LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 312, 12 June 1875, Page 3

LITERATURE.

GOOD FOR EVIL. ( Concluded.) But after a few all too short years of rare happiness, he lost his wife—he worried her to death, said the evil speakers—and under the burden of his bitter grief he became twice as stern and unbending as before. It may have been that he was a trying man with whom to deal, but he certainly loved his gentle wife with all the force of his heart, and she knew it, and valued his rugged tenderness, discerning the vein of gold that ran through his nature.

The girl, whose appearance fascinated the Earl so strangely, did not seem altogether unconscious of his scrutiny; while the bishop offered up the closing prayer, Lord Killcullen’s deep-set grey eyes peered out yearningly from beneath his heavy, bushy eyebrows, and never wandered from her face for an instant! And yet she did not seem disturbed. There was nothing repulsive in his gaze, for she was bringing back to his sore heart recollections of youth, brief happiness, and love. When the ‘ Amen’ was spoken, the Earl asked a bystander who the girl was who had attracted his attention, and learned that he owed his emotion to Mr Clampit’s daughter. He turned quickly away and left the ground. The morning after the ceremonial all the papers of the day, save one, were laid on the Earl’s breakfast table. The Moderator only was not there. It had become a habit of the Earl to take the physic of Clampit’s abuse with his coffee, and when he did not see the paper’s hated title line showing between the Standard and the Dublin Express, he imagined at once that the paper contained some more than usually violent and scurrilous attack, and that his servants were keeping it from him.

* Bring me the Moderator ,’ he said, fixing his eyes angrily on his old butler. ‘ It has not come to-day, my lord.’

On no breakfast table that morning did the Moderator shine. The whole printer’s staff, instead of appearing at their work overnight, had been discovered blind drunk by their employer in their several favorite publichouses. In vain, with the aid of the sub-editor, he tried to get out the paper, but the type had all been thrown into confusion, and the thing was simply impossible.

This disaster was the result of Mr Spiler’s clumsy plots. The officious fool could think of no better plan by which to deliver his patron from the editor of the Moderator. Before ten o’clock in the morning Mr Clampit was quite aware to whom he was indebted for such a serious loss and interruption to his business. By two o’clock a special issue had appeared, giving a full account of the way in which the Earl of Killcullen had tried to injure a citizen of the town from which he took his illgotten title, and destroy the liberty of the press. As was only natural, before this at tack on the Earl all previous onslaughts paled and faded from memory. When the Earl received the special issue he was completely thunderstruck. Of course he thought the statements before him false, and that it was only Clampit’s malice that blamed him for the drunkenness of the compositors. He sent for Mr Spiler at once. But Spiler’s conscience was uneasy, and he was terrified at the easy detection of his manoeuvre. He feigned illness, and sent an excuse to the Earl, and took to his bed as he did so. But the Earl was too sharp for him; and almost as quickly as Clampit had detected the Earl, the Earl detected Spiler. Before two days the attorney’s connection with the Killcullen property had been severed. But the Earl’s name was not cleared thereby. Mr Spiler gave it out that he had been made a scape-goat, and he was spoken of in pitying terms by the Moderator as * the victim. ’

As may be imagined, after such a local storm the Earl’s generous declaration regarding the Inches and water supply fell ilat on the public ear. A short seven days before, the announcement might have gained Hm credit, and improved his position witli his neighbours, but now it was only considered as a bid to recover ground lost by his shameful treatment of Mr Clampit. People said, too, that there had been something iishy about the contradiction of the ‘ arrears and rent’ report—the old fellow was known to have been meditating a disbursement of ‘ conscience money’ for some time past, and only abandoned the plan when he found it too dear. Now, however, it was necessary to be whitewashed a little, so he had taken up a cheap scheme. If ho had intended to carry out the water and drainage works at his own expense, could he not have said so at once ?

It was May, and the weather was just growing warm. The spring was unusually mild, and the water supply, owing to a long drought, both bad and insufficient;; the Inches, as if to spite the drainage operators, exhaled their moat noisome vapours, and fever of a very bad type began to appear. The Earl appealed to the present state of things as his justification, but the Moderator took another view of the matter, and just as the Earl one morning laid down his paper, after plodding through a long rigmarole, in which Clampit tried to prove that the fever was due to Lord Killcullen’s opposition to the improvement of the navigation of the Cull, the door of his study opened, and his new man of business entered. The first piece of news that the Earl heard from him was, that Clampit’s daughter was stricken down by the fever. Next day there was sorrow and confusion in Mr Clampit’s house. The Moderator, notwithstanding its spicy personalities, did not pay its proprietor over well; and some speculations that had turned out ill combined to embarrass him. He had no wife to help him with his half-dozen children, and when his eldest daughter—only eighteen years old, but the ‘ little mother’ of the house—was laid low, the wretched man did not know where to look to look for help. The fever was typhus, so his first act was to send the younger children out of the reach of infection.

Late in the afternoon, as he was drinking a cup of tea, after returning from a hasty visit to the Moderator office, a servant entered the room hastily. * Plaze, sorr, there’s a strange gentleman wants to see ye.’

‘ I can’t see any one,’ answered Clampit, moodily. * Haze, soar, lie says he’s a doehther, and lie looks that same; he have black clothes and specs.’

‘ A doctor! what do ye mean?’ ‘ And that he 11 be thankful if ye’ll come down and spake a word to him,’ Hastily swallowing his tea, Clampit went to the hall door, where he met a grey-haired, wiry-looking man, a doctor all over, and the ‘ specs’ firmly seated on his nose.

‘ I have been requested by a friend of yours, sir,’said the doctor, after Mr Clampit had made himself known, ‘to call and render you any assistance in my power. The person who requested me to offer you my services takes the entire pecuniary responsibility, and only begs that you will not endeavour to discover who he is. Here is mv card. ’

Mr Clampit, like a man in a dream, took the card, and read, “Dr Powder Grey, 121 Merrion square south.’ No wonder Mr Clampit was surprised; Dr Powder Gray was a man whom crowned heads consulted— Avhom fifty guineas would not bring very far. But the editor’s fear for his daughter made him take wonders very coolly, and with some muttered thanks to his unknown benefactor, he led the way upstairs to his daughter’s room. Before the'doctor took his departure, he remarked casually that Mr Clampit’s unknown friend had requested him to bring with him from Dublin a trained nurse, and that she was at the hotel, and would take up her abode at Mr Clarapit’s house as soon as convenient. The doctor also observed that he would return to Dublin in an hour, and run down again to Killcullen on the next day but one. The nurse came accordingly, and with her a gigantic hamper, carriage paid, and with a note inside containing an invoice of the goods, and a laconic announcement that the goods had all been paid for, and were forwarded as per instructions. The hamper contained simply everything that was needed in the house at such a crisis.

Under such circumstances the girl had all the help possible to fight the fever. Ice reached the feditor’s house every day from Dublin; and as the patient grew gradually better good things poured in only more abundantly. The girl recovered, and certainly Mr Clampit thought it was due in a great measure to the mysterious kindness lavished upon her. He was never tired of praising his anonymous benefactor, and quite believed his friends when they told him he owed the benefits to some public man who had been inspired with an interest in the editor through admiration for the highspirited manner in which the Moderator was conducted.

One sad morning, just when his daughter was beginning,'* as he said, to ‘ get round the corner,’ poor Clampit himself fell ill. In his case, the disease assumed even a more malignant type than in his daughter’s case, and his anxiety and care for her had so far reduced his strength, that he was unable to fight against the disease. In vain Dr Powder Gray did all that human skill could devise—the poor editor grew worse and worse, till at last, after a weary struggle with death, he breathed his last.

After poor Clampit’s death, a few of his friends at once started a subscription for him, but somehow or other, the corporation did not come forward, as might have been expected. When the wretched state of the dead man’s affairs was known, such words even as ‘ culpable negligence,’ and ‘ reckless want of foresight,’ were heard: and there seemed a very good chance of the whole family of children being ultimately reduced to find shelter in the workhouse.

In the meantime, however, their wants from day to day were satisfied in the same anonymous manner as during the time when fever was among them; but of course they were a momentary dread of a failing in these strange supplies. Greatly to the public surprise, when the result of the public subscription was known, Lord Killcullen came forward and said he would be responsible for the support and education of the entire family of orphans. * ■*

When, two years after Mr Clampit’s death, the marriage of Lord Wurstesser, and Miss Clampit of Killcullen, was announced in all the papers, the whole of Ireland was profoundly astonished, and many matrons were disconcerted even in tbc greater island; but there were great rejoicings in Killcullen, and nothing was ever afterwards heard of the old Earl as an unpopular man. His relations in England used to hint that he was in his dotage, and said nothing else was to have been expected from his folly in taking a girl out of her proper place, and making such a fuss about her, and having her constantly in the house with his foolish and impressionable son. At the same time, it is only due to the old Earl to remark that the corporation of Killcullen, the bishop, and functionaries in general, never could conscientiously say i hat, in transacting business with him about this time, they were aware of any failure in his intelligence or shrewdness.