“Boy” passes into Sandhurst, but is expelled therefrom for drunkenness; he gets a clerkship, incurs card debts, alters the amount on a check which Miss Letty has sent him, repents of the fraud, returns the whole amount, with a manly apology, to Miss Letty, enlists, and is killed by the Boers. That, then, is the sad end of “Boy.”
In addition to the characters mentioned there are others of subsidiary importance, and there is, threading in and out of the “Boy” episodes, a love-story which ends tragically, at the time, for the Major’s niece, though she eventually meets the man Fate has decreed she shall marry, on a South African battle-field.
In no other book has Miss Corelli favored us with so many smile-provoking passages. There is, for instance, a good deal of grim humor about “Rattling Jack”—the salt-dried veteran of whom “Boy” makes a friend when the D’Arcy Muirs move from their London home in Hereford Square to cheaper quarters on the coast.
Rattling Jack doesn’t sympathize with the elementary methods of the young student of natural history. He doesn’t see why beetles and butterflies should be trapped and carried home for the “museum.” One day “Boy” brings for the old sailor’s inspection a beautiful rose-colored sea-anemone which he had managed to detach from the rocks and carry off in his tin pail.
“There y’are, you see!” cries Rattling Jack. “Now ye’ve made a fellow-creature miserable, y’are as ’appy as the day is long! Eh, eh—why for mussy’s sake didn’t ye leave it on the rocks in the sun with the sea a-washin’ it an’ the blessin’ of the Lord A’mighty on it? They things are jes’ like human souls—there they stick on a rock o’ faith and hope maybe, jes’ wantin’ nothin’ but to be let alone; and then by and by some one comes along that begins to poke at ’em, and pull ’em about, and wake up all their sensitiveness-like—’urt ’em as much as possible, that’s the way!—and then they pulls ’em off their rocks and carries ’em off in a mean little tin pail! Ay, ay, ye may call a tin pail whatever ye please—a pile o’ money or a pile o’ love—it’s nought but a tin pail—not a rock with the sun shinin’ upon it. And o’ coorse they dies—there ain’t no sense in livin’ in a tin pail.”
This weary-wise old fellow must be credited to Miss Corelli as one of her best portraits in miniature. His observations are full of sage and seasoning, and we could do with more of him.
Did Miss Corelli’s themes allow of it, we might have been treated to a good deal more humor in her works, but she is too good an artist to intrude comic relief when such relief would merely be an annoying interruption. But various passages in her books show her to be the possessor of a considerable sense of the laughable, and it is to be hoped that she will some day find time to write a story dealing with the lighter side of existence.
CHAPTER XI
“THE MURDER OF DELICIA” AND “ZISKA”[C]
In the former of these works Marie Corelli has much to say about men that is very disagreeable and, as it appears to us, only partially true. It would seem that the novelist is too prone to seize upon a particular instance of “man’s ingratitude,” laziness, cruelty, and general worthlessness, and set it up as a frequently occurring type.
In “The Murder of Delicia,” for example, a handsome guardsman, nicknamed by his fellow-officers “Beauty Carlyon,” marries a lady novelist who is equally gifted in brain and person, and, after spending her money for a considerable period, finally breaks her heart—in short, “murders” her—by his neglect and infidelity.