What is the end?  Mercy Vint is given in marriage to the honestest and faithfulest gentleman in the book, whose heroism we admire without envying.  But in any case so good a woman would have achieved peace for herself, and it is at some cost to our regard for her entirety that we consent to see her rewarded by being made a nobleman’s wife and the mother of nine children.  In this character she lives a life less perfect and consequent than she might have led in a station less exalted, but distant from the circles in which she could not appear at the same time with the man who had infamously wronged her without exciting whispers painful to herself and embarrassing to her husband.  Indeed, there seems to be rather more of vicarious expiation in her fate than the interests of population and of “young women who have been betrayed” have any right to demand.

Mrs. Gaunt fully expiates her error before her trial ends.  But how of her husband?  Mr. Reade seems to like his Griffith Gaunt, who is not to our mind, and who is never less worthy of happiness than at the moment when his wife forgives him.  It is not that he is a bigamist and betrayer of innocence that his redemption seems impossible through the means employed; but how can Catharine Gaunt love a coward and sneak, even in the wisdom which a court of justice has taught her?  This furious and stupid traitor is afraid to appear and save his wife lest he be branded in the hand; and we are to pardon him because, at no risk to himself, he gives the worthless blood of his veins to rescue her from death.  If the fable teaches anything in Griffith Gaunt’s case, it is this:  Betray two noble women, and after some difficulty you shall get rid of one, be forgiven by the other, come into a handsome property, and have a large and interesting family.  If the reader will take the fate of Griffith Gaunt and contrast it with that of Tito Melema, in “Romola,” he shall see all the difference that passes between an artificial and an artistic solution of a moral problem.

Defective art is noticeable in the minor as well as the principal features of the denouement of Griffith Gaunt.  There is the case of the unhappy little baby of Mercy.  It is plain that the infant is a stumbling-block in its mother’s path to Neville Cross; but we have scarcely begun to lament its presence, when it is swiftly put to death by a special despatch from the obliging destiny of the denouement.  The event is a coincidence, to say the least, and is scarcely less an operation than the transfusion of blood by which Griffith Gaunt and his wife are preserved to a long life of happiness.  But this part of the work is full of wonders.  The cruel enchantments are all dissolved by more potent preternatural agencies, and a superhuman prosperity dwells alike with the just and the unjust,—­Mrs. Ryder excepted, who will probably go to the Devil as some slight compensation for the loss of Griffith Gaunt.