MEMORANDUM OF MARTIN CONRAD

What I had done is easily told. I had gone straight to Daniel O'Neill himself, intending to know the truth of the story and to act accordingly.

Already I knew enough to scent mischief. I could not be so stupefied into blindness of what was going on under my eyes as not to see that the dirty question of money, and perhaps the dirtier question of the aims and expectations of the woman MacLeod, were at the root of the matter that was distressing my darling.

Daniel O'Neill had left the Big House and gone to live in his mother's old cottage for two reasons--first, to delude the law into the idea that he was himself utterly ruined by the bankruptcy to which he had brought the whole island; and next, to gratify the greed of his mistress, who wanted to get him to herself at the end, so that he might be persuaded to marry her (if it were only on his death-bed) and so establish, against any claim of his daughter's, her widow's rights in what a husband leaves behind him--which is half of everything in Ellan.

What connection this had with the man's desire to get hold of the child I had yet to learn; but I meant to learn it without another hour's delay, so I set off for the cottage on the curragh.

It was growing dark, and not being sure of my way through the ever-changing bypaths of the bog land, I called on Father Dan to guide me. The old priest seemed to know my errand (the matter my darling had communicated as a secret being common knowledge), and at first he looked afraid.

"Well ... yes, yes ... why shouldn't I?" he said, and then, "Yes, I will, I will"--with the air of a man who had made up his mind to a daring enterprise.

Our curragh is a stretch of wild marsh lying over against the sea, undrained, only partly cultivated, half covered with sedge and sallow bushes, and consequently liable to heavy mists. There was a mist over it that night, and hence it was not easy even for Father Dan (accustomed to midnight visits to curragh cottages) to find the house which had once been the home of "Neale the Lord."

We rooted it out at last by help of the parish constable, who was standing at the corner of a by-road talking to the coachman of a gorgeous carriage waiting there, with its two splendid horses smoking in the thick night air.

When, over the shingle of what we call "the street," we reached the low straggling crofter-cottage under its thick trammon tree (supposed to keep off the evil spirits), I rapped with my knuckles at the door, and it was opened by a tall scraggy woman with a candle in her hand.

This was Nessy MacLeod, harder and uglier than ever, with her red hair combed up, giving her the appearance of a bunch of carrots over two stalks of rhubarb.

Almost before I had time to say that we had come to see Mr. O'Neill, and to step into the house while saying so, a hoarse, husky, querulous man's voice cried from within:

"Who is it, Nessy?"

It's Father Dan, and Martin ... I mean Sir... ."

"That'll do," I said, and the next moment we were in the living-room--a bare, bleak, comfortless Curraghman's kitchen.

A more incongruous sight than we saw there human eyes never beheld.

Daniel O'Neill, a shadow of the big brute creature he once was, a shrivelled old man, with his bony hands scored and contracted like an autumn leaf, his shrunken legs scarcely showing through his baggy trousers, his square face whiter than the wall behind it, and a piece of red flannel hanging over his head like a cowl, sat in the elbow-chair at the side of the hearth-fire, while at a deal table, which was covered with papers that looked like law deeds and share certificates (being stamped and sealed), sat the Bishop of the island, and its leading lawyer, Mr. Curphy.

On hearing my name and seeing me enter the house, Daniel O'Neill lost all control of himself. He struggled to his feet by help of a stick, and as I walked up to him he laid hold of me.

"You devil!" he cried. "You infernal villain! You... ."

But it is of no use to repeat what else he said in the fuming of his rage, laying hold of me by the collar of my coat, and tugging at it as if he would drag me to his feet.

I was half sorry for the man, badly as I thought of him, so I only opened his hand (easy enough to do, for the grip was gone from it) and said:

"You're an old man, sir, and you're a sick man--don't tempt me to forget that you are the father of Mary O'Neill. Sit down."

He sat down, breathless and broken, without another word. But the Bishop, with a large air of outraged dignity, faced about to poor Father Dan (who was standing near the door, turning his round hat in his trembling hands) and said:

"Father Donovan, did you know that Mr. O'Neill was very ill?"

"I did, Monsignor," said Father Dan.

"And that a surgeon is coming from London to perform an operation upon him--did you know that?"

"I did, Monsignor."

"Did you know also that I was here to-night to attend with Mr. Curphy to important affairs and perhaps discharge some sacred duties?"

"I knew that too, Monsignor."

"Then," said the Bishop, pointing at me, "how dare you bring this man here--this man of all others, who has been the chief instrument in bringing shame and disgrace upon our poor sick friend and his deeply injured family?"

"So that's how you look at it, is it, Monsignor?"

"Yes, sir, that is how I look at it, and I am sorry for a priest of my Church who has so weakened his conscience by sympathy with notorious sinners as to see things in any other light."

"Sinners, Bishop?"

"Didn't you hear me, Father Donovan? Or do you desire me to use a harder name for them--for one of them in particular, on whom you have wasted so much weak sentimentality, to the injury of your spiritual influence and the demoralisation of your parish. I have warned you already. Do you wish me to go further, to remove you from your Presbytery, or perhaps report your conduct to those who have power to take the frock off your back? What standard of sanctity for the sacrament of Holy Matrimony do you expect to maintain while you degrade it by openly associating with a woman who has broken her marriage vows and become little better ... I grieve to say it [with a deep inclination of the head towards the poor wreck in the elbow-chair] little better than a common... ."

I saw the word that was coming, and I was out in an instant. But there was somebody before me. It was Father Dan. The timid old priest seemed to break in one moment the bonds of a life-long tyranny.

"What's that you say, Monsignor?" he cried in a shrill voice. "_I_ degrade the sacrament of Holy Matrimony? Never in this world! But if there's anybody in the island of Ellan who has done that same every day of his life, it's yourself, and never more cruelly and shamefully than in the case we're talking of at this present speaking."

"I'm not used to this kind of language from my clergy, Father Donovan,"

began the Bishop, but before he could say more Father Dan caught him up by crying:

"Perhaps not, Monsignor. But you've got to hear for once, and that's now. When this man [pointing to Daniel O'Neill] for his own purposes wanted to marry his daughter (who was a child and had no choice in the matter) to one of another faith, a man who didn't believe in the sacrament of marriage as we know it, who was it that paved the way for him?"

"You actually mean that _I_... ."

"I mean that without your help, Monsignor, a good girl could never have been married to a bad man. You didn't act in ignorance, either. When somebody told you--somebody who is here now--that the man to whom you were going to marry that innocent girl was a notorious loose liver, a profligate, a reprobate, a betrayer of women, and a damned scoundrel... ."

"Go on, Father Dan; that's God's own name for him," I said, when the old priest caught his breath for a moment, terrified by the word that had burst from his lips.

"Let's have an end of this," said the Bishop mightily.

"Wait a bit, sir," I said, and then Father Dan went on to say how he had been told there was nothing to my story, and how he had been forbidden to inquire into it.

"That's how you made _me_ a party to this wicked marriage, God and his Holy Mother pardon me! And now that it has come to the end you might have expected, and the poor helpless child who was bought and sold like a slave is in the position of the sinner, you want me to cut her off, to turn the hearts of all good people against her, to cast her out of communion, to make her a thing to point the finger at--me, her spiritual father who baptized her, taking her out of the arms of the angel who bore her and giving her to Christ--or if I won't you'll deprive me of my living, you'll report me to Rome, you'll unfrock me... ."

"Do it, Monsignor," cried Father Dan, taking a step nearer to the Bishop and lifting a trembling hand over his head. "Do it, if our holy Church will permit you, and I'll put a wallet on my old shoulders and go round the houses of my parish in my old age, begging a bite of bread and a basin of meal, and sleeping under a thorn bush, rather than lay my head on my pillow and know that that poor victim of your wicked scheming is in the road."

The throbbing and breaking of the old priest's voice had compelled me to drop my head, and it was not until I heard the sneck of the lock of the outer door that I realised that, overcome by his emotion, he had fled from the house.

"And now I guess you can follow your friend," said Daniel O'Neill.

"Not yet, sir," I answered; "I have something to say first."

"Well, well, what is it, please?" said the lawyer sharply and insolently, looking to where I was standing with folded arms at one side of the hearth-place.

"You'll hear soon enough, Master Curphy," I answered.