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