IN HOMESPUN.*
Fon eight of these short stories out of the ten, In Homespun, is a very good title, and the title of an excellent little book. The other two stories are melodrama " in homespun," and melodrama does not improve when related in the simple speech of a Kent servant. The two tiny melodramas are " Son and • In Hometrun, By E. Nesbit. London: John Lane. Batons Roberts. Brother.. 1896. Heir" and " Guilty," the former being the most melodramatic of the two, and having the least of human nature in it. 4` Guilty " is not quite so melodramatic, and the picture of the footman who tries to destroy the reputation for honesty of the housemaid with whom he is in love, that the rival to whom she is engaged may refuse to marry her, is sketched with a certain force, but both these tales borrow staginess from romance, and neither of them reads like the story of a domestic servant, as it is intended to read. For the remaining eight stories we have little but hearty appreciation. Short as they are, and the longest occupies only thirty very short pages, they are really literature "in homespun," and hardly contain a line which does not add to the effect of the tale which is told with such simple and homely force. It may be said with some plausibility that stories told by uneducated or half-educated women, as these are supposed to be told, would not be so strongly and simply told, that they would not keep to the point, but would wander about in circuitous rigmaroles, and give us the story through a haze of confused hints. And no doubt in nine cases out of ten that might be so. But still there are uneducated or half-educated people who go straight to the point and indulge in no meaningless circumlocutions, and Mrs., or Miss, Nesbit,—the author must be a woman,—has caught the style and manner of one of these. And she can tell the story of a bad girl, a deceitful and grasping girl, at least as well as the story of a generous and trusting girl ; indeed we should say that few of these tales are better told than "The Bristol Bowl" and "Acting for the Best," both stories of girls of this kind,—if they were not told without any sense of shame at all; and there we think they are defpetive. Moreover, now and then perhaps there is a touch put in, which the supposed author would not have put in, as when the heroine of "The Bristol Bowl" says, "Now, the minister I sit under always warns us against superstition, which, I take it, means believing more than you have any occasion to." That is perhaps a little nearer to a literary definition of superstition,—to Matthew Arnold's definition of it, for example,—than it should have been, but the selfish and unscrupulous girl in question has such good reason for wishing to believe much less than she has in reality good "occasion" to believe, that it is barely possible she might really have hit upon this definition by a kind of instinct of self-defence. She certainly wishes to think that there is no sort of occasion to see harm in the disgraceful treachery of which she has been guilty; she would like to think it rather to her credit that she can cheat others into doing what suits her own interest. But these subtle suggestions are not often to be found in the little book, and are defects in it when they are found. That human beings have a singular power of excusing themselves for their own selfish thoughts and deeds is true enough, but they would hardly put it in such plain black and white as the supposed narrator of "Acting for the Best" and "The Bristol Bowl" puts it. In these two tales there is, we think, a franker display of a wicked heart than we should expect from girls who could have done what they did. If they bad been as frank as that with them- selves, they would have been a little more ashamed of themselves also. To paint yourself black is at least the beginning, we fancy, of thinking yourself black. But these two girls make a display of their meanness and deceitfulness which could hardly have been consistent with so much self- complacency. On the whole, therefore, we much prefer the stories of the better kind of girls to the two very clever stories of the worse. If you can look at yourself quite as straight as these bad girls do, without shrinking, it is not easy to recognise the existence of such a faculty as conscience in the human heart at all. And human beings without a trace of a conscience are more than rare; we doubt if they exist.
On the other hand the stories of those who have done wrong again and again, but have done it with shame and misery, are very pathetic, though they are told in such plain and such few words. "A Death-bed Confession," for instance, and "One Way of Love," are both admirable, though in the latter the story is told, not by the girl who had the confession to make, but by him to whom it was made, and therefore not so plainly told as it is in the former. The "Death-bed Con. feseion " is made to a clergyman, for whom the dying woman has evidently no great respect. She would have preferred, she says, to have made it to the doctor, had the doctor been able to tell her whether there was forgiveness for such a sin as hers, but that, she supposed, was only possible for a clergy. man. It is the old story of a straggle between love and a lifelong sisterly attachment, and of the momentary victory of the former :—
"And that night the place seemed very quiet and empty, as if there was more room in it for being unhappy in. When Lilian had taken her candle and gone up to bed, I walked through all the rooms below, as uncle's habit was, to see that all was fast for the night. It was as I set the bolt on the door of the little lean-to shed, where the faggots were kept, that the devil entered into me all in a breath ; and I thought of Lilian upstairs in her white bed, and of how the day must come when he would see how pretty she looked and white, and I said to myself, No, it never shall, not if I burn for it too.' I hope you are understanding me. I sometimes think there is something done to folks when they are learning to be parsons as takes out of them a part of a natural person's understandingness ; and I would rather have told the doctor, but then he couldn't have told me whether these are the kind of things Christ died to make His father forgive, and I sup- pose you can. What I did was this. I clean forgot all about uncle and how fond I was of Whitecroft, and how much I had always loved Lilian (and I loved her then, though I know you can't under- stand me when I say so), and I took all them faggots, dragging them across the sanded floor of the kitchen, and I put them in the parlour in the little wing to the left, and just under Lilian's bedroom, and I laid them under the wooden corner cupboard where the best china is, and then I poured oil and brandy all over, and set it alight. Then I put on my bat and jacket, but- toning it all the way down, as quiet as if I was going down to the village for a pound of candles. And I made sure all was burning free, and out of the front door I went and up on to the Downs, and there I set me down under the wall where I could see Whitecroft. And I watched to see the old place burn down; and at first there was no light to be seen. But presently I see the parlour windows get redder and redder, and soon I knew the curtains had caught, and then there was a light in Lilian's bed- room. I see the bars of the window as you do in the ruined mill when the sun is setting behind it ; and the light got more and more, till I see the stone above the front door that tells how it was builded by one of our name this long time since ; and at that, as sudden as he had come, the devil left me, and I knew all in a minute that I was crouched against a wall, very cold, and my hands hooked into my hair over my ears, and my knees drawn up under my chin ; and there was the old house on fire, the dear old house, with Lilian inside it in her little white bed, being burnt to death, and me her murderer ! And with that I got up, and I remember I was stiff, as if I had been screwing myself all close together to keep from knowing what it was I had been a- doing. I ran down the meadow to our house faster than I ever ran in my life, in at the door, and up the stairs, all blue and black, and hidden up with coppery-coloured smoke. I don't know how I got up them stairs, for they were beginning to burn too. I opened her door—all red and glowing it was inside ! like an oven when you open it to rake out the ashes on a baking-day. And I tried to get in, because all I wanted then was to save her—to get her out safe and sound, if I had to roast myself for it, because we had been brought up together from little things, and I loved her like a sister. And while I was trying to get my jacket off and round my head, something gave way right under my feet, and I seemed to fall straight into hell ! I was badly burnt, and what handsomeness there was about my face was pretty well scorched out of it by that night's work ; and I didn't know any- thing for a bit. When I come to myself they had got me into bed bound up with cotton-wool and oil and things. And the first thing I did was to sit up and try to tear them off.' You'll kill yourself,' says the nurse.—` Thank you,' says I, that's the best thing I can do, now Lilian is dead.'—And with that the nurse gives a laugh. Oh, that's what's on your mind, is it 1' says she. Doctor said there was something. Miss Lilian had run away that night to her young man. Lucky for her ! She's luckier than you, poor thing ! And they're married and living in lodgings at Brighton, and she's been over to see you every day.' That day she came again. I lay still and let her thank me for having tried to save her ; for the farm men had seen the fire, and had come up in time to see me go up the staircase to her room, and they had pulled me out. She believes to this day the fire was an accident, and that I would have sacrificed my life for her. And so I would ; she right's there. I wasn't going to make her unhappy by telling her the real truth, because she was as fond of me as I was of her ; and she has been as happy as the day is long, all her life long, and so she deserves."
There is great power in that passage, and it is the kind of power which is shown again and again in this little book, though perhaps never so clearly as in this terse description of sin and repentance. It is a pity that a writer who can write like this should have placed among her tales so poor a bit of melodrama as " Son and Heir." And we doubt whether she has not got something to learn of the working of a guilty conscience, even in a cold and all but perfectly selfish heart.
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