Alice Lauder/Part 1/Chapter 1
ALICE LAUDER.
CHAPTER I.
THEY all said it would never do; and, as a matter of fact, it didn’t. There was some comfort in that—to the other people. Whether it was at all consoling to Alice Lauder to know that the inevitable result had been foreseen, prophesied, deplored, and commiserated by the whole of her acquaintances on board ship, is another matter; yet, as often as she went over the whole affair in her thoughts, she declared to herself that she could not have acted differently, even from the very beginning.
The beginning of it all was not a very cheerful day for a beginning. The mail steamer “Suez” had put into this forlorn Australian port for a few hours, to pick up the mails and to take in any incidental passengers who might easily be anxious to get away from St. Paul’s Bay. The white deck of the vessel was always kept in a state of supernatural neatness and shininess. Every coil of rope was tidied up to a hairpin, every brass plate and moulding shone with more than Dutch brilliancy; indeed, the rites of cleanliness and order were carried out to a counsel of perfection on board the “Suez;” yet even this perfection could not make her deck appear a cheerful home on such a day. The passengers, who for the most part had been on board for eight or nine days, and who now felt to the manner born, superciliously gazed at the land, or hung listlessly over the bulwarks, vainly seeking what they could devour in the way of amusement. But there was very little to amuse them either in the weather or the surroundings. Under a sad, misty sky, the horn-shaped land-locked harbour looked all one uniform tint of faded grey, except for an occasional gleam of orange or purple, like stains of iron-mould, as the heavy water moved with the tide. The wind was blowing from the land in a persistent melancholy spirit; it was not strong enough to stir up the waves to strife, but it kept up a dreary sort of strumming in the rigging; and the few grey-green, thin-leaved trees that grew near the beach stooped and hobbled, like old crones driven before the blast, and bent nearly double with age and fatigue. Sometimes a swift, transitory gust of rain flew over the ship, but soon relapsed into the indefinite saline mist that seemed to pervade both earth and sky. A few scattered white houses with wet iron roofs, a white lighthouse on the north side of the harbour, and the mute sunburnt forest rising tier above tier till it rolled away into the horizon—these were all the visible attractions of St. Paul’s, W.A. Sometimes a quick glance of sunshine alighted on the bushy hills far inland, and showed out their ashy-white network of dead trees, or flashed on the flying splinters of rain close at hand; but there was something pallid and cheerless even in that momentary brightness.
“It’s very Australian,” said Lady May Carr, who was the leading lady of this voyage, to her companion, a tall young Englishman with a grave, handsome face. Lady May was tall, too, and fair and robust. She was a very good imitation of a pretty woman, but her eyes and eyelashes, hair and complexion, were all exactly the same tint—a sort of whitey-brown sugar-paper shade. Nevertheless, she possessed in perfection the well-born, well-trained, well-preserved appearance of the superior travelling English-woman. Everything she had on was evidently the right thing; if anything, it was too right. This was before the advent of tailor-made figures; yet there was a sort of prophetic tailor’s finish in her severe yachting dress and professional cloth cap. Her hair was arranged in that neat mathematical formula which no woman, however talented, can produce by her own unaided fingers. Only a lady’s maid, and a very clever one at that, could have turned out those whitey-brown braids and puffs in such polished completeness on board ship. She looked rather contemptuously through her eyeglass at the only passenger from St. Paul’s, a young lady who was just then coming on board, and mounting the steps as if she were being led to execution; and, indeed, it was evident to the unaided vision that everything about the new-comer was in the wrong, passively if not actively wrong. Her thin, shiny black silk at once declared the fact of having seen better days, but it need not have been decked out with cheap fringe and unfortunate ornaments. The feathers in her hat were weak and drooping, as if they had been curled and recurled with great care and trouble, but could not keep it up a moment longer. On one arm she carried a worn but excellent shawl of real cashmere, which might have covered a multitude of sins, but that some evil genius had sewn on a garnishing of imitation ermine, which gave the last touch to her failure. Little could be seen of her face, but her eyes were tearful, and she looked as if in the last extremity of shyness and sorrow. The occasion of her sorrow was apparently the parting with her father—a father whose long hair and velvet coat and general air of slipshoddiness proclaimed him aloud as one of those broken-down geniuses who are so often turned off to sink or swim—and who generally sink—in Australian waters. He made his adieu to his daughter in a very ill-timed theatrical manner, with a flourish of tin trumpets as it were, and a waving of hands, just as if he were going off the stage two steps to the bar, to the ghost-tune in the “Corsican Brothers” on a crowded benefit night.
The girl’s face was very white, but she suppressed her sobs, and the expression of her eyes, as she held her father’s hand and gazed on him in silent farewell, made Arthur Campbell turn away with an uncomfortable sensation of sympathy.
“What a guy! I wonder she does not go second-class,” observed Lady May, in her clear, high-toned accents, which were always thought to be so aristocratic. Perhaps they were rather too clear on this occasion, for the girl heard her, and looked at the speaker, or rather over her, with a swift glance of sad, yet supreme disdain. The other passengers noted this little passage with amusement, and not without a pleased consciousness that for once in her life Lady May had been put down by the silent reproof of a shabby young person in moulting feathers and imitation fur.
Lady May, who was a good-natured person in the main, smiled at Arthur Campbell and resumed her conversation in perhaps slightly lowered tones, while the new passenger waved her hand towards the boat, now leaving the ship’s neighbourhood, and went away slowly and sadly to her cabin; and the “Suez” cheerfully made a start towards the Indian Ocean, leaving behind her the white lighthouse and lonely forests of St. Paul’s, more forlorn and solitary than ever as they faded away into the sad grey distance.