You must forgive me now, for you will be free.
If I were a better man I would say, God bless you. In my last conscious
moments I will think of you, and speak your name. And now good-bye--an
everlasting good-bye. I was your loving husband, and am your lover until
death.' And it was signed, 'Boyd Madras.'
"However, he didn't die. Between the captain and myself, we kept life in
him, and at last landed him at Port Darwin; all of us, officers and crew,
swearing to let no one know he was a convict. And I'll say this for the
crew of the 'Dancing Kate' that, so far as I know, they kept their word.
That letter, addressed in care of a firm of Melbourne bankers, I gave
back to him before we landed. We made him up a purse of fifty
pounds,--for the crew got to like him,--and left him at Port Darwin,
sailing away again in a few days to another pearl-field farther east.
What happened to him at Port Darwin and elsewhere, I don't know; but one
day I found him on a fashionable steamer in the Indian Ocean, looking
almost as near to Kingdom Come as when he starved in the dingey on No
Man's Sea. As I said before, I think he didn't recognise me; and he's
lying now in 116 Intermediate, with a look on him that I've seen in the
face of a man condemned to death by the devils of cholera or equatorial
fever.
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