The American nodded.
‘Deader’n a smelt.’
‘I wish I were dead too!’ said Mr. Cato bitterly.
The American made a motion of diving with his joined hands. Mr. Cato shook his head.
‘I have my two sisters to look after.’
‘I wish you joy.’
Then the cables were loosed, the screw snorted in the water, the American waved, and followed Lady Wyse into the cabin; the boat slid away from the jetty, and, slowly turning in mid-stream, reared its defiant head towards the sea.
After many days of alert and passive silence, Dwala died on his pallet on the deck. He turned his face sideways down into the pillow, as if to hide the smile that was rising to his lips; then breathed one deep, luxurious sigh, and was ended. They wrapped him in sacking, with an iron reel at his feet; and in the cold, clear morning, when the sun mounted flat and yellow to its daily course and the low mists smoked this way and that along the waves, they slid him without a word off a door and over the bulwarks.
Down, down through the crystal indifference, wavering gently to his appointed place in the rocky bottom of the rapt thicket of weeds; losing the last remnant of individuality as the motion ceased; indistinguishable from a little heap of sand; lying careless and obscure, like some tired animal which has crept to rest in the wild garden of a crumbled castle in an empty world, long since abandoned and forgotten by mankind.