We gave several dinners, and to each of them I asked Mr. Parnell. Among the first to come were Mr. Justin McCarthy (the elder), Colonel Colthurst, Richard Power, Colonel Nolan, and several others; but—in spite of his acceptance of the invitation—Mr. Parnell did not come. Someone alluded to the "vacant chair," and laughingly defied me to fill it; the rest of our guests took up the tale and vied with each other in tales of the inaccessibility of Parnell, of how he ignored even the invitations of the most important political hostesses in London, and of his dislike of all social intercourse—though he had mixed freely in society in America and Paris before he became a politician for the sake of the Irish poor. I then became determined that I would get Parnell to come, and said, amid laughter and applause: "The uncrowned King of Ireland shall sit in that chair at the next dinner I give!"
One bright sunny day when the House was sitting I drove, accompanied by my sister, Mrs. Steele (who had a house in Buckingham Gate), to the House of Commons and sent in a card asking Mr. Parnell to come out and speak to us in Palace Yard.
He came out, a tall, gaunt figure, thin and deadly pale. He looked straight at me smiling, and his curiously burning eyes looked into mine with a wondering intentness that threw into my brain the sudden thought: "This man is wonderful—and different."
I asked him why he had not answered my last invitation to dinner, and if nothing would induce him to come. He answered that he had not opened his letters for days, but if I would let him, he would come to dinner directly he returned from Paris, where he had to go for his sister's wedding.
In leaning forward in the cab to say good-bye a rose I was wearing in my bodice fell out on to my skirt. He picked it up and, touching it lightly with his lips, placed it in his button-hole.
This rose I found long years afterwards done up in an envelope, with my name and the date, among his most private papers, and when he died I laid it upon his heart.
This is the first letter I had from Mr. Parnell:—
LONDON,
July 17, 1880.
MY DEAR MRS. O'SHEA,—We have all been in such a "disturbed" condition lately that I have been quite unable to wander further from here than a radius of about one hundred paces allons. And this notwithstanding the powerful attractions which have been tending to seduce me from my duty towards my country in the direction of Thomas's Hotel.