ii
The House of Five Swords, by Tristram Tupper, is a gallant representative of those novels which we are beginning to get in the inevitable reaction from such realism as Main Street and Moon-Calf, a romantic story of age and youth, of love and hate, of bitter unyielding hardness, and of melting pity and tenderness. It begins with the Robin, age seven, with burnished curls, viewing with awestruck delight five polished swords against the shining dark wall in Colonial House, where she had gone to deliver the Colonel’s boots! She forgot the boots. She lifted two of the swords from the wall, crossed them on the floor and danced the sword dance of Scotland. From the doorway a white-haired old figure watched with narrowed eyes and tightened mouth. Then the storm broke....
The House of Five Swords is Mr. Tupper’s first novel. A native of Virginia, he has done newspaper work, has tramped a good deal and was fooling with the study of law when American troops were ordered to the Mexican border. After that experience he went overseas. On his return from the war, he tried writing and met with rapid success.
iii
Readers of Baroness Orczy’s novels will welcome Nicolette.
This is essentially a love story, with the scene laid in the mountains of Provence in the early days of the Restoration of King Louis XVIII to the throne of France. An ancient half-ruined château perches among dwarf olives and mimosa, orange and lemon groves. There is a vivid contrast between the prosperity of Jaume Deydier, a rich peasant-proprietor, and the grinding poverty of the proud and ancient family of de Ventadour, whose last scion, Bertrand, goes to seek fortune in Paris and there becomes affianced to a wealthy and beautiful heiress. Nicolette, the daughter of Jaume Deydier, whose ancestor had been a lackey in the service of the Comte de Ventadour, is passionately in love with Bertrand, but a bitter feud keeps the lovers for long apart.
There will be a new novel this autumn, Ann and Her Mother, by O. Douglas, whose Penny Plain gave great pleasure to its readers. “Penny plain,” if you remember, was the way Jean described the lot of herself and her brothers whom she mothered in the Scottish cottage; but matters were somewhat changed when romance crossed the threshold in the person of the Honourable Pamela and a bitter old millionaire who came to claim the house as his own.
Ann and Her Mother is the story of a Scotch family as seen through the eyes of the mother and her daughter. The author of Penny Plain and Ann and Her Mother is a sister of John Buchan, author of The Thirty-nine Steps, The Path of the King, and many other books.
December Love, by Robert Hichens, will have a greater popularity than any of his novels since The Garden of Allah. It is a question whether this uncannily penetrative study of power and the need for love of a woman of sixty does not surpass The Garden of Allah. In Lady Sellingworth, Mr. Hichens is dealing with a brilliant woman. The theme is daring and calls for both skill and delicacy. Of the action, one really should not say very much, lest one spoil the book for the reader. The loss of the Sellingworth jewels in Paris had caused a sensation in the midst of which Lady Sellingworth was silent. She declined to discuss the disappearance of the jewels. There followed the advent at No. 4 Berkeley Square of Alick Craven, a man of thirty, vigorous, attractive and decidedly a somebody. But inexplicably—at any rate without explanation—Lady Sellingworth retired from society when Craven appeared.
Tell England by Ernest Raymond is a novel which has been sensationally successful in England. It is a war story and I will give you some of the opening paragraphs of the “Prologue by Padre Monty”: