k
stood on a little table by the side of the easy chair. They had been
talking a long time. The noises of the street had died out one by one,
till at last, in the moonlight, the London houses began to look like the
tombs of an unvisited, unhonoured, cemetery of hopes.

He had listened. Then, after a silence, he had asked--for he was really
young then:

"Is there no guidance?"

His father was in an unexpectedly soft mood on that night, when the moon
swam in a cloudless sky over the begrimed shadows of the town.

"You still believe in something, then?" he said in a clear voice,
which had been growing feeble of late. "You believe in flesh and blood,
perhaps? A full and equable contempt would soon do away with that, too.
But since you have not attained to it, I advise you to cultivate
that form of contempt which is called pity. It is perhaps the least
difficult--always remembering that you, too, if you are anything, are as
pitiful as the rest, yet never expecting any pity for yourself."

"What is one to do, then?" sighed the young man, regarding his father,
rigid in the high-backed chair.

"Look on--make no sound," were the last words of the man who had spent
his life in blowing blasts upon a terrible trumpet which filled heaven
and earth with ruins, while mankind went on its way unheeding.

That very night he died in his bed, so quietly that they found him
in his usual attitude of sleep, lying on his side, one hand under his
cheek, and his knees slightly bent. He had not even straightened his
legs.

His son buried the silenced destroyer of systems, of hopes, of beliefs.
He observed that the death of that bitter contemner of life did not
trouble the flow of life's stream, where men and women go by thick as
dust, revolving and jostling one another like figures cut out of cork
and weighted with lead just sufficiently to keep them in their proudly
upright posture.

After the funeral, Heyst sat alone, in the dusk, and his meditation took
the form of a definite vision of the stream, of the fatuously jostling,
nodding, spinning figures hurried irresistibly along, and giving no sign
of being aware that the voice on the bank had been suddenly silenced .
. . Yes. A few obituary notices generally insignificant and some grossly
abusive. The son had read them all with mournful detachment.

"This is the hate and rage of their fear," he thought to himself, "and
also of wounded vanity. They shriek their little shriek as they f