SON AND HEIR.*
Son and Heir is a decidedly clever novel of what may be termed the strongly emotional school of fiction, but also possessing con- siderable merits of a less ambitious and exciting nature. One can see from the tone of the very first page that the story is not going to be sensational, and from the first chapter that it is not going to be dull, so that the consideration that the three volumes contain close upon a thousand pages, fur more closely printed than urinal, need not excite the least apprehension in the reader's mind of being either disgusted or bored before he reaches the end. It is true that the plot turns on bigamy, but we hasten to add, for the sake of those who do not admire Miss Braddon's style of art, that the bigamy in question is the crime of an antecedent generation to that which furnishes the cen- tral characters of the story, and that it is only dis- covered at all with the object of proving the " son" to be not the "heir." The story opens in a Devonshire country house, and we are introduced at once to all the actors. The head of the house is an elderly country baronet, boisterous, kind- hearted, but irritable and weak. His wife is a faded beauty, selfish and friiolous, constantly occupied in fancy-work for mis- sionary bazaars. The only son is a quiet, ordinary country gentleman, somewhat stern and reserved, but with all the tastes and pursuits of his class. The other members of the family are an orphan niece and her brother. The former is a girl of eighteen, pretty, impulsive, self-willed, and the pet of the entire family, with, however, quite sufficient individuality to distinguish her widely from the ordinary type of spoilt young ladies in novels. We are glad to record that she is pretty, as there has been far too great a tendency amongst novelists of late in favour of plain or even ugly heroines, or heroines whose powers of fascination re- main the one unsolved mystery of the tale. Her brother is the villain of the book, and the author has evidently taken consider- able pains in the elaboration of his character. He is a cool, self- possessed, nineteenth-century man of the world, not without kindly impulses where his own interests are in no way involved, but simply unscrupulous where they are. He possesses all the fascinating qualities of a clever man accustomed to society, and contributes weekly to a brilliant but unamiable periodical thinly veiled under the title of the "Saturnine Review." Enthusiasm with him is "cant," philanthropy "Utopianism," and heroism "Quixotism." He is too well-bred to show or even to feel any ill-will against his cousin for living and thereby keeping him out of the baronetcy, but he watches with the keenest interest all chances of his being killed. At an early stage of the story, however, this worthy runs away with an heiress from under his uncle's roof, and nothing can look more unpromising for a novel of exciting interest than the situation of affairs. But before long the old baronet dies suddenly the moment after binding his son by a terrible oath never to reveal to living being the secret which he was about to entrust to him. The son has before this gradually tamed his half-wild cousin, who had previously cherished a determination to retain her "liberty' all her life into submission and love, and the wedding-day is fixed. A week before the day Sir Everard discovers amongst the family papers a packet of letters which reveal the dreaded secret—that his father had been secretly married when young, and that the cast-off wife survived at the time of his recognized marriage. He therefore is in the most distracting position possible. Bound by the most stringent oath never to reveal the secret of his father's life to any human being, he finds himself legally a penniless bastard, his mother disgraced, and in default of issue by his father's first marriage his hated cousin the adventurer is heir to the title and estates. This is the one great situation of the story, and the author manages to maintain the interest throughout the whole of the two last volumes. Sir Everard is a man who would under other circumstances have rather died than knowingly held possession of property not lawfully his own, or done a deed to dishonour, and the last man from whom he would have ac- cepted money would have been his cousin and intended brother- in-law. Yet he feels his oath binding,—he cannot relinquish his position without revealing the secret, and, on the other hand, he shudders at the thought of acting one perpetual lie, and carrying out the gigantic fraud of owning Chalcote Place and appearing before the world as Sir Everard Heathcote. He cannot even reconcile it with his principle of honour to marry his cousin,— and yet what possible reason is he to assign. He determines to abandon the estate to his mother, to leave England, earn his own living by burying himself in a Swedish mine, and quietly wait for death,—the only possible escape from his misery. He • Son and Heir. Three vole. London : Hurst and Blaokett. 1534.
simply tells his cousin that from a cause she can never know their marriage can never take place. She is half distracted, but at last her trust in him returns, and she accepts his assurance, the only one he can give, that he is bound by the acts of others. To his mother and the rest of the world he either seems a madman or a criminal himself in fear of detection,—he cannot even defend himself against the worst scandal. Perhaps the cleverest scene in the book is that in which the cousin demands an explanation of his deserting his engagement with his sister, and finds all his lawyer's skill, mau- of-the-world acuteness, all baffled by Sir Everard's cold dead indifference to insult and absolute silence. Sir Everard is hardened by his one terrible misery into a hard, passionless, spiritless man, absorbed solely in his one grim determination to keep his oath through whatever may come. With all the advantages on the side of the other in the encounter, all his efforts to extract the secret are vain, his nature is incapable of even imagining a sense of honour so deep as to induce a man to submit to exile and poverty for a mere idea. Sir Everard goes to Sweden, the death for which he wishes comes in the shape of heart disease, he re- turns to England to die, and dies without breaking his oath. He is succeeded by his cousin, who lives a prosperous life and is regarded as the most brilliant and estimable of his line, the monument in Chalcote Church records the many virtues of his father in glowing terms, while he is only recollected as the black sheep of the family, who in consequence of some unknown dis- grace was driven from his home.
This is the whole story ; though gloomy as it is the author has relieved the monotony of the subject by occasional digressions into mere ordinary social life. But the struggles and question- ings in Sir Everard's mind as to the necessity or justice of his stern resolve are the great evidences in the work of what almost approaches to genius.
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