MY DEAR MRS. O'SHEA,—Will you kindly direct, enclose, and post enclosed.
Many thanks for your letter, also for two from Captain O'Shea, which I will reply to shortly.—Believe me, in haste, yours very truly, CHAS. S. PARNELL.
Just before Christmas in 1883 I took a furnished house in Brighton for three months for my children. I had arranged to go into a house in Second Avenue, which both Parnell and I liked, but Willie came down and insisted on my taking one facing the sea in Medina Terrace; so I (with difficulty) got out of my former agreement, and certainly the house Willie chose was very much pleasanter, owing to its close proximity to the sea.
Willie undertook to stay here to be with the children while I went back to my aunt (coming myself to Brighton for one or two days in the week).
Willie asked Parnell to come and stay. He did so, and Willie and he discussed the Local Government Bill at all hours, as Parnell wished to find out what the views of Mr. Chamberlain and the Tories were—better ascertainable by Willie than others.
I went back to my aunt for Christmas Eve. It was bitterly cold, and as the old lady never cared for festivities, she was soon glad to shut herself up in her warm house and "forget in slumber the foolish junketings I permit in my domestics, my love."
There was snow that Christmas, very deep at Eltham; and Parnell, who had joined me there, walked round the snowy paths of my aunt's place with me in the moonlight. Now and then he moved with me into the shadow of the trees as a few lads and men, with the inevitable cornet and trombone of a village "band," plunged through the drifts on their short cut to the old house. There they sang Christmas carols to their hearts' content, knowing they were earning their yearly bonus, to be presented with a polite message of her "distaste" for carol singing by "Mrs. Ben's" (as she was affectionately called in the village) man-servant the next morning.
Parnell and I enjoyed that pacing up and down the wide terrace in the snowy moonlight. The snow had drifted up against the old urns and the long, low balustrade that divided the north and south lawns; and the great shadows of the beech trees looked unfamiliar and mysterious—pierced here and there, where the blanket covering of snow had dropped off, by the cold glitter of moonlight on the whiteness.
Right away to the south lay the "Chase," leading away to Chislehurst, wide, cold, and lonely in the moonlight, and I told Parnell that the cloud shadows that flitted over the glistening whiteness were the phantoms of the hunters of King John's time, who used to hunt over this ground, renewing their sport in the moonlight.
Parnell loved to hear these little imaginations, and I loved to tell them to him for the sake of seeing the grave smile come, and of hearing the naïve "Is that so?" of his appreciation.