‘I—really—don’t know,’ protested Mr. Neuchamp, now discovering suddenly that he was on unsafe ground. ‘I thought you were English, and making the voyage, like myself, for the first time.’
‘Don’t apologise,’ laughed Alice; ‘you may as well say at once that you thought we were too much like ordinary English people to be colonists,’ and she made him a slight bow.
‘Well, so I did,’ confessed our hero, too honest to evade the expression of his opinions. ‘But you know, you’re so—well—you do expect a little difference in appearance, or manner——’
‘Or complexion?’ continued his fair tormentor. ‘Did you think Australians were—just a little—dark?’
‘I recant, and apologise, and sue for pardon,’ said Ernest, now completely dislodged from his pedestal, a horrid thought obtruding itself that similar discoveries would narrow his mission to most uninteresting dimensions.
This ‘check to his queen’ sobered Mr. Neuchamp for several days. He began to question the probability of influencing society in Australia to any great extent, if the component parts were like the Middleton family. However, he reflected that people of cultivated tastes and unexceptionable manners were rare in any country. And when he thought of the vast interior with its scattered untravelled population, hope revived and he again saw himself the ‘guide, philosopher, and friend of a guileless and grateful people.’
There were several landed proprietors who held great possessions in Australia among the passengers, with whom he made a point of conversing whenever such conversation was possible. But here again unexpected hindrances and obstacles arose.
Mr. Neuchamp found that these returning Australians were rather reserved, and had very little to say about the land in which so large a portion of their lives had been passed. They committed themselves to the extent of stating in answer to his numerous inquiries, that it was a ‘very fair sort of place—you could manage to live there.’ ‘As to the people?’ ‘Well, they were much like people everywhere else—some good, some bad.’ ‘Climate?‘ ‘Hot in some places, cold in others.’ ‘Manners?’‘Well, many of the inhabitants hadn’t any, but that was a complaint almost universal at the present day.’ The oppressed colonist generally wound up by stating that when he, Neuchamp, had been in Australia for a year or two, he would know all about it.
All this was very unsatisfactory. As far as these pieces of evidence went, the terra incognita to which, after such rending of ancient associations and family ties, he was even now voyaging, was as prosaic as Middlesex or Kent. These people either did not know anything about their own country or their own people, or, with the absurd indifferentism of Englishmen, did not care. He was partly reassured by one of the more youthful passengers, who had not been very long away from his Australian birthland. He considerately raised Ernest’s spirits, and his estimate of Australia as a ‘wonderland,’ by certain historiettes and tales of adventure by flood and field. But when he introduced Indians, habitual scalping, and a serpent fifty feet long, Mr. Neuchamp’s course of reading enabled him to detect the unprincipled fabrication, and to withdraw with dignity.
In due course of time, the vessel which carried Mr. Neuchamp and his purpose arrived at her destination. The night was misty, so that he had no opportunity of comparing the harbour of Sydney with the numerous descriptions which he had read. He was met on the wharf by the perfectly British inquiry of ‘Cab, sir, cab?’ upon replying to which in the affirmative, he was rattled up to the Royal Hotel, and charged double fare, with a completeness and despatch upon which even a Shoreditch Station cabby could not have improved.