THE LOVER'S CREED.*
" ONE, and one only, is the lover's creed,"—at least in Mrs. Cashel Hoey's pleasant story ; though it must be confessed that from the standpoint of some novelists such a sharp limita- tion of possibilities would probably be intolerable. Mrs. Hoey's three pairs of lovers, although two of them elect to spend the best part of their lives apart, are true to their creed, and wisely eschew all forms of what Pepys somewhat euphemistically termed " meandering." The book has neither the strength of plot of Out of Court, nor the gentle pathos of The Blossoming of an Aloe ; its structure is slight—perhaps too slight—bat the time has happily not yet arrived when a tale of true love in practised hands has lost its fascination.
Mavis Wynne, the heroine, is the daughter of a rather unneces- sarily brutal farmer, tenant of Squire Bassett, "scholar and gentleman," who is accounted a widower with an only son. Jack Bassett, boyish, generous, and true-hearted, comes home from his Sandhurst studies, just as Mavis, who has been brought up with her dead mother's relations, returns to Fieldflower Farm. The children—for in 1854 Sandhurst cadets were well in their teens—fall, naturally and gracefully, in love. The Squire's prospects are suddenly clouded by the unfavour- able termination of one of those mysterious lawsuits which lie in wait for the upright ; and Jack must forego the Dragoons and seek a commission in the Rifle Brigade, bound for Gallipoli and the Russian campaign. The lovers part in the " Dame's Parlour " of the old Cheshire farmhouse, as lovers must to the end of time ; and Mavis, innocent of the world, but realising their difference of station, and understanding that the Squire would " mind " their engagement, consents to conceal it Jack sails for the East ; and Wynne, too favourably estimated as " a bit of a brute," suddenly announces to Mavis and his poor cowed wife that he and they are The Lover's Creed, By Mrs. Cashel Hoey. 3 vols. London : (Matto -and wanton. to start at once for Australia. The girl and her stepmother go to Liverpool to make their preparations for the voyage, and the latter dies broken-hearted. Mavis decides to leave her brutal father, and runs away to a governesses' institute in the dim regions of the Euston Road. Perhaps the best part of the plot is the way in which all traces of her are now naturally, but surely, obliterated. Here she meets Madame Vivian, and accompanies her to Brittany as companion to her only daughter, Sybil. Mavis, now Margaret Warne, devotes herself to the interests of the Vivians, like the true-hearted girl she is, and writes rather long letters to Jack, till the sword of Damocles falls in the shape of an announcement in the Times—even then the Times occasionally disseminated wrong intelligence—of Jack's death in the allied camp. Mavis staggers under her cruel fate; bat the strength of character, previously indicated in her relations to her father and stepmother, asserts itself, and though " her past has died," she struggles bravely on, seeking interests in the quiet Brittany home, and strongly drawn towards Madame Vivian by a companionship in suffer- ing. But Jack, severely wounded at Inkerman, has come home to Bassett, and told all to his father, who receives it with a sympathy too rare in such cases. It must be confessed, however, that he conducts his cause well; and his simple, proud words, "I hate even to seem to plead for her, father," might have touched a harder heart than the Squire's. The two join hands in quest of the lost girl ; while she, like another Evan- geline, finds no " angel of God" to tell her that Rene de Rastacq, Sybil's lover, also home from the Crimea, is Jack's friend, whom he has saved from the valley of death at Inker- man. Meanwhile, Jack must sail for Melbourne to follow out the single clue left to him. There he learns that Mavis had not accompanied her father ; and he starts up country merely to act as coroner and jury on the body of the murdered Wynne. Returning to Bassett, he finds his father has gone to the Brittany chateau. The plot now begins to unravel itself. The mystery, which the readers mast learn for themselves, clears away, and the faithful lovers are rewarded after their kind.
Slight though the plot, there is good and true workmanship in The Lover's Creed. Mavis is as fresh as her name ; and if there is a fault to be found with her, it is that she does not speak quite enough. She is revealed, rather than self-revealing. Jack is simple, natural, and true-hearted. No thought of doubt crosses his mind, though the long months pass ; and, thanks to the general administrative chaos in the Crimea—of which the absence of postal arrangements was an insignificant item— no letters from Mavis reach the camp. If the seven pages of description of Fieldflower Farm seem a little out of scale, the brief glimpses of Australian life are touched with a firm hand ; and though the scene when Rene de Rastacq declares his love for Sybil strikes one as a little unreal, there is unmistakeable strength in the description of Mavis's ready offer of her life for Sybil in the Roche du Diable Pass. And there are some good minor characters in the book. There is Miss Nestle, the Squire's housekeeper, the prim, faithful woman of a vanished type, with her unconscious sententious- ness, her jams, and her ready suspicions of the dangerous nature of the heroine's attractions. Mr. Dexter, the family lawyer, slightly drawn but still alive, is made the exponent of what are probably the writer's own views as to the real meaning of the pomp and circumstance of war,—" their advances, operations, evolutions, steady fire, closing up, falling back in good order, and all the rest of it. What does the simplest bit of all that jargon imply but suffering to man and beast, a woeful waste of precious life and hard-earned money, all incurred for the attain- ment of some object to be cheerfully relinquished by the next generation P" Let Mr. Richard look to woman's suffrage as the one star of hope amid the storm-clouds of gathering armaments and mustering squadrons. There is, too, a real understanding of animals, as rare as it is pleasant. Isaac,' the Wynnes' cat, with whom the Squire makes friends, and wbo "gradually trained the man to his own harmless, happy ways "—ah l if London cats were really as " harmless " as they are presumably " happy " I—and Belshazzar' the parrot, detested alike by Isaac' and Trotty Veck' the terrier, are studies from life. And there is quiet humour in the meeting between Trotty Veck,' and Isaac,' to which the Squire had looked forward with natural misgiving. "He sniffed at 'Isaac' for a moment ; this attention was acknowledged by a yawn and a stretch, expressive of patronage as well as leisurely com- poem 04 the part of the cat. Presently, Trotty ' lay down
amicably by the side of the footstool, and they had a long sleep together, equivalent to the drink' which seals the bond of certain human amities." For why ; ' Trotty Veck' and ' Isaac' were already intimately acquainted, having been in the habit of meeting every day, unknown to the Squire, during the court- ship of Mavis and Jack.
The illustrations are unequal, and hardly seem to interpret the writer's mind. The glimpses of landscape are sometimes well handled; but one does not readily recognise Mavis with her "erect carriage and steady, graceful gait," in the rather dowdy girl sitting with her schoolboy-lover on the top of the old tower. Rene, telling his love to Sybil, and attired like the third officer of a P. and 0. steamship, is stumbling forward after a manner which is positively dangerous. Under such circumstances, it is perhaps difficult to look graceful—we are not all Black Bruns- wickers—but to bend both knees at once in this fashion is at least rash.
Previous page
