Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and Political Life

by Kitty O'Shea

I was much vexed when I heard this, for I always made such a point of his not keeping on damp things, and provided against it so carefully when starting him off.

He said: "It is no matter, really, I think, and I won't go away again till I'm really well this time. They were all so kind to me, but I was feeling so ill that I had to point out that breakfast was made for me, not I for breakfast, when I was expected to come down quickly for it. I do hate being away from home, especially when I feel ill."

After dinner that night he sat before the fire trying to smoke a cigar, but he did not care for it as usual, and presently threw it away half smoked. He wanted to "feel" I was there, he said, so I sat by his feet on the rug, and leant my head against his knee while he stroked my hair. I stopped his hand because I feared the pain might come on again, and held it while he smiled assent to my suggestion that he should try to sleep a little. Grouse and Pincher, our setter and terrier, had to come close by us, and, as they settled by his feet, he said: "This is really a beautiful rest."

He dozed now and then, and I could see how wan and exhausted the still, clear-cut face was, and I vowed to myself that he should not again leave my care until his health was completely re-established.

Presently he asked for his stick and wanted to go into the other room for a while, but he could not walk without my assistance, his legs were too weak to support him. I was terribly worried now, but did not let him see it, and only said: "Now you are up you must let me help you to bed, so that you can get all the rest you need—and you are not going to leave home again till you take me for a real honeymoon in a country where the sun is strong enough to get the cold out of your bones. We will get out of England this winter." And he answered: "So we will, Wifie, directly I get that mortgage through."

Then, as we made our painful way up the stairs—for the last time—he laughed at the Irish setter, who was trying to help him lift the stick he used, and said: "Grouse thinks we are doing this for his own special benefit." I undressed him, and got him into bed, and he said: "Come and lie down as quickly as you can, Wifie," but I rubbed him with the firwood oil, and packed his arm in the wool he so much believed in, before I lay down.

He dozed off, but woke shortly, and could not sleep again. He asked me if I thought the champagne Dr. Kenny had made him take in Dublin had made him worse, but I reassured him, for he had been so exhausted he had required something, and no doubt Dr. Kenny had known that it would do him good, although in a general way it was bad for him.

During the night I made him promise he would see a doctor in the morning. Presently he said: "I would rather write to Thompson, as he understands me." I said I would telegraph to him to come down, but this excited my husband, who said, "No, the fee would be enormous at this distance." I pointed out that his health was more precious than the quarries and saw-mills at Arklow, on which he was just proposing to spend some hundreds of pounds, but he put me off with, "We'll make it all right in the morning, Wifie."

Finding he still did not sleep, I gently massaged his shoulders and arms with oil, and wrapped him in wool again.

He talked a good deal, chiefly of the Irish peasantry, of their privations and sufferings, the deadly poverty and the prevalence of the very pain (rheumatism) from which he was suffering, in their case aggravated by the damp, insanitary cabins in which they lived. And he murmured under his breath: "There are no means at hand for calculating the people who suffered in silence during those awful years of famine." That was what J. H. Mohonagy said of the famine, from '79 to '80. And he went on: "I wish I could do something for them—the Irish peasantry—they are worth helping. I have always wished it, but there is so much between—and they 'suffer in silence,' Wifie."