And when I asked him what he would do with a fortune if he had one he answered:

"Do? Have a tunderin' [thundering] good law-shoot and sattle some o'

them big fellas."

Going to bed in the "Plough" that night, I had an ugly vision of the scene being enacted in the cottage on the curragh (a scene not without precedent in the history of the world, though the priesthood as a whole is so pure and noble)--the midnight marriage of a man dying in unnatural hatred of his own daughter (and she the sweetest woman in the world) while the priest and the prostitute divided the spoils.

[END OF MARTIN CONRAD'S MEMORANDUM]

ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTEENTH CHAPTER

JULY 25. The old doctor brought me such sad and startling news to-day.

My poor father is dead--died yesterday, after an operation which he had deferred too long, refusing to believe it necessary.

The dreadful fact has hitherto been kept secret not only from me but from everybody, out of fear of legal proceedings arising from the failure of banks, &c., which has brought the whole island to the verge of bankruptcy.

He was buried this morning at old St. Mary's--very early, almost before daybreak, to suit the convenience of the Bishop, who wished to catch the first steamer _en route_ for Rome.

As a consequence of these strange arrangements, and the secrecy that has surrounded my father's life of late, people are saying that he is not dead at all, that in order to avoid prosecution he has escaped from the island (going off with the Bishop in a sort of disguise), and that the coffin put into the grave this morning did not contain a human body.

"But that's all wrong," said the old doctor. "Your father is really dead and buried, and the strange man who went away with the Bishop was the London surgeon who performed the operation."

I can hardly realise it--that the strong, stalwart being, the stern old lion whose heavy foot, tramping through my poor mother's room, used to make the very house shake, is gone.

He died as he had lived, it seems. To the last self-centred, inflexible, domineering--a peasant yet a great man (if greatness is to be measured by power), ranking, I think, in his own little scene of life with the tragic figures of history.

I have spent the day in bitter grief. Ever since I was a child there has been a dark shadow between my father and me. He was like a beetling mountain, always hanging over my head. I wonder whether he wished to see me at the end. Perhaps he did, and was over-persuaded by the cold and savourless nature of Nessy MacLeod, who is giving it out, I hear, that grief and shame for me killed him.

People will say he was a vulgar parvenu, a sycophant, a snob--heaven knows what. All wrong! For the true reading of his character one has to go back to the day when he was a ragged boy and the liveried coachman of the "bad Lord Raa" lashed at his mother on the road, and he swore that when he was a man she should have a carriage of her own, and then "nobody should never lash her."

He found Gessler's cap in the market-place and was no more willing than Tell to bend the knee to it.

My poor father! He did wrong to use another life, another soul, for either his pride or his revenge. But God knows best how it will be with him, and if he was the first cause of making my life what it has been, I send after him (I almost tremble to say it) if not my love, my forgiveness.

JULY 26. I begin to realise that after all I was not romancing when I told the old dears that Martin and his schemes would collapse if I failed him. Poor boy, he is always talking as it everything depended upon me. It is utterly frightening to think what would happen to the Expedition if he thought I could not sail with him on the sixteenth.

Martin is not one of the men who weep for their wives as if the sun had suffered eclipse, and then marry again before their graves are green.

So, having begun on my great scheme of pretending that I am getting better every day, and shall be "ready to go, never fear," I have to keep it up.

I begin to suspect, though, that I am not such a wonderful actress after all. Sometimes in the midst of my raptures I see him looking at me uneasily as if he were conscious of a certain effort. At such moments I have to avoid his eyes lest anything should happen, for my great love seems to be always lying in wait to break down my make-believe.

To-day (though I had resolved not to give way to tears) when he was talking about the voyage out, and how it would "set me up" and how the invigorating air of the Antarctic would "make another woman of me," I cried:

"How splendid! How glorious!"

"Then why are you crying?" he asked.

"Oh, good gracious, that's nothing--for _me_," I answered.

But if I am throwing dust in Martin's eyes I am deceiving nobody else, it seems. To-night after he and Dr. O'Sullivan had gone back to the "Plough," Father Dan came in to ask Christian Ann how she found me, and being answered rather sadly, I heard him say:

"_Ugh cha nee!_ [Woe is me!] What is life? It is even a vapour which appeareth for a little while and then vanisheth away."

And half an hour later, when old Tommy came to bring me some lobsters (he still declares they are the only food for invalids) and to ask "how's the lil woman now?" I heard him moaning, as he was going out:

"There'll be no shelter for her this voyage, the _vogh!_ She'll carry the sea in with her to the Head, I'm thinking."

JULY 27. I _must_ keep it up--I must, I must! To allow Martin's hopes and dreams to be broken in upon now would be enough to kill me outright.

I don't want to be unkind, but some explorers leave the impression that their highest impulse is the praise of achievement, and once they have done something all they've got to do next is to stay at home and talk about it. Martin is not like that. Exploration is a passion with him.

The "lure of the little voices" and the "call of the Unknown" have been with him from the beginning, and they will be with him to the end.

I cannot possibly think of Martin dying in bed, and being laid to rest in the green peace of English earth--dear and sweet as that is to tamer natures, mine for instance. I can only think of that wild heroic soul going up to God from the broad white wilderness of the stormy South, and leaving his body under heaving hummocks of snow with blizzards blowing a requiem over his grave.

Far off may that glorious ending be, but shall my poor failing heart make it impossible? Never, never, never!

Moral--I'm going to get up every day--whatever my nurse may say.

JULY 28. I was rocking baby to sleep this afternoon when Christian Ann, who was spinning by the fire, told me of a quarrel between Aunt Bridget and Nessy MacLeod.

It seems that Nessy (who says she was married to my father immediately before the operation) claims to be the heiress of all that is left, and as the estate includes the Big House she is "putting the law on" Aunt Bridget to obtain possession.

Poor Aunt Bridget! What a pitiful end to all her scheming for Betsy Beauty, all her cruelties to my long-suffering mother, all her treatment of me--to be turned out of doors by her own step-daughter!

When old Tommy heard of the lawsuit, he said:

"Chut! Sarves her right, I say! It's the black life the Big Woman lived before, and it's the black life she'll be living now, and her growing old, and the Death looking in on her."

JULY 29. We have finished the proofs to-day and Dr. O'Sullivan has gone back with them. I thought he looked rather _wae_ when he came to say good-bye to me, and though he made a great deal of noise his voice was husky when (swearing by his favourite Saints) he talked about "returning for the tenth with all the boys, including Treacle."

Of course that was nonsense about his being in love with me. But I'm sure he loves me all the same--many, many people love me. I don't know what I've done to deserve all this love. I have had a great deal of love in my life now that I come to think of it.

We worked hard over the last of the proofs, and I suppose I was tired at the end of them, for when Martin carried me upstairs to-night there was less laughter than usual, and I thought he looked serious as he set me down by the bed.

I bantered him about that ("A penny for your thoughts, mister"), but towards midnight the truth flashed upon me--I am becoming thinner and therefore lighter every day, and he is beginning to notice it.

Moral--I must try to walk upstairs in future.