The love of Mildred and Mertoun, which blots the Tresham ’scutcheon, is in origin as innocent as that which breaks into flower across the royal ambitions of Colombe; and their childlike purity of passion becomes, in spite of the wrong to which it has led them, the reconciling fact upon which at the close all animosities and resentments die away.  The conception is genuinely tragic, for the doom which descends upon them all is a Nemesis which they have all contributed to provoke, but which none of them deserves; and which precisely the blended nobility and naivete of Mildred and Mertoun prevents from passing by them altogether.  More mature or less sensitive lovers would have found an issue from the situation as easily as an ordinary Hamlet from his task of vengeance.  But Mertoun and Mildred are at once too timid and too audacious, too tremulous in their consciousness of guilt, too hardy and reckless in their mutual devotion, to carry through so difficult a game.  Mertoun falters and stammers in his suit to Tresham; Mildred stands mute at her brother’s charge, incapable of evasion, only resolute not to betray.  Yet these same two children in the arts of politic self-defence are found recklessly courting the peril of midnight meetings in Mildred’s chamber with the aid of all the approved resources and ruses of romance—­the disguise, the convenient tree, the signal set in the window, the lover’s serenade.  And when the lover, who dared all risks to his lady and to himself for a stolen interview with her night by night, finally encounters Tresham, he is instantly paralysed, and will not even lift a sword in his own defence.  Upon this union of boundless daring for one another’s sake and sensibility to the shame of having wronged the house and blotted the ’scutcheon Mertoun’s fate hangs, and with his Mildred’s, and with hers Tresham’s.

Beside the tragedy and the stain of the love of Mertoun and Mildred, Browning characteristically sets the calm, immaculate, cousinly affection of Gwendolen and Austin.  One has a glimpse here of his habitual criticism of all satisfied attainment, of all easy completeness on a low plane.  It is Gwendolen herself who half disarms that criticism, or makes it, as applied to her, more pathetic than trenchant by instantly detecting and proclaiming the different quality of Mertoun’s love.  “Mark him, Austin:  that’s true love!  Ours must begin again.”  In Tresham Browning seems to have designed to portray the finest type of ancestral pride.  He is “proud” of his “interminable line,” because the men were all “paladins” and the women all of flawless honour; and he has the chivalrous tenderness of ideal knighthood, as well as its honourable pride.  When Mertoun has received his death-stroke and told his story, the tenderness comes out; the sullied image of his passionately loved sister not only recovers its appeal, but rises up before him in mute intolerable reproach; and Mildred has scarcely breathed her last in his arms when Tresham succumbs to the poison he has taken in remorse for his hasty act.  It is unlucky that this tragic climax, finely conceived as it is, is marred by the unconscious burlesque of his “Ah,—­I had forgotten:  I am dying.”  In such things one feels Browning’s want of the unerring sureness of a great dramatist at the crucial moments of action.