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: