Dorothy Eden (39 page)

“It’s all true.”

“Well, as you know, I don’t trust Healy too far.”

“But after all this, what happened? What went wrong?”

He looked at her with his hollowed tired eyes.

“Gladstone has killed us.”

The flat statement sent a tremor of fear through her. She remembered all too well the veiled cruelty in those slate-coloured eyes even when Mr. Gladstone had been at his most affable.

“I was afraid of this,” she whispered. “How did he do it?”

“He wrote a letter to John Morley. It’s been published in a special edition of the
Pall Mall Gazette
. Here it is.” He pulled a crumpled newspaper from his pocket, and stabbed with his forefinger at the place. Katharine began to read, then pushed the paper away, unable to concentrate on the formalised language.

“Tell me what it means.”

“Morley told Justin McCarthy about the letter just before the meeting. McCarthy told me, but I had no alternative at that late hour but to stick to my guns. I intend to go on doing so. I won’t have the Grand Old Spider defeat me. Briefly, Kate, he says that it would be a great embarrassment to him if I continued as leader of the Irish party. It would render his retention of the leadership of the Liberal party, based as it has been mainly upon the presentation of the Irish cause, a nullity.”

Katharine bowed her head.

At last she said, “Was it such a crime—loving a woman?”

His fingers worked in her hair.

“He’s a coward. He’s afraid of public opinion. Probably, as you guessed, he’s afraid of the Queen.”

“He’s an old man,” she said fiercely. “He’ll die.”

“Not soon enough. I know he’s eighty-one, nearly twice my age. But at this moment he seems younger than me. And he’s got the whip-hand. He’s the one man in the British Government who can get the Home Rule Bill through.”

“Without you?”

“I believe my party may think so.”

“So he must be placated.”

“At any cost.”

Katharine looked at him, knowing what that cost was.

“What will you do?”

He stirred. “Begin on a new manifesto.”

“Now?”

“There’s no time to be lost. We’ve called a meeting for next week. Everyone will be there except those on sickbeds and poor Patrick O’Brien who’s still in jail. Most of them,” he added, “out for my blood. So I must have a plan of campaign. Don’t wait up for me, Kate. I don’t feel like sleeping yet. I’ll begin work.”

She looked at him in dismay, allowing herself to worry only about his look of exhaustion. Later the other thoughts would come. The realisation that he was still, for all his protestations of happiness, deeply, irrevocably involved with his country. If it now, in all its histrionic cruelty, destroyed its most dedicated leader, he would die, as surely as if he had been assassinated.

But it wouldn’t be Ireland, it would be she who had killed him. By adultery.

Not only Mr. Gladstone would be responsible.

An edict that no Irish bishops or priests would dare to disobey was bound to come from Rome. The people might struggle against it. But they would begin to remember that the leader they had loved so wildly and trusted so much was not a Catholic like themselves. And the powerful yeast of their religion would begin to work in them.

All Catholics, Katharine thought, turning on her pillow to look at the high cold moon riding over the dark sea, had the death wish. If Parnell were dead they would have a great glorious orgy of grief. But alive, and tarnished because of the woman at his side, they would be as unremittingly cruel as ignorance and emotional frenzy could make them.

She had always known these things, but Charles had almost convinced her that they didn’t matter, that it was she only who mattered.

Now, as she thought of his tired gaunt face bent over the papers on the lamplit table downstairs, she knew better. He had not won a victory over his two-sided self after all. He was forever committed to both sides. It was a situation too harrowing to be endured.

But she must endure it. She got up and went downstairs and made coffee. Sitting in the chilly kitchen waiting for the water to boil she thought of those other nights now so long ago when she had cooked midnight meals over the fire in her bedroom and they had sat in the firelight making the first exquisite discoveries of love.

Looking back, that time seemed to have been a time of perfect happiness, all its anxieties and separations forgotten. She remembered their stolen drives by the river, the white rose she had dropped and the dried remains of which she had found years later in an envelope in the breast pocket of his jacket, their secret meetings in hotels, his private signal to her across the floor of the House of Commons. Even their vigil over the dying baby now had its aura of poignant happiness.

And now they were back to this, the unending fight, and both of them ten years older, and exhausted by the constant tension of their efforts to be together.

But they were still together. She smoothed her hair, and made herself look alert and sympathetic as she carried the tray into the study.

He looked up.

“Why aren’t you in bed asleep?”

“You know I never sleep well without you. Have some coffee now. I see you’ve written a great deal.”

“Yes. I expect I’ll discard most of it. I’m feeling my way. Stay down here with me, Kate. Sit by the fire.”

“Grouse is here.” She touched the sleeping dog with the toe of her slipper.”

“Grouse does his best, but doesn’t stop me from being lonely.” He sat back and regarded her. “It’s only you who has ever been able to do that. Isn’t that wonderful, Kate? That I should find the one person in the world who can do that for me?”

“And yet you leave her to sleep alone.”

“Don’t scold me at this hour in the morning. But you’re not. I can see that naughty twinkle in your eye.” He flung down his pen. “I believe neither of us will stay down here, after all.”

So she had won again for a few hours, although she had not gone downstairs meaning to win. But with the dear heaviness of his head on her breast, and the blown spray on the windows heightening the comfort of the warm bed, she had her familiar feeling of victory, of being saved once more, of their happiness being strong enough to stand the coldest winds.

The meeting in Room 15 of the House of Commons began the following week.

The effect of Mr. Gladstone’s letter on the Irish Nationalist party, most of whom were men who had fought long and painfully served jail sentences for their cause, had been devastating. They had felt duped, deceived, humiliated. Victory had been in sight and now it had been snatched away from them. Home Rule, possible only through Mr. Gladstone’s Bill, was receding like a mirage. And it was all the fault of their leader with his fatal flaw, his obsession for a woman.

Not that many of them led perfect lives themselves. Mr. John Morley had made an acid comment. “Why don’t the Irish members go into their constituencies to speak about improvident marriages?” But they were not fools enough or great enough to risk their entire future for a woman. They had listened to and sympathised with Mr. Parnell’s earnest comment, “Life is not supportable without the friendship of a woman. Even the saints needed them. You would never have got young men to sacrifice themselves for so unlucky a country as Ireland only that they pictured her as a woman.”

But the virtue was in not being found out.

Mr. Parnell had been found out. So he must be sacrificed.

They used his manifesto to defeat him. They debated it and argued about it hour after hour. Tempers rose. There were heated objections to a reference to “English wolves” which Mr. Parnell flatly refused to remove. The chameleon Mr. Healy shed emotional tears at one stage, he was still torn between love and hate for this man who had influenced him so deeply. But eventually hate triumphed.

He was an orator trained by Parnell himself, and he could not resist the cut and thrust of brilliant wounding argument.

The long trial in Room 15 went on all the week. They swayed back and forth in their emotions. Redmond was always strongly with Parnell.

“Who is the man to take his place? Who is the man who, when the Home Rule Bill comes to be settled, can discuss its provisions on an equal footing with the leaders of the English parties? There is no such man.”

But Healy was having none of this any longer.

He turned to his leader, his eyes glittering, and made a long peroration, finishing with the words:

“If you, sir, should go down, you are only one man gone. Heads of greater leaders have been stricken on the block before now for Ireland.”

“Not by their own friends,” Colonel Nolan interrupted, but Healy, contemptuously ignoring the interruption, went on, “And the Irish cause remains. The Irish people can put us down, but the Irish cause will always remain.”

He dropped from this noble level, however, when Mr. Parnell, still somehow retaining his composure, said that he was the chairman of the party until he was deposed.

“Allow me to depose you,” retorted Mr. Healy.

From the turbulent discussion that ensued Mr. Redmond’s sane voice emerged, “Mr. Parnell is the master of the party.”

As quick as a flash came Mr. Healy’s spiteful, “Who is to be the mistress of the party?”

Pandemonium broke out. Mr. O’Connor appealed for order, and over the confused shouting, Mr. Parnell’s voice rang out, incisive, full of a deadly cold anger.

“Better appeal to your friend,” he said to Mr. O’Connor. “Better appeal to that cowardly little scoundrel there who in an assembly of Irishmen dares to insult a woman!”

That was the end. There was a desultory effort to restore order and continue discussions, but Mr. Justin McCarthy rose and said he thought the time had come to close the debate. He stood a moment looking round the assembled company, then turned fatefully to the door, and forty-four of his colleagues rose to follow him.

Mr. Parnell was left in the disastrously emptied room. Only twenty-six had remained with him. The king was dethroned. The Irish Nationalist party had committed suicide.

But Mr. Parnell refused defeat. He said that he would retire only if Gladstone said in writing that he would give the Irish Parliament control of the police and the land. And if ever the letter was written he advised its being kept in a glass case.

Dr. Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin, probably finding him now too much of an embarrassment in a Catholic country, urged him to retire, but this plea also he ignored, saying that a time came sooner or later when a priest had to choose between Rome and Ireland and he would always choose Rome.

The immense strain of those weeks told severely on his health. He was suffering from acute rheumatism in one arm and Katharine rubbed it with firwood oil and packed it with wool.

That made it feel a little better, and he pronounced himself perfectly fit to travel. He would need to be in Ireland a great deal over the next few months, he said. He intended travelling backwards and forwards twice a week.

Katharine couldn’t bear it. He was growing old visibly, his hair greying, his face deeply lined, his eyes sunken. Why couldn’t he give up? Why didn’t he acknowledge that the fight was hopeless? They would be free to marry in midsummer. Why couldn’t they then go abroad and live quietly and peacefully as Sir Charles Dilke had done?

He listened gravely to her arguments, but only said that it was now too late. He would be a coward to desert his post when the difficulties were at their greatest.

“Be patient, Kate. It will all come right.”

How
could
he still be optimistic?

“You’re not only killing yourself, you’re killing me.”

His face tightened with pain, and she, as always, bitterly regretted her impulsive words.

“The children scarcely ever see you. They think of Papa as someone who lives on the Irish mail steamer.”

“One couldn’t exactly call it living,” he said with a flash of his old dry humour. “I do understand, Kate. After the Kilkenny election I’ll try to be home more.”

The Kilkenny election was another bitter blow. The Parnellite candidate was defeated. The Church was showing its strength. There were priests at every polling booth. The people who in a Dublin Square had shouted hysterically, “We will die for him,” now showed that they had not the courage to disobey their Church. They found it easier not to die for Mr. Parnell after all lest they should endanger their immortal souls.

But they still longed to love him.

At Kildare, Portarlington, Maryborough, Ballybrophy, Thurles, and Limerick he was cheered wildly, at Mallow he was called a ruffian, a coward, a renegade, but at Cork, his own constituency he spoke to a crowd of fifty thousand. He stood on the platform, the wind lifting a lock of hair on his forehead, his dark eyes blazing in his pale dedicated face. He looked frail and ill, his clothes hanging on his gaunt frame. If the wind got stronger he might very well be in danger of blowing away. But there was nothing weak about his voice.

It rang over the complete hushed crowd.

“Men of Cork, I come before you with a proud and confident heart. Without you I am nothing. With you we are everything … I don’t pretend to be immaculate. But never in thought, in word, or deed have I been false to the trust that Irishmen have confided in me. I have fought for you for sixteen years …”

When he stopped there was a brief silence, an isolated voice called “Kitty”, then like an avalanche the cheering began. Women sobbed, lifting their black shawls to their faces, men waved their caps and shouted themselves hoarse. This was tremendous. This was what they admired, a brave man pitting his strength against a hostile world. They were for him completely in that moment. Indeed, they were so carried away with their enthusiasm that they hardly noticed the brave man being assisted from the platform, and taken into an hotel to be revived with brandy. Nor did they know how often this happened on that strenuous tour.

But he came safely back to England in time for Christmas.

A
PART FROM THE JOY
of having Charles home, Christmas held another pleasure for Katharine, a visit from Gerard and Carmen.