'Leave that to me!' he replied, in the same tone.
'As you please,' she said; 'but I must not fall alive into their hands. Never look your mother in the face again if I do.'
He gave one more glance around, and saw that the enemy would come within a hundred yards of their hiding-place. Then he held the horse faster than ever and shut his eyes.
Was it a minute only, or an hour, until they heard the sound of the voices dying away in the roar of the river, and, opening their eyes once more, looked into one another's faces? Faces they thought that they had never seen before--so each told the other afterwards--so wild, so haggard, and so strange.
If, as Professor Masson says, 'it is by his characters that a novelist is chiefly judged,' Henry Kingsley's future reputation will be found to depend almost solely on what he accomplished in _Geoffry Hamlyn_, _The Hillyars and the Burtons_ and _Ravenshoe_. In the first two of these there is an abundance of original observation and little conscious study of character. The vivid Australian scenes of the one, and the Chelsea life of the other, are transcripts of the author's own memories. His knowledge of the squatters he got by working for them and living with them; what he knew of police and convicts and bushrangers he learned in doing police duty; the life of the Burtons, as told in 'Jim Burton's Story,' was that which the author saw during his boyhood round his father's old rectory on Chelsea Embankment.
'He seemed to me,' says Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie, 'to have lived his own books, battled them out and forced them into their living shapes, to have felt them and been them all.' Hardly all--one feels bound to say. The remark is entirely true of nearly everything in _Geoffry Hamlyn_ and of three-fourths of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_, but to _Ravenshoe_ it applies in a more limited degree, and to some of the later novels scarcely ever. Either through carelessness (of which one often suspects him) or deficiency of judgment, Kingsley more than once allowed the exigencies of his plots to destroy all consistency in his characters.
Thus, Squire Silcote, the clever old ex-lawyer, is made to retire from the world and brood for many years, and on quite insufficient grounds, in the belief that his first wife had been unfaithful, and had tried to poison him. Nothing short of a condition of semi-insanity could explain his conduct. In other respects the character is finely conceived. Emma Burton, too, is a perfectly natural and charming person until she is employed to revive the old problem of how far a sense of duty can triumph over the power of love. Her devotion to her deformed brother is wrong, because it is unnecessary. But even if this were not the case, it would be irrational in a woman so eminently sensible and unromantic as she is shown to be in the first half of the story. Almost at the beginning of her voluntary service she is represented as realising 'the hideous fate to which she has condemned herself in her fanaticism.' It is quite impossible to make the reader believe that, loving Erne Hillyar as she did, she could for years persist in rejecting him, and that her brother would permit so much sacrifice on his account.