(By the Editor of the Cornhill Magazine.)Here the story is broken off, and it can never be finished.What promised to be the crowning work of a life is a memorial of death.A few days longer, and it would have been a triumphal column, crowned with a capital of festal leaves and flowers: now it is another sort of column - one of those sad white pillars which stand broken in the churchyard.
But if the work is not quite complete, little remains to be added to it, and that little has been distinctly reflected into our minds.We know that Roger Hamley will marry Molly, and that is what we are most concerned about.Indeed, there was little else to tell.Had the writer lived, she would have sent her hero back to Africa forthwith; and those scientific parts of Africa are a long way from Hamley; and there is not much to choose between a long distance and a long time.How many hours are there in twenty-four when you are all alone in a desert place, a thousand miles from the happiness which might be yours to take - if you were there to take it? How many, when from the sources of the Topinambo your heart flies back ten times a day, like a carrier-pigeon, to the one only source of future good for you, and ten times a day returns with its message undelivered? Many more than are counted on the calendar.So Roger found.The days were weeks that separated him from the time when Molly gave him a certain little flower, and months from the time which divorced him from Cynthia, whom he had begun to doubt before he knew for certain that she was never much worth hoping for.And if such were his days, what was the slow procession of actual weeks and months in those remote and solitary places? They were like years of a stay-at-home life, with liberty and leisure to see that nobody was courting Molly meanwhile.The effect of this was, that long before the term of his engagement was ended all that Cynthia had been to him was departed from Roger's mind, and all that Molly was and might be to him filled it full.
He returned; but when he saw Molly again he remembered that to her the time of his absence might not have seemed so long, and was oppressed with the old dread that she would think him fickle.Therefore this young gentleman, so self-reliant and so lucid in scientific matters, found it difficult after all to tell Molly how much he hoped she loved him; and might have blundered if he had not thought of beginning by showing her the flower that was plucked from the nosegay.How charmingly that scene would have been drawn, had Mrs Gaskell lived to depict it, we can only imagine: that it would have been charming - especially in what Molly did, and looked, and said - we know.
Roger and Molly are married; and if one of them is happier than the other, it is Molly.Her husband has no need to draw upon the little fortune which is to go to poor Osborne's boy, for he becomes professor at some grey scientific institution, and wins his way in the world handsomely.
The squire is almost as happy in this marriage as his son.If any one suffers for it, it is Mr Gibson.But he takes a partner, so as to get a chance of running up to London to stay with Molly for a few days now and then, and 'to get a little rest from Mrs Gibson.' Of what was to happen to Cynthia after her marriage the author was not heard to say much, and, indeed, it does not seem that anything needs to be added.One little anecdote, however, was told of her by Mrs Gaskell, which is very characteristic.One day, when Cynthia and her husband were on a visit to Hollingford, Mr Henderson learned for the first time, through an innocent casual remark of Mr Gibson's, that the famous traveller, Roger Hamley, was known to the family.Cynthia had never happened to mention it.How well that little incident, too, would have been described!
But it is useless to speculate upon what would have been done by the delicate strong hand which can create no more Molly Gibsons - no more Roger Hamleys.We have repeated, in this brief note, all that is known of her designs for the story, which would have been completed in another chapter.
There is not so much to regret, then, so far as this novel is concerned;indeed, the regrets of those who knew her are less for the loss of the novelist than of the woman - one of the kindest and wisest of her time.
