LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 268, 21 April 1875, Page 3

LITERATURE.

KILLING NO MURDER,

A STORY OF IRELAND IN 1840.

By E. G. Curtis.

' How many years is it since we left Ireland, Laura?' said Mr Lendrick, looking up from a letter which he had been reading to address his wife, who was sittiug opposite to him at the breakfast-table.

' I can tell you, papa,' cried "Miss Lendrick, before her mother could reply. ' I was ten when we left, and I. am twenty now.' ' Why do you ask?' said Mrs Lendrick. ' Because, my dear, it struck me as I read this letter from my agent, that whatever may be the number of years we have been absentees, we have been so many too long, and that we ought ' ' Oh, my dear John, do not go back to that dreadful place!' ' Oh, papa, do come back to that dear old place!' cried Mrs Lendrick and her daughter in a breath.

'There it is,' said Mr Lendrick, with something very like a groan. ' One of you calls it dreadful, while the other calls it dear.'

' But Letty cannot know the country as I do,' answered Mrs Lendrick; ' she was a mere child when she left it; she does not know the misery I have lived through there; never sure that you would not be brought home to me on a shutter. I could not live such a life again; I am happy here, we are all happy, why should we leave?' If surroundings can make a woman happy, Mrs Lendrick ought to have been so ; her house was pretty and comfortable, it was within easy reach of London, and many agreeable families, with whom the Lendricks were intimate and friendly, had their houses close by ; to exchange that pleasant life for the loneliness of Mount Lendrick, which was situated in a county equally remarkable for the beauty of its scenery, and the lawlessness of its inhabitants, would have been to Mrs Lendrick something like having to undergo penal servitude for life. She was Irish by birth, and Ireland had been her home until her daughter had reached the age of ten ; she had all her life been accustomed to hear discussions upon the evils of absenteeism, and the miseries which which it entailed upon the Irish people ; she had heard it affirmed by some, that the church was at the root of Irish disaffection and agrarian crime, by others that the laws relating to land must be altered if peace were to be restored, or created, in her unhappy country ; she knew nothing of the pros and eons of these great questions, but the full meaning of agrarian crime came home to her and her family when her father was shot across the table at which he was sitting to receive his rents ; he was a victim to the " Ribbon system," which was then in full vigour in that part of the country; and although the foul deed was done in the open day, the murderer was never discovered.

There was no improvement in the state of the country at the time of her marriage to Mr Lendrick, who had, it may here be said, a kind of negative popularity among his tenantry ; he was considered hard but just, and although he had been several times threatened, no attempt had ever been made upon his life. But to live in a state of constant alarm and anxiety, can scarcely be said to live at all, so without attempting to defend absenteeism in the abstract, we cannot very severely blame Mrs Lendrick for urging ner husband to live in England.

Lendrick, himself, had no strong patriotic attachment to Ireland ; he had been educated hi England, and he had imbibed, unconsciously, some of her prejudices regarding the " Emerald Isle." as, half in derision, half in admiration, the English love to call a place, about which their ideas are taken from Times' leaders and Moore's Melodies. Lendrick liked to be able to have his own money to spend in his own way, but although he disliked to be forced to use severity to extract his rents from an unwilling tenantry, so also he had a natural repugnance to being shot down from behind a hedge; so, when his only son was still at Eton, and his only daughter a girl of ten, Mount Lendrick was shut up, the Lendricks settled near London, and by the time ten years had passed, Ireland had become an unknown land to them.

Letty was the only one of the family who looked back with regret to the home which she had loved as a child ; just as Emerson has said, that 'every ship is a romantic object, except that in which we sail,' so Ireland, the country which she never visited, and to which she could see her father, mother, and brother were half ashamed to belong, was the only place which she most ardently longed to sec again; she had been in the principal cities of Europe, but she fancied that a season in Dublin must be the most delightful thing in the world. In vain her mother, who had as a girl often joined in the Castle festivities, told her that, as compared to the London season, that of the Irish capital was as 'water unto wine,' Letty could not be convinced, she made up her enthusiastic mind to marry an Irishman iw>ho ! was 1 not an absentee; but as, unfortunately, my true

tale is not a history of Miss Lendrick's love affairs, I must not linger upon the subject. During the ten years which Mr Lendrick had spent in England, there had been but one serious agrarian outrage upon his property; a man who had taken a farm from which a defaulting tenant had been evicted, had been murdered on his way home from a neighboring fair, and, as is usual, in districts in which the ' Ribbon system' prevails, the murderer had never been discovered, although the Government reward was supplemented jby one of a hundred pounds offered by the magistrates of the county. So, on the whole, Lendrick looked upon himself as rather a fortunate specimen of an absentee landlord; his rents were paid with tolerable punctuality; if his agent was harsh or exacting, no complaints reached him in his English home; and although disapproving of absenteeism on principle, he was far too happy himself, out of Ireland, to make any serious effort to live up to his theories. Within the few months, however, preceding the opening of my story, his agent had been writing letters which bored him about a holding on the estate let to a man called O'Shee, through which it would be very advantageous to make a new road; but the owner of the little farm and cottage—the latter would have to be pulled down —had, until within the past year, paid his rent regularly ; there had been no good reason to give for turning him out, and he was certain to cling to his old home with all the unreasoning tenacity of the Celtic nature. But now, owing to a bad harvest, and to mortality among the pigs, O'Shee was behindhand with his rent, and the agent, wishing in this case to have explicit authority from Lendrick to evict, wrote an urgent letter upon the subject, which reached his employer as I have already described, and it had awakened in Lendrick a strong desire to go over and see for himself how things were going on at home ; he understood perfectly all the advantages which would be gained by the new road, but he was not prepared to resort to harsh measures against a tenant who had now failed for the first time, and he flattered himself, too, as people are wont to do when they have a certain object in view, that he would be able to induce O'Shee voluntarily to give up the coveted holding, and either to accept compensation in money, or a better house elsewhere. But even as he thus leaned to the side of mercy, it was pleasant to remember that, as it was the practice on the Mount Lendrick property not to grant leases, a troublesome tenant could be turned out at a month's notice, and, therefore, if O'Shee proved too obstinate, he would be obliged to submit, and his case would serve as a warning to others. , A week or two passed, and Lendrick s desire to visit his property grew stronger; his son was of age, and it was time to make him known to his future tenants ; so he at length prevailed upon his wife to agree to the scheme, and it was decided that the autumn should be spent at Mount Lendrick, instead of in Switzerland as usual. The news that the "Master" and his family were coming home, spread rapidly among the tenantry on the Mount Lendrick estate ; and those who know Ireland well, have no need to be told that it is a common custom with the peasantry to discuss among themselves any subject of importance after the last mass on Sunday. If the weather is fine, the men will be seen sitting, or lounging, on the top of a dry and sheltered ditch, listening attentively while one of the crowd holds forth, either reading from an old newspaper, or giving his opinion with all the dictatorial energy of a man accustomed to be heard with deference. It would not be easy to overrate the eagerness with which the naturally shrewd, but too easily deluded and illogical Irishman, listens to what he considers his "wrongs," set forth with all the vigour, and ornamented with all the rhetorical flowers of provincial journalism ; whatever is read "on the paper," carries great weight to the ignorant mind; the hard words, which cannot be clearly understood, are invested with the grandeur of mystery; while the comments which now and then break almost involuntarily from the listeners, betray the interest with which they follow the, to them, unknown writer, who is capable of putting into words the vague thoughts which have been passing through their own minds. And yet I question whether the thoughts are not often created by the words. On the Sunday after it had been announced that the Lendricks were expected, there was a larger crowd than usual assembled after mass, under the shade of the fine old trees which bordered the high road, near the entrance gates of Mount Lendrick. One of the group held a newspaper, and presently he began in that high pitched and sing-song delivery so common among the uneducated, and interrupted by many pauses to spell out an unfamiliar word, to read aloud the paragraph in which the editor of a local paper, notorious for the disaffection of his political opinions, commented upon the return of the absentees. The paragraph ended with the following peroration: — "We would, therefore, warn Mr Lendrick, that a flying visit to the home of his ancestors, cannot efface the wrong done by years of absenteeism; the money wrung from an oppressed and long-suffering tenantry has been squandered in an alien land, and the proprietors, who think that they can come back, like hungry vultures to pick the last remnants of flesh from the already wellstripped carcases of their victims, must be taught there are limits to our endurance; and that they will be called upon to answer before a tribunal from which there is no appeal, for the wrongs they have so wantonly committed."

The utter vagueness of these threats, and the involved language in which they were uttered, of course passed unnoticed by the excited hearers. —' See that now.' 'Shure isn't it well for us has some one to spake for us on the papers ?' ' Isn't it the truth he's tellin' every word?' 'Divil welcome the strangers, I say !' Such were the comments of the listening crowd, and they augured badly for Lendrick's reception among his tenantry.

Among those who listened silently were John O'Shee and his wife, the tenants who were to be displaced to make way for the new road ; O'Shee was a good-looking young fellow of about thirty, but his naturally open, honest countenance, wore an expression which showed a mind ill at ease, if not actually discontented ; by his side stood his wife, a pretty woman still, but thjxt and faded, and with unmistakable evidences of of heart disease in her wax-like looking complexion and bloodless lips ; she had her hand upon her husband's arm, and while he listened intently to the reading, her eyes never wandered from ,his face. T<* be continued.