All this I thought over a little sadly, as I sat at home that night; and not without some self-questioning as to my own place in the world. Most of us, I think, are a little saddened when we realise our unimportance; most of us, no doubt, would be a little shocked could we return a day or two after our death and see how merrily the world wags on! I would be missed, I knew, scarcely more than Vantine. It was not a pleasant thought, for it seemed to argue some deficiency in myself.
Then, too, the mystery of Vantine's death had a depressing effect upon me. So long as there seemed some theory to build on, so long as there was a ray of light ahead, I had hoped that the tragedy would be explained and expiated; but now my theory had crumbled to pieces; I was left in utter darkness, from which there seemed no way out. Never before, in the face of any mystery, had I felt so blind and helpless, and the feeling took such a grip upon me that it kept me awake for a long time after I got to bed. It seemed, in some mysterious way, that I was contending with a power greater than myself, a power threatening and awful, which could crush me with a turn of the wrist.
Vantine's will was probated next morning. He had directed that his collection of art objects be removed to the museum, and that the house and such portion of its contents as the museum did not care for be sold for the museum's benefit. I had already notified Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke of the terms of the will, and the museum's attorney was present when it was read. He stated that he had been requested to ask me to remain in charge of things for a week or two, until arrangements for the removal could be made. It would also be necessary to make an inventory of Vantine's collection, and the assistant director of the museum was to get this under way at once.
I acquiesced in all these arrangements, but I was feeling decidedly blue when I started back to the office. Vantine's collection had always seemed to me somehow a part of himself; more especially a part of the house in which it had been assembled. It would lose much of its beauty and significance ticketed and arranged stiffly along the walls of the museum, and the thought came to me that it would be a splendid thing for New York if this old house and its contents could be kept intact as an object lesson to the nervous and hurrying younger generation of the easier and more finished manner of life of the older one; something after the fashion that the beautiful old Plantin-Moretus mansion at Antwerp is a rebuke to those present-day publishers who reckon literature a commodity, along with soap and cheese.