TWO NOVELS."
ice must be some ten or eleven years since we reviewed Dr. Edith Romney, and during the interval the author's output, if not penurious, has certainly been frugal. That she is, com- paratively speaking, little known and talked about even among novel-readers of the better class, can only, we think, be due to the fact that she has not numbered herself with the great tribe of two-books-a-year producers who excite the public interest by the very frequency and regularity of the appeals they make to it. Certainly there are not very many living novelists who combine in a higher degree uniformity of mere literary excellence with power of dramatic conception, narrative skill, and a facility in portraiture which has vigour with refinement and subtlety without perplexing elusiveness. Only the reader whose palate has been vitiated by the fiery condiments of fiction, will be so misled by the general quietness and restraint of A Family Arrange- ment as to miss the truth and power of the presentation ; and in the one or two passages where the writer, so to speak, lets herself go, there is no opening for mistake even on the part of the dullest. The novel is a powerful study of the growth of a seed of crime, which might have had for its motto,—
" Alas, what tangled webs we weave When first we practise to deceive ; "
and though the mere narrative plan of the book is its least striking feature, even here there are points of freshness which arrest the reader's attention. Under the pressure of strong and sudden temptation, two men of ordinary, commonplace respectability become accomplices in a great crime. Their father-in-law, in whose chamber they stand, is within a few days, possibly a few hours, of death, and he has just executed a will practically disinheriting their wives in favour of a long-neglected grand-daughter. The old man is seized by a sudden attack of his malady, and one of the two men, a .doctor, deliberately withholds the restorative which he knows will for the time sustain life, while the other commits to the flames the document by which they are both impoverished. This is the situation which provides the opening for what follows. The men are not men of high moral principle, but etill less are they natural criminals. They are men who have been struck by temptation through the one imperfect joint in their moral armour; and from the moment of the crime they become partners in a torturing remorse and an un- reasoning terror. As time goes, events seem to render feasible a plan by which the lawyer, who is the stronger of the two men, suggests that they can make restitution without the impossible confession. His own son shall marry the wronged girl, and endow her with the wealth that should have been hers; but as a preliminary to this, it is neces- sary that his cousin, the doctor's daughter, to whom he has seemed attracted, should be put definitely out of his reach by a marriage with a wealthy but dissipated young man who has been eagerly wooing her, though his suit is one from which the girl evidently recoils. This is the family arrangement which gives the book its title, and clears the way for the strong emotional and dramatic situations of the second and third volumes. As a matter of fact, the exist- ence of the guilty secret and something of its nature, have not been so unsuspected as the criminals suppose. Alison, the wronged girl, has doubts, and for years the heart of Mrs. Winstanley, the doctor's wife, has been oppressed with some- thing like a horrible certainty, all the more horrible because it is a load which must be borne in solitude. Then comes the matrimonial scheme of the allies, which renders her dreadful assurance doubly sure ; and when Margaret, her daughter— helpless under the pressure put upon her by her father and uncle—comes to her mother in anguish, and demands to know why she is to be sacrificed, the much-tried woman can hold out no longer, and she makes the girl a sharer in her secret. This fateful interview, in spite of, perhaps because of, the restraint and reticence of the writer's manner, contributes one of the most powerful and moving chapters to a story which, from this point onward, never relaxes the intensity of its interest. Mrs. Winstanley is what we suppose would be called a subordinate character, and yet it is in her, rather • (1.) A Famils Arrangement. By the Author of " Dr. Edith R01111ley." 3 vole Lond”n: R. Bentley and Bon —(2.) John Darker. By Aubrey Dee. 3 Vole. London Adam and Charles Black.
than in her vicariously enduring daughter, or even in her remorse-haunted husband, that the interest most frequently centres. There is one very finely felt and subtly rendered passage, in 'which Dr. Winstanley, after the agitating death of his partner in crime (for a confession has trembled on Ogilvie's dying lips), is almost cheerful in the thought that the secret is in his own keeping, when he feels a sudden chill despair, as in a dreadful moment he discerns that his wife knows something, and dare not ask her how much. The incidents which lead up to his final confession are admirably conceived ; but the scene of the confession itself, which ought to have been not only a narrative climax, but a climax of power and interest, is made ineffective by diffuseness, as if the author had exhausted herself just too soon. There are even one or two false or exaggerated touches in this chapter, such as we find nowhere else ; for the novel, as a whole, is not more noteworthy for its dramatic effectiveness than for the delicate truthfulness by which that effective- ness is achieved.
"Aubrey," as a prenomen, is perhaps more masculine than feminine, but it may be either. We have certainly a very strong impression that "Aubrey Lee" is among the latest additions to the ranks of our feminine novelists; and in the three volumes of john Darker she has made a beginning which, if by no means wholly good, has enough of quality to confer interest and inspire hope. It is, indeed, a curiously mixed book. There is in it a slight element of something like farce; there is also a larger element of melodrama ; and yet there are, in addition to these things, certain other things not usually found in combination with them,—gleams of fine insight, touches of true pathos. The story itself, though free from what is absurdly called "sensationalism," is of the frankly melodramatic, unconvincing kind. Rosamund Plunkett is a child of seven when she is returning to England with her father, a ne'er-do-weal of good family, who has been an unsuccessful digger on the Australian gold-fields. In a chance medley on board the ship, a blow is struck and the father is killed. The child only catches a momentary glimpse of the man who strikes the blow, and knows nothing of him but that his name is John Darker, and that the results of his trial in Liverpool have been his acquittal, discharge, and disappearance. The lonely orphan child passes through various experiences which are narrated with a good deal of force and vivacity, and on the verge of womanhood she finds herself at a Welsh watering-place in close association with three men who are destined to play important parts in her life. To one of them she is gradually and irresistibly attracted, when suddenly, to her horror, she learns something which convinces her that she has given her love to none other than John Darker himself. She turns from him and takes a step which it seems must be one of final separation ; and the climax of the story—one of the most artfully contrived surprises we have met with in this kind of fiction—is the sudden discovery of Darker's true identity. The narrative is clumsy in parts, as with such a scheme it was almost bound to be (there is a long explanatory story to which this criticism specially ap- plies); but the author realises it with sufficient intensity to make it not merely readable, but full of interest. Some of the scenes of Rosamund's child-life are very skilfully and sympathetically rendered ; but we incline to think that one of the cleverest things in the book is the development of the character of the young man Eugene Smith. At first he is not a character at all, but simply a carica- ture. He is not even the caricature of a possible person, nor has he the saving grace of originality, for he is Mr. an Manner's Maudle or Postlethwaite, boldly conveyed from the back numbers of Punch, with all his incredi- bilities thick upon him. The way in which, as the story proceeds, he is made to become a creature of flesh and blood whom we regard with pathetic interest, and who is yet allowed to retain, through all, the surface absurdities which at first made him so utterly unreal, is a feat which could only have been performed by a writer of genuine ability. Eugene's Pecksniffian father, on the other hand, is never thus humanised, and therefore he never becomes real to us. Indeed, the book is full of the most curious inequalities of all kinds ; but many novels of much more level workmanship than John Darker have much lees not merely of promise, but of positive worth.
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