Australian Writers Part 4

Buckley's ride to rescue his sweetheart from the bushrangers is one of the most moving and dramatic incidents in the book, and a good specimen of Kingsley's graphic narrative style. A band of the outlaws who were the terror of pioneer colonists fifty years ago have risen in the district, and, after committing outrages at one station, are reported to be riding on to another twenty miles distant. At the latter, Captain Brentwood's home, Alice happens to be alone. When the terrible news comes to her young lover, he is at Baroona, which by the shortest road is ten miles from Brentwood's. What start have the bushrangers had, and will they arrive before him?

Sam's n.o.ble horse, Widderin, a horse with a pedigree a hundred years old, stood in the stable. The buying of that horse had been Sam's only extravagance, for which he had often reproached himself, and now this day he would see whether he would get his money's-worth out of that horse or no.

I followed him up to the stable, and found him putting the bridle on Widderin's beautiful little head. Neither of us spoke; only when I handed him the saddle, and helped him with the girths, he said, 'G.o.d bless you!'

I ran out and got down the slip-rails for him. As he rode by, he said, 'Good-bye, Uncle Jeff; perhaps you won't see me again'; and I cried out, 'Remember your G.o.d and your mother, Sam, and don't do anything foolish.' Then he was gone....

Looking across the plains the way he should go, I saw another horseman toiling far away, and recognised Doctor Mulhaus. Good Doctor! he had seen the danger in a moment, and by his ready wit had got a start of everyone else by ten minutes. The Doctor, on his handsome, long-bodied Arabian mare, was making good work of it across the plains, when he heard the rush of a horse's feet behind him, and turning, he saw tall Widderin bestridden by Sam, springing over the turf, gaining on him stride after stride. In a few minutes they were alongside of one another.

'Good lad!' cried the Doctor. 'On, forwards; catch her, and away to the woods with her! Bloodhound Desborough will be on their trail in half an hour. Save her, and we will have n.o.ble vengeance!'

Sam only waved his hand in good-bye, and sped on across the plain like a solitary ship at sea. The good horse, with elastic and easy motion, fled on his course like a bird, lifting his feet clearly and rapidly through the gra.s.s. The brisk south wind filled his wide nostrils as he turned his graceful neck from side to side, till, finding that work was meant, and not play, he began to hold his head straight before him, and rush steadily forward....

One stumble now, and it were better to lie down on the plain and die. He was in the hands of G.o.d, and he felt it. He said one short prayer, but that towards the end was interrupted by the wild current of his thoughts. Was there any hope? They, the devils, would have been drinking at the Mayfords', and perhaps would go slow; or would they ride fast and wild? After thinking a short time, he feared the latter. They had tasted blood, and knew that the country would be roused on them shortly....

Here are a brace of good pistols, and they with care shall give account, if need be, of two men. After that, nothing. It were better--so much better--not to live if one were only ten minutes too late.... Now he was in the forest again, and now as he rode quickly down the steep sandy road among the bracken, he heard the hoa.r.s.e rush of the river in his ears, and knew the end was well-nigh come.... Now the house was in sight, and now he cried aloud some wild inarticulate sound of thankfulness and joy. All was as peaceful as ever, and Alice, unconscious, stood white-robed in the verandah, feeding her birds.

As he rode up he shouted to her and beckoned. She came running through the house, and met him breathless at the doorway.

'The bushrangers, Alice, my love!' he said. 'We must fly this instant; they are close to us now.'

She had been prepared for this. She knew her duty well, for her father had often told her what to do. No tears! no hysterics! She took Sam's hand without a word, and, placing her fairy foot upon his boot, vaulted up into the saddle before him.... They crossed the river, and dismounting, they led the tired horse up the steep slope of turf that surrounded a little castellated tor of bluestone....

'I do not see them anywhere, Alice,' said Sam presently. 'I see no one coming across the plains. They must be either very near us in the hollow of the river-valley, or else a long way off.'

'There they are!' said Alice. 'Surely there is a large party of hors.e.m.e.n on the plain, but they are seven or eight miles off.'

'Ay, ten,' said Sam. 'I am not sure that they are hors.e.m.e.n.' Then he said suddenly in a whisper, 'Lie down, my love, in G.o.d's name! Here they are, close to us!'

There burst on his ear a confused round of talking and laughing, and out of one of the rocky gullies leading towards the river came the men they had been flying from, in number about fourteen. They had crossed the river, for some unknown reason, and to the fear-struck hiders it seemed as though they were making straight towards their lair.

He had got Widderin's head in his breast, blindfolding him with his coat, for should he neigh now they were undone indeed! As the bushrangers approached, the horse began to get uneasy and paw the ground, putting Sam in such an agony of terror that the sweat rolled down his face. In the midst of this he felt a hand on his arm, and Alice's voice, which he scarcely recognised, said in a fierce whisper: 'Give me one of your pistols, sir!'

'Leave that to me!' he replied, in the same tone.

'As you please,' she said; 'but I must not fall alive into their hands. Never look your mother in the face again if I do.'

He gave one more glance around, and saw that the enemy would come within a hundred yards of their hiding-place. Then he held the horse faster than ever and shut his eyes.

Was it a minute only, or an hour, until they heard the sound of the voices dying away in the roar of the river, and, opening their eyes once more, looked into one another's faces? Faces they thought that they had never seen before--so each told the other afterwards--so wild, so haggard, and so strange.

If, as Professor Ma.s.son says, 'it is by his characters that a novelist is chiefly judged,' Henry Kingsley's future reputation will be found to depend almost solely on what he accomplished in _Geoffry Hamlyn_, _The Hillyars and the Burtons_ and _Ravenshoe_. In the first two of these there is an abundance of original observation and little conscious study of character. The vivid Australian scenes of the one, and the Chelsea life of the other, are transcripts of the author's own memories. His knowledge of the squatters he got by working for them and living with them; what he knew of police and convicts and bushrangers he learned in doing police duty; the life of the Burtons, as told in 'Jim Burton's Story,' was that which the author saw during his boyhood round his father's old rectory on Chelsea Embankment.

'He seemed to me,' says Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie, 'to have lived his own books, battled them out and forced them into their living shapes, to have felt them and been them all.' Hardly all--one feels bound to say.

The remark is entirely true of nearly everything in _Geoffry Hamlyn_ and of three-fourths of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_, but to _Ravenshoe_ it applies in a more limited degree, and to some of the later novels scarcely ever. Either through carelessness (of which one often suspects him) or deficiency of judgment, Kingsley more than once allowed the exigencies of his plots to destroy all consistency in his characters.

Thus, Squire Silcote, the clever old ex-lawyer, is made to retire from the world and brood for many years, and on quite insufficient grounds, in the belief that his first wife had been unfaithful, and had tried to poison him. Nothing short of a condition of semi-insanity could explain his conduct. In other respects the character is finely conceived. Emma Burton, too, is a perfectly natural and charming person until she is employed to revive the old problem of how far a sense of duty can triumph over the power of love. Her devotion to her deformed brother is wrong, because it is unnecessary. But even if this were not the case, it would be irrational in a woman so eminently sensible and unromantic as she is shown to be in the first half of the story. Almost at the beginning of her voluntary service she is represented as realising 'the hideous fate to which she has condemned herself in her fanaticism.' It is quite impossible to make the reader believe that, loving Erne Hillyar as she did, she could for years persist in rejecting him, and that her brother would permit so much sacrifice on his account.

The beautiful, crazy Gerty Neville is another instance of perversion.

Her silliness is exaggerated in order that she shall weary and disgust the _blase_ aristocrat who has married her. Some of her chatter is more inconceivable than the 'coo-ee-ing' which Mr. Hornung's 'Bride from the Bush' employed to attract the attention of a colonial acquaintance of hers in Rotten Row.

But the distortion which the character of Emma Burton undergoes, and the caricature of Gerty Neville, are, after all, easily pardonable faults in a story rich in n.o.ble thought and sympathy, bright with pretty, audacious nonsense, and containing such real personages as Jim Burton and his father and mother, Erne Hillyar, and the Honourable Jack Dawson.

Even in _Silcote of Silcotes_ there are intermittent glimpses of finely-conceived character which almost outbalance the eccentricities of the Dark Squire and his sister, the fantastic meddler in foreign intrigue. Kingsley's skill lay chiefly in his portrayal of men, especially of young men, such as the dashing Charles Ravenshoe and his philosophic friend Marston (a study of the George Warrington type); Lord Welter, Lieutenant Hillyar, and Colonel Tom Silcote, reckless profligates, but likeable fellows all; Frank Maberly, the athletic curate; and Sam Buckley, the type of an Australian country gentleman.

With old men he was less successful. Lord Saltire, the placid good-natured cynic of _Ravenshoe_, is, however, a clever exception. 'All old women are beautiful,' says Kingsley in one of his stories, and he never portrayed one that was not. His best are Miss Thornton and Lady Ascot. The younger women, excepting Mary Hawker and Adelaide Summers, are rather slightly drawn. Even Alice Brentwood is a somewhat indistinct personage compared with the Australian girls of Mrs. Campbell Praed and Ada Cambridge.

The superior position usually accorded to _Ravenshoe_ among Kingsley's novels is merited more by the soundness of its plot than by the naturalness of its characters. It was the author's first essay in pure romance, and, with Henry Kingsley, to build character from imagination was always largely, sometimes extravagantly, to idealise. He loved to people old country houses with walking mysteries, to unravel tangled genealogies, and discover secrets of youthful folly, to apportion property to rightful heirs, and endow his characters with a superhuman generosity. When Charles Ravenshoe is recovering from the long illness which terminates the full series of his misfortunes, he sends for Welter, the man who might be considered his arch-enemy, who not so long before that had seduced Charles's sister and stole his _fiancee_.

Ravenshoe is represented as forgetting all his newly-suffered wrongs, and thinking only of Welter as his favourite schoolfellow and youthful companion. Antic.i.p.ating doubts as to the feasibility of this, the author proceeds to discuss the point with the reader, as he does in many similar instances throughout the story. He appears to have a constant anxiety about the impression he is making, and his comments and confidences certainly become distasteful. But this foible goes only a small way to discount the sterling merits of the novel.

ADA CAMBRIDGE.

Towards the close of 1890 the Australian booksellers--a cautious, conservative cla.s.s in their att.i.tude towards new fiction, especially that produced by the adventurous female writer of these latter days--began to display so marked an interest in the work of Ada Cambridge, that one not acquainted with the circ.u.mstances of the case might have credited them with a friendly--possibly a patriotic--desire to give due place to a newly-risen native genius. And when, in the following year, another story from the same pen appeared, the popularity of the author was firmly established.

The neat red volumes were on every stall; the Mudie of Melbourne gave them a place of honour in his show-window, and the leading critical review said that the second story possessed a charm which ought to induce even the person who ignored fiction on principle to make an exception in its favour. It was the kind of gratifying recognition that the public always believes itself eager to offer the deserving young writer. Yet Ada Cambridge's literary work had extended over no less a period than fifteen years. Of course, much of this delay in securing recognition might have been avoided. Probably in England she could have won a substantial reputation in a third of the time, and with half the labour expended by her in contributing to the Australian press. But, as the wife of a country clergyman, she had other matters besides literature to occupy her attention, and was content to write when there happened to be leisure for it, and to see her work in a few of the leading colonial newspapers.

About half a dozen novels were issued in this way, besides occasional articles and poems. The publication of the longer stories in the _Australasian_, a high-cla.s.s weekly journal, ought in itself to have made a name for the author, and possibly would have done so, were they not in most cases so obviously a local product, and therefore not to be seriously considered. It was a repet.i.tion of the experience of Rolf Boldrewood. In the end, as usual, it was the English public that first accepted her novels for what they were worth.

Ada Cambridge is a native of Norfolk, the lonely fens and quaint villages of which are a picturesque background of some of her best stories. In 1870, shortly after her marriage, she went with her husband, the Rev. George Frederick Cross, a clergyman of the Church of England, to w.a.n.garatta, in Victoria. After residing successively in several other country towns of this colony, they settled in 1893 at Williamstown, a waterside suburb of Melbourne.

A novel ent.i.tled _Up the Murray_, dealing with life in the colonies, was published by Ada Cambridge (the author continues to issue her work under her maiden name) in the Melbourne press in 1875. Others of the same character followed at irregular intervals. Two were issued in book-form by a London firm of publishers, but did not attain to much more than a library circulation.

When the author again came before the English public, it was with a novel in which the purely Australian interest was rigidly subordinated to dramatic quality and a richly sympathetic study of character. _A Marked Man_ is the story of a younger son of an old English county family who, while sharing the pride and indomitable spirit of his ancestry, develops a hatred for conventional prejudices and religious cant, and, after making a final a.s.sertion of independence by marrying a farmer's daughter, emigrates to New South Wales to establish a name and fortune on his own account.

The first half of the action takes place in England, the remainder in the colonies. The natural beauties surrounding the home of the Delavels at Sydney are not less delicately and poetically described than the village life they have left behind in the mother country--the patriarchal rule of an old-fashioned, rather pompous house, over a people retaining the hereditary respect of va.s.sals for their feudal lord; but the view given of Australian society is, in keeping with the relation to it of Richard Delavel and his household, of the slightest kind.

Delavel and the only daughter whom he has trained to be his second self, whose comradeship makes him almost forget the long-drawn thraldom of his early _mesalliance_, live in a world so much and so necessarily their own, that one is grateful for the good taste which excluded from it the bustle and commoner interests of colonial life. The novel met with general, and in several instances cordial, favour in England, and since then the author has yearly increased her reputation.

Three out of five of the later novels are, like _A Marked Man_, made comparatively independent of the distinctively local interest to which we have been accustomed in the works of most Australian authors. It is not possible, for example, to point out anything in the shape of an essentially local first cause for any of the princ.i.p.al incidents of _Not All in Vain_ and _A Marriage Ceremony_. The pa.s.sionate half-brute, Neil Hammond, who pursues the heroine of the former story across the world, and terrorises her with his unwelcome attentions, would have met a violent death, or himself have murdered someone, in his own country or elsewhere as inevitably as in Australia; and the man who killed him would not have found Katherine Knowles less faithful during the long years of his imprisonment had her sacrifice been under the daily observation of Hammond's family and her own strait-laced aunts in their East Norfolk home.

In _A Marriage Ceremony_, the only advantage secured by taking the story from London to Melbourne--instead of to New York, let us say--seems to lie in whatever added strength the sense of greater distance imparts to the temporary appearance of a final separation between Betty Ochiltree and her strangely-wedded husband. The marriage that was a condition of their inheritance having been performed, bride and bridegroom part in accordance with a previous agreement. The former reappears as a prominent figure in the society of modern Melbourne--the Melbourne of 1893, when the failure of banks and land companies was a regular subject of morning news.

Here, it might be supposed, was an opportunity for one or two vivid and instructive sketches of the sensational period that witnessed the proof of so much folly and its punishment, and wrought so many more effects on all cla.s.ses of Australian society than could be noted in the common records of the time. But the great crisis is almost ignored in the novel. There are merely a few pa.s.sing references to its progress, and a mention of the loss on the part of Mrs. Ochiltree of some of the wealth which she is beginning to regard as having been rather spuriously acquired.

Even the very successful story of the _Three Miss Kings_ and _A Mere Chance_ tell little of the city life of Australia, though their action is placed in it almost exclusively. The latter is a tale of match-making intrigue and money-worship in Toorak, but the main interest of the plot apart, the account of fashionable Melbourne is a singularly colourless one. As for Mrs. Duff-Scott and her Major, the amiable pair who in the character of leaders of Melbourne society undertake to find husbands for Elizabeth King and her sisters, and whose benevolent intentions are so effectually forestalled, they are as conventionally English as though they belonged to the pages of Miss Braddon or Mrs. Henry Wood.

Again, though during half of _Fidelis_ we are given occasional impressive and delightful glimpses of Nature under southern skies, the princ.i.p.al characters are English, and in England is centred first and last the dominant pathos of the story. A complete absence of dialect from the novels helps to emphasise the author's slender use of extraneous aids to interest.

The influence of Ada Cambridge's twenty-five years' Australian experience is shown in her general outlook upon life, rather than in the details of her work. The prevailing tone of her books is one of marked cheerfulness, sincerity, and simplicity; she has a hearty dislike for conventional stupidities, especially for the mock-modesty that stifles honest sentiment; and she gives emphatic endors.e.m.e.nt to the pleasant dictum (which seems so much more feasible in sunny Australia than in colder northern lands) that the second half of life is not less fruitful and satisfying than the first.

As the general effect of Ada Cambridge's teaching, so far as it can be gathered from her plots, and the few instances in which she has permitted herself anything in the shape of didactic expression, is to make us more patient with life's complexities and perceptive of its compensations, and more content with whatever happiness may be drawn in our way by the chain of accidents called Destiny, so do her princ.i.p.al characters, in their foibles and their strength--in the little acts and impulses which qualify alike their heroism and their baseness--tend to make us more discriminative and charitable.

In almost every case they are strong studies from some point of view.

Of deliberate a.n.a.lysis there is very little; but there are numerous realistic touches not commonly admitted in fiction, which, handled with skill and insight, keep the character within the pale of common experience and increase rather than alienate the reader's sympathy.

Thus, Richard Delavel's outburst of relief upon the death of his first wife, so far from being vulgar and brutal, as it might have seemed in other circ.u.mstances, recalls and emphasises the high sense of duty and honour and the iron self-restraint which had enabled him to be in all essentials a good husband for twenty-five years to a cold-hearted creature, between whom and himself there had never been either common interest or feeling, and for whose sake he had relinquished the woman that would have been his real mate in intellect and sympathy. Delavel's housekeeper, who is also a privileged friend, takes him to task for his unseemly hurry to go in search of this old love before his wife had been a week in her grave. He makes no secret of his relief. 'The sense that I am free is turning my brain with joy,' he confesses.