What I had done is easily told. I had gone straight to Daniel O'Neill
himself, intending to know the truth of the story and to act
accordingly.
Already I knew enough to scent mischief. I could not be so stupefied
into blindness of what was going on under my eyes as not to see that the
dirty question of money, and perhaps the dirtier question of the aims
and expectations of the woman MacLeod, were at the root of the matter
that was distressing my darling.
Daniel O'Neill had left the Big House and gone to live in his mother's
old cottage for two reasons--first, to delude the law into the idea that
he was himself utterly ruined by the bankruptcy to which he had brought
the whole island; and next, to gratify the greed of his mistress, who
wanted to get him to herself at the end, so that he might be persuaded
to marry her (if it were only on his death-bed) and so establish,
against any claim of his daughter's, her widow's rights in what a
husband leaves behind him--which is half of everything in Ellan.
What connection this had with the man's desire to get hold of the child
I had yet to learn; but I meant to learn it without another hour's
delay, so I set off for the cottage on the curragh.
It was growing dark, and not being sure of my way through the
ever-changing bypaths of the bog land, I called on Father Dan to guide
me. The old priest seemed to know my errand (the matter my darling had
communicated as a secret being common knowledge), and at first he looked
afraid.
"Well . . . yes, yes . . . why shouldn't I?" he said, and then, "Yes, I
will, I will"--with the air of a man who had made up his mind to a
daring enterprise.
Our curragh is a stretch of wild marsh lying over against the sea,
undrained, only partly cultivated, half covered with sedge and sallow
bushes, and consequently liable to heavy mists. There was a mist over it
that night, and hence it was not easy even for Father Dan (accustomed to
midnight visits to curragh cottages) to find the house which had once
been the home of "Neale the Lord."
We rooted it out at last by help of the parish constable, who was
standing at the corner of a by-road talking to the coachman of a
gorgeous carriage waiting there, with its two splendid horses smoking in
the thick night air.
When, over the shingle of what we call "the street," we reached the low
straggling crofter-cottage under its thick trammon tree (supposed to
keep off the evil spirits), I rapped with my knuckles at the door, and
it was opened by a tall scraggy woman with a candle in her hand.
This was Nessy MacLeod, harder and uglier than ever, with her red hair
combed up, giving her the appearance of a bunch of carrots over two
stalks of rhubarb.
Almost before I had time to say that we had come to see Mr. O'Neill, and
to step into the house while saying so, a hoarse, husky, querulous man's
voice cried from within:
"Who is it, Nessy?"