"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.