RED SPIDER.*
WE have lately seen so many announcements, made principally by magazine-publishers, of new stories "by the author of John Hewing," that we have been haunted by a not unnatural fear that one of the strongest of our living novelists may be yielding to the temptation to overwrite himself. It is therefore pleasant to be able to say emphatically that none of the evil results of such yielding are to be found in the pages of Bed Spider, for it is a book which, in addition to its other merits, is characterised throughout by undiminished force and freshness. Of course, the inventive range of every creative artist has its limitations, and this special artist is no more successful than many of his brethren in leaving altogether the things that are behind. Honor Loxmore, the carrier's daughter, is a gentler, more domestic, but not weaker sister of the fisher-maiden Mehalah, and the idea of a girl being forced by stress of cruel circumstance into an uncongenial marriage is repeated from the earlier work. In Bed Spider, however, the sacrifice is not consummated, for Honor, more fortunate than Mehalah, is saved at the last moment from her saturnine suitor ; and the story, instead of being a tragedy, is a vigorous rural comedy upon which tragic shadows are for a time allowed to lie. In all other respects than those referred to, there is no similarity between the two novels,—back- ground, characters, and incidents are new, both in conception and arrangement ; and though we believe that Mehalah is now, and will probably remain, its author's strongest and most im- pressive work, we incline to give Red Spider the second place. It is, indeed, quite possible that, in virtue of its cheerful con- clusion—for the reading public like cheerfulness—it may be more of a popular favourite than its undoubtedly greater predecessor, and though we could not endorse such a verdict, we should not fail to understand the grounds of it.
Bed Spider is a picture of rural life in Devonshire half-a. centuryago, and is rendered additionally interesting by the skill with which the author utilises those local customs, superstitions, and modes of thought which are either ex- tinct or are fast becoming so. The title is a nickname given to the heroine on account of her fanciful resemblance, imparted by her habitual costume, to a little insect which seems to be common in Devonshire ; and a local superstition connected with this same insect provides the story at its opening with a situation out of which arise all the complications which follow. The red spider—otherwise, the money-epinner—was supposed to bring lack to the person in whose direction it crawled, and the fateful quarrel which brings to an end the friendship of Taverner Langford and Hillary Nanspian is fairly begun when one of the brothers-in-law accuses the other of " sloking "—i e., enticing away—the lock-bearer, which is slowly travelling towards his outstretched band. From the beginning of the book to the end, we are, indeed, in an atmosphere of supersti- tion ; and the various " over-beliefs " are not merely passively accepted, but are seen working as active factors in life. The well-to-do yeoman, Hillary Nanspian, seriously suggests to his lawyer that he shall take out a summons against Mrs. Veale for giving him an apoplectic fit by the practice of the black art ; his unimaginative and by no means ignorant son Larry is completely unmanned by the apparition in broad daylight of the white hare; even the canny, common-sense, matter.of- fact Langford is not unaffected by supernatural terrors ; and one of the most powerful chapters in the novel is that in which the diabolical Mrs. Veale uses the hideous and gruesome super- stition of the "hand of glory" as a means to induce Charles Luxmore to rob his employer. The old-world feeling of the book is intensified by the pictures of dead and half-forgotten customs which find a place in its pages ; and one of these customs—the" hare-hunt"—the very mention of which rouses in the breast of the scolding woman a mingled emotion of rage and terror, is described with a wonderfully picturesque and graphic touch. Then, too, the conversations in the book are rich in those quaint proverbial phrases which linger longest in those out-of-the-way rural places, "far from noise and smoke of • lied Spider. By the Author of "John Herring." 2 vole. London Matto and Hindus.
town," and which are now rapidly dying out even there,— phrases which are unhappily being replaced by the town-born banalities of modern slang. So largely have they vanished that they have to be supplied by invention rather than memory; and the author does not always catch the true tone, for now and then we come across a simile which is more after the manner of Sam Weller than of Mrs. Poyeer ; and in this matter the sharp- tongued wife of the Loamshire farmer may be taken as a. standard type, which is, at any rate, a very different one from that represented by Dickens's cockney comedian.
The story proper begins with the quarrel, already referred to,. between Taverner Langford and Hillary Nanspian, who occupy adjoining farms, and who for years—though they are in every way unlike—have found a tepid but real pleasure in each other's society. Natispian's wife, Blandina, who has long been dead, was Langford's sister, and brought to her husband the farm of Chimeworthy, which, under Nanspian's shiftless management, has for years been deteriorating, the quarrel being rendered a more serious one for him by the fact that he is at the time con- siderably in debt to his cold, stern, and unrelenting brother-in- law. Hillary Nanspian, like many another lazy swaggerer, has, however, a keen eye for the bright side of things, and there happens to be a bright side here sufficiently obvious to be dis- cerned by a less hopeful person than himself. Langford, his. brother-in-law's little estate, is in a very different condition. from Chimswortlay. It is, moreover, strictly entailed ; and as Taverner Langford, whose house is kept for him by the shrewish Mrs. 'Peale, is a confirmed old bachelor, it is to the purblind Nanspian a simple certainty that, whatever becomes of Chims- worthy, Langford must at its present owner's death pass either into his own hands, or into those of his son Larry. This cer- tainty Taverner Langford intends to scatter to the winds by the only possible means. He had determined never to marry, but
he revokes this determination, and being, in spite of his external coldness, not insensitive to feminine charms, he resolves that he will take to wife Honor Luxmore, the beautiful daughter of the village carrier. Luxmore pine is the victim of a monomania. He believes himself the rightful possessor of a neighbouring
estate, once inhabited by a family bearing his name ; and though he has not a tittle of valid evidence, or, indeed, of any evidence at all, in support of his claim, he is convinced that were he in possession of money—a hundred pounds is the sum he mentally fixes upon—his rights would be established, and he would be transported from poverty to affluence. The wily Taverner Langford works upon this craze, and in return for a promise of pecuniary assistance in his legal campaign, Luxmore engages to. press his daughter to accept Langford's suit. Honor, however, has half-unconsciously given her heart to the good-natnred„ affectionate, but lazy and unsatisfactory Larry Nanspian; and she is so resolute in her defence against the attack, that for a time the allies are defeated all along the line. At last, cir- cumstances put into Langford's hands a weapon which he uses relentlessly. He has taken into his employ a worthless brother of Honor's, who, after enlisting in the Army and going through a campaign, has deliberately chopped off a finger to escape further service, and is dismissed in disgrace as a malingerer. Charles Lmunore, and a box containing Langford's savings, amounting to more than a thousand pounds, disappear together, and the obvious inference is that the young man— whose character justifies any suspicions—is the thief. Only to- save her brother from a felon's cell, and her father from destitu- tion and a broken heart, does the strong and loyal Honor haul down her flag, and consent to become the wife of Taverner Langford. Happily, as has been indicated above, the final sacrifice is averted; but we have, perhaps, already told too much of the story, and must leave readers to discover from the pages of Bed Spider how the emotionally satisfying denouement is brought about. Suffice it to say that the story is strongly and compactly constructed ; it does not straggle, but moves steadily forward, and it presents to us a group of charactere anct situations which impress the imagination and linger in the memory.
It is rather curious that while Honor Lnxmore is the only person in the book who is wholly pleasant to contemplate—for even her lover Larry and her sister Kate are far from satisfactory —the book in its entirety leaves a decidedly agreeable flavour on. the mental palate, due, it may be, to the fact that Honor, one of the sweetest and strongest of recent heroines, is never long out of our sight, and that her finely touched spirit seems to pervade the book. The brothers-in-law whose fend provides the story
with its central motif; are portraits admirable alike in outline, modelling, and expression ; Mrs. Veale and the other Luxmores axe equally successful; and there is not, indeed, a single character who has any part in the action of the story who fails to live for us. The beauty or power of some of the situations can hardly fail to impress even the most careless reader. The chapters devoted to Larry and Honor's night-watch for the lamb-killer remind us somewhat of one of the loveliest chapters in English literature, which will be forgotten by no one who has ever read Mr. George Meredith's Ordeal of Rickard Peverel,—the chapter describing the walk of Richard and Lucy through the fields. We have not in Red Spider the same lyrical fervour, as of prose bursting into song ; but we have a similar feeling, a similar atmosphere, a similar rendering of the evanescent but unique charm of the dawning consciousness of a first-love. In the vivid, Rembrandt-like picturesqueness, which lies in strong, arresting chiaroscuro rather than in either outline or colour, the author has produced nothing which we think quite equals the night- visit of Mrs. Veale and Charles Luxmore to Wellon's cairn, and the scene in Langford's house which immediately precedes it ; indeed, Mrs. Veale's unctuously long-drawn description of the horrible yet fascinating potentialities of the " hand of glory" is one of the most impressive passages of " creepy " writing that we can remember. It has, however, a rival in the passage in which we see Taverner Langford's repulsive housekeeper for the last time. Detected in her theft, more than half-detected in her attempt at murder, she, whose life of wickedness has been so contemptibly mean, achieves, like Mr. Browning's Ottima, a certain "magnificence in sin." At her master's challenge, she drinks with unmoved face the poisoned bowl she has prepared for him, and vanishes from sight, only to be seen again digging with dying fingers a grave for herself under the hill where Wellon's gibbet has once stood, and where she has afore. time buried her plunder and hatched her plots. This is a very powerful scene, and in sombre tragedy it stands alone; but in other qualities it has various equals throughout the book, and though we have already said that we cannot regard Bed Spider as, on the whole, equal to Mehalah, it is nevertheless an ex- ceedingly powerful and fascinating story.
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