And yet I was a fool, or in spite of everything I should have spoken to Daniel O'Neill before he left Rome. I should have said to him:
"Do you know that the man to whom you are going to marry your daughter is a profligate and a reprobate? If you do know this, are you deliberately selling her, body and soul, to gratify your lust of rank and power and all the rest of your rotten aspirations?"
That is what I ought to have done, but didn't do. I was afraid of being thought to have personal motives—of interfering where I wasn't wanted, of butting in when I had no right.
Yet I felt I had a right, and I had half a mind to throw up everything and go back to Ellan. But the expedition was the big chance I had been looking forward to and I could not give it up.
So I resolved to write. But writing isn't exactly my job, and it took me a fortnight to get anything done to my satisfaction. By that time we were at Port Said, and from there I posted three letters,—the first to Daniel O'Neill, the second to Bishop Walsh, the third to Father Dan.
Would they reach in time? If so, would they be read and considered or resented and destroyed?
I did not know. I could not guess. And then I was going down into the deep Antarctic night, where no sound from the living world could reach me.
What would happen before I could get back? Only God could say.
M.C.