LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume VII, Issue 716, 5 October 1876, Page 3

LITERATURE.

THE STORY OF BERYL KARR. By Mrs Alexander Frasbr. Part I. Beryl Karr leant listlessly against the door of an ivy-covered portico, with a dreamy expression in her large brown eyes. It was a day full of midsummer loveliness, of green waving woods, of golden wheatfields, over which the soft breeze stole with a gentle billowy swell; of bloom and fragrance, depths of shadowy coolness, and long stretches of velvet turf ; while amidst them all the white picturesque house stood sheltered by century-old trees. Taken as a whole, it would have been difficult to find a lovelier or a sweeter place than this home of the Pelhams ; but probably the desert island on which found himself was also a lovely place, yet the fact did not, perhaps, prevent him from finding it excessively dull; and scarcely less dull than that island was Pelham Manor. * * * * *

Leaning against the portico, a weary and then a desperate feeling stole over Beryl. She felt for the first time how she was bound to a life she hated, and a gleam of an attempt to escape it came to her; but it was only a will-o'-the-wisp, for on attempting to substantiate it she knew that she was fighting against the inevitable. She was not only an orphan, but she was dependent on the bounty of some distant relatives ; and she had against her will consented to marry the heir of Pelham, more to please his parents, who were her benefactors, than from any motive of aggrandising herself. This heir Carlton Pelham, ordinarily called ' Carl'—was, like a good many Englishmen, what is called a * model' of domestic virtue. He was one of those men to whom it would never occur that there was a duty in life beyond his own well-tilled fields, or a pleasure beyond his own hearthstone ; a man well renowned in [the county where his family had been born, and had vegetated for generations, as a walking epitome of amiable qualities, and eminently fitted to make the happiness of a really good woman. What he was calculated to be to a woman who was not really good, who had a hot perverse heart, and a wilful spirit that soared above the homely occupation delegated to the sex, it is scarcely worth while to say. *****

Carl Pelham had been Beryl's accepted lover two years ago. She had engaged herse'f to him when she was but sixteen, and a very little way beyond badyhood in point of appearance and character. She stood now with her gaze falling on the circlet of pearls which was her betrothal ring, and thinking that at any .rate marriage would be some change. Would it be more agreeable to live the same old life as Carl's wife ? she wondered j but somehow she felt too listless to go into the question, and dismissing the sad fact from her mind, she went into the house. As she entered the door, she remarked that Carl's coat and hat were lying on the table ; and she knew that during her absence on the stroll that had preceded her reverie by the portico Carl must have returned from his visit to Paris of some weeks. The only feeling that the knowledge of his arrival caused was one of weariness ; and it was with a slight frown furrowing her white forehead, from which her hair was pushed carelessly back, and with her usually faint colour deepened a shade, that she walked into the sitting room. Carl rose gladly to meet her, and she noticed that a stranger, and a handsome one, was conversing with Carl's mother. Beryl let her glance rest a moment on him, and a little admiration she could not control welled up within her at the finely-cut features and dark wavy hair. Then she spoke to her intended husband, a little coldly, perhaps, under the circumstances. ' ...

' What has made you come back so suddedly, Carl ? We did not |expect you for some days.' ' I thought you would be glad to see me, no matter what time I returned,' he answered, withl a lazy placid smile. ' And I recollected that you were eighteen to-day, so I wanted to wish you many happy returns, and all that sort of thing.'

'Did you?' said Beryl, indifferently. 'Well, wish me many more brilliant ones. I have been wondering this morning whether lam human or vegetable ? Whom have you brought with you ?' 'lt is Lennard,' Carl said, more warmly than was hia wont. I came across him in Paris, and persuaded him to come here to |assist me' in those experiments, you know.' # * * * ' Lennard, this is Miss Karr. Let me present you to ber,' he broke in, impatient that Beryl should make so desirable an acquaintance without delay. • Carl's intended,' Paul Lennard thought, as he bowed, and then his usual fluency of speech seemed to desert him. He had heard that the girl was beautiful, but there was so much scepticism in hia nature that he had not believed it. Now he acknowledged her beauty at once to himself, and the power it had over him. Beryl was scarcely one to be described, There was too much of a wild-rose loveliness about her—an evanscent bloom, a shy light in the great brown eyes, a changeful turn of the scarlet lips—to bear pen-and-ink description. She had especially that beauty which is the ' gift of the devil;' and very few men could have turned- from her to a classical divinity, with faultless features and a strict outline.

' I think I saw a white dress flitting through the woods as we arrived,' Paul said.

' I daresay,' Beryl answered quietly. She has not lost her head as he had done. Coolly surveying him with frank fearless eyea, she went on speaking unreservedly, as though she had known nim for years—but, then, shyness was not Beryl's forte. ' I did not notice your arrival. I suppose I was thinking of something else. I think I did fall into a brown study, which is not a pleasant way of passing time, but which may be a useful one on one's birthday.'

' A fit day for your birthday,' Paul said involuntarily, thinking that the extrome loveliness of nature which he had remarked on as he drove up to the house was well matched to the exquisitely lovely face and tigurejj before him. Beryl understood the covered compliment, as she could not but understand the undisguised admiration in the keen eyes that gazed at her ,• but she only answered him by a scornful curve of her Jip,

' I do not think much of this paragon,' she remarked to Carl later. ' You don't, Beryl V and Carl's face fell at her disparaging remark. 'But he improves so much on acquaintance. And besides, there are the experiments, which I am anxious for him to try ; so that I hope you will not send him away by incivility.' 'I am not likely to be civil or uncivil to him. He had better employ himself with chemistry; only I know that the end of it will be that the whole house will be blown to atoms.' * I cannot help liking chemistry, Beryl,' he murmured half apologetically. And it was true what he said. Nature has her freaks"; and she had varied the dull monotony of the Pelham race by developing a man of science among them. Carl from an early period of boyhood had dabbled in chemical experiments ; had alarmed the whole household by sudden and untimely explosions ; had turned his room at college into a laboratory ; and since his return home had been engrossed in the one pursuit that was beyond tilling the fields or lolling over his hearth.

Paul Lennard was the only person he had found to sympathise with him ; a man who had been an erratic but brilliant student whed Carl knew him first—full of devotion to science, but also full of crude theories, mad enough to have exploded the whole system of chemistry as at present held and expounded. He had gained practical knowledge later in the laboratory of a great Russian chemist; but being a shrewd and clever thinker, he still inclined to a theoretical school —too visionary to be ever an eminent man of science, but still with an enviable reputation; and Carl's faith in him was unlimited.

To Berl, Paul Lennard's name had suggested weariness and boredom. Carl, in his exceeding enthusiasm, had persisted in reading her one or two of his friend's scientific articles, and she yawned over them dismally. She had heard so much of him in connection with retorts and crucibles, blowpipes and gasses, that she had drawn one of those fancy sketches in which we are all given to indulge—a portrait of a tall, ungainly,' redhaired man, weak-eyedand round-shouldered, such, as one naturally connects with study. She was surprised, but nothing more, when she saw Paul Lennard himself, slender, handsome, and thoroughbred, and with an appearance of intellect that was a rare article at Pelhan Manor.

Beryl passed the afternoon of her birthday alone. Possibly Paul would have preferred lingering in the cool, pleasant drawing-room, and watching the pretty piquant face that had caught his fancy at once, but Carl had dragged him away perforce. And it was late when the two emerged from the retreat of science. . e

Beryl was ill-natured enough to feel a certain gratification at the look of disappointment that sat on her betrothed's stolid features as she met him before dinner.

' You do not seem to have enjoyed the experiments so much as I expected,' she remarked stiffly, a little vexed perhaps that chemistry should have proved such an efficient rival to her own attractions.

' The experiments came to nothing, Beryl, was the honest answer. ' I find I have been foolish and ignorant. Lennard thinks my idea a good one, but the sprocess all wrong; he does not believe that the result I wish to obtain is practicable.' 'Of course, it is all nonsense,' laughed Beryl satirically. ' I have told you so a dozen times ; but now that Mr Lennard has given you his fiat, you had best throw it all to the four winds.' (To he continued.)