A HANDFUL OF NOVELS.*
THE principal and most interesting portion of A Witch's Legacy describes the extraordinary adventures of valuable jewels that are found and loot, whirled from the West Indies to England and back again, vanishing and reappearing, and • (1.) A Witch's Legacy. By Hesketh Bell. London : Sampson Low and Co. --(2.) The Quarry Farm. By J. S Fletcher. London : Ward and Downey.— (3.) Vaidnuir the Viking. By Hume Nisbet. London : Hutchinson and Co.— (4.) A Third Person. By B M. Croker. London: F. V. White and Co.—(5.) Jeanie a' Biggersdale. By Katharine Simpson. London T. Fisher Unwin.— (60 Bianca. By Mrs. Ba,got Harts. London : T. Fisher Unwire. being snatched hitter and *hither with their whereabouts usually indicated by a souffle, in a manner that reminds one of the wild course of the ball at a football-match, whilst the resemblance is rendered all the greater by there being no lack of unfair dealings to provoke the shouts of " off-side !" which greet a departure from the rules of the game at such matches. The jewels appear first as part of a pirate's hoard buried in Crown land at the island of Grenadilla ; and as two-thirds of this kind of treasure-trove ought by law to go to Govern,. ment, it might perhaps be expected that the hero, Jack, on learning of its existence, would feel bound to give notice thereof to the authorities, even although part of the hoard consisted of diamonds that bad been stolen from his grandmother, and to which therefore he might justly lay claim. Jack, however, has no qualms as to the moral rectitude of appropriating whatever extras in the way of piratical accumulations may chance to be in the same casket as his diamonds, nor has he any such penetrating respect for the law as to contemplate sharing with the Crown if he can avoid it, so he proceeds surreptitiously to dig up and carry off the casket directly its secret is imparted to him. Being robbed of his booty a few hours later, he at once starts off in hot pursuit after the thief; and then ensues a chase so full of bustle and incident that one has not time to stop and examine closely into the probability of every detail, but only wonders what is going to happen next as one follows on con- tentedly to the final adventure of the treasure, when an old lady makes a comically plucky but ineffectual attempt to defend it from three men bent on obtaining forcible possession, by depositing it on her chair and sitting down thereon. Throughout the whole book, it is the jewels and not the people who engage one's interest ; and the love-story interwoven is altogether commonplace and devoid of feature whereby to distinguish it from innumerable others of the kind.
Power and pathos enough for a tragedy are not looked for (even if they might not possibly be out of place) in a simple, idyllic tale such as Mr. Fletcher's new work, The Quarry Farm, which is excellent of its kind, though not rousing the deeper emotions, nor aspiring to belong to the highest order of fiction. Entertaining the reader quietly without vexing his brains to consider problems in philosophy, religion, morals, or meta- physics, or to unravel mysteries and plots, it is fresh, graceful, artistic, and well arranged, and has the restful charm of an agreeable, easily followed melody, uncomplicated by difficult passages, suspended harmonies, and discords hard to resolve. Natural fitness of temperament is evidently regarded by the author as an all-important element in matrimony; and in his story, this view is exemplified by two sisters of widely differ- ing dispositions, both of whom are well sketched, attractive, and charming in their respective ways. The farming one, Miranda, practical, good at a bargain, large hearted and handed, a safe source of comfort and sure counsellor in time of need, is a rock of strength to all, and a woman whom even a jilted lover with his faith in female virtue shaken by the defection of• his promised bride, never dreams of including in his sweeping condemnation of the sex. And in contrast to her is the weaker, more unpractical Juliet, whose delicately fanciful poetic nature the kindly Miranda humours without being able to understand, and who will probably be considered the inferior sister of the two by most people, whatever she was in the eyes of Philip Marsh. Each sister is provided with a young man to suit her own individuality. But before they finally pair off happily together, Juliet is in imminent danger of becoming the wife of the wrong one, and the peril is only averted by the machinations and benevolently exercised in- sight of a wise old man whose hypnotic powers procure him the reputation of a wizard, and whose behaviour would cer- tainly be resented as unpardonably meddlesome if the wisdom of his interference were not established beyond all doubt by the successful result. The only time when one is inclined to
question the book's fidelity to life is at the end, where Juliet is represented as perfectly satisfied with a town life, for this seems hardly possible in the case of a person with a genuine passion for the country and a gift for discovering and appre-
eating its inner beauties which are beyond the ken of most people, a fact that ought by rights, one imagines, to incapaci- tate her from ever being happy in town surroundings. The mention of " reaping " hay is surely a printer's mistake P The historical romance, entitled Vo2dmer the Viking, pro- fesses itself the modernised version of a record. of some Norsemen who, early in the eleventh century, sailed from the Isle of Thanet to the North Pole, and afterwards circum- navigated the world "without thinking -they had done any- thing in particular; " and as the preface's promise of " strange adventures, miracles, ghosts, and bedevilments" is fulfilled amply, people who object to the supernatural element being introduced into fiction will probably not be able to take much interest in this wild tale of bold Vikings fighting, feasting, and making love, adventuring by land and sea, and moved by strains of weird music, now to fierce Berserker wrath, and now to love and tenderness. Another class of readers, however, who have no such objection, will find a good deal to enjoy ; and for our own part, remembering how dependent for ex- pression the immaterial must always be on the material, we see no cause to complain if Mr. Nisbet (as seems likely) has employed the supernatural as a medium for giving ideas tangible form. Take, for instance, Yaldmer's enchanted harp, with strings made from part of a woman, long dead, who had adopted this method of abiding materially amongst men, and whose spirit, imprisoned in the harp, is thus enabled to enthrall its possessor, and exercise a merciful, softening in- fluence upon earth by means of visions that are evoked by its strains. Is not this an image that gracefully symbolises human unwillingness to be severed by death from old haunts and friends, and longing to remain and aid them ? And again, in the excessively civilised land of Tule, where the very day- light is turned on and off at will, is not the feeble, insipid condition of the inhabitants intended to be emblematic of the quenching of Nature's fire and energy by artificiality ? The last part of the book, describing the Watts and the City of Light, reminds us vaguely of something we have read before by either Westall or Rider Haggard, and is less interesting and more of a commonplace fairy-tale than the beginning.
Mrs. Baggot is, to our thinking, the most interesting of the characters in A Third Person ; and whilst heartily grateful for an introduction to her, we are also tempted to murmur a little at not being permitted more fully to cultivate the acquaintance of this refreshingly vivacious lady (rather re- minding us of Mrs. Walford's Baby's Grandmother), whose sixty years in no way prevent her from dancing, smoking, singing, riding a kicking horse, enjoying life after a fashion unusual at her age, and generally conducting herself in a manner that is perfectly harmless, but often a sore trial to her staid daughter Annie,—as, e.g., on the occasion of Mrs. Baggot's greeting to her nephew:—" Well, Roger," she ex- claimed, putting up her face to kiss him, " how are you ? Dear me ! How nice, to be kissed by a moustache again." "Mother," expostulated Annie in an agonised aside, " the cab- man !" The energy she displays is all the more conspicuous by contrast with the weak-kneed behaviour of her (otherwise manly) nephew in suffering his love-making to be hindered by the malicious syren with a squint, pretty manners, a flattering tongue, and no scruples about lying, who manages to keep him apart from the object of his affections by dint of wiles and petty barriers that would, one feels sure, have proved no obstacles whatever to his resolute and lively aunt. It is a pity that no intimation is given of how the match turned out between the aforesaid syren and the tyrannical, gunpowdery old General whom she is confident of being able to tame, and marries solely for his money ; one of the pair must certainly have caught a Tartar, and we should like to have known which the victim was, and whether retribution at length over- took her in the shape of General Yaldwin,—at any rate, we hope it did. The story is extremely slight, but brisk and entertaining enough to afford fairly good amusement for the brief time occupied in its perusal; and there is a sudden hasty excursion away from beaten tracks to Burmah and Dacoits, that seems to be the work of a person unusually well qualified for depicting these unfamiliar scenes.
The five Yorkshire stories comprised in Jeanie o' Biggersdale are vigorously and concisely told, and evince signs of spon- taneous force that promise hopefully for the writer's future development. Choice as to subject-matter and details is not, in her opinion, left wholly to an author's own will, but is controlled by the voice of an inward monitor that should always be obeyed without regarding considerations of popu- larity, whether the selection be of things agreeable, or of stern truths to which men prefer to shut their eyes ; and the result of her conscientiousness in acting according to this opinion causes sometimes a bitter taste in the mouth to the reader, as, for example, in the most striking tale in the book, "A Jael of the Nineteenth Century," where the ending is unsatisfactory, owing to the scurvy treatment meted out to the poor friendless heroine, when her gallant defence of her master's property, and her unjust detention in prison, are only recompensed by his " bearing her no ill-will," and being graciously pleased to receive her back to his service on condi- tion of her accepting a reduction of wages,—a termination that may be true to Nature, but is disappointing none the less. For short stories, such as those in this volume, Miss Simpson appears to have a decided gift, though we do not know whether she would be equally successful with longer ones. The heroine of Bianca, the first husband whom she marries secretly, the second whom she espouses under a mistaken im- pression of the death of number one, her absurd old father, and the other characters who appear in the work, are all powerless to excite our sympathies ; but we are disposed to pity some people who do not appear, that is to say, Main- waring's next-of-kin, who were clearly defrauded by the bigamy's concealment, though nobody in the book seems ever to have given that a thought. As far as the heroine is con- cerned, however, this thoughtlessness is perhaps only natural, seeing that when on one occasion she is calmly deliberating on the pros and cons of accepting matrimonial proposals, the little accident of being already a wife never enters into her considerations at all.
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