Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J. K. Rowling [176]
The steady rhythm of his arms beat time with his thoughts. Hallows … Horcruxes … Hallows … Horcruxes … Yet he no longer burned with that weird, obsessive longing. Loss and fear had snuffed it out: He felt as though he had been slapped awake again.
Deeper and deeper Harry sank into the grave, and he knew where Voldemort had been tonight, and whom he had killed in the topmost cell of Nurmengard, and why. …
And he thought of Wormtail, dead because of one small unconscious impulse of mercy. … Dumbledore had foreseen that. … How much more had he known?
Harry lost track of time. He knew only that the darkness had lightened a few degrees when he was rejoined by Ron and Dean.
“How’s Hermione?”
“Better,” said Ron. “Fleur’s looking after her.”
Harry had his retort ready for when they asked him why he had not simply created a perfect grave with his wand, but he did not need it. They jumped down into the hole he had made with spades of their own, and together they worked in silence until the hole seemed deep enough.
Harry wrapped the elf more snugly in his jacket. Ron sat on the edge of the grave and stripped off his shoes and socks, which he placed upon the elf’s bare feet. Dean produced a woolen hat, which Harry placed carefully upon Dobby’s head, muffling his batlike ears.
“We should close his eyes.”
Harry had not heard the others coming through the darkness. Bill was wearing a traveling cloak, Fleur a large white apron, from the pocket of which protruded a bottle of what Harry recognized to be Skele-Gro. Hermione was wrapped in a borrowed dressing gown, pale and unsteady on her feet; Ron put an arm around her when she reached him. Luna, who was huddled in one of Fleur’s coats, crouched down and placed her fingers tenderly upon each of the elf’s eyelids, sliding them over his glassy stare.
“There,” she said softly. “Now he could be sleeping.”
Harry placed the elf into the grave, arranged his tiny limbs so that he might have been resting, then climbed out and gazed for the last time upon the little body. He forced himself not to break down as he remembered Dumbledore’s funeral, and the rows and rows of golden chairs, and the Minister of Magic in the front row, the recitation of Dumbledore’s achievements, the stateliness of the white marble tomb. He felt that Dobby deserved just as grand a funeral, and yet here the elf lay between bushes in a roughly dug hole.
“I think we ought to say something,” piped up Luna. “I’ll go first, shall I?”
And as everybody looked at her, she addressed the dead elf at the bottom of the grave.
“Thank you so much, Dobby, for rescuing me from that cellar. It’s so unfair that you had to die, when you were so good and brave. I’ll always remember what you did for us. I hope you’re happy now.”
She turned and looked expectantly at Ron, who cleared his throat and said in a thick voice, “Yeah … thanks, Dobby.”
“Thanks,” muttered Dean.
Harry swallowed.
“Good-bye, Dobby,” he said. It was all he could manage, but Luna had said it all for him. Bill raised his wand, and the pile of earth beside the grave rose up into the air and fell neatly upon it, a small, reddish mound.
“D’you mind if I stay here a moment?” he asked the others.
They murmured words he did not catch; he felt gentle pats upon his back, and then they all traipsed back toward the cottage, leaving Harry alone beside the elf.
He looked around: There were a number of large white stones, smoothed by the sea, marking the edge of the flower beds. He picked up one of the largest and laid it, pillowlike, over the place where Dobby’s head now rested. He then felt in his pocket for a wand.
There were two in there. He had forgotten, lost track; he could not now remember whose wands these were; he seemed to remember wrenching them out