MARGARET DENZIL'S HISTORY.*
Tuts novel is clever, with the sort of cleverness which one some- times encounters in conversation which does not bore you, but which you instinctively dislike, talk which leaves an unpleasant taste behind it, in which conclusions have been jumped at appa- rently beyond contradiction, but which at the same time one knows to be hollow. The book is unpleasant, and apparently designedly so. The heroine comes before us as the foster-child (she has been taught to believe the child) of Richard and Elizabeth Forster, cottagers of the New Forest. The child's instinct rebels against the coarseness of her surroundings, against the cottage which " was not like a cottage at all, much more did it resemble a slice of a barrack," "its narrow windows viciously staring like little Malayan eyes without eyebrows." And then the supposed forester's child finds herself placed in a French school, the in- mates of which make no scruple of their surprise that she should be there. When about thirteen she is wandering dreamily in the forest, where she follows the course of a brook, which is to her with its monotonous murmur like a companion in her solitude, till she comes at length to a still little lake. It is night, the moon is reflected in the water. Acting on a sudden impulse she determines to bathe. In the water her foot catches in a tangled hank of hies and a broken string of beads, horror, terror, darkness succeed all the quiet sense of beauty and of calm, and we are plunged at once into the regular sensation novel, a sudden sense of something terrible seems to enter her mind—" an en- chantment .of terror." " Remember," she adds, "I was a woman- child of thirteen, and imagine the hosts of ghostly shapes that came into my mind with one suspicion, or rather revelation." Presently she has to re-cross the water, and sees another face floating on it beside her own, which face, which was "only a phantom," never left her, but whenever she looked in a glass in all her after life was there beside her—a sort of thing which would have driven any mortal with an ordinary amount of imagination mad ; but our heroine has not a strong imagi- nation, only the power to imagine imagination, -- a pre- cess of thought which, however analogous, is by no means the same thing. While endeavouring to escape from the spell- bound spot she falls down in.ensible, and is at last aroused by a man's voice. An outline of her after history may be quickly given. The gentleman who all the book through writes short, uncomfortable foot-notes signed "J. D." is struck with her beauty aud exhausted condition, kindly helps her home, determines to alopt her, has a mysterious consultation with her foster- parents, pays them twenty pounds for their consent to his wish, and sends Margaret to school to a Madame Lamont, intending, so he tells us, to bring her to his home as a daughter. But he has married in Bermuda a wife who through- out the story he calls " my Torment," and who seems a sort of she fiend. Margaret finds out that she is the daughter of a young officer named Wilmot, who was shot in a duel by Madame Lamont's son, a scapegrace who, ignorant of her parentage, falls in love with Margaret. Mr. Denzil in the char- acter of gu irdian is disgusted and interferes, his wife discovers he has a beautiful ward whose existence has been kept secret from her, is mad with jealousy, leaves her home, and writes word that she has drowned herself. Stifling a fit of remorse lest he should after all have misunderstood his own motives, and been at heart no better than his wife imagined him, Denzil makes short mourning for the miserable woman who has rendered his life wretched, marries Margaret, and goes to live at Twickenham. There Margaret's felicity is disturbed by a Mr. Calamy, whose antecedents are known to no one, but who has contrived to acquire for himself a reputation for cleverness, though " nobody could vouch for any particular instances of successful practice." He describes himself as a retired doctor, and declines all patients except Mrs. Denzil, but contrives to introduce Margaret's foster- mother to her as a person in great distress, and to obtain for her the situation of nurse. He is established as Margaret's doctor when her child is born, half kills her with insinuating suspicions against •her husband suggesting that her mother was murdered and her husband at least privy to the fact. He gets Betsy Forster to repeat the story of the twenty pounds, and persuades Margaret that she was bought by her husband like a slave. 1Ve think this passage, on the whole, one of the most disagreeable of an essentially disagreeable story. There is • Margaret Denzil': Ilistcry. Annotated by her Husband. 2 yohl. Lmden : Smith, Elder, Ind Co.
a coarseness of thought in .Margaret's mind when she first hears this accusation.which comes upon us like a clue to the writing which it is an irritationto read ;— " Ask him whether he did not pay twenty pounds for you!' Was that possible? Twenty pounds : it was dreadfully, basely precise ! Could such a bargain have been at the bottom of the arrangement concluded between Mr. Denzil and the people whom I thought my parents, when he carried me away, an innocent child of thirteen ? Did it explain. Mrs. Forster's sarcastic politeness after the bargain was made ? Whether I would or no, the question played upon my mind like lightning on the thing it destroys. It fired my pride. It brought out into unnatural dis- tinctness my life with Madame Lamont, and Arthur's love for me, and how cruelly and strangely he had been driven away from his 'last chance.' For she had been previously disposed of r Madame was under contract to train me for my owner (a kind owner, but what then ?), just as horses are trained in special stables ; and that was why her own son was not permitted to ask for the love I could and would have given him. But he did ask it! Yes, but when? After Lisabeth's blundering letter had told him ' Miss Forster's a governess now, which makes a difference.' True or false, the suspicion that I had been sold and trained for my owner made all that clear, luridly clear.' "
Denzil, who has been away, returns to his home, and his wife, though not believing him guilty, flies from home (a feature of domestic life which is spreading like an epidemic among recent novels), taking her baby with her. She thus speaks of her eight:— "To be sure, I felt confident throughout that I should come back again by and by. Have I explained that? Well, do not imagine I thought there was reason enough to separate myself from my husband for ever, because that would have been assuming he was very guilty indeed, No. What I said to him in effect •was—' Here are certain dreadful, doubtful things said of you, and forced on me in a way I cannot resist. You must explain them. I cannot stay in the same 'house with you unless they are done away,—indeed I am afraid to do so. Besides, how can we meet otherwise than as we have hitherto lived ? better not to meet at all. But I love you all the same ; you will make all clear, and then—"
Everything is made clear, and she returns home to find her husband quarrelling with Mr. Calamy, who proves to be no other than the drowned wife, who has •all along been plotting to destroy their happiness, and succeeds. In the author's own words, " there is nothing strange in the spectacle of evil mounting to the highest pinnacles of life with good, and toppling good over into the abyss." That is the main chord struck throughout the story, and its second note is a false one. There are laws of spiritual gravity which prevent " good " from toppling over, though it may have to wait for freer breathing-room fill it has gained a stage beyond the climbing powers of evil.
There is in the story a good deal of power in the description of the secondary characters. Arthur Lamont is not badly drawn, and his mother stands out with lifelike distinctness. In describing scenes and places brilliant touches are not wanting, and the pen which could delineate " Sister Agnes" is capable of higher things. Still the story is inartistic, lika one of those pictures which have a certain lurid light before which we involuntarily pause, but which disappoint us in almost every detail. Denzil has strong fits of remorse lest lie should have dreamed of loving Margaret, as his drunken wife jealously believed he did ; he has none at all for marrying the said wife solely for her money, which we are com- pelled to suppose he did, since from the hour he married her he seems to have regarded her as the curse of his life. Mr. Calamy's existence in Twickenham is an item in the picture glaringly out of all drawing. An old woman 'dis- guised as a man, and trying to pass for a retired doctor, would, we imagine, have small chance of being admitted as a welcome guest even "at the afternoon tea-tables of the ladies," in a community where the faintest failure in preserving the incognito would suggest instant inquiry as to the medical diploma and verifying references to the alleged medical college. Neither is it within the limits of probability that a man so utterly unknown and unrecommended should have found his way into any clear- headed man's house as medical attendant. Again, the whole description of Margaret's flight is absurd. She distinctly states she did not believe her husband guilth—then why not stay and hear what he had to say.? Time is something, too, in the way these imaginary flights are made easy which implies loose writing. The author in such case knows his book will be read none the less that he has ignored all kinds of practical difficulties. And his responsibility for the general truthfulness of his colour- ing sits on him as lightly as on the razor-vendor of old whose goods were not made to cut, but to sell. In short Margaret Denzil is a disagreeable, inartistic, clever book, which scrambles hastily over many imaginative gaps in the narrative, and yet betrays in passages a power which convinces us that the author must have recognized the imperfect character of his work. He would be less disagreeable if he abstained in future from a machinery which obliges him to be, as it were, a spy upon his own creations,—a radically inartistic device.
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