The Woman Thou Gavest Me eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 874 pages of information about The Woman Thou Gavest Me.

The Woman Thou Gavest Me eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 874 pages of information about The Woman Thou Gavest Me.

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 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.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Woman Thou Gavest Me from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.