NEPENTHES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2808, 8 January 1908, Page 86

NEPENTHES.

By Florence Hallyak.

Edinburgh: William. Blackwood and Sons.

Thus is a very curious story, possessing at any rate the merit of originality in conception, andi a certain beauty of harmony in the even ooirbinuity of thought and style necessary to work out an entirely atrtificial theme. The story is told by an old poet, Robert Fellowes, to the narrator, and by her retold in the first person. It concern® a grave, set in a wooded dell opening to the wide ocean. A spot of unconsecrated ground, where one white headstone bears the name " Nepenthes." Here was buried a Hindu lady of high caste, whose life beneath the roof of his elder brother Hugh is told- by Robert Fellowes. The gracious, silent, and reserved Indian woman, who possess€S strange powers of healing and mystic virtues, is not the only curious character in the book. The wfhole atmosphere of the tale is strange and abnormal. Nor is this due to place or period, fo^ the former is •ai of the English coast still noted for its wrecks, and formerly for its wreckers ; and the latter is, as the writer grandiloquently phrases it, "in the second quarter of the nineteenth centufry." 'The peculiarity lies dn the theme, which is the entirely abnormal power possessed by the shipwrecked Indian woman whom the Fellowes, in grateful memory of her healing virtues exercised on the idolised child of the home, christen, "Nepenthes" and in the curious oharaoteristics of the remaining characters. The] narrator, Robert (Fellowes-, starts by confessing that hs and his elder and only brother Hugh — "a great, handsome man/ with a fiendish temper, more wealtli than- could be accounted! for, and a KeautSful wife," — hated andi despised one another with whole-souled and hearty unanimity. Later on one is permitted glimpses of extraordinary past relations and very uncomfortable .present complications between Hugh Fello-wes, his wife, a village mirse, and a gang of wreckers <whose criminal designs all centre about a great iron, chest of "jewels" quite worthy of Mrs Rad'eliff in her most inspired moments.