In almost every case they are strong [p 140] studies from some point of view. Of deliberate analysis 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 circumstances, 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 [p 141] sense that I am free is turning my brain with joy,’ he confesses.
‘I say it because I feel it. I am aware that it is in very bad taste, but that doesn’t make it the less true. Do you suppose people are never glad when their relations die? They are—very often; they can’t help it; only they pretend they are not, because it seems so shocking. I don’t pretend—at least, I need not pretend to you. The fault is not always—not all—on the side of the survivors, Hannah. I don’t think I am any worse than those who pretend a grief that they don’t feel. I was never unkind to her—never in my life, that I can remember. I did not kill her; I would have kept her alive as long as I possibly could. I think—I hope—that if I could have saved her by the sacrifice of my own life, I should have done it without a single moment’s hesitation.’
‘I am sure you would,’ said Hannah.
‘But,’ he continued, with that unwonted fire blazing in his eyes, ‘since dead she is, I am glad—I am, I am! I am glad as a man who has been kept in prison is to be let out. It is not my fault; I would be sorry if I could. Some day, Hannah—some day, when we have been dust for a few hundred years—perhaps for a few score only—people will wake up to see how stupid it is to drive a man to be glad when his wife is dead. They are finding out so many things; they will find that out too in time.’
Probably it will still appear to many that Delavel’s admission was at least indelicate [p 142] and inconsistent with his chivalrous nature. It is not here possible to convey an adequate impression of his fiery spirit, his long heart-hunger, and the magnitude of the loss which a wholly uncongenial marriage must ever mean to such a man. When the full story of his life and that of his quietly ‘implacable’ wife is read, his conduct seems natural and excusable. It is as much a part of himself as the tremulous tenderness with which he ministers to the comfort of the frail Constance Bethune, after finding and bringing her home, or as his fierce grief when she dies.
Another very human spectacle that illustrates the author’s method is the reunion of Betty and Rutherford Ochiltree—the frank selfishness of their mutual joy while the poor woman who had been an unconscious barrier between them lies dead under their roof. It is a somewhat painful episode, and precludes anything like high esteem for Rutherford, but it has the quality of intense actuality.
In like manner is Adam Drewe shorn of some of the merit of his devotion to the heroine of Fidelis by being shown in [p 143] successive attachments to other women during his long exile in Australia. The author recognises that, ‘the laws of literary romance being so much at variance with the laws of Nature,’ Adam is certain to suffer in the reader’s good opinion for having ‘continued to hunger for feminine sympathy as well as his daily dinner.’ No doubt his stature as a hero lessens when it appears that though the absent Fidelia was ever in his thoughts, and a daily source of inspiration to him as a writer, he twice narrowly escaped marriage—first with a servant girl at his lodgings, and afterwards with the daughter of his landlady—and that at another period of his colonial life he became involved in a disreputable kind of Bohemianism. But he is not disgraced by these lapses to the extent that the author anticipates; at all events, they make him more human than he could otherwise have been.
It is this power of infusing a robust humanity into her characters that makes the distinctive feature of Ada Cambridge’s best novels. In each, whatever the quality of the [p 144] plot, there are always two or three personages who talk and act as real men and women do—now rationally or in obedience to custom, now passionately or with that perversity which, as the author once describes it, ‘is like a natural law, independent of other laws, the only one that persistently defies our calculations.’ They are mostly big people with big appetites. The beauty of the women is the beauty of mind and of sound physical health.
Susy Delavel was tall, well grown, straight and graceful, with an intelligent, eager face, though ‘her mouth was large, her nose not all it should have been, and her complexion showed the want of parasols and veils.’ She was ‘not handsome at all, but decidedly attractive.’
Sarah French, the girl in Fidelis whose comeliness so nearly drew the hero from his old allegiance, has ‘a strong and good, rather than a pretty, face,’ with a ‘large and substantial figure.’ Adam Drewe concluded on first sight of her that she was a nice woman. Later on he finds her ‘looking the very [p 145] incarnation of home, with her cheerful healthy face, her strong busy hands, her neat hair, her neat dress…. She might have sat for a statue of Motherhood—of Charity with a babe at her ample breast, and others clinging to her supporting hand; Nature had so evidently intended her to play the part.’
Katherine Knowles has fine physical symmetry and a strong, frank face. While lacking ‘the airs and graces, the superficial brightness, of conventional girlhood,’ she is ‘singularly vivid in her more substantial way.’
Betty Ochiltree’s beauty, too, is of the kind that wears well. She has a face ‘frank and spirited, firm of mouth and chin, kind and sweet, as honest as the day,’ surmounting an ample body, and she carries herself with dignity, ‘as few Australian girls can do.’ And how impressive and consistent with her character is the noble, placid figure of Elizabeth King, ‘perfect in proportion, fine in texture, full of natural dignity and ease!’