WITHIN THE MAZE.* How grateful Mr. Bruce will be to
Mrs. Henry Wood for laying her finger at once, in her own dexterous way, on so weak a point as Portland Prison, hitherto deemed so strong ! It appears now that no less than four prisoners escaped in almost as many months from its gloomy retirement, mistakenly supposed to be so conducive to that peace which springs from a certainty of not being inter- rupted, and to that entire cessation of the restlessness which is fostered by the expectation of an early return to the exciting haunts of men. It is true that one of these bold fugitives was retaken, and that two were killed in the endeavour to recapture them—as well as an unworthy warder, who was a party to the attempted flight—but such loss of life is not contemplated by Government, nor can we cheerfully afford to part with so much productive convict labour ; and it will behove Mr. Bruce to look to his laurels, and see that this fortress, erroneously supposed to be impregnable, is put forthwith into good working order. He will do well, too, to give immediate instructions that the bodies of felons shall be identified before burial, as at present a culpable negligence obtains on this point, so that the remains of a common prisoner are buried as proxy for those of a baronet. Again, even if the remains are satisfactorily identified, they should not, we sub- mit, be handed over to relatives for sepulture ; and if we are not mistaken, the Home Secretary is responsible for a serious breach of the law in allowing this to be done. We demand that a convict for life shall be interred, as by statute provided, within the precincts Of the gaol. In making these remarks in reference to these important and unexpected disclosures, we are aware that we are not beginning at the beginning of the book which we are about to consider, but we shall be excused, when the imperativeness is con- sidered, of suggesting to the Home Secretary the advantage he will de- rive from making an early appointment with Mrs. Wood, to master the details doubtless in her possession "from information which she has received." To go back, then, to the events which led to these startling revelations. These events are marked by some most singular coincidences, by numerous traits of character altogether unique, and by conduct of which we are entirely without previous example. The earliest events are not entirely without precedent. Two ami- able and affectionate brothers, a baronet and a captain, marry two strong-willed viragoes, who at once conceive an undying ani- mosity to each other, not softened by the fact that the less unami- able of the sisters-in-law takes precedence as the Baronet's lady, though she, in part, attenuates her offence by bearing no heir to come between Sir Joseph and his nephews. The Captain, the Baronet's lady and the Baronet follow each other rapidly to the land of spirits, and Sir Adam Andinnian—euphonious and alliterative name! — becomes master of Foxwood Court. Several coincidences mark the day on which he succeeds to the title. He himself returns home after a short absence,—his pretty little humbly-born neighbour whom, in fear of his mother, he has surreptitiously married, doing the same next door ; his mother leaves for Foxwood in the morning, deputed by her love-sick son to take possession in his stead ; his only brother, puzzled by the telegram from home, does not arrive till evening; and an ardent admirer of his bride chooses the interval, while Sir Adam is alone in his garden in the afternoon, to call on the young lady, and in the centre of her front garden, in sight of Sir Adam, and in defiance of his solemn warning that he would "shoot him like a dog" if he repeated the offence—but in undeniable ignorance of their marriage—folds the baronet's young bride to his bosom. Coincidence number five is that Sir Adam's gun stood by Sir Adam's spade, for he not only delved but shot, and not only loved flowers but hated small birds. The upshot, of course, is that the reprobate medical student is shot down ; one of the tiny shots provided for small birds pierced right through the misguided medical man's heart,—" he sprang a foot or two into the air," and descended a subject for his own dissecting-room. Though too enamoured to take possession of his estate, Sir Adam shows no reluctance to take possession of a felon's cell. He is violent and passionate, but he has also all the deliberation which we know so well is consistent with these qualities, and in this matter he has been quite deliberate. He tells the police all about it, avers that he was fully justified, and assures them and the judge and jury that he should certainly do it again under similar circumstances. His mother—naturally leaning to views
* Main the Maze. By Elre. Henry Wood. London : Bentley and Son.
of insanity—presented herself before the court, waving aside the officers thereof, and being a very turbulent and uncontrolled person, made an uncalled-for statement "calmly and respectfully" in support of her theory, —a statement which, not being on oath, so won upon the judge, that though the cherished old domestic of the Andinnian family was compelled to testify to the deliberateness of the deed, and though Sir Adam himself assisted the court moat cheerfully and courteously to find him guilty of intelligent and premeditated murder, his lordship—partly, no doubt, in gratitude for these services—strongly recommended him to mercy, and the Home Secretary eagerly commuted the capital sentence to imprisonment for life at Portland. Here, again, we think the Home Secretary may have exceeded his privileges. And one more suggestion for the greater security of the country we must be allowed to make to him,—that the warders of Portland Prison shall not be allowed to wander about the island after dark with women muffled in cloaks and hoods. We find that Sir Adam's escape was due to these little inadvertencea. And here the novel proper commences. Sir Adam's majestic mother hates her only other son—the beautiful, brave, high-principled Karl—and always has done, because she could not nurse him when he was born ; but she thinks it wise to tell him of her plans for Adam's escape, and though he judges the scheme dangerous and wrong, he does not betray it, for being both brave and high-principled, he is quite unable at any time to frustrate or oppose the devices and plans of wife, mother, brother, or other of the numerous agents of folly who figure before him, and who are really entirely in his power. Perhaps after all he was not so high-principled, for we find later on, that when he knew that it was Adam's wife who was insulted he "almost held" his brother "justified," regardless of the fact that the unfortunate medical student did not know. Karl's judgment and principle come out very remarkably in the events which follow. He hears that his brother is killed in the muffle to retake him, and with bitter sorrow enters on his suc- cession, first going to the funeral (of the proxy) when he wishes to see his brother's dead face, but does not press it against his mother's objection ; next, he proceeds to engage himself to a lady whom he has till now mildly and obediently re- signed at the insulting command of her father because of his insufficient means. On the eve of marriage his mother conscientiously explains that he is not the baronet, notwithstanding which, in cogsideration of his promised bride's fragile life—but recently snatched from the grave by Sir Karl's supposed succession and her father's consequent consent—he marries her, and lest it should lead to his brother's recapture, leaves her in ignorance of the fact of his insignificance and of the unlikelihood of his succession. The next two volumes and a half are devoted to the misunderstandings and mysteries which are manufactured out of this ignorance by Mrs. Henry Wood, against nature and reason, and evidently in order to make out the three volumes; and it would be laborious to count up the number of times that somebody or other sees somebody or other else pro- duce a key to let him or herself in or out of somewhere ; or the countless occasions on which someone steals along in the shade and under the darkness of night and suddenly conceals him or herself while someone passes, but to no purpose, as the someone else invariably sees and recognises ; or the endless interviews of and with detectives of police, the rencontres in trains, the hurrying to stations, and all the other well-known machinery of sensation novels. We can only say they are simply wearisome and sicken- ing to the last degree. "Quite convenient," as an Irishman would say, to Foxwood Court, on the other side of the garden fence, is a nice little house in a maze, the very place for concealment, and here Sir Adam's mother and a man who assisted in his rescue bring the convict and his wife during the reputed Sir Karl's honeymoon. And another nice little cottage being empty just opposite the Court and Maze gates, Sir Adam's mother hands it over to her accomplice, Smith, giving him the appointment of agent to Sir Karl, which is at once ratified by Karl, as he has nothing for an agent to do, and knows nothing of Smith's antecedents, except that Smith is quite ignorant of an agent's business. An amiable friend of Karl's, who had passionately desired him for herself, but of whom we are told, "sin she detested, no matter of what nature," spies about everywhere, discovers Sir Adam's beautiful wife at the Maze, and Karl's frequent visits there, and does not let the grass grow under her feet before informing Karl's wife, Mr. Smith, and everyone else of Karl's flagrant infidelity. Karl is about to ex- plain to his wife the horrible perplexity in which he is placed by his mother's proceedings, when she tells him, with that faithful love and trustful confidence and gentle humility which are her peculiar attributes, that she knows all, that she will not hear a word more, and that all she demands is the immediate removal of his tenant at the Maze. Of course, Karl thinks she refers to his brother ; of course he is annoyed at the temper she displays ; and of course he obeys her injunctions of silence ; and a dozen times, at least, we have to encounter similar scenes, and a hundred others not mentioned must have occurred, where it is absolutely im- possible that the real explanation should not have come out, but where the most arbitrary and unlikely arrangement of words and interruptions is contrived by Mrs. Henry Wood to carry on the preposterous misunderstanding. At last—a baby son and heir to Sir Adam having first good-naturedly and judiciously died—Sir Adam dies also, of a wonderful disease, which enables him to work in his disguise of a deformed old gardener to the last, but which, once set up, no earthly power could stay. This disease, though not named, is clearly the moral right of Karl to be in reality what he has so long been ostensibly, the lawful baronet. We hope, then, that we have illustrated sufficiently the singularity of the coincidences, the uniqueness of the characters, and the unexampledness of the conduct which we set out by asserting. The fact is that Mrs. Henry Wool reminds us of the classic Thomas of our childhood's nursery rhymes, of whom it is written, "Young Thomas grew from bad to worse." There was a time when, however sensational her plot, it produced not unsuccessful nor unmoving dramatic situations, and when her actors ran their stormy or lurid courses with some power and more consistency. Better still was The Channings, an interesting, touching, and fairly natural story. But this story is simply manufactured rubbish, wits impossible persons wriggling through impossible events. Instead of her characters working out her plot, the exigencies of her plot largely modify her characters, or altogether destroy their consistency.
The story proper of Within the Maze is filled in with some by- play meant to throw ridicule upon Ritualism ; but it is such a burlesque of anything that could really occur, that it only serves to make the book more childishly absurd. The detester of sin "no matter of what nature," gets together a handful of young ladies, who rig up an old barn for a church, engage two clergy- men—the Reverends Guy Cattacomb and Damon Puff—and pro- vide all the costly properties of a very high ritualistic establishment. How a party of young ladies of the middle class, so moderate in number that they can all squeeze into Mr. Cattacomb's tiny sitting- room for their meetings and kettledrums, and the greater propor- tion of them into one omnibus, contrive to meet such heavy expenses, Mrs. Wood, wisely, does not attempt to explain ; she informs us, however, that they save small items by scrubbing their church floor on their own fair knees, and, she adds, that this scrubbing iucident is drawn from the life.
The only solitary proof of ability we can find is the undeniably clever way in which Mrs. Henry Wood makes Karl himself the in- strument of additional jeopardy to his brother in his attempts to add to his safety, but as this ability is much too trifling to redeem the book, we shall not dwell upon it, and only mention it from a perhaps over-conscientiousness.
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