Dorothy Eden by Never Call It Loving Page A

me up unnecessarily.”
    “But what did people say?”
    “I didn’t stay to listen. I only wanted to get back to you. Oh, they were jubilant, of course. I believe there were going to be bonfires lit on all the hills. We won’t let the English forget this mistake.” He sighed deeply. “I’m tired. It will be so good to have a rest. But am I to stay, Kate?”
    “What else would you do?” she asked in reproach.
    “You said Willie was not here. I was afraid he might not be. But I couldn’t stay away. Just for tonight, Kate. Tomorrow I must be in the House. Forster is carrying out his threat to introduce a Bill suspending Habeas Corpus. We’ve got to fight it with every means we’ve got.”
    “But you look so tired. You need rest.”
    “Just tonight, Kate.”
    “Food, shelter, rest. You treat me like an innkeeper.”
    “You know me better than that.”
    She nodded, ashamed of her moment of pique. He had been away so long, he was to go so soon. Although he looked ready to drop, she was going to grudge every minute he spent in sleep.
    As it happened he was not inclined to want to sleep either. When the servants had gone to bed, he told her to stay with him, by the fire.
    She sat on the floor, her head against his knees. She felt his fingers in her hair as he began to talk.
    Presently he was telling her everything. The winter rains in Ireland were very cold. They found their way through thatched roofs, through windows stuffed with bits of sacking and straw. The children who never minded running barefoot in summer were pinched and frozen. If they were turned on to the roads with their evicted parents they were so cold, hungry and miserable they didn’t even cry any longer. To dry up tears was the worst thing of all. There was the mother dragged to watch her son hanged. He was a skinny undersized lad of only sixteen, he had been found near the barracks with a loaded gun. When questioned he had been perky, cheeky, defiant. But on the gallows he had no defence left. He had gone into a kind of catalepsy of terror, and his watching mother had the horror of it written on her face for ever.
    A grand ball had been given in Dublin Castle. There had been enough food to feed a regiment. Statistics showed that over a hundred had died that bitterly cold night in Dublin alone, of cold, malnutrition, and the attendant diseases, typhus, consumption, lung fever.
    In the country people who had never locked a window or bolted a door now did both at nightfall, and were fearful to stir outdoors not only because of the military but because of the depredations of their own kith and kin who had lost all reason and nightly, by their forays, risked the gallows.
    Yet there were the immense crowds who listened and hung on Mr. Parnell’s words as he begged them not to throw away all that was being achieved, to have patience, to trust him to make a fair but peaceful settlement with the English. He hated the English, too, but he did not intend to slaughter them one by one, he would defeat them without bloodshed in their own Houses of Parliament in their own city …
    He will stop soon, she thought. It’s good for him to talk, but he will stop soon and kiss me again, and the servants have all gone to bed. It’s as if we were alone in the house … Is this the night that neither of us is going to be sane?
    The heat of the fire was making her cheeks and her body burn. She felt languorous and heavy limbed. As his fingers moved in her hair she trembled.
    “Gladstone will have to do something with his Land Bill this session,” the weary voice was saying. “If he doesn’t I won’t be responsible for my men. I’ll have to make him, Kate. I’ll have to use every ounce of my strength—and that—isn’t as much—as it was …”
    His hand had slid heavily off her head. She turned sharply. She thought he had collapsed. But he had only lost consciousness. He was sound asleep!
    She had to throw off her languorous feelings and be practical. She was