The author is fond of showing the attractiveness of such women at the age of thirty, [p 146] or even more. ‘In real life,’ she once observes, ‘the supremely interesting woman is not a girl of eighteen, as she is in fiction. Every man worth calling a man knows that. A girl of that age … knows as much about love as does a young animal in the spring, and not a bit more. And the human male of these days—so highly developed, so subtly compounded—has grown out of the stage when that much would satisfy him. I mean, of course, the human male who in real life answers to the hero in fiction—a man who must have left, not only his teens, but his twenties behind him.’
When one comes to the heroes, it is easy to recall half a dozen commanding figures who blunder in the most natural and amiable manner in their affairs; who think a good deal more of their immediate personal comforts than of religious or ethical abstractions; who like their own way and try to get it; who, in short, are mostly what the author wishes them to appear—‘the men out of books that we meet every day.’ Of little men, in the physical sense, there are only [p 147] two of any importance, but even these are virile and masterful. A general aim of the stories would seem to be to show the sexes what each chiefly admires in the other. It is first a sort of apotheosis of the mens sana in corpore sano, and after that an illustration of the independent attractions of sympathy, gentleness, culture, and high character.
Though in most cases the strongest attachments are formed between men and women arrived at an age to discriminate beyond mere physical charm, nevertheless physical charm is the most powerful, though not always acknowledged, motive of their choice. ‘Because of this,’ says the pathetic Hilda Donne in A Marriage Ceremony, touching her cheek, which is terribly disfigured by a birth-mark, ‘I have never had love. Can you think what that means? You can’t. Once I thought I was not going to be quite shut out—once; but I was mistaken. I have found out that it is for one’s body that one is loved, and not for one’s soul.’
Hilda unconsciously exaggerates, for it appears that Rutherford Hope, though at [p 148] first affected with disgust by her disfigurement, and convinced that no healthy man could consort with ‘so unnatural a woman,’ had come at last to regard her as a possible wife—before he was confronted with the sudden temptation to secure a fortune by wedding Betty Ochiltree, in compliance with the conditions of her millionaire uncle’s will. Yet Hilda’s comment is substantially sound. Even Rutherford, with all the sense of his mature years, and all the culture that enabled him to appreciate her poetic gift, would have had to argue himself into a marriage with her.
The ugliness of Adam Drewe, from which his mother turned in disgust at his birth, and which in youth drove him across the seas in an agony of sensitiveness from the woman he loved, was a less serious affliction than that of Hilda Donne; but we know that he continued to be keenly reminded of its disadvantages long after time had proved the sterling qualities of his manhood, lessened his deformity, and brought him fame and wealth.
[p 149]
Compared with the previous illustration, however, his case is at fault in failing to give a sufficient description of his deformity. But that he himself long thought it an insuperable bar to his happiness is clear. When he fell in love with Fidelia Plunket, she was temporarily blind. His affection for her was returned, and he knew it, but dreading the disillusionment that would ensue when her sight was restored, he fled to Australia and determined to abandon all thought of her as a wife. Urged to return, because ‘when a woman is a woman,’ and really in love with a man, ‘there’s no camel she won’t swallow for him,’ Drewe replied that his camel was just the one camel that no woman had been known to swallow, or, at any rate, to digest. And he remained—for twenty years.
The plots of Ada Cambridge’s novels are of the episodical order, and the author, despite her openly-expressed scorn for the unnaturalness of the average conventional novel, has not disdained employment of some of its time-honoured methods. Occasionally she is at pains to explain the feasibility of [p 150] coincidences employed to secure dramatic interest. They are certainly never of an impossible kind, and no one would deny the truism that real life abounds in them. But has not a distinguished writer aptly pointed out that there are matters in which fiction cannot compete with life? As a rule, however, where a few such weaknesses exist, they do not count for much with the average reader when the principal scenes are as finely drawn as those in A Marked Man or Fidelis, or The Three Miss Kings. The latter story in some details puts a greater strain upon the credulity than any of the other novels, yet so well conceived and absolutely natural are the characters of the three girls, and so humorously and pictorially presented the chief incidents in their development, that the dubious points of the plot become almost insignificant. The qualities of the novel as a whole are similar to those which obscure the artistic defects of Geoffry Hamlyn, and which for thirty-seven years have made it one of the most popular of Australian stories.
[p 151]
In the presentation of tragic or pathetic incidents lies Ada Cambridge’s chief power, as far as her plots are concerned. In A Marked Man it is accompanied by her highest achievements in portraying a variety of well-contrasted character
. Fidelis, which opens at the Norfolk village of the earlier novel, and reintroduces the Delavels, contains fewer developed characters, as may also be said of A Marriage Ceremony. But the three novels are equal in the high standard of their emotional quality. No quotation of moderate size could do justice to any of the principal scenes of A Marked Man: the chivalrous sacrifice of Richard Delavel’s youthful marriage; the inward repentance of it for twenty-two years; the revival of his love for Constance Bethune; his painful anxiety for her health, hungry enjoyment of her companionship, and anguish at her death; and his own death soon afterwards. In the more briefly detailed tragedy that brings into such striking relief the sprightly drama of A Marriage Ceremony, there is a scene giving a fair example of the author’s style in [p 152] touching passages. When Hilda, deeply in love with Rutherford Hope, hears of his union with another woman, she takes the readiest means of effacing herself by suddenly marrying a shallow coxcomb who seeks her for mercenary reasons, and going with him to Australia. Years afterwards she is so affected by the sudden reappearance of Rutherford, and by subsequent ill-treatment received from her jealous husband, that an exhausting illness follows, and to save herself from insanity she commits suicide. Meanwhile the long separation of Rutherford and Betty Ochiltree, which began on the day of their marriage, is coming to an end, and Hilda’s death removes the final impediment. Together they pay a last visit to the dead woman:
Incapable of speech, he lifted a tress of hair—flowing free over the rigid arms, because it was really pretty, and thus had to be made the most of—and pressed it a moment to his bearded mouth. In that gesture he seemed to ask her forgiveness for having been a man like other men, as Nature made them.
‘Kiss her,’ Betty whispered, pushing him a little. She, too, felt that it would be something, if not much, [p 153] to put to the account that was so frightfully ill-balanced—a kiss from Rutherford before all was wholly over.
He stooped and laid his lips—scarcely laid them—on the waxen forehead. And he thought how he had nearly kissed her once, in the scented spring dusk, at her father’s gate, and been repelled at the last moment by the thought of something that he could not see…. He turned back the sheet and straightened it, and nobody but hired undertakers had anything more to do with Hilda Donne. He put out the lamps, leaving her in the dark, which, as a living, nervous woman, she had always been afraid of; and he took Betty in his arms to comfort her a little, before he opened the door upon the light and life of their own transfigured world.