Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and Political LifeO'Shea, Kitty
History
Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and Political Life
O'Shea, Kitty
Parnell, Charles Stewart, 1846-1891
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 {328} 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 {329} peasantry--they are worth helping. I have
always wished it, but there is so much between--and they 'suffer in
silence,' Wifie."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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