie, leaning forward with clasped hands outstretched before her, and, for a wonder, with a serious, inquiring look in her bright eyes.

“There! that’s the very thing—just stay like that for ten minutes, and my fortune’s made. Yes, just like that. Don’t smile, and don’t yawn, Princess, please—for my sake! Think of ​my reputation. Well, as we were saying,” he continued, rushing the outline in on a fresh block, and trying to keep hold of the thread of conversation which gave her that momentary solemnity, “if you use all your favourite expressions when you go to England, people will call you a Colonial. Think of that! Though I have heard girls who have never been out of England quite as bad; but, however———” he hesitated, absorbed in his work, and feeling the difficulty of being all artist and at the same time playing Mentor and Sir Charles Grandison at one and the same moment, for the benefit of his model.

“Well, give me an instance,” said Lizzie, with some dignity. “I really do want to know the lay of the land, for of course we shall go Home some time, and I don’t want people to laugh at me for being a perfect savage. I believe you can tell me things without being disagreeable, like Aunt Granby, when she puts on extra starch, and goes for me like a coach-and-four in a hurricane.”

“Well, for instance—it’s a trifle, but perhaps you needn’t say, ‘That’s a whopper,’ or ‘That’s a good lie,’ every time poor Captain Swan pays you a compliment.”

“Oh, that is a whopper! I don’t! I only snub him sometimes because he is so fearfully ​meek. I just want to see how far I can go without putting him in a passion.”

“Oh, well, I don’t object to that. Swanny is a good sort of fellow in the main—his bray is worse than his bite, as it were. So we will pass over that. Did I hear some young ladies saying, ‘Go on, you little brute!’ at tennis, yesterday?”

“Why, I was talking to the ball, of course. That’s nothing.”

“No, oh no, of course not. I did not think it was—but, I know you will be angry with me, and that will spoil my picture; just turn your head ever so little to the right, please. There!”

. . . . Years after, in a distant land, Campbell turned out a portfolio full of half-finished sketches which he had never looked at since that day. He looked sadly at the graceful head and half-suggested background. Those few touches brought him back again to the surroundings of that summer afternoon. The trellised veranda, with its deeply-carved vine-leaves that made a frame for the cornfield sloping upward, and on the edge of the hill a farmhouse surrounded by its brown loaf-shaped haystacks; and beyond that a blue wavy line of mountain, cleft in two where the unseen river mysteriously forced its way through the narrow gorge. It ​was still broad summer, but there was a taste of autumn in the air, in the milky, vaporous sunshine, the over-ripeness of the corn, and the fruity essence of the atmosphere. A warm soft wind blew from the sea and carried along a procession of drowsy clouds, whose shadows floated in tortoiseshell tints over the wheat; the whole cornfield seemed at times to flow upwards and follow the clouds over the hill. The farmhouse was Campbell’s home at that time. He could see the men building a rick and tossing the sheaves in a slow, rhythmic measure, and he felt a passing desire to join them at their immemorial rustic labour. A large drove of cattle was reluctantly passing along the road below the hillside. From the distance they looked like vivid parti-coloured waves moving slowly through the valley, with an occasional glimpse of head and horns emerging from the ruddy-tinted mass. He longed, too, momentarily, to paint those rich reds and browns and white splashes of colour which made such a fine contrast to the faded greens and yellows of the landscape. They swayed slowly onwards, lowing as they went, and their loud, mingled lament came on the wind with a deep orchestral effect. All the summer pleasantness came back to Campbell as he looked at the little sketch in the after-time, ​and he could almost hear again the locusts’ poignant, penetrating cry throbbing through the warm, sleepy afternoon. He looked a little sadly at the half-finished sketch of a face that had passed so soon afterwards into the Silent Land, and said to one who stood near him:

“I don’t know how it was that I could never catch her expression. When she looked down I often thought I could idealize her face, and sometimes she would seem so gentle—sad, almost—but then she would laugh again, and that look was gone. I wish I had a better picture of her; but perhaps this rough outline brings her back more clearly.” And he wondered why his wife only sighed and said softly, as if to herself, “Poor, poor Lizzie!” . . . .

“Well, go on,” said Lizzie’s living voice on that summer afternoon. “What am I to be angry with you about? Don’t you put yourself in a perspiration over it, anyway.”

“Oh, never mind, just now, Princess,” he answered absently, giving up his improvement class as a hopeless task. “But there’s something wrong about your hair to-day. It doesn’t suit the shape of your head in all those twists and fal-lals. Couldn’t you put it up in a round sort of knob at the back. You know the way I mean.”

​“Well, do it yourself, if you don’t like it,” she laughed back; and, pulling out a few hairpins, her brilliant fair hair fell all over her shoulders. With the sea-green gauzy drapery and the bright metallic cloud of hair she looked exactly like the picture of a mermaid emerging from the green wave, and there was a mischievous glance in her eyes that seemed to personate the siren’s smile to perfection.

Arthur stopped for a moment half-vexed that she had spoilt her pose. Then, taking her at her word, he silently caught up her glistening tresses, and slowly and laboriously coiled them up in a distant resemblance to the coiffure of the Diana at the Louvre. He leaned over her head, to judge of the front effect. Her eyes were half-closed; but there was a meaning dimple in each cheek that seemed to speak volumes. He bent closer still, but in the instant she had jerked herself out of reach, and, with one of her wild, childish laughs, flung away the drapery and the curtain, exclaiming in her cheerfullest tone:

“Well, I vote we do something livelier than sit here all day. What will you bet I won’t get a love set from you first thing? Come on! Who’s afraid?”