LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 309, 9 June 1875, Page 3

LITERATURE.

KATHLEEN'S REVENGE.

By E. J. Curtis.

! {Concluded.) Edward went in, and she shut the door behind him, then standing before him, and looking in her excitement almost as beautiful as of old, she said, ' There was a time, Edward O'Brian, when ye've said ye wouldn't refuse me anything I axed, an' now I'm goin' to ax ye a favour now. It was only yesterday I knew where yer child was, an' that them I trusted her to hadn't tuk her home at all; iv I take ye to her now, will ye let them off that done the wrong? They're me own flesh an' blood, an' ' If they were my own flesh and blood,' broke in O'Brien, impatiently, ' I would not spare them for having kept my child away from me in this manner—she may be half dead from hardship and fright. Tell me instantly where to find her, and think yourself very safe if you are not taken up as an accomplice. You need not try to deceive me any longer; I shall find her, if I pull the house down stone by stone.'

For one moment Kathleen stood looking at him; was this the gentle, tender-hearted man, the gay and fascinating Edward O'Brian, whom she had worshipped with the full intensity of her almost savage nature? But something, she knew not what, pleaded for him in her heart, cruelly as he had spoken to her; it seemed as though she understood his passionate love for Norah by the force of her own unextinguished dove for him.

' Come,' she said, ' I'll show ye where the child is, an' iv there is bloodshed, on yer own head be it.'

She walked up the glen silently by his side; while the revenue men, half a dozen in number, marched at some distance behind them. In about ten minutes they came within sight of the "sheeling;' the door was shut and everything was quiet around, but a wreath of thin blue turf smoke, rising from what was apparently a hole in the roof of the hut, which was half shed, half cave, showed that it was not uninhabited.

• The still is at work,' whispered Kathleen, with a bitter laugh, *so the polismtn will have something to find too.' Before the little party reached the shed, the door was flung open, and Phelim came out, and behind him, pale and frightenedlooking, with her bright hair rough and tangled, and her white frock blackened with smoke, stood Norah O'Brian. Phelim had a leather strap round her waist, which he quickly fastened to the door post; and still more to impede her movements, her hands were tied behind her back.

On recognising her father the poor little thing gave a cry of joy, but then feeling safe as long as she could see him, and fearing to rouse the anger of her terrible gaoler, she kept bravely silent, and, as she afterwards confided to her mother ' tried to see no one but papa?' ' There she is,' said Phelim, pointing at her with his pistol,' 'an' let the best man among yees take her out iv that idout my lave.' He did not notice, or did not care, that his sister had gone slowly forward, and was almost beside him as he spoke. I have a word to say to ye, Mr O'Brian, an' to them chaps too—yer work's cut out for ye, boys, for there's the still at work, and lots iv fine poteen about, more's the pity; but iv that gentleman,' pointing to O'Brian, 'has a mind to have that child of his out iv that spot alive, I must be let get clane off; there, now, I've no more to say; it's for his honour to spake next.'

' Close up, men, and seize him!' cried O'Brian, half beside himself with rage at the coolness of the young scoundrel, and, as .he spoke, he dashed forward to try and throw up Phelim's right arm before he could take aim at the helpless child. But he was too late, the report of the pistol echoed through the lonely glen, mingled with a cry of agony which was not in Norah's feeble voice; Phelim made a wild dash forward, and darted off, with the revenue nfen in close pursuit, while O'Brian, with one hurried glance to assure himself that his darling was unhurt, knelt down to raise in his arms the bleeding form of Kathleen Donovan, who had thrown herself forward just in time to save the child's life at the cost of her own.

As Edward lifted her up she moaned, and opening her beautiful dark eyes, she smiled faintly. ' You were hard on me just now,' she said, evidently speaking with great difficulty, • but I've saved her for ye, an' ye'll not forget me now, will ye?' 'Forget you, 5 he answered, 'it is not likely, and I believe I know why you did this, my poor faithful girl.'

1 It was because ye war more to me nor any one in the world, and because the child is like ye in the face; I tried to curse ye both the day ye brought her mother home, only the women stopped me, I'm—very—sorry.' There was a short interval of pain, and laboured breathing, then she spoke again. ' Lay me down, an' go to the child; shure the life must be frightened out iv the crature,' but even as she said the words, her eyes closed, and she was gone, Phelim was eventually taken and executed, but his father and brother escaped to America, and it was many months before either O'Brian or his child fully recovered from the effects of the fearful scene which had ended the life of the hapless Kathleen Donovan. As time went on it gradually faded from brave little Norah's mind, but, to the last hour of his life, O'Brian never forgot the noble self-sacrifice of the woman whom in an idle hour he had led on to love him so unwisely and so well, and the country people still talk of the tragedy which broke up the home of the Donovans, and the victim of which is supposed to haunt the lonely glen to this day.

GOOD FOR EVIL. (Fromthe Duilin University Magazine.) The Earl of Killcullen was [a man out of all harmony with the age in which he lived. His nature was a riddle to his neighbours, and because they would not take the trouble of solving it, and. lest they should be deemed slow of wit if they said nothing at all about him, they called him a wilfully bad, wrongheaded man. Public opinion often takes such short cuts to judgment, even with less excuse. The Earl was an old man, and a proud man. This latter fact every one felt, though had you asked them in what way, they would have been puzzled to answer you. They might have said, perhaps, that the stern cast of his features, his compressed

lips, and erect bearing, told a tale of pride and inaccessibility; but, beyond this, they could say little, except that he showed an extraordinary care in avoiding any sense of obligation to his fellow-creatures, and held hirr, self aloof as much as possible from his neighbours. He was scrupulously just in all his dealings; he helped the needy, but never gave an alms without investigation. Yet, where he gave help, no kinds words accompanied the dole of relief. His vast estates were managed with justice and mercy, and he spent almost all his time in developing schemes of improvements, and in working out the details of agricultural systems ; but, at the same time, he never laid out a shilling on plans that gave no promise of ultimately proving worth the money expended of them. Sentiment had nothing to do with his conduct in any business matters, so that, however he might have fared among a more practical people, in Ireland his caution and exactness made him thoroughly unpopular. His general principles in business matters were sound enough, but he carried them out so pedantically, and cared so little for other people's feelings, as long as he declared emphatically what he believed to be the truth, that to thin-skinned Irish men and women, with plenty of faults, and a peculiar appreciation of well-bred indifference, he soon became an object of absolute hatred. But worse even than his pride, his severe bluntness and his closeness in money matters, were his political opinions, and the odium of his descent. The founder of the house of Killcullen had been a German lord in the army of King William 111., who, for his services in the Irish campaign, rewarded him with the title of Baron Killcullen, and a fine slice of territory, the former owner of which slept peacefully beneath the waters of the Boyne with a bullet in his brain. This origin of the Killcullen prosperity was never forgotten by some of those who hated the old Earl, because he would not join the directors of the Killcullen and Bogmore Railway Company in advocating the formation of a tunnel through the Shrugh—a hill of solid rock outside the town of Killcullen —at an expense of about one hundred thousand pounds (the projectors said it could be done for fifty, but the Earl and an engineer

—not a gentleman chosen by the board—thought otherwise); the object of the tunnel was to save some eight minutes for trains, which at present skirted the hill! The Earl thought this eight minutes not worth |a hundred thousand pounds to Killcullen, and had no scruples about calling the whole thing a shameful job. This was bad enough, but when he refused to countenance a scheme for deepening the bed, and improving the navigation of the Cull (an insignificant little river between Killcullen and Ballyscanlon, in neither of which inland towns were there three tall chimneys), the popular outcry against the Earl reached its climax? There had been a party in Killcullen unfavorable to the tunnelling scheme, but there were no two opinions as to the navigation improvement project, and the whole odium of alienating a government loan, and resisting a popular measure calculated to benefit a whole community, fell upon the already over-abused Earl.

In his political opinions he stood almost alone. A Tory of the Tories, devoted to the principles of a school long obsolete, he was t a hindrance to his own party, and disliked by them almost as much as by his opponents for the discredit he brought upon them. He never glossed over a difference of opinion, or, to gain an end, suppressed any part of what he believed to be the truth. He had no mercy upon men who took their pay and shirked their work, aud worried the bishop out of his episcopal benignity with incessant complaints of the idleness and incompetence of the clergy, and this while he was fighting tooth and nail against Mr Gladstone's Church Bill. As for the Poor Law and National Education Boards, he left them no peace. The corporation of Killcullen (more given to ncisy ' scenes' and the discussion of political questions, and other subjects outside their jurisdiction, than sanitary reforms urgently needed in fever-stricken portions of the town) hated the very mention of his name, and their faces were a study when he occasionally took the chair at a public meeting. Finally, his brutal sincerity of speech and conduct, by its unpleasantness, so utterly disorganised the local Tory party, that their organ, the Irreconcilable, simply died out because the obsequious editor made his paper a medium for giving the Earl's opinions to the public. After its decease, its offices and 'plant,' and most of its staff, changed sides, and passed over to a new proprietor and editor—a rampant Radical—and Lord Killcullen's most bitter local opponent. When it became a question of giving the journal a new name, to denote its change of sentiments, Mr Clampit, the new proprietor, called his sub-editor to him, and asked for his advice.

' The Pestle, sir; I thought of that last night, it gives an idea of force,' said the subeditor, who was rather a weak-minded man, so far as his inventive powers went, but capable of enduring any amount of work. ' Won't do. We should be called the Pest all over the country in two days' time. Musn't have anything that gives a handle to caricature, Simmons.' • What do you say to the Mallet, or the Hammer, sir? they carry on the idea of force.'

' Nonsense; I think the Killcullen Freeman will do.'

' Well, sir, it might to be sure; but then there's Mr Freeman, of Bridge street. He's considered a very peculiar person, and it might be thought we were aiming at him. It's supposed he's the stoutest and reddestfac«d man in Ireland.'

' Alliteration is a good thing. Let me see —the Killcullen Kite — Killcullen Courier — Chronicle — Critic.'

1 1 think, sir, as we are rising, so to speak, from the ruins of the Irreconcilable, we couldn't take a more suitable name than the Moderator,'

* Good!' ejaculated Mr Clampit, 'as the Moderator we'll start. But we needn't be moderate on that account.'

Nor were they.

The first number of the Moderator appeared, and a column and a half of the most violent personal abuse of Lord Killcullen constituted the leading article. The new editor determined to give tone and colour to his paper, and ensure it a good sale, by printing plenty of offensive personalities; and his own hatred, and the general unpopularity of the Earl, gave him a rare opening for displaying his peculiar literary power. (To be continued.)