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Novels and Novelists

‘My True Love Hath My Heart’

My True Love Hath My Heart

A Man's Honour — By Violet M. Methley

Underneath the price of this novel there is a blue hand sinister pointing to the words: ‘Read first turn-over of over.’ We are obedient, and here is the cream: Valentia Garland, misunderstanding husband, follows him England, Ceylon. Native rising; hunted like wild animals in tropical woods by native prince; end, happiness cost sister's life, heroic self-sacrifice. Fine story finely told, great ability, tense situations, thrilling, grim, interesting….

What is the misunderstanding between Valentia and Charles? In seeking for the answer we are confronted once again by the Law by which all popular novelists are governed, and it is—whatever comes in at the door, let the door but be shaken, the handle rattled, a voice heard without—Love flies out of the window. It would seem there is no other adventure in life but hunting the sweet terrible boy. Shall we be amazed then if one or the other of his captors, their first fine fatigue over, tiptoes page 166 to the window and softly opens it? Alas! we are so far from the world of faëry to-day that the only satisfactory ending to our stones is—‘they lived unhappily ever after.’ They never became King and Queen and lived in the castle beyond the blue mountains. Always, at the last moment, some happy accident awakened his suspicions or hers, and away flew Love and the chase began all over again.

Who of us can believe that Valentia Garland, cutting roses in the old-world garden, singing ‘in a low, sweet voice’ the old-world song, blushing and burying her face in the flower-filled basket, regardless of possible thorns in the old-world way, was only terrified by that sharp report like the crack of a whip shattering the peace of the afternoon? She never for a moment feared anything but the worst.

His heart in me keeps him and me in one,

My heart in him his thoughts and senses guide.

The words, she felt, described exactly what she and Charles were to each other, and then ‘bang’ and she rushed into the parlour to find her husband and her sister struggling together for the possession of the newly-fired revolver. What had happened? Little shrill hysterical Letty cried that Charles had tried to kill himself. Is that true? He will not say ‘Yes,’ and he will not say ‘No.’ Then, of course, it is true.

‘Don't you understand that I would rather have found you dead—yes, rather that!—than know you to be so utterly callous—utterly heartless, as you are!’

Any woman a shade less blissfully married might, at least, have asked her husband if he were unhappy or had lost his fortune, but there were too many roses in Valentia's garden, and so she flings the window open and out flies Love.

Charles's regiment is ordered to Ceylon. Before he leaves he feels it his duty—after all, he is her husband—to explain to Valentia that he was not trying to commit page 167 suicide; it was Letty. Oh, her burning scorn that he should try to shield himself behind a helpless girl! There is nothing to be done but to let him go to Ceylon without so much as ‘good-bye,’ and when he is gone and Letty has explained that his story was the true one, to follow him there and ask his pardon. But by the time she arrives at Colombo, Charles has gone with an expedition to Kandy, and by the time she has followed him there he has met with a femme fatale, and as Valentia raises the curtain over the door of his room he stoops to kiss ‘the smiling provocative lips.’ As if this were not enough, at this point the native prince enters upon the scene and begins his evil, unsleeping pursuit of her; and then, until the end of the book, we are in the thick of horrid native warfare, grim enough in all conscience, culminating in a hideous massacre and a blood-curdling description of death by the elephant. At the darkest hour the native prince demands that Valentia shall be given him and Charles set free as payment. But Letty goes instead, kills herself before the Old Spider has caught her, and before Charles, rushing into the Private Apartments, kills him.

And as, no doubt, always happens, with the dead still unburied, the ‘indescribable’ horrors scarcely a day old, Valentia and Charles shut the door and shut the window again, and vow that they and Love shall dwell together until….

(March 26, 1920.)