THE QUESTION OF CAIN.*
Mts. CASHEL Hoar has given us nothing as yet so skilfully constructed in plot and so interesting from beginning to end as this story. It is not that the surprises in it are great, for we are allowed to see, from the very first mention of that which naturally baffles the understanding of the actors in the tale, what the real secret is. But the different clues of the plot are all woven so skilfully together, and each of them lends so much addi- tional interest to the others, that the effect of the whole has much more of genuine art in it than in any of Mrs. Hoey's previous stories. The part which deals with the great jewel robberies is ex- tremely well managed. And next to the heroine—whose character is lovable, not as the heroines of romance are lovable, but as fair, innocent, and happy girls with characters of their own are lovable—we think the happiest sketch in the book is that of the accomplice of the diamond robbers, the lady who moves in good society, and is the directing spirit of the frauds—Mrs. Mabberley. The reader feels a certain shrinking from that old lady, as if he had positively met her, and felt convinced that she would contrive to get him into 'her power ; and nothing can be more dexterous than the way in which the internal social machinery of the jewel robberies is explained. Even the actual robber and murderer is dashed off with a good deal of life. It is a happy touch in the story that the author makes her most splendid beauty, the bad heroine,—in some sense, no doubt, an adventuress, who passes herself off as having property when she is really deep in debt, and without any means to discharge the debts,—the perfectly unconscious tool of the confederates. Miss Chevenix is well drawn in every way. And if we are a little without experience of this supreme and command- ing kind of beauty, yet power to endow women lavishly in that way must, we suppose, be regarded as the great postu- late of romance, though a postulate, like many of Euclid's, which is by no means within the verification of our experience. Here is Miss Chevenix, the young lady Nyhose lack of money and desire to marry well, prove to be such useful instruments to the gang of jewel-robbers who had managed to plant themselves in the focus of London society :— "As she stood trimming and watering the flowers in the balcony • The gasstiou of Call. By Mrs. Cashel Hoey. 3 vols. London; Hurst and Slackett. green-house of her drawing-room one fine spring morning, a few weeks after the return of Mrs. Townley Gore to London, Miss Chevenix presented a picture which few could have failed to admire. She was above the middle height, and of the fall and florid order of beauty ; health, strength, activity, and vitality were expressed in her large and symmetrical form, and in the colouring of her almost faultless face. Her complexion could defy any light ; it had no im- perfections to conceal ; the skin, with its underlying carnation tints, was as smooth as a magnolia-blossom, and the deeper colour of the lips and cheeks was never too deep. A finely-modelled mouth and chin; well-shaped eyes, of an indefinite colour, with a slightly fur- tive but very intelligent look in them ; a low, smooth, white forehead; and a soft, shining diadem of red hair—the true, gold-flecked red, that is as beartiftil as it is rare—worn in rich plaits all round her head, and curling in little rings at the back of her neck, made up the details of a portrait which will probably be as unsatisfactory as almost every written description of a fair woman is. There were many whom the beauty of Beatrix Chevenix moved to enthusiasm ; there were others whom it failed to touch, who thought the luminous, golden-lashed eyes as cold as they were bright, and their lack of colour a defect, and who said that the richly-tinted month had no feeling and no sweetness in its curves. There were even persons— hard to please in point of expression—who described her face as deceitful, and to whom her perfect aplomb, and a certain finish of look and manner which we do not readily associate with girlhood, were not attractive. These critics were, however, in a despicable minority, and they troubled not at all the pleasantly triumphant course of Miss Chevenix's life in London and elsewhere."
The present writer has often wished to see such wonderful and perfect beauties, but not hitherto with much success. Beauty, with take-offs of some kind, is common enough amongst us ; but has any one ever seen anything quite so dazzling as Beatrix Chevenix is represented in this story? It is a very happy moderation in Mrs. Cashel Hoey that has suggested to her to make this brilliant young lady fall genuinely in love with the man whose fortune she had intended to marry, and thus to inspire us with a certain sympathy for the girl, who, though hard, worldly, an atheist, and capable of cruelty, is yet the perfectly unconscious tool of much wickeder people than herself, and
passionately devoted to the man whom she deceives. We have not recently read a novel in which so much is made of what we may call the bad heroine, and so mach sympathy elicited by her fate. That fate is described with a good deal of force, and is felt by the reader to be genuinely tragic. We prefer Miss Chevenix very much to Mrs. Townley Gore, who is, perhaps, too completely destitute of any but self-regarding instincts to correspond with experience. Most people have a secret, if not a visible, vein of unselfishness, on which you are apt to come suddenly and as a surprise.
The good people are, we suppose, the despair of all novel- writers, and Mrs. Hoey has wisely economised her good people. Except the heroine, there are none of them we really care for. Jane Merrick ought to be more of a sketch than she is. Mrs.
Morrison is a regular good, motherly, pious person ; and Frank Lisle is only an artist, and one never quite sees why he is so much attached to Frederick Lorton. Mr. Warrender, who eventually, we suppose, marries the heroine, is elderly goodness in the abstract, and Mrs. Masters is Mrs. Morrison in another rank of life. But the heroine is charming. Her gaiety when she is happy, her horror of herself for forgetting her father, for forgetting her unworthy lover, for finding so little that is durable in her own feelings when she is miserable, her weakness in falling in love, and her secret triumph that a good man should fall in love with her after she bad happily got free from her selfish lover, are all made very real to us. Nor can we deny that this selfish lover himself is well presented to us. "There is such a possibility," says Mrs. Cashel Hoey, acutely, "as that of finding certain difficulties smoothed away to the point of mortification," and the struggle in Frederick Lorton's mind between mortifica- tion and satisfaction, when he finds that his selfishness has saved him from a burden, at the cost of a severe pang to his vanity, is admirably drawn.
Taken as a whole, The Question of Cain must be described as a very successful novel, with a remarkably well-constructe4 plot, showing great power in the dinouenzont, and with at least one charming character, and not a few that are as vivid as they arc repelling.
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