Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and Political Life

by Kitty O'Shea

I then sent over a servant, with some flowers, and his report was even worse. Fragments of glass from the broken artificial wreaths, placed there years before; trampled, neglected grass, and little of that but weeds; and the bare untidy backings and wires of the wreaths I had been sending for the greeting of so many days marked only in the calendar of our love.

Poor Ireland—a child in her asking, a child in her receiving, and so much a child in her forgetting.

When Mr. Parnell first came to Eltham he told me that he had had, since his boyhood at school, a habit of sleep-walking whenever he was at all run down in health. When he was in America he used to lock the door of his room and put the key into a box with a spring lock that he had bought for the purpose. He feared he might wander about the hotel in his sleep. Also he warned me, when he first came, that he was subject to "night terrors," very much as a highly strung child is, and in these he would spring up panic-stricken out of deep sleep, and, without fully awaking, try to beat off the imaginary foe that pressed upon him. It was a species of nightmare; not apparently excited by any particular cause other than general want of tone. After a few years of careful dieting I succeeded in freeing him of these painful and most wearing attacks.

When the attacks came on I went into his room and held him until he became fully conscious, for I feared that he would hurt himself. They were followed by a profuse perspiration and deep sleep of several hours. He was terribly worried about these nightmares, but I assured him that it was only indigestion in a peculiar form. "You really think so?" he would reply, and when I told him that they would pass off with careful dieting he was reassured, and he followed my directions so implicitly as to diet that he soon proved me right.

He became very much run down again after his sister's death, but recovered perfectly, and had no recurrence of these attacks until some years after, when he suffered from a nervous breakdown brought on by overwork. Sir Henry Thompson treated him then, and he quickly recovered.

Soon after I met Mr. Parnell I sent to Worcester for some white roses in pots to keep in my hothouse in order to provide my exigeant lover with buttonholes. He loved white roses, he told me, and would not be content with any other flower from me; nor would he wear a rose from my garden, as he said anyone could have those who asked me for them. So I had to keep a constantly blooming company of white roses in my conservatory to provide a buttonhole of ceremony on his speech days, or on other occasions when I wished him to look particularly well. Sometimes we would drive out miles into the country. Keston Common was a favourite resort of ours, and, as we rarely took a servant with us, we would either put up the horse I drove (Dictator, given to me by Mr. Parnell) at some inn, or tie him to a tree while we wandered about or sat under the trees talking.

He would do his best to learn the names of the wild flowers he picked for me—with uncomfortably short stalks!—but, beyond being at last able to name a dandelion or buttercup at sight, he did not shine in any branch of botany. "What did you call this fine plant?" he would ask with a glimmer of fun in his eyes. "It is not a plant you have, but a single flower branch, and it is called a king-cup—picked much too short!" I would answer severely, and he laughed as he tumbled his trophies into my lap and insisted that the ferns ruthlessly dug and cut out with his pocket-knife would grow all right, in spite of their denuded roots, if I "made them do it, in the greenhouse!"

When it was too wet to go out, or if he was not well, he used to amuse himself at home in my sitting-room practising shooting with an air-gun. He used a lighted candle for target, and became so expert in putting out the light this way that it became too troublesome to light the candle so often, and we substituted other targets.

Sometimes he would go to the farther end of my aunt's park, where there was a pond basin, dried up long before, and many happy hours were spent there, shooting in turn, with his revolvers.

I remember on one Sunday afternoon my aunt's bailiff came down, having heard revolver shots, though the sound was deadened by the high banks. The bailiff was much perturbed by our Sunday sport, chiefly because it was Sunday. He did not dare press his opinion upon me, as he knew my position in my aunt's household was impregnable, but he had always been jealous of my coming to Eltham, where he had served her for over forty years, and he was now so plainly antagonistic that Mr. Parnell, who did not particularly wish his presence with me talked about, rose to the occasion with the tact he could exert when he considered it worth while.