Dorothy Eden (7 page)

Anyway, tears were an extravagance, for he would soon be back. She knew that he would always come back.

T
HE SUMMER WORE ON,
and it seemed probable that Mr. Disraeli was glad to be elevated to the House of Lords, to watch Mr. Gladstone battling with the difficult and increasingly insoluble Irish question. The Land League seemed to have got entirely out of hand and not a day passed without some fresh outrage being perpetrated. The toll of arson, terrorisation and even murder rose daily. It was all very well for Mr. Parnell to say he was against violence, the Fenian element in his followers was growing unmanageable, even for him.

But, despite the anger and dismay in England and despite the Queen writing, “Something must be done about these shameless Home Rulers”, there was the occasional English sympathiser. General Gordon, who was by all accounts reliable, and British to the core, wrote, “The state of our fellow-countrymen in Ireland is worse than that of any people in the world, let alone Europe.” He described them as “lying on the verge of starvation in places where we would not keep cattle.”

It was forced upon the Government to think again. Mr. John Morley talked picturesquely of “the wild squalor of Macedonia and Armenia not being less wild than the squalor in Connaught and Munster, in Mayo, Galway, Sligo and Kerry”. Since the House of Lords had contemptuously thrown out the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, there was nothing for the Government to do but fall back on the detested coercion. If anyone cried out with hunger or protested that his children were starving, kick him, beat him, throw him in jail, but silence him for his impudence.

As for Mr. Parnell, who had had grandiose dreams of bringing the English to their knees, if he could not be arrested as the peasants he incited to violence could be, there would be other ways of dealing with him. Lord Cowper, the Lord Lieutenant, and Mr. Forster, the Chief Secretary, put their heads together. But while they were still plotting Mr. Parnell made his triumphant speech at Ennis.

And it was not an incitement to violence. It was a very different affair altogether.

He stood easily on the platform, his hands clasped behind his back, and asked a quiet question.

“What are you to do to a tenant who bids for a farm from which his neighbour has been evicted?”

As was to be expected the wild tattered hungry crowd roared, “Kill him! Shoot him!”

Mr. Parnell waited until the tumultuous applause had died down, and then said with his quiet reasonableness:

“I think I heard someone say shoot him, but I wish to point out to you a very much better way—a more Christian and a more charitable way—which will give the lost sinner an opportunity of repenting.”

The crowd stirred restlessly, but such was the man’s magnetism that no one interrupted.

The voice, with its devastating logic, went on: “When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop counter, you must show him in the fair and in the market-place, and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a moral Coventry, by isolating him from his kind as if he were a leper of old—you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed, and you may depend upon it that there will be no man so full of avarice, so lost to shame, as to dare the public opinion of all right-thinking men and to transgress your unwritten code of laws.”

The eternal soft misty rain was falling, shining on the uplifted faces, blurring the distances. When Mr. Parnell had finished speaking he wiped the moisture off his cheeks and no one knew whether it was rain or tears. All they knew was that this man with the pale face and eloquent dark eyes was the man they would follow and on whom they would lavish their untidy emotional but total love.

The speech at Ennis was no pointless meandering in the House of Commons designed merely to obstruct business. There was nothing negative or defensive about this. It was oratory in the best parliamentary tradition. It merited comparison with Mr. Gladstone. The seventy-year-old Prime Minister was forced into an uneasy new contemplation of the troublesome Irish question. If Parnell, a man of only thirty-four, could command his audience so effectively now, what would he do in ten years or twenty years, or when he had the white hair of his Prime Minister?

Stories began to drift across the Irish Channel about the adulation the young man was receiving; people mobbing him in the street, kissing his hand, carrying him shoulder high. If it didn’t ruin him, and they said it wouldn’t because he was too calm and level-headed, then he was becoming a force to be reckoned with. The Irish party would no longer be amiably dismissed as a fairly negligible factor in the government of the British Isles.

Of course the Celts made everything larger than life, especially a man like this, composed, proud, unknowable. They could invent romantic stories about him, they could already see in him the making of one of their revered martyrs. So the English had better be careful in their treatment of the new Irish leader. Should there be signs of martyrdom, a fire would be kindled in the emerald isle that might smoulder and burn for a century.

It was all very well for the Queen to sigh with exasperation and say that she found her tiresome Irish subjects becoming too tedious with their constant rebellion. How could the people expect mercy when they defied all laws, and drove poor Mr. Forster distracted? He must make an example of more of them. The gallows was a terrible thing, but perhaps a few judicious hangings would at least put the fear of God into the rest of the populace, since it was too much to hope that they would ever learn good sense. No, the Queen had never seen the Dublin slums, or the disastrous cabins that housed the poorer of her subjects, but she believed the descriptions of these places to be greatly exaggerated. And anyway couldn’t the people do more to help themselves?

The troublesome thing was that they did, incited by Mr. Parnell, and in entirely the wrong way.

The famous speech at Ennis had been taken to heart, and was put into practice three days later. Captain Boycott, an Englishman, agent to Lord Erne in Connaught, was offered what was considered a just rent by the tenants on Lord Erne’s estate. He refused it contemptuously and ordered the usual eviction notices to be served on the unruly tenants.

The notices were not served, because the process server, by what intimidation no one knew, was persuaded to desist from doing so. One morning Captain Boycott got up to find his house, dairy and stables empty. His servants had left him in a body. What was more, no shopkeeper would serve him, no mail was delivered, he could persuade no one to come and milk his cows or look after his horses. He was abandoned. And he must have been haunted by the thought of the whole county chuckling evilly and gleefully at his fate, for, although later fifty men, under the armed supervision of police and soldiers, were forced to gather his crops, he himself could not stand the awful isolation. He left Connaught, never to return, unwillingly leaving his name to be used in quips in every public house and tavern in the country.

The new policy had a name. Boycott.

At first Katharine, waiting impatiently for Charles’ letters, was a little disappointed with them. They were warm and friendly, but gave no account of the tremendous work he had been doing, or what had been happening to him. They said both too little and too much.

“Morison’s Hotel, Dublin.

“Dear Mrs. O’Shea,

Just a line to say that I have arrived here and must go on to Avondale this evening where I hope to hear from you. I may tell you in confidence that I don’t feel quite so content at the prospect of ten days’ absence from London amongst the hills and valleys of Wicklow as I should have done some three months since. The cause is mysterious, but perhaps you will help me to find it on my return.

Yours always,

Charles Parnell”

But he was going to tell her nothing about what he was doing and planning, and, above all, when he was coming back?

If he loved her, why did he leave her alone so long? He had said he would be a week and instead it was nearly a month. Why must the affairs of his country be quite so absorbing?

Katharine looked soberly at her face in the mirror.

She couldn’t understand how it showed nothing of her inner turmoil. She still looked serene, good-tempered, even generous. And she was not generous at all. She was beginning to think herself more hardly done by than the three million struggling people across the Irish Sea.

Now that he was away from her, had he had second thoughts about the dangerous unwisdom of their friendship? Had his other side, his deep driving obsession to free his country, absorbed him completely? How well, or how little did she know him? Should she be grateful if he stayed away and left her to sink back into the peace of her quiet life, with her children, the garden, Aunt Ben, and an occasional visit to London to do some entertaining for her husband?

Sometimes for a whole hour, when she romped with the children or drove sedately through the park with Aunt Ben, she persuaded herself that this was the best solution. Then, without warning, shatteringly, his face would come into her mind, the sound of his voice into her ears. Her hand would tingle as if his lay on it. And she knew he had only to whisper a request and she would fly to him, utterly reckless, utterly willing.

Willie was in London, living in his rooms at Albert Hall Mansions. He sent a message to Katharine asking her to come up. He was giving a dinner party for Mr. Joseph Chamberlain whom he counted as one of the most influential men in Mr. Gladstone’s Government. So Kate must be sure to come. Whatever their differences she had promised to help him in his career. And he was sure she would agree that his conciliatory tactics were far more effective than the hostility and arrogance Parnell displayed.

Katharine agreed that more than ever now the façade of their marriage must be kept up. Anyway, she was curious to meet Mr. Chamberlain, and there might be news of Charles. She sent a message to Willie saying that she would come.

The conversation at the dinner party was about the new word that had been coined, “boycott”. Mr. Chamberlain thought it a cheap trick, something to get popular publicity. But Willie, who saw the stature Parnell was acquiring, was torn between his powerful English friends, and his necessary allegiance to the leader of his party. Who should he cultivate most? Could he successfully take the middle of the road?

Katharine could read what lay behind his handsome face. Long familiarity had taught her the working of his mind. He despised his countrymen as a whole, so was angry that one of them should prove so supremely effective. He was jealous, too. And yet the honesty he had compelled him to admire Parnell, perhaps more than he did Chamberlain. He would like to be friends with them both.

“My wife has a great admiration for Mr. Parnell,” he observed.

Mr. Chamberlain let his appraising glance rest on Katharine.

“I didn’t know he was a ladies’ man.”

Willie laughed, his blue eyes alight with amusement.

“Oh, it wouldn’t be for that that Kate admired him. Would it, Kate? She likes his courage, and his gifts as an orator.”

“Well, don’t let the man become a legend, Mrs. O’Shea,” Mr. Chamberlain said, a trifle irritably. “Then we’ll never get down to real business.”

“So you are going to do business with him?” Katharine enquired calmly.

“It looks as if we have no alternative. Isn’t that so, Captain O’Shea? I’d be glad to know, if it could be found out in advance, what sort of a reception Mr. Parnell proposes to give the new Land Act. I think it’s as good an act as could be devised, but he doesn’t trust us an inch. He’s got an unshakeable belief that every law we make is biased in our favour.”

“Or perhaps that you won’t keep your word,” Katharine said.

Willie darted her an angry look, but Mr. Chamberlain laughed in his dry way and said: “Oh, I know Mr. Parnell bears no love for us. He’s convinced no good will ever come out of England. So I’m afraid we’ve reached an impasse with him. Unless you can sway him to your more generous view of us, O’Shea.”

When Katharine reached home that night she found all the lights on and Miss Glennister waiting for her in a state of extreme distress.

“Oh, Mrs. O’Shea, something terrible has happened. Lucy—”

The silly woman began to cry and Katharine had to take her and almost shake the words out of her.

“What? Is she dead? Where is she?”

“Not dead, Mrs. O’Shea. But she can’t speak. She tries, and it’s awful.”

Katharine was halfway up the stairs.

“Has the doctor been?”

“Yes. He says she’s had a stroke. She won’t last long, he thinks.” Miss Glennister was in fresh tears. “I’ve told the children she’s poorly. Poor lambs, they’d be so frightened if they knew the truth.”

“They must learn not to be frightened,” Katharine said, and didn’t wait for Miss Glennister’s tearful rejoinder, for she was already halfway to Lucy’s room.

She scarcely recognised the poor distorted face. The doctor had sent a nurse who said softly to Katharine, “Speak to her, Mrs. O’Shea. I don’t think she sees anything, but she can hear. She’s been waiting for you.”

Katharine took Lucy’s hand, and felt the gnarled fingers moving feeling for her rings to identify her.

“It is me, Lucy. Don’t worry about anything. I’ll stay beside you.”

Lucy—the faithful figure that had been beside her all her life. There had never been a time without her. She had been growing old, one realised, but not this old. She had never complained, never said she was getting tired or feeling ill until she had had that nasty chill a little while ago. Katharine sat beside her, fighting tears. Lucy who had shepherded her through childhood, been like a rock beside her when Papa had died, rejoiced in her wedding, and the birth of her babies, loyally poured out her savings for the dear Captain when he was temporarily embarrassed, as was natural to a gentleman who enjoyed a gay life.