LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume VII, Issue 723, 13 October 1876, Page 3

LITERATURE.

THE STORY OF BERYL KARR. {Continued ) ' You have no right to speak to me like this, Mr Lennard,' she said in a voice that had lost a little of its strength. 'lt is true that, having brought all this on myself, I have no right to complain ; still you know that, though I have forgotten a good deal for you, it is not right that I should forget everything.' ' Bah !' he ejaculated scornfully. To him this pandering to conscience was simply folly. Paul Lennard was a bad man, with an extraordinary lack of respect for anything that could stand between him and his desires, and the wonderful intellect that, mated to a nobler nature, would have achieved great things, now only served to make him scoff at any power, heavenly or earthly, that rose up against hia own. 'When you come with me, Beryl, you will have to forget everything. The past will be a sealed book, but the future a fair open volume, that you will enjoy to your full bent. Beryl!'—and grasping her two hands with more roughness than tenderness, he drew her to him—' do you not love me well enough to be glad that you are mine—my very own ?' The girl tried to free herself from his clasp. ' It is not possible for me to be yours—l am pledged to Carl!' she cried vehemently. ' I may have been rash and foolish, but I never intend to be your wife.'

' Then you have been deliberately trifling with me ?' he asked, with a dark fire gathering in his eye, a deep red flush mounting to his brow.

1 And if I had,' she exclaimed, with spirit, ' you would have had no right to be surprised at it. You never intended anything but trifling with me, and you stayed on here just for carrying on your amns?menV 1 That is false, Beryl,' he answered quickly. ' I loved you, and I lingered here so that I might try and make you love me in return. '

'And was that "honour' on your part, when you knew that I was going to marry your friend V 'My friend! Who ever thinks of friendship when love is paramount 1 Everything is admissible, you know, in love and war. Carl was but a stepping-stone by which I hoped to arrive at my end.' Beryl dashed away a tear impatiently from her eyes. It had risen from a certain pitiful recollection of the man whom they had both so unscrupulously injured. A feeling of remorse surged over her. The handsome chiselled face, full of power and haughtiness, of Paul Lennard seemed to vanish; and in place of it rose the fair placid brow, the mild frank glance, of Carlton Pelham. She thought of the affection that had been lavished, the trust that had been so freely bestowed on her. After all, would the world that Paul held out as a glittering bait reward her for trampling on the best feeling of nature—gratitude ? Beryl, with all her faults—and their name was legion—hesitated, and the hesitation did her credit, for, at the core of her heart, Paul Lennard and freedom were dearer| far than the old dull life in Pelham Manor, with Carl for her husband.

'Mr Lennard,' she said in a low voice, a little dreary and hopeless, but with pathos and sincerity in it, 'I am as much to blame as you are, if not more ; still I can atone for my share of wrong to Carl by trying to be a good wife to him.' ' A proceeding that would end in making both of you wretched,' sneered Paul. 'I thought your intellect was of a higher order than it seems, Beryl, or you would surely recognise the absurdtiy of such notions. Listen to me, my love,' he went on, infusing a marvellous depth of tenderness in his tone, and again drawing her closer to him, an action she did not resist this time. 'Do not waste your strength against the inevitable. You could as soon change night into day as set aside the consequences which must flow from an accomplished fact. None of us in this world can escape the necessity of giving pain at times to our fellow-mortals, no more than we can escape the necessity of receiving it. If we paused at every step of life to think what heart we should crush, we should never advance at all. You were born to crush hearts, my beautiful Beryl,' he cried, with a strange power of sophistry, ' and you have only to choose whether it shall be Carl's heart—or mine.'

'Yours,' she was on the point of saying, but something in his countenance silenced the word on her lips. She drew herself quickly away from him, and knew that she had been defeated in this struggle for will, and defeated with her eyes open. After all, it was but the first keynote of a contest that had been struck, of a struggle that grew stronger each day; and then Paul began to realise that Beryl's marriage was close at hand, ani that she was more difficult to move to his purpose than he imagined. A curious change had come over her, which not only puzzled but angered him. For a short while he doubted the genuineness of the change. Jt might be, he fancied, one of those numerous conquettish wiles in which all women were so adept; but as it continued, he ceased to look upon it as simply a game or a trick on her part, and was per force convinced that Beryl had spoken no falsehood when she avowed her determination to marry Carl. So he began at last to understand how wonderfully he had overrated his influence over the girl, and how she had only meant to find food for her own vanity in her tender episode with him, and how, though by sheer dint of his will (rather than from any attraction he possessed), she had gone farther than she intended, but still had never purposed any sacrifice for his sake of the worldly advantages of a luxurious home and a well-filled purse, such as Pelham Manor offered her.

Whether Beryl was of an interested nature or not, Paul put her down as such. Kealisine that he had never awakened more than a flattered fancy—that a young and impressionable heart always yields to the first man that woos her by eloquent looks and a ' covered' homage—and thinking that, in this fancy, there was none of the mighty love he had pictured—a love that was ready to overleap all, so long as it reached its end—he put her down as a flirt—a heartless worthless flirt; he never recollected that, even if his attractions had been less potent than he desired, she had, at any rate, for the sake of the faith pledged to Carl, resisted her ardent longing for •freedom,' and her yearning after the 'world,' which Paul had drawn for her in such lovely glowing colours. A bitterness, composed of hurt vanity and of foiled desire, raged within him as he de-

cided that he had been trifled with. There is not a man living who likes his own weapons against the sex turned against him, and least of all a man like Paul Lennard. It was gall and wormwood to him to think that he, an experienced cosmopolite, had been fooled bj a country girl. If, however, it had only been his amour propre that was hurt, he would probably have turned his face from Pelham with a contempt in his mind, leaving Beryl to the stagnation which he knew would punish her in the end for her conduct to him ; but unfortunately there were other reasons to prevent him leaving—graver passions that were in reserve, and which grew into ominous strength as he marked the beautiful face and form he wished to make his own passing quickly into the possession of another. With Carlton Pelham on the other side of her, Beryl acquired fresh beauty in Paul's eyes, and seemed a thousand times more worth winning, when she set her will against his and professed her determination to be another man's wife. Never had his wish to win her assumed so gigantic a height as when she irritated him by an opposition and a defiance on which he had never counted, or even dreamed.

Paul was singularly free from scruples if he were bent on any end, and he possessed such an indomitable resolution that he had learnt to consider it invincible; added to this, he had intense passions, with a very small amount of conscientiousness ; and the most tranquil ignorance could imagine that such a combination would not fail to be dangerous, though it was hidden by the quiet indifference that the march of intellect in this nineteenth century has taught men and women. A. volcanic mountain is none the less a volcanic 'mountain because smiling vineyards and gardens are planted on its slope; and so it was with the nature whose passions were not dead but dormant. Perhaps if Beryl had in any way understood the character of the man she had apparently coquetted with, the might have known that it was too late to think of turning back to the peaceful grooves she had forsaken for a while. She forgot that she had evoked a demon of circumstance that was far beyond her control. But the truth was that she was very young, and her ideas and judgment were extremely crude to form any judgment of character in the concrete. In the abstract, she believed Paul to resemble other men, to bequick and ready to amuse himself with any pretty face, but quick and ready enough also to know when his amusement must be over, and to go on his way with a radiant philosophy that worldlings are supposed to possess. Desperate love and tragic actions were out of fashion, and it was only in ' Castle of Otranto-ish' romances where men were incited to such things by the magic of a woman's beauty. And Beryl was not the only one who thought all this, and was egregiously mistaken. There are many people in the world who wake up to find that this old wicked nature of ours is the same to-day as yesterday—the same yesterday as three hundred or three thousand years ago.

Still it cannot be denied that, with all the reassuring opinions she had, Beryl felt as if she were living a vague wretched existence —a sort of uncomfortable dual life, without knowing which of the two lives was real On the one hand there were the petty, yet allimportant, preparations for the marriage, in which she was forced to appear interested; and, united to them, the daily difficult ordeal of meeting Carl's happy satisfied smile, as he calmly descanted on the short time that must elapse before they twoBeryl and himself—accomplishing the conventional but absurd honey-moon trip, found themselves duly installed as man and wife at Pelham, with a map of happiness sketched out, that to the girl's eyes bore an area of dull wide plains without any boundary.

On the other hand was Paul's handsome face, full of fiery passion; his vehement pleadings, his imperious demands; the struggle with his will, that seemed for ever renewed and never ended, and the delicious ' freedom,' which a simple word of assent from her lips would assure ; but she could not bring herself to speak that word. [ To be continued.']