"Out of the depths, O Lord, out of the depths," begins the most
beautiful of the services of our church, and it is out of the depths of
my life that I must bring the incidents of this story.
I was an unwanted child--unwanted as a girl at all events. Father Dan
Donovan, our parish priest, told me all about it. I was born in October.
It had been raining heavily all day long. The rain was beating hard
against the front of our house and running in rivers down the
window-panes. Towards four in the afternoon the wind rose and then the
yellow leaves of the chestnuts in the long drive rustled noisily, and
the sea, which is a mile away, moaned like a dog in pain.
In my father's room, on the ground floor, Father Dan sat by the fire,
fingering his beads and listening to every sound that came from my
mother's room, which was immediately overhead. My father himself, with
his heavy step that made the house tremble, was tramping to and fro,
from the window to the ingle, from the ingle to the opposite wall.
Sometimes Aunt Bridget came down to say that everything was going on
well, and at intervals of half an hour Doctor Conrad entered in his
noiseless way and sat in silence by the fire, took a few puffs from a
long clay pipe and then returned to his charge upstairs.
My father's impatience was consuming him.
"It's long," he said, searching the doctor's face.
"Don't worry--above all don't worry," said Father Dan.
"There's no need," said Doctor Conrad.
"Then hustle back and get it over," said my father. "It will be five
hundred dollars to you if this comes off all right."
I think my father was a great man at that time. I think he is still a
great man. Hard and cruel as he may have been to me, I feel bound to
say that for him. If he had been born a king, he would have made his
nation feared and perhaps respected throughout the world. He was born a
peasant, the poorest of peasants, a crofter. The little homestead of his
family, with its whitewashed walls and straw-thatched roof, still stands
on the bleak ayre-lands of Ellan, like a herd of mottled cattle
crouching together in a storm.
His own father had been a wild creature, full of daring dreams, and the
chief of them had centred in himself. Although brought up in a mud
cabin, and known as Daniel Neale, he believed that he belonged by lineal
descent to the highest aristocracy of his island, the O'Neills of the
Mansion House (commonly called the Big House) and the Barons of Castle
Raa. To prove his claim he spent his days in searching the registers of
the parish churches, and his nights in talking loudly in the village
inn. Half in jest and half in earnest, people called him "Neale the
Lord." One day he was brought home dead, killed in a drunken quarrel
with Captain O'Neill, a dissolute braggart, who had struck him over the
temple with a stick. His wife, my grandmother, hung a herring net across
the only room of her house to hide his body from the children who slept
in the other bed.
There were six of them, and after the death of her husband she had to
fend for all. The little croft was hungry land, and to make a sufficient
living she used to weed for her more prosperous neighbours. It was
ill-paid labour--ninepence a day fine days and sixpence all weathers,
with a can of milk twice a week and a lump of butter thrown in now and
then. The ways were hard and the children were the first to feel them.
Five of them died. "They weren't willing to stay with me," she used to
say. My father alone was left to her, and he was another Daniel. As he
grew up he was a great help to his mother. I feel sure he loved her.
Difficult as it may be to believe it now, I really and truly think that
his natural disposition was lovable and generous to begin with.
There is a story of his boyhood which it would be wrong of me not to
tell. His mother and he had been up in the mountains cutting gorse and
ling, which with turf from the Curragh used to be the crofter's only
fuel. They were dragging down a prickly pile of it by a straw rope when,
dipping into the high road by a bridge, they crossed the path of a
splendid carriage which swirled suddenly out of the drive of the Big
House behind two high-spirited bays driven by an English coachman in
gorgeous livery. The horses reared and shied at the bundle of kindling,
whereupon a gentleman inside the carriage leaned out and swore, and then
the brutal coachman, lashing out at the bare-headed woman with his whip,
struck the boy on his naked legs.
At the next moment the carriage had gone. It had belonged to the head of
the O'Neills, Lord Raa of Castle Raa, whose nearest kinsman, Captain
O'Neill, had killed my grandfather, so my poor grandmother said nothing.
But her little son, as soon as his smarting legs would allow, wiped his
eyes with his ragged sleeve and said:
"Never mind, mammy. You shall have a carriage of your own when I am a
man, and then nobody shall never lash you."
His mother died. He was twenty years of age at that time, a
large-limbed, lusty-lunged fellow, almost destitute of education but
with a big brain and an unconquerable will; so he strapped his chest and
emigrated to America. What work he found at first I never rightly knew.
I can only remember to have heard that it was something dangerous to
human life and that the hands above him dropped off rapidly. Within two
years he was a foreman. Within five years he was a partner. In ten years
he was a rich man. At the end of five-and-twenty years he was a
millionaire, controlling trusts and corporations and carrying out great
combines.
I once heard him say that the money tumbled into his chest like crushed
oats out of a crown shaft, but what happened at last was never fully
explained to me. Something I heard of a collision with the law and of a
forced assignment of his interests. All that is material to my story is
that at forty-five years of age he returned to Ellan. He was then a
changed man, with a hard tongue, a stern mouth, and a masterful lift of
the eyebrows. His passion for wealth had left its mark upon him, but the
whole island went down before his face like a flood, and the people who
had made game of his father came crawling to his feet like cockroaches.
The first thing he did on coming home was to buy up his mother's croft,
re-thatch the old house, and put in a poor person to take care of it.
"Guess it may come handy some day," he said.
His next act was worthy of the son of "Neale the Lord." Finding that
Captain O'Neill had fallen deeply into debt, he bought up the braggart's
mortgages, turned him out of the Big House, and took up his own abode in
it.
Twelve months later he made amends, after his own manner, by marrying
one of the Captain's daughters. There were two of them. Isabel, the
elder, was a gentle and beautiful girl, very delicate, very timid, and
most sweet when most submissive, like the woodland herbs which give out
their sweetest fragrance when they are trodden on and crushed. Bridget,
the younger, was rather homely, rather common, proud of her strength of
mind and will.
To the deep chagrin of the younger sister, my father selected the elder
one. I have never heard that my mother's wishes were consulted. Her
father and my father dealt with the marriage as a question of business,
and that was an end of the matter. On the wedding day my father did two
things that were highly significant. He signed the parish register in
the name of Daniel O'Neill by right of Letters Patent; and on taking his
bride back to her early home, he hoisted over the tower of his chill
grey house the stars and stripes of his once adopted country stitched to
the flag of his native island. He had talked less than "Neale the Lord,"
but he had thought and acted more.
Two years passed without offspring, and my father made no disguise of
his disappointment, which almost amounted to disgust. Hitherto he had
occupied himself with improvements in his house and estate, but now his
restless energies required a wider field, and he began to look about
him. Ellan was then a primitive place, and its inhabitants, half
landsmen, half seamen, were a simple pious race living in a sweet
poverty which rarely descended into want. But my father had magnificent
schemes for it. By push, energy and enterprise he would galvanise the
island into new life, build hotels, theatres, casinos, drinking halls
and dancing palaces, lay out race-courses, construct electric railways
to the tops of the mountains, and otherwise transform the place into a
holiday resort for the people of the United Kingdom.
"We'll just sail in and make this old island hum," he said, and a number
of his neighbours, nothing loth to be made rich by magic--advocates,
bankers and insular councillors--joined hands with him in his
adventurous schemes.
But hardly had he begun when a startling incident happened. The old Lord
Raa of Castle Raa, head of the O'Neills, the same that had sworn at my
grandmother, after many years in which he had lived a bad life abroad
where he had contracted fatal maladies, returned to Ellan to die. Being
a bachelor, his heir would have been Captain O'Neill, but my mother's
father had died during the previous winter, and in the absence of direct
male issue it seemed likely that both title and inheritance (which, by
the conditions of an old Patent, might have descended to the nearest
living male through the female line) would go to a distant relative, a
boy, fourteen years of age, a Protestant, who was then at school at
Eton.
More than ever now my father chewed the cud of his great disappointment.
But it is the unexpected that oftenest happens, and one day in the
spring, Doctor Conrad, being called to see my mother, who was
indisposed, announced that she was about to bear a child.
My father's delight was almost delirious, though at first his happiness
was tempered by the fear that the child that was to be born to him might
not prove a boy. Even this danger disappeared from his mind after a
time, and before long his vanity and his unconquerable will had so
triumphed over his common sense that he began to speak of his unborn
child as a son, just as if the birth of a male child had been
prearranged. With my mother, with Doctor Conrad, and above all with
Father Dan, he sometimes went the length of discussing his son's name.
It was to be Hugh, because that had been the name of the heads of the
O'Neills through all the ages, as far back as the legendary days in
which, as it was believed, they had been the Kings of Ellan.
My mother was no less overjoyed. She had justified herself at last, and
if she was happy enough at the beginning in the tingling delight of the
woman who is about to know the sweetest of human joys, the joy of
bearing a child, she acquiesced at length in the accepted idea that her
child would be a boy. Perhaps she was moved to this merely by a desire
to submit to her husband's will, and to realise his hopes and
expectations. Or perhaps she had another reason, a secret reason, a
reason that came of her own weakness and timidity as a woman, namely,
that the man child to be born of her would be strong and brave and free.
All went well down to the end of autumn, and then alarming news came
from Castle Raa. The old lord had developed some further malady and was
believed to be sinking rapidly. Doctor Conrad was consulted and he gave
it as his opinion that the patient could not live beyond the year. This
threw my father into a fever of anxiety. Sending for his advocate, he
took counsel both with him and with Father Dan.
"Come now, let us get the hang of this business," he said; and when he
realised that (according to the terms of the ancient Patent) if the old
lord died before his child was born, his high-built hopes would be in
the dust, his eagerness became a consuming fire.
For the first time in his life his excitement took forms of religion and
benevolence. He promised that if everything went well he would give a
new altar to Our Lady's Chapel in the parish church of St. Mary, a ton
of coals to every poor person within a radius of five miles, and a
supper to every inhabitant of the neighbouring village who was more than
sixty years of age. It was even rumoured that he went so far in secret
as to provide funds for the fireworks with which some of his flatterers
were to celebrate the forthcoming event, and that one form of
illumination was a gigantic frame which, set upon the Sky Hill,
immediately in front of our house, was intended to display in brilliant
lights the glowing words "God Bless the Happy Heir." Certainly the birth
was to be announced by the ringing of the big bell of the tower as
signal to the country round about that the appointed festivities might
begin.
Day by day through September into October, news came from Castle Raa by
secret channels. Morning by morning, Doctor Conrad was sent for to see
my mother. Never had the sun looked down on a more gruesome spectacle.
It was a race between the angel of death and the angel of life, with my
father's masterful soul between, struggling to keep back the one and to
hasten on the other.
My father's impatience affected everybody about him. Especially it
communicated itself to the person chiefly concerned. The result was just
what might have been expected. My mother was brought to bed prematurely,
a full month before her time.