Cumner's Son and Other South Sea Folk — Volume 03 by Parker, Gilbert, 1860-1932

Her eyes mutely asked a question, and he replied: "That you marry him," pointing to the inner room, "if he lives."

"He will live, but I--I cannot tell him, Edward," she sadly said.

"He knows."

"He knows! Did you dare to tell him?" It was the lover, not the sister, who spoke then.

"Yes. And he knows also that I'm going to reform--that I'm going away."

Her face was hid in her hand. "And I kept it from him five-and-twenty years! . . . Where are you going, Edward?"

"To the Farewell Islands," he slowly replied.

And she, thinking he meant some island group in the Pacific, tearfully inquired: "Are they far away?"

"Yes, very far away, my girl."

"But you will write to me or come to see me again--you will come to see me again, sometimes, Edward?"

He paused. He knew not at first what to reply, but at length he said, with a strangely determined flash of his dark eyes: "Yes, Barbara, I will come to see you again--if I can." He stooped and kissed her. "Goodbye, Barbara."

"But, Edward, must you go to-night?"

"Yes, I must go now. They are waiting for me. Good-bye."

She would have stayed him but he put her gently back, and she said plaintively: "God keep you, Edward. Remember you said that you would come again to me."

"I shall remember," he said quietly, and he was gone. Standing in the light from the window of the sick man's room he wrote a line in Latin on a slip of paper, begging of Louis Bachelor the mercy of silence, and gave it to Gongi, who whispered that he was surrounded. This he knew; he had not studied sounds in prison through the best years of his life for nothing. He asked Gongi to give the note to his master when he was better, and when it could be done unseen of any one. Then he turned and walked coolly towards the shore.

A few minutes later he lay upon a heap of magnolia branches breathing his life away. At the same moment of time that a rough but kindly hand closed the eyes of the bushranger, the woman from The Angel's Rest and Louis Bachelor saw the pale face of Roadmaster peer through the bedroom window at Barbara Golding sitting in a chair asleep; and she started and said through her half-wakefulness, looking at the window: "Where are you going, Edward?"

THE LONE CORVETTE

"Poor Ted, poor Ted! I'd give my commission to see him once again."

"I believe you would, Debney."

"I knew him to the last button of his nature, and any one who knew him well could never think hardly of him. There were five of us brothers, and we all worshipped him. He could run rings round us in everything, at school, with sports, in the business of life, in love."