I have read this over. It is all wrong, all poor and pale; I have told nothing. Yet the visions--they are in my soul. I throw my arms about them and hold them fast. Perhaps even they must be withdrawn. Perhaps it is a part of my service to lose my way. Even that I accept. I reach my hand for the cup--thirstily. I drink, and to the Unknown God. What is He? I am contented not to know. What am I? It is His will I should not know. Only this: the soul is perfect, indestructible, and she goes to lave herself in Him.
The next morning, said Pierre, Francis made swift preparations for going away. They were few, for he wished to retain nothing belonging to his former life. He took last long looks about the walls, he studied the pictures as if he would learn them by heart, and laid his hand upon one and another of the things that had been dear to him. Then he touched fire to the building, and stood by outside, waiting while it burned. Pierre very plainly understood why he did it, though he could not tell. He seemed to distrust the quality of my intelligence because I asked primitive questions. Was it because Francis feared marauders? Was it some idea of sacrifice to his father's memory? Was it because he felt himself unworthy to retain the precious surroundings of a life to which he had been false? As I became insistent, Pierre grew dumb. The cabin burned, he said. Francis watched it. Then he went away. He never came back.
In the old man's countenance I fancied I could trace, under a veiling patience, the lines of an immortal grief. Francis, I could understand, had been the child of his heart, his one human love. It had taken all the great austerity of the forest to teach him to bear that loss. Yet you could see from his face, as in the faces of so many who suffer with dignity, that he was not destitute of hope.
It has been surprisingly difficult to follow the after-track of Francis Hume. For those who knew him have only to say that he disappeared. But he disappeared merely by settling down at their own door: the back-door where carriages never come. He selected a very poor and sordid street in the city where he had met his loss, and betook himself there to live; not, I believe, with any idea of work among the poor, but because he had probed life to the bottom in his own experience, and he felt constrained to seek a lower depth. He had acquired that passionate abnegation which is the child of grief; not undervaluing the joys of time, he had learned that they were not for him. Now his life became very simple, very humble, in the expectancy of its attitude; for he leaned upon God, and waited until he should be told what to do. There are strange, vivid memories of him among the people with whom he walked. Evidently he gave munificently, yet from such austerity of life, and with such directness of speech and action, that few presumed to bleed him further. In that same dark region remain to-day strange touches of magnificence and beauty; a great picture here, a glowing curtain there, dowered with a richness the present owners may not understand, although they dimly feel it. He had no formulated idea of charity, no recognition of the fact that there are theories of doing good. All that can be discovered about his later life is that he was much beloved, and that he loved much; the latter, from an aching sense of the pain common to all souls, a sense of spiritual kinship. At least, he was spared many of the tawdry temptations of youth; for grief had touched him so near that she had opened his eyes to the foolishness of vain desires. He could watch the fluttering of the garment of happiness without wondering if happiness were really underneath. He had seen the real; thenceforth, for him, there was no illusion. He simply lived, and shared when the inner voice told him to share; and as it afterwards proved, he made his will, and left his fortune to buy great tracts of pine woods for a camping-ground forevermore. But that does not pertain to his story. Sufficient to know that the trust has been very wisely administered, and that hundreds of squalid creatures were last summer turned loose there.