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 assertion 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, [p 135] rather pompous house, over a people retaining the hereditary respect of vassals 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 mésalliance, 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 [p 136] for any of the principal incidents of Not All in Vain and A Marriage Ceremony. The passionate 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 [p 137] 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 classes 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 passing 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 [p 138] 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 principal 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 [p 139] 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 endorsement 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 principal 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.