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.