He closed the book, saying,

“So shall you find, Nephew, you, and every man in the evil days of age when you shall say, ‘I have no pleasure in them.’  Hubert, I am going to my long home, nor do I grieve.  In youth I met with sorrow, for though I have never told you, I was married then and had one son, a bright boy, and oh!  I loved him and his mother.  Then came the plague and took them both.  So having naught left and being by nature one of those who could wean himself from women, which I fear that you are not, Hubert, noting all the misery there is in the world and how those who are called noble whom I hate, grind down the humble and the poor, I turned myself to good works.  Half of all my gains I have given and still give to those who minister to poverty and sickness; you will find a list of them when I am gone should you wish to continue the bounty, as to which I do not desire to bind you in any way.  For know, Hubert, that I have left you all that is mine; the gold and the ships with the movables and chattels to be your own, but the lands which are the main wealth, for life and afterwards to be your children’s, or if you should die childless, then to go to certain hospitals where the sick are tended.”

Now I would have thanked him, but he waved my words aside and went on: 

“You will be a very rich man, Hubert, one of the richest in all London; yet set not your heart on wealth, and above all do not ape nobility or strive to climb from the honest class of which you come into the ranks of those idle and dissolute cut-throats and pick-brains who are called the great.  Lighten their pockets if you will, but do not seek to wear their silken, scented garments.  That is my counsel to you.”

He paused a while, picking at the bedclothes as the dying do, and continued,

“You told me that your mother thought you would be a wanderer, and it is strange that now my mind should be as hers was in this matter.  For I seem to see you far away amidst war and love and splendour, holding Wave-Flame aloft as did that Thorgrimmer who begat us.  Well, go where you are called or as occasion drives, though you have much to keep you at home.  I would that you were wed, since marriage is an anchor that few ships can drag.  Yet I am not sure, for how know I whom you should wed, and once that anchor is down no windlass will wind it up and death alone can cut its chain.  One word more.  Though you are so young and strong remember that as I am, so shall you be.  To-day for me, to-morrow for thee, said the wise old man, and thus it ever was and is.

“Hubert, I do not know why we are born to struggle and to suffer and at last be noosed with the rope of Doom.  Yet I hope the priests are right and that we live again, though Solomon thought not so; that is, if we live where there is neither sin nor sorrow nor fear of death.  If so, be sure that in some new land we shall meet afresh, and there I shall ask account of you of the wealth I entrusted to your keeping.  Think of me kindly at times, for I have learned to love you who are of my blood, and while we live on in the hearts of those we love, we are not truly dead.  Come hither that I may bless you in your coming in and going out while you still look upon the sun.”