less plaintive reached his ears. They pursued him even into his bedroom,
which opened into an upstairs veranda. The fragmentary and rasping
character of these sounds made their intrusion inexpressibly tedious in
the long run. Like most dreamers, to whom it is given sometimes to hear
the music of the spheres, Heyst, the wanderer of the Archipelago, had
a taste for silence which he had been able to gratify for years. The
islands are very quiet. One sees them lying about, clothed in their dark
garments of leaves, in a great hush of silver and azure, where the sea
without murmurs meets the sky in a ring of magic stillness. A sort of
smiling somnolence broods over them; the very voices of their people are
soft and subdued, as if afraid to break some protecting spell.

Perhaps this was the very spell which had enchanted Heyst in the early
days. For him, however, that was broken. He was no longer enchanted,
though he was still a captive of the islands. He had no intention to
leave them ever. Where could he have gone to, after all these years?
Not a single soul belonging to him lived anywhere on earth. Of this
fact--not such a remote one, after all--he had only lately become aware;
for it is failure that makes a man enter into himself and reckon up his
resources. And though he had made up his mind to retire from the world
in hermit fashion, yet he was irrationally moved by this sense of
loneliness which had come to him in the hour of renunciation. It hurt
him. Nothing is more painful than the shock of sharp contradictions that
lacerate our intelligence and our feelings.

Meantime Schomberg watched Heyst out of the corner of his eye.
Towards the unconscious object of his enmity he preserved a distant
lieutenant-of-the-Reserve demeanour. Nudging certain of his customers
with his elbow, he begged them to observe what airs "that Swede" was
giving himself.