The Woman Thou Gavest Me | Page 2

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