Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/409

tion of that dream which suggests the name of Olive—the mother's dream of losing her child, and then, after awhile, seeing at the foot of the bed a little angel—a child-angel—with a green olive-branch in its hand, and being bid by its baby voice to follow, and following it accordingly over a wide desert country, and across rivers, and among wild beasts; and how at every peril the child held out the olive-branch, and all was well; and how, when the mother felt weary, and her feet were bleeding with the rough journey, the little angel touched them with the olive, and she was strong again; and how, at last, they reached a beautiful valley, and the child said, "You are quite safe now," and then the white wings fell off, and there was seen only a sweet child's face, and the little one stretched out her hands and said, "Mother!" When that mother was lying, long years after, on her death-bed, tended by the daughter she had once scornfully entreated, she recalled and recited that strange dream, saying, "All this has come true, save that I did not lose you: I wickedly cast you from me." There is something strained in the character of Mrs. Rothesay, not quite pardonable on tho ground of developing that of Olive. The father, too, seems to us rather a fusion of characters than a character in himself. Olive is, indeed, the only being in the novel who possesses a true, sustained, and vital individuality of her own; for the painter Vanbrugh and his sister Meliora, though admired by some critics, are, to our thinking, unfinished sketches, which evince an sum at originality and humour, but without asserting success; and again, the infidel priest and his mother, Christal Manners and Lyle Derwent, able as are some of the touches by which they are discriminated, do not, either of them, stand out upon the canvas with a reality to be had in remembrance, with the intensity of a presence which is not to be put by. Olive we accept, and chivalrously reverence as a woman such as the world is not rife in—at once gentle and strong, meek and fearless, patient to endure, heroic to act. It is good, as well as sad, to see the frail girl at the time of her father's sudden death, and her mother's dull helplessness—when "misery had made her very wise, very quick to comprehend—and without shrinking she talked over every matter connected with that saddest thing, a deceased bankrupt's sale." That is a fine picture of Olive, pallid and careworn, her fair hair falling neglected over her black dress, her hand supporting her aching brow, as she pores over dusty papers, pausing at times to speak to the hard, cold lawyer, in a quiet, sensible, subdued manner, of things fit only for old heads and worn hearts. Perhaps the author is a little too hard upon Olive, and barely tempers tho wind to tho shorn lamb, as art might counsel and mercy incline. A blighted infancy; a childhood of neglect, like corn blasted before it be grown up; a "youthheid" too alien from the joyous, and too well acquainted with grief; the troubles of a father's death, an embarrassed res angusta domi, a mother's blindness, unrelieved to the hour when her feet stumble on the dark mountains, and Olive is left alone in the shadow of the valley beneath; and then the distresses caused by guardianship of a wilful sister; the withering dejection of one who never told her love, but who, like a virgin martyr, must suffer pang by pang the anguish of a maiden, pure and high-minded, who has given her heart way unrequited—"casting it down irretrievably and hopelessly at the feet of a man who knows not of the gift he has never sought to win." Harold Gwynne himself is portrayed in a painstaking manner, and is