"He who for winds and clouds
    Maketh a pathway free,
Through waste or hostile crowds
    Can make a way for thee."
                                                        —PAUL GERHARDT.
 
 
One morning in 1882 I saw in the morning papers a cable message announcing the death of Miss Fanny Parnell. Mr. Parnell was at my house at the time, but asleep. After an all-night sitting I would never allow him to be roused until four in the afternoon, when he would have breakfast and chat with me until it was time to go to the House. On seeing the newspaper cable from America about his sister I thought it better to wake him and tell him of it, lest he should read it while I was away with my aunt. I knew that Fanny Parnell was his favourite sister, and he had told me that she was the cleverest and most beautiful woman in his family. This I knew was high praise, as Willie had met Mrs. Thomson—another of Parnell's sisters—and had told me that she was the most strikingly beautiful woman he had ever met.
 
I woke him and told him of his sister's death as gently as I could, but he was terribly shocked, and I could not leave him at all that day. For a time he utterly broke down, but presently a cable arrived for him—sent on from London—saying that his sister's body was to be embalmed and brought to Ireland, and his horror and indignation {205} were extreme. He immediately wrote out a message for me to cable from London on his behalf, absolutely forbidding the embalmment of his sister's body, and saying that she was to be buried in America.
 
The idea of death was at all times very painful to him, but that anyone should be embalmed and taken from one place to another after death was to him unspeakably awful. For this, amongst other reasons, I could not bear to have him taken to Ireland—to Glasnevin Cemetery—after his death. My desire was to have him near me and, as he would have wished, to have taken care of his grave myself. But I gave way to the longing of the Ireland he had lived for, and to the clamour of those who had helped to kill him. How they dealt with him alive is history now, but how they dealt with him in death is not so well known; and I give an extract from the message of a friend, who had gone to see his grave a few short years after his death: "Your husband's grave is the most desolate and neglected spot in the whole cemetery, and I grieve to tell you of the painful impression it made upon me."
 
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. {206} 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 {207} 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, {208} 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.
 
"Oh, is that you, Mr. ——?" rising from an absorbed examination of his last bull's-eye. "Mrs. O'Shea was telling me when we started this match of your being such a good shot with a gun. Do have a shot with my revolver; see here, I've got a bull's-eye five times running against Mrs. O'Shea's one. Now let us see what you can do."
 
Mr. —— hesitated; he was a fine shot and had won prizes in his youth, and was susceptible to flattery.
 
Mr. Parnell said dryly: "I don't suppose you have had so much practice as I lately, but—" The bailiff turned a wary eye on his wife, who was waiting for him at the gate of a rookery some way off, and Mr. Parnell smiled as he said: "The lady will not see you," in such a gently sarcastic manner that Mr. —— was nettled, and picking up the revolver shot so wildly that he missed the little target altogether.
 
I said: "Mr. —— can shoot, really, Mr. Parnell, as I told you, but he is nervous!" So Mr. —— went on, making shot after shot with varying success till {209} Mrs. —— appeared on the scene dressed in her best and Sunday virtue, which was resplendent in Eltham. She gazed with pain upon Mr. ——, who, to appear at ease, entered into a discussion of revolver patterns with Mr. Parnell. I talked cheerfully to her for a few moments, and introduced Mr. Parnell, which gratified her immensely, and the two went off happy, but so conscious of the enormity of having given countenance to such desecration of the Sabbath, in Sunday shooting, that we knew we were safe from their perhaps inconvenient chatter.
 
Mr. Parnell was always interested in cricket, and I had a private pitch laid out for him at Eltham in a two-acre field. As a young man he had been an enthusiast, and the captain of his eleven. He never went to matches, however, after he entered Parliament.
 
He talked to me much about Avondale. He loved the place, and was never tired of planning the alterations and improvements he meant to make in the old house when we could marry. He often went over to Ireland expressly to see how things were going there, but after 1880 he could never stay even a few days there in peace. The after-effects of the awful famine, in such terrible cases of poverty and woe as were brought to his notice the moment he arrived in his old home, made it impossible for him to remain there at all. No one man could deal charitably with all these poor people and live, and as time went on Mr. Parnell's visits became necessarily shorter, for the demands were so many, and the poverty so great, that he could not carry the burden and continue the political life necessary to their alleviation. He told me that he despaired of ever having a penny in his pocket when he took me there, as he always hoped to do.
 
He was very fond of the old woman he kept at {210} Avondale in charge of the house, and who attended to his few needs when he was there; and whenever he went there he would get me to go to Fortnum and Mason's to buy a pound of their 4s. a pound tea for the old dame, who much appreciated this delicious tea, though she of course stewed it into poison before drinking it.
 
This old servant of his had the most curious ideas on "first aid to the injured," and when on one occasion Mr. Parnell had his hand crushed in some machinery at his Arklow quarries, she dressed the injured fingers with cobwebs from the cellar walls. To my astonishment he asked for cobwebs at Eltham once, when he had cut his finger, to "wrap it in." My children, with delighted interest, produced cobwebs (and spiders) from the cellar, and I had the greatest difficulty in preventing a "cure" so likely to produce blood-poisoning. He accepted the peasant lore of Ireland with the simplicity of a child, and I still remember his doubtful "Is that so?" when I told him it was most dangerous to put anything so dusty as a cobweb on an open wound. "Susan Gaffney said cobwebs would stop the poison. They all do it," meaning the peasants.
 
On August 16th, 1882, he was presented with the freedom of the City of Dublin. He wished to avoid a public demonstration, but the Corporation insisted on making the most of the occasion.
 
 
 
MORRISON'S HOTEL, DUBLIN,
    Saturday, August 20, 1882.
MY OWN QUEENIE,—Your two letters have given me the greatest pleasure, and I am so much obliged to Wifie for the trouble she has taken about the request I made to her.
 
The two D.'s[1] have quarrelled with, me because I won't {211} allow any further expenditure by the ladies and because I have made arrangements to make the payments myself for the future. They were in hopes of creating a party against me in the country by distributing the funds amongst their own creatures and are proportionately disappointed.
 
I hope to have everything settled by Tuesday evening so as to enable me to leave town then, and after a week in the country propose to return to Wifie.
 
YOUR OWN HUSBAND.
 
 
 
In October, 1882, was founded the National League, which was to fill the gap caused by the suppression of the Land League. A Convention had been called for the 17th of the month.
 
October 10, 1882.
MY OWN QUEENIE,—I hope to be able to start for London on Thursday evening.
 
The doctor says it was an attack of dysenterical diarrhoea, but............