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Hollis was facing us alone with something small that glittered between his fingers. It looked like a coin. "Ah! here it is," he said. He held it up. It was a sixpence a Jubilee sixpence. It was gilt; it had a hole punched near the rim. Hollis looked towards Karain. "A charm for our friend," he said to us. "The thing itself is of great power money, you know and his imagination is struck.
Karain stopped in the midst of his men and waved his hand; then, detaching himself from the splendid group, walked alone to the water's edge and waved his hand again. The schooner passed out to sea between the steep headlands that shut in the bay, and at the same instant Karain passed out of our life forever. But the memory remains. Some years afterwards I met Jackson, in the Strand.
Then, just as we were thinking of repose, the watchmen of the schooner would hail a splash of paddles away in the starlit gloom of the bay; a voice would respond in cautious tones, and our serang, putting his head down the open skylight, would inform us without surprise, "That Rajah, he coming. He here now." Karain appeared noiselessly in the doorway of the little cabin.
To him his life that cruel mirage of love and peace seemed as real, as undeniable, as theirs would be to any saint, philosopher, or fool of us all. Hollis muttered "You won't soothe him with your platitudes." Karain spoke to me. "You know us. You have lived with us. Why? we cannot know; but you understand our sorrows and our thoughts.
The end of all this shall be," he went on, looking up at us "the end of this shall be, that some day he will run amuck amongst his faithful subjects and send 'ad patres' ever so many of them before they make up their minds to the disloyalty of knocking him on the head." I nodded. I thought it more than probable that such would be the end of Karain.
Hollis mused, muttered suddenly with a short laugh, "Strength . . . Protection . . . Charm." He slipped off the table and left the cuddy without a look at us. It seemed a base desertion. Jackson and I exchanged indignant glances. We could hear him rummaging in his pigeon-hole of a cabin. Was the fellow actually going to bed? Karain sighed. It was intolerable!
A shaft of bright hot rays darted into the bay between the summits of two hills, and the water all round broke out as if by magic into a dazzling sparkle. "No! He is not there waiting," said Karain, after a long look over the beach. "I do not hear him," he went on, slowly. "No!" He turned to us. "He has departed again forever!" he cried.
Then Jackson, with glittering drops of water on his hair and beard, came back looking angry, and Hollis, who, being the youngest of us, assumed an indolent superiority, said without stirring, "Give him a dry sarong give him mine; it's hanging up in the bathroom." Karain laid the kriss on the table, hilt inwards, and murmured a few words in a strangled voice.
Karain did not visit us in the afternoon as usual. A message of greeting and a present of fruit and vegetables came off for us before sunset. Our friend paid us like a banker, but treated us like a prince. We sat up for him till midnight.
"Time to go on deck," said Jackson. Hollis put on a coat, and we went up, Karain leading. The sun had risen beyond the hills, and their long shadows stretched far over the bay in the pearly light. The air was clear, stainless, and cool. I pointed at the curved line of yellow sands. "He is not there," I said, emphatically, to Karain. "He waits no more. He has departed forever."
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