4

Robert Lyon and Hilary Leaf.

53

England for India, having first begged Hilary "to trust him" in his absence. No one can be surprised that in an absence of ten years, during which he corresponds with her sister, butin accordance, we presume, with Scottish notions of propriety— never writes one line to Hilary, she has many doubts as to whether she is to trust him as a friend or as a lover. The man who really loves a woman, and intends to marry her, and yet leaves her free, that is, imagines the possibility of her loving and marrying some one else, must lack either self-respect or true love, and most probably both. Robert Lyon could only have refrained from telling Hilary that he loved her and asking her to marry him when he returned to England, for her sake or his own. Now, Hilary would have gone down on her knees and thanked God for the assurance of Robert's love any and every day of his absence; it would have helped her in every trial that she had to endure. If he had loved her unselfishly he would have known this. Is it not probable that he actually did marry in India, and that he returned a widower, having left his children to the care of his wife's relatives in India? If not, his silence was neither true nor honest, nor creditable to him as a man. In fact, he has no more heart than a tailor's dummy. He is no more than a carved wooden head on an oak stick, and he has to be kept carefully out of the way that the reader may not see he is a stick. He comes home, however, and then there can no longer be any doubt. The good little woman will marry him after all, but she cannot go to India and leave the lonely sister-her only friend-now old and feeble. She tells him so, but the masculine element in his nature, which had apparently been dormant for fifteen years, revolts, and Hilary has every right to the sympathy of the reader.

"Robert, I want to talk to you about Johanna."

"I guess what it is," said he, smiling; "you would like her to go out to India with us. Certainly, if she chooses. I hope you did not suppose I should object?"

"No; but it is not that. She could not go; she would not live six months in a hot climate; the doctor tells me so.'

"You have consulted him?"

"Yes, last week; confidentially, without her knowing it. But I thought it right. I wanted to make quite sure before-before. Oh, Robert-"

The grief of her tone caused him to suspect what was coming. He started.

"You don't mean that? Oh, no, you cannot! My little woman -my own little woman-she could not be so unkind."

Hilary turned sick at heart. The dim landscape, the bright sky, seemed to mingle and dance before her, and Venus to stare at her with a piercing, threatening, baleful lustre.

"Robert, let me sit down on the bench, and sit you beside me. It is too dark for people to notice us, and we shall not be very cold." "No, my darling;" and he slipped his plaid round her shoulders, and his arm with it.

She looked up pitifully. "Don't be vexed with me, Robert, dear; I have thought it all over; weighed it on every side: nights and nights I have lain awake, pondering what was right for me to do. And it always comes to the same thing."

"What?"

"It's the old story," she answered, with a feeble smile. " ''I canna' leave my minnie.' There is nobody in the world to take care of Johanna but me, not even Elizabeth, who is engrossed in little Henry. If I left her, I am sure it would kill her. And she cannot come with me, dear!" (the only fond name she ever called him) "for these three years-you say it need only be three years—you will have to go back to India alone !" Robert Lyon was a very good man; but he was only a man, not an angel; and though he made comparatively little show of it, he was a man very deeply in love. With that jealous tenacity over his treasure, hardly blameable, since the love is worth little which does not wish to have its object all to itself, he had, I am afraid, contemplated, not without pleasure, the carrying off of Hilary to his Indian home; and it had cost him something to propose that Johanna should go too. He was very fond of Johanna; still

If I tell what followed, will it for ever lower Robert Lyon in the estimation of all readers? He said coldly, "As you please, Hilary," rose up, and never spoke another word till they reached home.

Mrs. Craik's last novel, 'A Noble Life,' is by no means a happy effort. It has neither the interest nor the merit of an authorized biography. The original of the Earl of Cairnforth is carefully photographed, and is accurate in every painful detail this was unnecessary, and ought to have been impossible. The story, as a story, is too shadowy for analysis, and does not deserve the dignity of its two volumes, its broad margins, and large type. But Christian's Mistake,' which preceded this, is a very beautiful story. The title is rather puzzling, and the mistake not very obvious. Christian is a

young governess, the orphan child of an unworthy father, and she marries an elderly and respectable college don, a widower with two children, whom she does not love. Of course this is not the mistake, if it is anything it must be called by a stronger name. But the Master of St. Bede's not only knows that Christian does not love him, but knows from letters which have fallen into

The Master and Mrs. Grey.

55

his hands before they were married, that she has felt a transient girlish affection for a worthless undergraduate. Again, that the Master did not return these letters was something much graver than a mistake. Ultimately, however, the sister of the Master's first wife suspects a previous intimacy with the undergraduate, and Christian has the satisfaction of an explanation with her husband. There must have been a mistake somewhere, but as we have said it is not obvious.

and

The author of John Halifax takes the unpromising material of this story, and it is pliant in her hands. She does not say that young girls should marry elderly men whom they do not love, but she sees this as a fact, and shows how a good man a good woman would act, supposing they stood in this relation to each other. Dr. Grey does love his young wife, therefore he meets with no trials and no difficulties, and occupies a very subordinate place in the story. It is Christian whose life we follow with the keenest interest. She has great respect for her husband, and is very grateful for his kindness to her, but neither respect nor gratitude guides her; it is duty which is her watchword. She has undertaken the duties of wife and step-mother, and resolves to fulfil them righteously. We follow with increasing interest the still calm figure of the young wife, who bears so patiently all the discomforts of her new home. She has to suffer insolence from servants, insolence from the children, insolence from the sister of her husband's first wife, and to bear with a very exasperating habit of the Master's, that of reading at meals. But she endures to the end, and so finds with duty love, love awakened in herself, and called forth towards her from those whom she serves so faithfully. It would seem impossible to love the children-who are only interesting in so far as they are disagreeable, and yet they are gradually brought under the sweet influence of the young mother-in-law. The following extracts show some of the difficulties which she had to encounter:

She took no notice of what was said, but merely desired the little girl to bring pillows and a footstool, so that she could hold Arthur as easily as possible till the doctor came. And then she bade her take off the diamond bracelets and the hanging laces, and told her where to put all this finery away; which Letitia accomplished with aptitude and neatness.

"There, that will do. Thank you, my dear. little girl. Will you come and give me a kiss?"

You are a tidy

Letitia obeyed, though with some hesitation, and then came and stood by her step-mother, watching her intently. At last she said,

66

You are crumpling your pretty white silk dress. Won't that vex you very much "

"Not very much, if it cannot be helped."

"That is odd.

I thought you liked fine clothes, and married

papa that he might give you them. Phillis said so."

"Phillis was mistaken."

More than that Christian did not answer; indeed, she hardly took in what the child said, being fully engrossed with her charge. Letitia spoke again.

"Are you really sorry for Atty? Aunt Henrietta said you did not care for any of us."

"Not care for any of you !"

And almost as if it were a real mother's heart, Christian felt hers yearn over the poor pale face, growing every minute more ghastly.

"I wonder where papa can be, Letitia! Go and look for him. Tell him to send Barker for the doctor at once."

And then she gave her whole attention to Arthur, forgetting everything except that she had taken upon herself towards these children, all the duties and anxieties of motherhood. How many-perhaps none-would she ever win of its joys? But to women like her, duty alone constitutes happiness.

'Titia," said Dr. Grey, with sudden energy, as if the thought had been brewing in his mind for many minutes, "is there not a piano in the drawing-room? There used to be."

'Yes, and I practise upon it two hours every day," answered Letitia, with dignity. "But afterwards Aunt Henrietta locks it up and takes the key. She says it is poor mamma's piano, and nobody is to play upon it but me."

As the child said this in a tone so like Aunt Henrietta's, her father looked-as Christian had only seen him look once or twice before, and thought there might be circumstances under which anybody displeasing him would be considerably afraid of Dr. Arnold Grey.

"Did you know of this, Christian?"

"Yes," she answered, very softly, with a glance, half warning, half entreating, round upon the children. "But we will not say anything

about it; I never did, and I had rather not do so now."

"I understand. We will speak of it another time."

But he did not; neither that night, nor for several days; and Christian felt only too thankful for his silence.

Sometimes, when after ringing at intervals of five minutes for some trifling thing, Barker had sent up "Miss Gascoigne's compliments, and the servants couldn't be spared to wait up-stairs ;" or the cook had apologised for deficiencies in Arthur's dinners, by "Miss Gascoigne wanted it for lunch," and especially, when to her various messages to the nursery no answer was ever returned-sometimes, it had occurred to Christian-gentle as she was, and too fully engrossed to notice small

things that this was not exactly the position Dr. Grey's wife ought to hold in his-and her-own house. Still she said nothing. She trusted to time and patience. And she had such a dread of domestic war, of a family divided against itself.

Great care has been bestowed on the three women who are alone prominent in this story, Miss Grey, Miss Gascoigne, and Christian. Miss Gascoigne, sister of the first wife, is second only in interest to Christian, and is cleverly but very imperfectly sketched. Like the children, she is excessively disagreeable; still, the author assures us that

It may seem an odd thing to assert, and a more difficult thing still to prove, but Miss Gascoigne was not at heart a bad woman. She had a fierce temper and an enormous egotism, yet these two qualities, in the strangely composite characters that one meets with in life, are not incompatible with many good qualities.

Miss Gascoigne was not a bad woman, only an utterly mistaken aud misguided one. She meant no harm-very few people do deliberately mean harm-they only do it. She had set herself against her brother-in-law's marriage-not in the abstract, she was scarcely so wicked and foolish as that; but against his marrying this particular woman. Partly because Christian was only a governess, with somewhat painful antecedents, one who could neither bring money, rank, nor position to Dr. Grey and his family, but chiefly because it had wounded her self-love that she, Miss Gascoigne, had not been consulted, and had had no hand in bringing about the marriage.

Therefore she had determined to see it, and all concerning it, in the very worst light; to modify nothing, to excuse nothing. She had made up her mind that things were to be so-and-so, and so-and-so they must of necessity turn out. Audi alteram partem was an idea that never occurred, never had occurred, in all her life, to Henrietta Gascoigne. In fact, she would never have believed there could be "another side," since she herself was not able to behold it.

We must add the last sentences of this book, because they are the key, not only to this story, but to every story by the author of John Halifax.' At last this hope had quite to be let go, and its substitute accepted-as we most of us have, more or less, to accept the will of Heaven, instead of our will, and go on our way resignedly, nay cheerfully, knowing that, whether we see it or not, all is well.'

Looking back, as we are now able to do, we find that this author has insight only through her sympathy, and that this fact accounts at once for her strength and weakness.

She