Beloved Half-Wit

THE KING'S GENERAL--Daphne du Maurier--Doubleday & Co. ($2.75).

"Oh, God, the Grenviles . . .!" Throughout England's wild West Country, in the 17th Century, no family could hold a candle to the wild Grenviles. "There was some quality in the race, some white undaunted spirit bred in their bones . . . surging through their blood." When roisterous Sir Richard, most dashing of all the Grenviles, met bitter-sweet Mistress Honor Harris over a dinner of roast swan and burgundy, their seismic passion rocked the country. "Oh wild betrothal, startling and swift . . .!" Gossips recounted how he had ". , . shamed me in a room in Plymouth . . . carried me [away] by force--[that] I ... lived as his mistress for three months--[but] Richard and I, in the gladness of our hearts, did nought but laugh.. . ."

Readers will not have to dig much farther than this into The King's General to know that Daphne du Maurier has again struck pay dirt in the same lode that produced her best-selling Rebecca and Jamaica Inn. Her new novel (the Literary Guild's January selection) is a hose-and-doublet pageant of the English Civil War (1642 to 1646) for which Miss du Maurier's agent has whispered loudly to Hollywood that $250,000 will do. The chief characters of The King's General are mostly out of English history; .heir lusty, gusty goings-on are mostly Author du Maurier's property-room imagination.

"Beware the Chasm!" One day, shortly after her seduction, Honor went horseback riding with Sir Richard. "Beware the chasm!" he cried, as they charged across a wild moor. It was too late. Honor plummeted into the "yawning crevice" and was totally wrecked below the waist. So Richard married a rich widow.

Fifteen years passed. England was torn by civil war. Honor, crippled for life, was politically very much on her toes; she sped about the King's business in a wheel chair. Richard, very unhappy with his wife (he now had "a brown, weather-beaten air about him"), was appointed King's General in the West. When he bumped into Honor at the Cavalier headquarters he said, rather tactlessly: "I had not thought to find you so damnably unchanged." Then he asked: "Have you not your own apartment?" Said Honor with "some small attempt at dignity": "It would be considered somewhat odd if we retired there."

"Farewell, Then, Sweetheart." Between battles, Sir Richard reminisced: "There was a bruise on your left thigh." Often he muttered tenderly: "Beloved half-wit!" At last, Honor flung off the bed sheets "and let him look upon the crumpled limbs that he had once known whole and clean." "Farewell, then, sweetheart," cried Richard, and rode away.

Novelist du Maurier's romantic whoop-dedo also includes a Puritan witch, a villainess with "serpent's eyes," a secret passageway with moldering bones in it, floods of blood, and scads of Gestapolike Roundheads.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.