“What is there about which you particularly want to know?” asked Parnell.
“Well,” said the interviewer, “my people are anxious to ascertain your present attitude with regard to Mr. Gladstone.”
“Oh, the old man?” said Parnell coolly, and dropping the “grand” which usually accompanied the words. “You can tell your people, if you like, that the old man has made three mistakes with me.”
“Yes,” said the other eagerly.
“The first was when he put me into gaol; the second was when he let me out; and the third was when he went into business with me and thought to get the better of me.”
But I have wandered some few perches from Anderton’s. I return. My last visit to that hotel was with the late Dr. Tanner, a Member for Mid-Cork. His brother had committed suicide there by injecting morphia. The deceased gentleman, Dr. Lombard Tanner, was an extremely jovial and good-looking Irishman. He had got into entanglements—not of a financial, but of the other kind—and he saw no way out but this. I had been an intimate friend of his. But he sought advice neither from friends nor relatives. The memory for me will always remain gruesome and ineffaceable. For before the inquest the coroner’s officer handed me a letter-card addressed to me by poor Lombard, which was written, as to the first part, just before he commenced the injection, and, as to the last part, ending blurred and incoherent, while the drug was taking effect. He wished me to accept his sword and certain other effects which he had left at his room, in St. James’s Place, St. James’s, and to bid me farewell!
This is, I confess, a sad note on which to close a chapter, but even the most jocund periods have their short sharp moments of tragedy.
CHAPTER XIII
DE MORTUIS
Fleet Street is haunted by the ghosts of dead newspapers. At midnight they flit—in white sheets, of course—out of the doors and windows of old offices in the thoroughfare itself, and in the tributary lanes and streets and courts that flow into it. You may—if you have a good reliable imagination—catch the glimmer of their silent passage as they scurry back to their long homes. Poor sheeted dead! once so full of life and hope and confidence, but cut down untimely, and fated to revisit the scenes of their short but well-meant labours!
When my time comes to go, I shall not be able to leave my children much money; but I can—and will—leave them a lot of good advice. Should one of them determine to try his fortune in Fleet Street—a course which I should deplore—I would advise that devoted child of mine to keep a diary. Had I adopted this precaution, I should now be in a position to fix an exact date to every incident and anecdote related in these chronicles, and to record a hundred others which have escaped my memory. And for the purposes of this particular chapter I should be in a position to give the names, dates, and careers, of all the dead newspapers I have known during their brief stay on earth.