Fathers and sons -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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