WYNCOTE.* Tars story opens in Rome, where we meet a
rather querulous widow (Mrs. Cooper) and her two girls, one of whom, Rose, soon draws us towards her by the kindness of her heart and the in- terest of her dawning love. One day, while standing at the window listlessly gazing at the passers-by, her attention is sud- denly attracted by the appearance of a girl in great grief and poorly dressed who had stopped at the jeweller's shop window opposite. The eyes of the two girls meet, and to Rose's surprise, the face of the poor maiden in the street was a "sweet English face" shaded with "soft, golden hair." It was a face evidently full of trouble, too. By and by the stranger went into the shop, and Rose could see her trying, but without success, to sell to the jeweller a gold cross she wore in her bosom. Some days after, these two were introduced to each other, and Rose was surprised to find that the sorrowful maid was Phoebe Heron, only daughter of Mr. Heron, an English artist in Rome whose name she knew, and to whom her family had introduc- tions. But the maiden's distress and poverty soon became easy to account for, when the truth was known. Mr. Heron was no longer able to paint, having begun to grow blind, and his means gone, there was no out-look for him and his daughter apparently but starvation, when all that they had was sold. But the meeting of Phoebe with Rose and her family changed the face of affairs for a time. A certain Miss Camilla Wyncote had written to Mrs. Cooper (Rose's mother) that old Mrs. Wyncote needed a new companion, and Phoebe, hearing of it, eagerly applied for the post. It would furnish means for her father, she thought, for the salary was 240 a year. She was accepted, and prepared to leave for Eng- land, for Wyncote. But ere she went, she had first to know some- thing of a male member of the Wyncote family, who had also come to Rome, George Wyncote, the presumptive heir to a dissipated heri- tage, nephew of the living bachelor squire, a young man of strong practical purpose, who had persisted in taking to business, and who joined the picnic party of Mrs. Cooper on the day when Phoebe was introduced, to fall a dreaming of her afterwards, to relieve her and her father in secret by buying Mr. Heron's last painting, that had been unnoticed so long. Presentlythe scene changes. We come back to England, and are introduced to three of the Wyncotes of Wyncote who live there, to sweet English landscapes, and homely English faces. Above all, we get to know Miss Camilla Wyncote, George's maiden aunt, the sister of the spendthrift squire, and the directress of the consciences and footsteps of all the poor and the young in Wyncote parish. The first hint we get of this lady in Rome is not prepossessing, for there, in the letter to her friend Mrs. Cooper that led to Phoebe's engagement, we learn that she is "so busy with school and house-keeping, and also so perpetu- ally in the parish trying to remedy the defects in poor Mr. Browne's teaching, that I have no time to read the papers to mamma." That sentence stamps her at once, to our mind, as a disagreeable per- son,—a prim old maid, living by the rule of some fanatical form of Low-Churchism ; but we are bound to admit that better ac- quaintance with Miss Camilla proves to us that we were never more mistaken in our lives. There is no person in all this history who so wins on our esteem and admiration as she does, no one in the book whose character is at once so truly and tenderly drawn, and so loveable and sweet at the core. This hard disciplinarian, this rigid purist in the faith, despot of the parish and of the Hall, is a sweet, sensitive, delicate woman, with much love in her heart, and with a story of her own that is full of pathos. Mrs. Erskine has manifestly spent
* Tryncote. By Mrs. Thomas Erskine, Author or "Marjory." London: Smith, Elder, and 00.
much pains in drawing Miss Camilla, and her success has been great ; the triumph by which she contrives that this hard-crusted, religious-formalist of a woman shall reveal herself to the reader and steal away his heart unawares, so to say, is complete. Had all the other characters been worthless, the book is worth reading for her sake. There is no mystery made of the story of this lady, and therefore we violate no secrets of the plot in telling it more
fully than those of the other characters. She is, indeed, the central figure, and the best of the rest are but foils to her. The lives of the others are, no doubt, interesting in their degree, and their fates, hard or fortunate, as the case may be, but nowhere is the strength of womanly self-sacrifice painted to the life as in Miss Camilla, not even in Rose ; while the humour and the pathos born of a blighted life reveal themselves side by side in her, until we should almost say she is the one character of the book, but that that would be unjust. Camilla Wyncote had sacrificed her life's happiness to uphold the name and preserve the domains of the Wyncotes of Wyncote. Her brother, the squire, was a spendthrift, a racing-man and butterfly of society, who had been ruined in his youth ; and Camilla came forward to save him by giving up her separately inherited private fortune, and what was harder to do, her lover. Phcebe's father, Mr. Heron, had won her heart five-and-twenty years before the opening of this story, and had loved her well, and she had refused him, because she was too proud to tell that she had spent nearly her all in saving the family domains. He turned from her in anger, never saw her more, not hearing the cry she sent after him ; and now when Phcebe, the sole daughter of her old love, who had married, and whose wife was dead, was coming to the house as attendant on her mother, Camilla's heart stirred within her, the old memories awoke, and almost melted for a time the hard incrustation she had fenced herself in by. Mr. Heron's love had been the one moment of sunshine breaking in upon her dreary existence, and she could "almost fancy that she heard his steps rustling among last year's dead leaves, as he suddenly turned and left her" on hearing her refusal. Since then what had her life been? A stern attempt to live up to a rigid, formal pattern, a constant struggle to busy her- self in the interests that lay around her, the strong will that governed and suppressed the pain in herself, finding excuse also in trying to shape the lives of others. Outside and to the world Camilla was thus a hard disciplinarian, the drill-serjeant of all in Wyncote parish, from parson to pauper. This was her outward life, had been her life all these years, until she had grown hard and grey in it, and after the disturbing influences of Phcebe's arrival had passed away, to this life Camilla returned. Through all the book nearly we find her striving, almost, one would say, from long-formed mechanical habit, to shape and mould the careers of people around her according to an ideal of her own ; and in the story of her match making proclivities, in particular, Mrs. Erskine draws a picture which is, unwittingly perhaps on her part, but none the less truly and pathetically humorous, with that humour which seems to be born of pain. Phoebe is not long domiciled at Wyn- cote, for example, until Miss Camilla decides that it would be well to marry her to Mr. Browne, and from the time that this decision is taken in her mind she grows indulgent towards that worthy clergyman and his views, to the horror of her old ally, Mrs. Foster, the doctor's wife, who is a wagon of orthodoxy and censoriousness, and who hitherto always counted on Camilla's help in running down the poor parson, with his dry discourses, and his enthusiasm about flint arrow-heads, his pother about ventilation and flooring in the school, and so forth. So, too, Camilla's conduct towards Rose Cooper varies according as she suspects that young lady of designs upon George Wyncote, or George of sneaking fondness for Rose ; it being her dream that George, in spite of his having degraded his name by going into business, shall restore the fortunes of his house by marrying an heiress. By-and-by an heiress does come within his scope. A millionaire with an only daughter rents the Mill-house, an ap- panage of the Wyncote family that lay conveniently near, and Camilla straightway resolves that George shall marry this lady. How she plans and settles everything, and how, alas ! she finds, as others have found, that "the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley," and how also gradually her heart loses its crust, and opens again under the pain of new disappointment, and the joy of those that have found again that which was lost, to the influences of a love that was buried, are all told to the life in this beautiful story. George does not marry the heiress, nor does Phcebe marry the parson, and yet in the end Camilla is happier than if all had been as she planned, for has not blind old Mr. Heron forgiven her?
Of the other characters in the book it is not necessary to say
much. They are mostly well drawn and interesting, but except Phcebe, and perhaps Rose, we hardly know any of them suffi- ciently to be able to take that personal interest in them that we do in Camilla. George, the hero of the story, is a mere lay figure. The squire, Piers Wyncote, is rather more defined, but is not a taking character. His cold, well-bred selfishness, his generosity that costs him nothing, and the miserable bondage which he sub- mits to on his late-in-life marriage to a minx and money are well brought out. But as is natural, the women are best drawn, and the sorrows and cares of Phcebe, her happiness, her love and devotion to her father, which lead her to face starvation, or its alternative,—marriage with a dull, thick-hearted man, "the maestro" who dragged through life wearily as a papal spy, but who had still a human soul within him, are beautifully told. We have but one objection to make indeed to the whole book, and that is to the want of art displayed in the crisis of Phcebe's fate. The climax of her second sojourn in Rome is too melo- dramatic and improbable for the otherwise quiet life-like story. We protest, too, against the fate of Rose, though in this we are conscious that as novel-readers we are quite unreasonably anxious that the heroes and heroines should have poetically complete and happy lives in this world. But yet it is hard on us to submit to see a girl like Rose Cooper left alone in the world, and we almost hope that Mrs. Erskine will find an opportunity of mating her yet, and to a man less emulous of the millionaire who began life sweeping shop-floors in Ely than George Wyncote showed himself to be.
But of the plot and windings of the story it would be unfair to say more, simple though they be, and we can only add that taken altogether, we have not read a more pleasant story than this for many a day. An agreeable remembrance of Marjory, Mrs. Erskine's first effort, led us to expect more than usual, and we are bound to say we have not been disappointed. Wyncote iswell written and full of human interest throughout, which is more than may be said of many a so-called "brilliant story."
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