He was a fantastic young lord of many sorrows. His heart had been broken in a very strange way. Death and Pity were his closest friends. He was so sad himself that he had come to realize that sorrow is the only sincerity of life. Thus sorrow had become a kind of passion with him, even a kind of connoisseurship; and he had come, so to say, to be a collector of sorrows. It was partly pity and partly an odd form of dilettanteism—for his own sad heart made him pitiful for and companionable with any other sad heart; but the sincerity of his sorrow made him jealous of the sanctity of sorrow, and at the same time sternly critical of, and sadly amused by, the hypocrisies of sorrow.
So, as he sat his horse and gazed at the sunset, he smiled sadly to himself as he heard, without seeming to hear, the small, insincere sorrows of his village of Beethorpe—sorrows forgotten long ago, but suddenly rediscovered in old drawers and unopened cupboards, at the sound of his lordship's trumpet and the promise of his strange proclamation.
Was there a sorrow in the world that no money could buy?
It was to find such a sorrow that Lord Mortimer thus fantastically rode from village to village of his estates, with herald and steward.
The unpurchasable sorrow—the sorrow no gold can gild, no jewel can buy!
Far and wide he had ridden over his estates, seeking so rare a sorrow; but as yet he had found no sorrow that could not be bought with a little bag of gold and silver coins.
So he sat his horse, while the villagers of Beethorpe were paid out of a great leathern bag by the steward—for the steward understood the mind of his master, and, without troubling him, paid each weeping and whimpering peasant as he thought fit.
In another great bag the steward had collected the sorrows of the Village of Beethorpe; and, by this, the moon was rising, and, with another blast of trumpet by way of farewell, the three horsemen took the road again to Lord Mortimer's castle.
When, out of the great leathern bag, in Lord Mortimer's cabinet they poured upon the table the sorrows of Beethorpe, the young lord smiled to himself, turning over one sorrow after the other, as though they had been precious stones—for there was not one genuine sorrow among them.