SIR JASPER'S TENANT.

Southland Times, Volume III, Issue 212, 5 February 1866, Page 2

SIR JASPER'S TENANT.

By the Author of " Lady Audley's Secret." Three Vols. [Maxwell and CoA] Miss Braddon writes novels very rapidly, but she writes so well that it is not likely the demand for them will slacken. " Sir Jasper's Tenant," the latest of the series, is fuE of interest, and it will be read with eager delight ; for although criticism may lay its hand upon some portions of its mystery, there is quite enough good sensible writing to carry the book into popular favor. The "florid widow," Mrs. Harding, is so admirable a portraiture that it 'would of itself make an author's reputation ; and if Miss Braddon had taken more time for fche development of this character, the bhird volume would have been of equal merit to the first. Her genius would bave been equal to the sustainment of the lazzling and daring woman through the marriage ceremony with the elegant sybarite, Sir Jasper, and to a denouement really moreeffective than the somewhat im- : probably one that has been chosen. Twin Children resemble each other very often ; ( mt Miss Braddow will find i* difficult to : persuade the nubjio of the possibility pf a l -

man being unable to distinguish his wife from her sister. Mr. Wilkie Collins^ appears to be carrying his Miss Gwilt" to the point #e*are contemplating ; but the effect is likely to be destroyed by the doctrine of fatality with which his story is?so heavily incumbered. Miss Braddon's novel is a better one than " Armadale," because it is free from those indications , of labor and excessive ingenuity that are most conspicuous in, and detremential to. the interest of, Mr. Coliins' work. To disclose any part of the story, would be to impair the interest that will be taken in its perusal, and we shall therefore only remark that the tenant of an old "hermitage" on the estate of Sir Jasper Denison is a strange mysterious traveller, who, under the pressure of a great sorrow, secludes himself from the world. By accident he sees Sir Jasper's daughter, and becomes enamoured of her virtues ; and his affection is returned. An obstacle exists in the way of their union, and its nature is explained in a scene of terrible interest, that would have a potent effect upon the stage. In connection with the story of these ill-starred lovers, the Mrs. Harding above mentioned, appears in Sir Jasper's family circle. She is a woman of great artificial beauty, whose agreeable manners and conversation first attract and then ensnare the baronet ; but just as she has conducted that self-sus* tamed personage, with his eyer open, into a fool's paradise, a thundercloud bursts over her hopes, which clears the atmosphere for the virtuous characters, but sends the daring impostor to destruction. There is a murder in the third volume; but it is not required to support the interest of the story, which might, have indeed, have been better carried on without it. The loves of the** tenant and Marcia are described with refined force, and the story of the widow and her sister, up to a certain point, is one of the finest things Miss Braddbn has written. Boy-love, its trust and devotion, its suffering and despair, are also described with beautiful and touching effect. Some of the incidental characters are also extremely well drawn ; Mr. Silbrook, the bashful curate, standing out very prominently from the number ; but the scenes with the Dobs family are of unequal nierit. Altogether it is a very readable novel, and will afford entertainment to thelegions of Miss Braddon's ad- ' mirers. We subjoin some passages, which will sustain the opinion we have given of the work : — THE HEBMITAGKE AND ITS OCCUPANT. " Seven o'clock on a fine dry October ' evening and a red sunset behind the gaunt walls and bare windows of Eoxborough Castle ; red splashes of light ' upon the broad waters of the Merdrid • river ; lurid patches upon all the windows i facing westward in the quaint old town > ofEoxbuxgh; and in Sir Jasper Denison's i park, and all the woods surrounding that I grand old domain, long trails of crimson ■ glory slanting between the brownboles of , the trees, and creeping to darkness far „ away amongst the fern. Seven o'clock , and the .London express, due in. Box- . borough at twenty minutes after seven, r was to bring with it Sir Jasper's tenant, the unknown personage who had hired t a certain modest tenement, or shootingbox, hidden deep in the heart of Scarsdale wood, and let furnished by the Baronet to any respectable occupant who cared to give a decent price for a secluded habitation in a pieteresque locality. The 1 secluded habitation was known as the Hermitage, which romantic title had been 1 given to it by some sentimental occupant 1 in days gone by. There was a story connected with it, a tragical story, such - as generally belongs to a place of this ; kind; the story of a faithless wife, a i midnight meeting, a servant's treachery, and a surprise — a shrieking woman locked in an inner chamber, and watching through the keyhole — a duel to the death, and then a flight on horseback through the blackwoods away to the open country, and the miry roads leading Londonwards — an inquest at the Hermitage — a suicide found stark and stiff in a London lodging-house — and, last of all, a mad woman, living her dreary lifo for five-and-twenty miserable years in the great mansion yonder in the Park, and never uttering one coherent sentence in all those years, but in the paroxysms of her madness always doing the same things any saying the same words ; always watching through a keyhole, and beating with frantic hands against a door, and screaming out that there was murder being done-within. If you had been an amateur artist on the look-out for a subject for a water-colour drawing, scarcely anything could have been better for you than the Hermitage, lying low in a deep hollow of Scarsdale wood, with trackless depths of fern stretching away to the left of its grim walls, and a still black pool lying to the right ofthe old ivy-grown gate surmounted by a stone escutcheon, and marking the boundary of a garden that was no more. . . . The Hermitage had been, for a long time vacant, and the auctioner's advertisement had figured in the Times' Supplement at intervals during the last twelve months, agreeably varied by some little artistic touch of colour in the description, so that its staleness should escape the detection of house-hunters. Bachelors, with a taste for field- sports and retirement, came to look at the Hermitage, and generally went away despondent. Halfpay officers in search of a cheap habitation, and prepared to endure a good deal in the way of damp and dullness, came tb Eoxborough, puffed-up with hope, and returned to London stricken down by despair. One morning in, October Sir Jasper's housekeepers had received a letter from the Baronet, then travelling in Italy with his only daughter and heiresss, Marcia Denison, to the effect that a tenant who was to be expected by the afternoon express from London on the 15th of, October ; a very methodical .' kind of tenant, it would seem, since he had answered the auctioneer's advertisement from Marseilles, and had replied to the auctioneer's letter of particulars by definitely hiring the house, andannouncing his arrival at Eoxborough by a certain tram upoa a certain, dayy