The Woman Thou Gavest Me | Page 3

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