WYLDER'S HAND.*
Mn. LE FANU is certainly one of the cleverest contrivers of lurid plots whose novels we ever read and enjoyed. There is not in Wylder's Hand quite the wealth of conception which marked his first novel, "The House by the Churchyard," and there is but little of that genuine drollery which set off so powerfully the ghastly core of his first story. The scene is laid in England, and ranch of Mr. Le Fanu's humour in the former novel was gleaned from experience of Irish society. But if the tale has in • Wyider's Hand. A novel. By Joseph Sheridan be Fang. 3 cols. London: Bentley. "'I suppose the world thinks me a very happy fellow, Miss Lake?' Mark Wylder said, with a rather pensive glance of inquiry into that young lady's eyes, as he set down his hock glass.—' I'm afraid it's a selfish world, Mr. Wylder. and thinks very little of what does not con- cern Now, you, I dare say,' continued Wylder, not caring to per- ceive the soupcon of sarcasm that modulated her answer so musically, look upon me as a very fortunate fellow?'—' You are a very fortunate person, Mr. Wylder ; a gentleman of very moderate abilities, with no prospects, and without fortune, who finds himself, without any deserv- ings of his own, on a sudden possessed of an estate, and about to be united to the most beautiful heiress in England, is, I think, rather a fortunate person.'—' You did not always think me so stupid, Miss Lake, said Mr. Wylder, showing something of the hectic of vexation.—' Stupid ! did I say ? Well, you know, we learn by experience, Mr. Wylder. One's judgment matures, and we are harder to please—don't you think so ?—as we grow older.'—' Aye, so we are, I dare say; at any rate, some things don't please us as we calculated. I remember when this bit of
it a less affluent experience and humour, it is more closely knit, and anything more ingenious than the plot, both for keeping the' reader in continuous suspense and throwing him off the true scent up to the very close, we have seldom met with. It would be treachery to spoil the interest of so well-contrived a tale by giving any key to its denouement here, so we shall only say that probably its greatest merit lies in the extraordinary unity of effect,—the grim glassiness with which it slides on to the end, giving a constant sense of the placid dangerous glitter, with occasionally startling cracks, of thin ice over deep water. Nor does any novel-writer of the day succeed better in delineating that grim sense of humour which a villain's knowledge of the complete contrast between his real purposes and the estimate placed upon him by society fosters in him, when he is either bold enough or rash enough to face completely the situation before him. The same sense of humour may often arise from a very different cause,—a hidden, inward, irremediable pain, which occupies a man's deepest nature, and renders hint profoundly sensitive to the trifling character of the small anxie- ties and superficial amusements which seem to the world to make up his outward lot. Anything which causes a complete chasm between the realities and the appearances of life will give rise to this playful mockery on the surface, but no one has hitherto made such good use of it in the delineation of true villany as Mr. Le Fanu.
The characters, however, are very unequal. Of the five prin- cipal characters in the book three are, in a slight way, very vividly and graphically sketched, namely, the heroine, as we suppose she may be called, Rachel Lake; her brother and evil genius, Cap- tain Stanley Lake; and the ex-lieutenant of the navy, who gives the name to the book, Mark Wylder. Dorcas Brandon is a com- pletely unfinished sketch of which something might have been made but was not ; and the grasping, Pharisaic attorney emulous of gentility, though admirably drawn in some scenes, is in other scenes an unnatural caricature. There is one outlying picture of great beauty, much the most finished and delicate sketch in the book, namely, that of little " Fairy," as he is called, the Rev. Wil- liam Wylder's little boy, and his ways with his father and mother. It is the only backwater, as we may call it, in the rapid stream of the story, and it is painted with a touch that proves how much higher as an artist Mr. Le Fanu might rise, if he would give to the whole of his exceedingly clever and rather ghastly stories the same careful pencilling which he has given to this little drawing.
Perhaps Mark Wylder is, if not the most graphic or carefully painted, the most real character in the bcok. When the story opens be has just come into a large fortune after knocking about in the navy all his life and rising only to a lieutenancy. Selfish, vulgar, and fast, with a good deal of temper, and much dangerous determi- nation in him, he is pitted in the tale against a polished man of the world, Captain Stanley Lake, equally selfish, much more un- scrupulous, much more sly, far more fertile in finesse, but with less courage in an emergency, and rash in embarking in a deep scheme without fully calculating his own strength to carry it out. The pair are well matched, and the contrast between them cleverly worked out. Mark Wylder, though so rich and prodigal, gives an irresistible impression of stale tobacco- smoke and general seediness, and the turbid workings of his mind, iu his suspicious rage against Captain Lake, who has got an unpleasant hold over him in connection with gambling transactions belonging to the period of his poverty, are very cleverly painted. He is engaged but not attached to the heiress Dorcas Brandon, and in the first scene in the book, at a dinner party, he is represented as trying in his coarse way to apologize to her cousin, Rachel Lake, to whom in years long passed he had been attached but not engaged, for the alliance forced upon him by the excellent motive of wishing to unite in one family two large estates:—
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luck would have made me a devilish happy fellow—twice as happy; but you see, if a fellow hasn't his liberty, where's the good of money ? I don't know how I got into it, but I can't get away now ; and the lawyer fellows, and trustees, and all that aort of prudent people, get about one, and persuade, and exhort, and they bully you, by Jove, into what they call a marriage of convenience—I forget the French word—you know; and then, you see, your feelings may be very different, and all that ; and where's the good of money, I say, if you can't enjoy it?'—And Mr. Wylder looked poetically unhappy, and trundled over a little bit of fri- candean on his plate with his fork desolately, as though earthly things had lost their relish.—`Yes; I think I know the feeling,' said Miss Lake, quietly. That ballad, you know, expresses it very prettily: "Oh, thou hast been the cause of this anguish, my mother ?"—It was not then as old a song as it is now.—Wylder looked sharply at her, but she did not smile, and seemed to speak in good faith; and being some- what thick in some matters, though a cunning fellow, he said, 'Yes; that is the sort of thing, you know—of course, with a difference—a girl is supposed to speak there ; but men suffer that way, too—though, of course, very likely it's more their own fault.'—'It is very sad,' said Miss Lake, who was busy with a She has no life in her ; she's a mere figurehead; she's awfully slow ; I don't like black hair ; I'm taken by conversation—and all that There are some men that can only really love once in their lives, and never forget their first love, I assure you.'—Wylder murmured all this, and looked as plaintive as he could without exciting the attention of the people over the way. Mark Wylder had, as you perceive, rather vague notions of decency, and not much experience of ladies ; and thought he was making just the inter- esting impression he meditated. He was a good deal surprised, then, when Miss Lake said, and with quite a cheerful countenance, and very quickly, but so that her words sting his oar like the prick of a bodkin, 'Your way of speaking of my cousin, Sir, is in the highest degree discreditable to you and offensive to me, and should you venture to repeat it, I will certainly mention it to Lady Chelford: —And so she turned to old Major Jackson at her right, who had been expounding a point of the battle of Vittoria to Lord Chelford."
This will give a fair specimen of the lively dialogue of the volume which, though generally concerned with interests of a darker kind, is almost always sustained with fire and a con- siderable share of dramatic power.
Mr. Le Fenn has, however, spent most of his labour on the figure of Mark Wylder's rival and enemy, Captain Stanley Lake, which contains a good deal in it that without resembling, will remind the reader of, the picture of Mr. Dangerfield, alias Charles Archer, in "The House by the Churchyard." We say it will remind the readers of his former novel of that clever sketch without resembling it, because the mode of conceiving and dis- playing the character is so similar, though they resemble each other only in their inventive villany. Dangerfield is bold and sardonic, Captain Lake a coward at bottom, and sly. Dangerfield shows an imperturbable generalship in crime, Captain Lake has a violent temper, which betrays him directly he is really frightened. Dangerfield is the hard masculine, Captain Lake the feline, feminine kind of villain. Still the mode of portraiture is curiously the same. Dangerfield wears benevolent silver spectacle-3, and the glitter of those benevolent spectacles is always dazzling the reader's eyes, as he smiles his hard smile. Captain Lake wears French leather boots, and always smiles down just upon the tops of them, and the glimmer of those boots, and of the yellow eyes which rest upon them, haunts the tale just as the silver spectacles and the eyes beneath them haunt the house by the Churchyard. The point is the more noticeable, because both the spectacles and the French boots being artificial and not natural features of the person, there seems at first sight something arbitrary in associating the villany of the men so closely with them. Yet these are some of the most effective strokes in two very effective novels. There is in in- sincere or positively treacherous characters a certain sense of artificiality which draws the attention even of innocent persons who are quite taken in by them, to some point where the artifi- ciality may be said to culminate. Mere affectations take effect on the manner, but deep-seated insincerity, too prudent and skilful for any superficial trick of manner, will generally throw into relief some superficial point or other in the costume which connects itself unconsciously in the imagination with the insoluble character of the man. Just where your knowledge of him leaves off, as it were, and you fail, in spite of all effort, to see further, there you find some trait which impresses you because it is the low-tide mark which limits your knowledge of his character, even when you see or think you see the waters withdrawn from it. So, with Mr. Dangerfield's silver spectacles,—they baffled your knowledge of the expression conveyed by his eyes ; and their gleam therefore constantly associated itself with the point where you lost your bearings in gauging his character. And similarly as Captain Lake's soft polish of manner baffles the attempt to see the real working of his mind, the French patent boots take up an emblematic position with regard to him, and as they reflect back his sly impenetrable smile, and remind you of his superficial grace, convince you that you cannot get further into his secrets. Nothing can be more skilful than the way in which Captain Lake is always pictured, though we seem to know him only partially even at the end. Take the scene in which be first opens the parallels against Mark Wylder, who, as we said, bad been mixed up in some discreditable attempt to cheat at cards at an earlier period. One of Mark Wylder's bridal presents to his betrothed is being exhibited :- "Well, it was pretty—French, I dare say—a little set of tablets—a toy—the cover of enamel, studded in small jewels, with a slender border of symbolic flowers, and with a heart in the centre, a mosaic of little carbuncles, rubies, and other red and crimson stones, placed with a view to light and shade.—' Exquisite, indeed !' said Lord Chelford. Is this yours, Mrs. Wylder?'—' Mine, indeed!' laughed poor little Mrs. Dorothy. 'Well, dear me, no, indeed ;'—and in an earnest whisper close.
in his a present to Miss Brandon, and the donor is not a hundred miles away from your elbow, my Lord !' and she winked slyly, and laughed, with a little nod at Wylder.—'Oh! I see—to be sure—really, Wylder, it does your taste infinite credit.'—' I'm glad you like it,' says
Wylder, chuckling benignantly on it, over his shoulder. believe I have alittle taste that way ; those are all real, you know, those jewels.' —' Oh, yes! of course. Have you seen it, Captain Lake ?' And he placed it in that gentleman's fingers, who now took his turn at the lamp, and contemplated the little parallelogram with a gleam of sly amusement.—' What are you laughing at ?' asked Wylder, a little snappishly.' I was thinking it's very like the ace of hearts,' answered the Captain softly, smiling on.—' Fie ! Lake, there's no poetry in yon,' said Lord Chelford, laughing.—' Well now, though, really it is funny; it did not strike me before, but do you know, now, it is,' laughs out jolly Mrs. Dolly, 'isn't it? Look at it—do, Mr. Wylder. Isn't it like the ace of hearts ?' — Wylder was laughing rather redly, with the upper part of his face very surly, I thought—' Never mind, Wylder, it's the winning card,' said Lord Chelford, laying his hand on his shoulder. Whereupon Lake laughed quietly, still looking on the ace of hearts with his sly eyes. And Wylder laughed too, more suddenly and noisily than the humour of the joke seemed quite to call for, and glanced a grim look from the corners of his eyes on Lake, but the gallant Captain did not seem to perceive it ; and after a few seconds more he handed it very innocently back to Mrs. Dorothy, only remarking Seriously, it is very pretty, and appropriate.' " Besides these two characters, Rachel Lake is really cleverly sketched, soft and yet spirited, with delicacy and wit, beauty and independence of character combined. But the plot, after all, is the most striking thing in the book. If Mr. Le Fanu had painted the detail as carefully as he has contrived and con- cealed the plot, the novel would have deserved to live. As it is, it is a very good one, though not quite equal, we think, to its predecessor.
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