Sterne from the boat shouted—­

“Yes; we’ve got him.  Come along, sir.  It’s madness to stay longer.”

Captain Whalley felt along the rail carefully, and, without a word, cast off the painter.  They were expecting him still down there.  They were waiting, till a voice suddenly exclaimed—­

“We are adrift!  Shove off!”

“Captain Whalley!  Leap! . . . pull up a little . . . leap!  You can swim.”

In that old heart, in that vigorous body, there was, that nothing should be wanting, a horror of death that apparently could not be overcome by the horror of blindness.  But after all, for Ivy he had carried his point, walking in his darkness to the very verge of a crime.  God had not listened to his prayers.  The light had finished ebbing out of the world; not a glimmer.  It was a dark waste; but it was unseemly that a Whalley who had gone so far to carry a point should continue to live.  He must pay the price.

“Leap as far as you can, sir; we will pick you up.”

They did not hear him answer.  But their shouting seemed to remind him of something.  He groped his way back, and sought for Mr. Massy’s coat.  He could swim indeed; people sucked down by the whirlpool of a sinking ship do come up sometimes to the surface, and it was unseemly that a Whalley, who had made up his mind to die, should be beguiled by chance into a struggle.  He would put all these pieces of iron into his own pockets.

They, looking from the boat, saw the Sofala, a black mass upon a black sea, lying still at an appalling cant.  No sound came from her.  Then, with a great bizarre shuffling noise, as if the boilers had broken through the bulkheads, and with a faint muffled detonation, where the ship had been there appeared for a moment something standing upright and narrow, like a rock out of the sea.  Then that too disappeared.

When the Sofala failed to come back to Batu Beru at the proper time, Mr. Van Wyk understood at once that he would never see her any more.  But he did not know what had happened till some months afterwards, when, in a native craft lent him by his Sultan, he had made his way to the Sofala’s port of registry, where already her existence and the official inquiry into her loss was beginning to be forgotten.

It had not been a very remarkable or interesting case, except for the fact that the captain had gone down with his sinking ship.  It was the only life lost; and Mr. Van Wyk would not have been able to learn any details had it not been for Sterne, whom he met one day on the quay near the bridge over the creek, almost on the very spot where Captain Whalley, to preserve his daughter’s five hundred pounds intact, had turned to get a sampan which would take him on board the Sofala.