AT HER MERCY.*
To say of At Her Mercy that it is amusing, is to give an idea of its character at once true and yet not quite just, for the plot is of a grave and even tragic character, and it has incident enough for two or three stories of a more economical kind. Nevertheless, it is on the amusing side of it that the book is remarkable, and that the author's increased facility for combining the realities of every-day life with the portentous events of which his stories are generally constructed, is evident. In his earlier novels, the Author of Lost Sir Massingberd blended the aspects of human life less skilfully than he has done of late, and drew the line which we all know is frequently indiscernible much more sharply, though he was not at any time to be confounded with the turners-out of machine-made novels, whose manceuvres may be predicted as unfailingly as a stage murder by the lowering of the foot-lights, and the rising of the artificial storm among the flats. His style is singularly free from trick of any kind,—one is never reminded by him of the conjuror who arouses the liveliest expectations by entreating his juvenile audience not on any account to allow their eyes to be diverted from a certain object, and disappoints them by never recurring to it again, or deludes them by some unexpected performance with an un watched portion of his apparatus. He is plain-spoken about all his personages, but he makes them play their parts with ease, not leading-up to events until the events happen, and he sur- rounds them with a natural atmosphere, so that they are not the abstract beings of the ordinary novel. Each of them has well- marked characteristics, but they do not degenerate into manner- ism; and the oddities with which his people are plentifully endowed are not suffered to do away with all the proprieties of time and place. The conceit which colours the whole story is amusing, and the author has done a clever thing in making it, quite naturally, the proximate occasion of the most grave and terrible of the events which he "springs" upon his readers with a suddenness like that for which Mr. Hawkins reproached Dr. Kenealy. There is philo- sophy as well as fun in the use which is made of Mr. Angelo Hulet's retrospective Radicalism, and of his veneration for the apocryphal ancestor who was supposed to have cut off the head of King Charles I.
The pleasant, chatty tone of the first volume, and the whimsical, harmless, indeed estimable character of the old gentleman who is the real hero of the story—though not the lover of the charming heroine—are not at all indicative of the stirring drama of passion and wickedness to which they furnish a prologue, tranquil, but not tedious. When the author gets well into the second volume, and troublous times for his people come, he cannot give us the amusing sketches which we find sprinkled about the first ; -and we
At Her Nervy : a Novel. By the Author of "Lost Sir Maseingbercl." London: Bentley.
especially miss Dr. Borne, a humorous person, of whom the writer says, "though he was over-fond of banter, and had an un- becoming habit of wetting his thumb when he commenced to deal at whist, he was in feeling a gentleman after a far higher pattern than the Chesterfield, once thought very well of, but now happily relegated to its proper place, the tailor's shop," and who remains in one's memory, a friend, when the book is closed. We have no intention of telling the story ; of revealing who was at the mercy of whom, and why ; but as everyone knows that there must 63 love in a novel, and of lovers at least one pair, we may remark, without prejudice, that Eva Carthew is very much too good for tbe athletic young gentleman whom his uncle, Lord Dirleton, calls "my Jack." Not only does one grudge her to him after his flagrant infidelity, but in the beginning, when he meets her in Dirleton Park, and they talk the very best and most nonsensical love-talk to be found in any novel within our know- ledge. Not too much of it either ; the principle on which Sam Weller wrote his letters evidently guides the author of At Her Mercy in this respect, and the result is that we do " wish there was more of it." That he has a lurking contempt for Jack, even when he makes him win that steeplechase which he describes so well, and with so pleasant a sense of the folly of it, is perceptible ; and we cannot help thinking that if he could have made Eva—a sweet, womanly, heroic young woman—happy by any other means than those to which he does resort in the end, he would have done so. No doubt he consoled himself by reflecting that he was not bound to look beyond the end of his third volume, and that his readers, to whom he makes the devoted girl so charming and so real that they are obliged to apprehend she must find Jack a failure, may console themselves by hoping that he has ridden one steeplechase too many since that angelic pardon and happy reconciliation. Well, indeed, does the exem- plary rector say to his wife, after she has repeated to him a delicious scene of neighbourly gossip and comment upon Eva's presumption in engaging herself to the nephew of Lord Dirleton :—" Of course the marriage of a girl like that with Heyton is a very serious
thing. Let well alone ' is a wise saying, and to bring brains into a family that have got on so uncommonly well without them for three hundred years is, without doubt, a risk." But Mr. Mellish is not borne out by the evidence, when he adds that Jack is "not nearly such a dunderhead as his uncle." Lord Dirleton makes much shrewder remarks—though he makes them unconsciously, like the old Indian in Gilbert Gurney—than any of those ascribed to his nephew, and, as he says of himself, "by Jove ! how be hated the other one!" The "other one" is the handsome demon of the story, with the machinery of her malignity kept so well out of sight until the end, that there is nothing Melodramatic about her, it is not necessary to make Eva weak, in order to enable Judith to deceive and betray her with thorough success ; her character needs only the candour and refinement with which the author invests it, to place her at the mercy of ,Judith, who, by one well-contrived falsehood, gives Eva a totally erroneous basis for their after- relations. That Eva should be deceived is only in harmony with her nature, which one touch of suspicion would, under the circumstances, have belied. At the crisis of the story, the author has a difficult task to discharge ; that of raising a personage who has hitherto been rather comic than otherwise to the height of tragic interest, merging eccentricities in emotions, and while preserving the characteristics of the individual, enabling him to inspire a new order of sympathies. In Angelo Hulet's case the author does this diffi- cult thing as successfully as Mr. Toole effects a similar kind of transformation, when in Dearer than Life the vulgar tradesman, bustling and jolly, turns into the agonised, shame-stricken, despair- ing, but always loving-father, whose heart is torn with agony at the detection of his son, and terror of the effect upon the boy's mother, to whom he is dearer than life. The catastrophe which befalls Angelo Hulet and his beloved niece is brought about too soon in point of time, though not with abruptness in narration ; six months is too brief a period for the undertaking, and for the failure of such an experiment as that which leads to the appalling results we are resolved not to indicate, however remotely ; but here the author evidently could not avoid an incongruity. The events which were to part Eva and Jack after their probation must occur immediately on its conclusion, or of course, Eva and Jack would have been married and out of the reach of that particular trial ; and so the preliminaries can be permitted to occupy only six months. The reader is bound to allow for this ; still it bothers him a little, until he finds the threads of the earlier part of the story cleverly taken up, and its apparent trivialities made to tell, under circumstances which are at first distressingly new and discordant with the pleasant, unsensational
commencement. As the eccentric valetudinarian takes the form of a man who is either a criminal of the worst kind, or a victim of intrigue concocted with infernal skill, we appreciate in- creasingly the ingenuity of the writer, and also the art with which he conceals his art,—for the crash comes as crashes come in real life, when people are eating and drinking, talking, and amusing themselves, aid the only defect in the management of it is a little too much prominence given to Mr. Hulet's medicine-bottles.
The author of At Her Mercy does not like lords, and yet he somehow makes us like his typical objectionable lord, who rules all Dunwich with an iron rod, and has an intolerable temper, especially when he is suffering from gout. Again, our author unintentionally exalts the institution he deprecates by leaving Eva in the position of a peeress expectant. He depicts local people and things and manners and customs at Dunwich with humour, and actually finds scme excuse for his pet aversion in the snobbishness and subserviency of the people :—
"Lord Dirleton's relation to his Dunwich neighbours had always been, thanks to themselves, that of a stick to a basket of eggs, with two exceptions ; the rector was not one bit afraid of him, and in Mr. Angelo Hulet's case a cockatrice had been hatched who ignored his .authority, and even his existence. If when he had used bad words the doctor had • stuck up to him,' with 'Say that again, and damme, tread on your toe,' and especially if he had carried out his threat, it would have done his lordship more good than a pint of colchicum. But such remedies lie outside the pharmacopteia. Excellent as they are in other respects, there is no class of men so inclined to knock under 'to their social superiors as medical practitioners, which, considering that they generally catch them at a disadvantage, is inexcusable. Dr. Burne was upright enough to everybody else, but whenever he paid a professional visit—and he paid no others to the park—he left his inde- pendence in the hall along with his umbrella."
This is Dr. Burne's only weakness, and he is sure to surmount it in the case of the next Lord Dirleton ; nobody will be afraid of “Jack." A fearfully genteel boarding-house, called " Lucullus Mansion," with its proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. Hodlin Barmby, ruined (and real) gentlefolk, form one of many good bits of genre in this book. It looks very like portrait-painting, especially the following account of how Mr. and Mrs. Barmby contrived to give the air of an ordinary dinner-party to the usually dreadful ordeal
of a boarding-house dinner. :— " Mr. Hodlin Barmby, a broad-shouldered, ' acred '-looking gentle- man, did the honours at tho bottom of the table, and looked the genial host to perfection ; he was not eloquent, unless you got him on a horse, but was always ready to come to the rescue of the conversation with the weather and the crops ; and if it needed a dead lift, had only to look towards his better-half in a concerted manner for the required assistance. He had his orders to refer to my father, Sir Ilesketh,' when any new-corner was present, but in other respects was very wisely permitted to take his own line ; if any exceptional people were at table, whom a reference to the prospects for the next Derby was likely to shock, Mrs. Barmby took care to place them in her own' neighbour- hood. Under these circumstances, the host had generally the pick of the company about him, while the hostess was surrounded with tho feebler sort, who required colloquial manipulation."
The company are amusing, especially the Australian who has come to England "to spend in horse-flesh what he had amassed by sheep ;" the American lady, " with her voice too high up and her gown too low down, but her heart in the right place ;" and the people who discuss the " aspects " of Balcombe, which, we take it, is no fancy-portrait of Torquay, for the author incautiously admits that "to a hale and hearty stranger arriving at this recuperating spot for the first time, the idea was apt to occur that it was raining ;" and thereupon gives a very funny description of the intense belief of all the invalids in the climate. As "all's well that ends well," and this story does end well, with the trifling drawback of Jack's inferiority to Eva, it is not unbecoming to dwell upon the general pleasantness, while acknowledging the power of the dismal portions of Al Her Mercy.
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