More than ever now my father chewed the cud of his great disappointment.  But it is the unexpected that oftenest happens, and one day in the spring, Doctor Conrad, being called to see my mother, who was indisposed, announced that she was about to bear a child.

My father’s delight was almost delirious, though at first his happiness was tempered by the fear that the child that was to be born to him might not prove a boy.  Even this danger disappeared from his mind after a time, and before long his vanity and his unconquerable will had so triumphed over his common sense that he began to speak of his unborn child as a son, just as if the birth of a male child had been prearranged.  With my mother, with Doctor Conrad, and above all with Father Dan, he sometimes went the length of discussing his son’s name.  It was to be Hugh, because that had been the name of the heads of the O’Neills through all the ages, as far back as the legendary days in which, as it was believed, they had been the Kings of Ellan.

My mother was no less overjoyed.  She had justified herself at last, and if she was happy enough at the beginning in the tingling delight of the woman who is about to know the sweetest of human joys, the joy of bearing a child, she acquiesced at length in the accepted idea that her child would be a boy.  Perhaps she was moved to this merely by a desire to submit to her husband’s will, and to realise his hopes and expectations.  Or perhaps she had another reason, a secret reason, a reason that came of her own weakness and timidity as a woman, namely, that the man child to be born of her would be strong and brave and free.

All went well down to the end of autumn, and then alarming news came from Castle Raa.  The old lord had developed some further malady and was believed to be sinking rapidly.  Doctor Conrad was consulted and he gave it as his opinion that the patient could not live beyond the year.  This threw my father into a fever of anxiety.  Sending for his advocate, he took counsel both with him and with Father Dan.

“Come now, let us get the hang of this business,” he said; and when he realised that (according to the terms of the ancient Patent) if the old lord died before his child was born, his high-built hopes would be in the dust, his eagerness became a consuming fire.

For the first time in his life his excitement took forms of religion and benevolence.  He promised that if everything went well he would give a new altar to Our Lady’s Chapel in the parish church of St. Mary, a ton of coals to every poor person within a radius of five miles, and a supper to every inhabitant of the neighbouring village who was more than sixty years of age.  It was even rumoured that he went so far in secret as to provide funds for the fireworks with which some of his flatterers were to celebrate the forthcoming event, and that one form of illumination was a gigantic frame which, set upon the Sky Hill, immediately in front of our house, was intended to display in brilliant lights the glowing words “God Bless the Happy Heir.”  Certainly the birth was to be announced by the ringing of the big bell of the tower as signal to the country round about that the appointed festivities might begin.