MISS BRADDON'S LATEST NOVEL,
Millard's Weird is a return on the part of Miss Braddon to her (and our) first literary love. It is welcome; we prefer this story to Ishmael, although it is not so clever, taking cleverness to mean what painters express by that word, and although there are faults in the work which so skilful and practised an artist in fiction ought to have avoided. In spite of these, however, the book has a great charm, and it is that of the olden time, when Miss Braddon was the mark for imitation by nobodies who fondly supposed that, in order to compete with the inventor of Lady Audley and Aurora Floyd, they had only to borrow a golden-haired murderess and a racing-stable
The title is a blunder into which Miss Braddon has been led by what somebody calls "a fatal love of alliteration ;" for Wyllard's is the last among the names of her personages which ought to have been forced upon the attention of the reader to whom an intended puzzle is presented, although without the broad hint of the title the reader knows who it is that has committed the crime with which, upon the system of Ga.boriau, the story begins. Yet so ingenious is the plot, and so skilful is the retracing of the clue thus deliberately placed in the hand of the reader, that no diminution of interest is caused by the foregone conclusion. We have here a truer test of ability than the propounding in a first chapter of an enigma which is to await its solution until the last; for the author has to invest the where, the why, and the how of the case with constant interest and consistent importance, while the absence of these would be readily overlooked by curiosity for which a drag had been laid "from first to finish." Then, despite the grimness of the actual story, it is pleasant reading, because of its freshness, its easy humour, and the sympathetic characters grouped around the man whom Miss Braddon has placed in a situation equally novel and dramatic, the man who commits a second crime as the inexorable consequence of a first, effected with impunity many years before.
We have once more a Cornish story in Wyllard's Weird; and Miss Braddon gives the local colour and atmosphere of Cornwall with as much effect as she gave those of the New Forest in Vixen, and those of Brittany in Ishmael. Her picture of the unostentatious, secluded luxury of Penmorval, the home of Julian Wyllard and his wife, is very attractive—she trusts for her effects more to nature and less to upholstery than usual—and the garden at Penmorval is, like Mary Howitt's, a thing to be remembered. There is artful art in the contrast presented by the place, and the cultivated, quiet life of its owners, with the mystery of guilt, and the slow, sure march of the avenger of blood, coming to lay it all bare and desolate.
"Penmorval was a beautiful old place, standing on high ground, yet so richly wooded as to be shut-in from the outer world. Only the Cornish giants, Boughtor and Brown Willie, showed their dark crests above the broad belt of timber which surrounded the old Tudor mansion. A double avenue of elms and yews led to the stone porch. The long stone façade to the north looked-out upon a level lawn, divided from the park by a haha. The southern front was curtained with roses and myrtle, and looked upon one of the loveliest gardens in Cornwall,—a garden for which the wives and dowagers of three centuries of Cornish squires had laboured and thought. Nowhere could be found more glorious roses, or such a treasury of out-of-the. way flowers, from the finest to the simplest that grows. Nowhere did April sunlight shine upon such tulip@ and hyacinths; nowhere did June crown herself with fairer lilies, or autumn flaunt in greater splendour of dahlias, hollyhocks, and chrysanthemums. The soil teemed with flowers. There was no room left for a weed."
The childless wife of the refined, fascinating, but distinctly selfish, exacting, and cynical Julian Wyllard, lives for her garden, in so far as her husband will permit her to live for anything except himself. "She counts the blossoms on a particular Moire de Dijon. She remembers the cruel winter when that superb John Hopper' succumbed to the frost. She has her nostrums, and remedies for green-fly, as mothers have for measles." Dora Wyllard is one of Miss Braddon's most successful characters ; she is not inconsistent or dis• appointing until quite at last ; but then we do not agree with Miss Braddon,—for a reason to be assigned presently,—as to what Dora will do. She is a very sweet woman, and a perfect lady. The change of mind which leads her to break her engagement with Mr. Edward Heathcote—the future amateur detective of this clever story—and to marry Mr. Wyllard, is so skilfully treated that our good opinion of the inconstant fair one is not modified by it ; and we do not care to remember that jilting is the usual description of transactions of the kind. Mr. Heathcote, too, who combines the status of a prosperous country gentleman with the functions of a coroner, and is on the friendliest terms with Mr. Willard and his wife, is a welldrawn character and an interesting person at first; but it is afterwards that Miss Braddon makes the great mistake of the book with regard to him. Then we have Bothwell Grahame, a cousin of Mrs. Wyllard's, who lives at Penmorval as much as he likes, and is "not much worse than a Newfoundland dog" in the way of companionship with the bookish and att-loving Wyllard. He is admirably described ; and the complications that result from his unavowed excursions by railway to visit Lady Valeria Ildrborough, a flirting married woman, drawn to the life of her type and class with the very best of Miss Braddon's power, are managed ingeniously. There is serious truth to life, human nature, and certain phases of society in this story of a well-born, well-bred, well-educated young man, not a bad fellow by any means, or even "half-bad." Grahame drifts helplessly into a useless existence, and a compromising position, which at length becomes intolerable to him ; and the author is at her best in the description of the redeeming influence of a true and lawful love, and in the merciless exposure of the vulgarity, vanity, and venality of the great lady whose dupe and victim the handsome young fellow is, until a stroke of fate sets him free to begin a life of honest work. The leading interest of the story is so strong, its development is so dramatic, and the Wyllards are so absorbing that after Bothwell G-rahame has ceased to be suspected of the murder on which the plot turns, and the suspicions of Mr. Heathcote, at first directed against the idle young man, are diverted into the right channel, he does not continue to interest us vividly ; but this is no fault of his own. Mr. Heathcote's sister, Hilda, the white-winged angel who redeems Bothwell Grahame, is a very nice young lady very nicely drawn ; but she has no chance in the same book with Mrs. Wyllard and Lady Valeria, nor do we believe she would have been talked by the latter out of her common-sense belief that her lover meant what be said, and really preferred her to the wealthy widow with whom he had "broken." Old love-letters would not have convinced a new love of so trusting and candid a kind as that with which Miss Braddon has endowed Hilda Heathcote.
The tracing of the crime which forms the motive of the story is very clever indeed. That Julian Wyllard should send for the most famous " criminal " lawyer of the day to investigate on the spot the murder that has convulsed the whole neighbourhood, and of which his own wife's cousin is suspected by the coroner, is a stroke at once so bold and cynical that it indicates the whole character of the man. In Mr. Distin we have a portrait to be recognised at a glance :—" Dora had expected a foxy and unpleasant individual, with craft in every feature of his face. She was agreeably surprised on beholding a good-looking man, with aquiline nose, dark eyes, hair and whiskers inclining to grey ; slim, well set-up, neat without being dapper or priggish—a man who might have been taken for an artist or an author, just as readily as for a lawyer versed in the dark ways of crime." Very characteristic is Mr. Distin's talk, too, as be discusses the beauties of Cornish nature, and the drawback of their not being available from Saturday to Monday. " I like my little London,' says Distin coyly, almost as if he were talking of a fascinating woman, there's so much in it, and it's such a devilish wicked place, to those who really know it.'" The French retired detective, not the least like M. Lecoq or Ponson du Terrell's people, and all the scenes through which Mr. Heathcote is led by his self-imposed mission, are cleverly described ; the .
convent at which the murdered girl was reared, the story of the first crime, the slow unravelling of the mystery of " Monsieur
Georges," all these are in Miss Braddon's best style. That the cynicism and hypocrisy of the criminal are too complete and successful for belief is, perhaps, true ; but we come to know him only when he has hidden his secret for ton years, and the author is entitled to. have him taken for granted at that time. The weak point of his conduct is his ever having allowed the girl whom he had reason to fear to leave London, where he might easily have disposed of her, for his own country and his own neighbourhood, where danger of detection lay, and he would inevitably be forced to make one compromising confidence at all events. However, if Leonie Lemarque had not been in the train that crossed the viaduct between Saltash and Bodmin Road on the evening when this story opens, Wyllard's Weird would never have been written.
We now come to the mistake of the book, and here we may surprise our readers and arouse their incredulity by saying that we believe it to be occasioned by a failure of courage on Miss Braddon's part. There is a delicate touch of skill in her handling of Wyllard's death ; in the sudden yet deliberately
wrought catastrophe that preclude all discussion between the detected and denounced criminal and his wretched wife; the cynical hardihood-of the man is carried out to the ideal point of consistency ; over the wife's despair a veil is properly drawn. But the writer of this story must know very well that she had to deal with a situation that was completely, thoroughly tragical ; that no such woman as she makes Dora Wyllard would "some day" approach even in thought the possibility of marriage with Mr. Heathcote, once her betrothed lover, who had resigned his claim to her hand, at her own entreaty, because she found that she loved Julian Wyllard, and not Edward Heathcote,and who had afterwards hunted her husband down, and come to denounce him as a murderer on his death-bed. When Mr. Heathcote begins to investigate the mysterious crime, our sympathies are with him ; the author has put him forward as a person to be admired and respected ; as the plot thickens, and we find him pursuing his successful rival in the murderer of Leonie Le marque, his character suffers a violent change. What are we to think of the man who, when he is on the track of :" Monsieur Georges," speaks thus to the loyal friend of Bohemia, who refuses to betray a former comrade :— " I want to stand face to face with that man and to siy, You are the murderer of Maria Pre vol and her lover. You are the murderer of the helpless girl who went alone to England, having in her possession certain papers which throw too strong a light upon your guilty past. Yon who have held your head erect before the world, and have passed for a man of honour and probity, you are the remorseless
villain whose life stands twice forfeited to the law.' What would you gain by this ?' asked Trottier, wondering at this new aspect of his English friend. 'Revenge ! There is enough of the old Adam left in the best of us to make revenge sweet. What must'it be to a man who has lost the one delight that made life worth living?'"
After this, what becomes of the Heathcote previously drawn for us ? It was a fine idea to make Mrs. Wyllard urge her former lover and true friend to devote himself to the investiga tion which would clear her cousin, Bothwell Grahame, from an unjust suspicion, thus rendering hers the hand that put retribution in motion ; but Miss Braddon had not the courage of the situation; she had created a real tragedy, and she recoiled before its fulness of doom. She could not resist the temptation to get her people out of the impasse somehow ; she yielded to the fatal temptation to "make things comfortable," and so she has weakened one of her most powerful stories, and departed from some of her best-laid lines of character.
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