“Hazen!” it said, “you are not wise or really good or loved or beautiful. Why don’t you become so?”
“I!” said Hazen, sadly. “I have lost my chance. I came out to find my fortune and I have thrown it away.”
But still the Thought spoke to him, and said the same thing over and over so many times that at last he answered:—
“What, then, must I do?” he asked.
And then he listened, there in the night and the stillness, to hear what it was that he must do. And this was the first time that ever he had listened like this, or questioned carefully his course. Always before he had done what seemed to him the thing that he wished to do, without questioning whether his fortune lay that way.
“Bravely spoken, Hazen,” said the Thought, then. “Someone near is in great need. Find him and help him.”
Instantly Hazen leaped lightly to the ground, and ran away through the moonlit meadow, and he sought as never in his life had he sought anything before, for the one near, in great need, whom he was to find and help. All through the night he sought, and with the setting of the moon he was struggling up the mountain, because it seemed to him that he must do some hard thing, and this was hard. In the early dawn he stood on the mountain’s very summit, and knocked at the gate of the deserted castle there. And it was the forsaken castle of his father, the king, whom the Princess Vista’s father had conquered; but this Hazen did not know.
No sound answered his summons, so he swung the heavy gate on its broken hinges and stepped within. The court yard was vacant and echoing and grass-grown. Rabbits scuttled away at his approach, and about the sightless eyes of the windows, bats were clinging and moving. The clock in the tower was still and pointed to an hour long-spent. The whole place breathed of things forgotten and of those who, having loved them, were forgotten too.
Hazen mounted the broad, mossy steps leading to the portals, and he found one door slightly ajar. Wondering greatly, he touched it open, and the groined hall appeared like a grim face from behind a mask. On the stone floor, not far beyond the threshold, lay an old man, motionless. And when, uttering a little cry of pity and amazement, Hazen stooped over him, he knew him at once to be that old man who had greeted him at the entrance to the wood on the evening of the day on which he himself had left the king’s palace.
What with bringing him water and bathing his face and chafing his hands, Hazen at last enabled the old man to speak, and found that he had been nearly all his life-time the keeper of the castle and for some years its only occupant. He was not ill, but he had fallen and was hurt, and he had lain for several days without food. So Hazen, who knew well how to do it, kindled a fire of fagots in the great, echoing castle kitchen, and, from the scanty store which he found there, prepared broth and eggs, and then helped the old man to his bed in the little room which had once been a king’s cabinet.