THE FUNERAL HAD been a quiet affair. Sallmer Weet was laid to rest with a smile on his face.
The world had ended for him in the eyes of the few looking on and the peacefulness of his passing seemed a blessing to those who had witnessed those final painful years.
Soopsie Weet looked on with a grimness that conveyed more than the regret for a lost loved one. Her mother had wept and her brother appeared confused, as if struggling to shape this world anew now that his father was no longer a part of it.
Then there was the doctor. Not the one who attended him in his last moments, but another man, strangely moved by the ceremony and very pressing in his condolences. He smelt a little of what she presumed as sterilising alcohol but could not be too sure.
'I have donated a large sum to a charity in his honour,' he said after her father had been placed in his final resting place.
'That's nice,' Soopsie replied, she by her forthright demeanour being the head of the family. Her mother's tearful regrets were too little too late and she was in no state to understand much of what was going on.
The funeral parlour had laid on a meal in one of their reception rooms for the few who had turned up. Old friends from the Metalloid District, some still twitching from past health issues, and some bringing with them combative words about blame, culpability and compensation, spoken softly it was true but with focus from long years of brooding over matters. The passing of Sallmer Weet seemed to bring such thoughts to the fore.
'We was all looking for a class action,' one grizzled former employee of the metal works said. 'But couldn't find a body to blame. Them poisons been there for decades and no one's sure who put 'em there.'
'My father never spoke of blame,' Soopsie said. He never in fact spoke much at all in the final years of his life except about the pain.
'He took on the burden bravely and fought as best he could,' the doctor said. 'Yet there was something in his eyes.'
Soopsie turned to the medical man who had wandered about the reception room uncertainly, tasting some nibbles, sipping a drink but otherwise merely being a witness for the most part of other people's conversations.
'His eyes?' She thought of that one eye she could see as he lay in his hospital bed after the accident. Rarely was it open and on those occasions it looked past her, beyond the room they were in and far into the distance with a sort of hunger.
'Yes,' and the doctor coughed as he controlled his emotions. 'He endured the pain, his complaints being more like topics of conversation than anything else. Yet there was a pleading in his eyes. One word he never spoke out loud, but you could read it there in a glance.'
'And what was that word?'
The doctor finished his drink in one final gulp.
'Mercy,' he said thickly, placed the empty glass on the nearest table and walked out.
Well, the powers that be had granted him that, his daughter thought and then a creeping sensation regarding her own situation came upon her.
In the following days she began asking questions of herself. What had she done? The passing of her father had placed her own actions in a different light. She had made sacrifices but they had all been in vain. The money she needed was useless now. The money she wanted, more than she could spend in a lifetime, was a different matter.
Soopsie the maid felt the effect of sudden wealth in a way that she did not expect. The altering of perceptions, expectations, and a life of service had become a life of idleness.
She wanted to be up and doing. Arranging things. Feeling the gratification for a job well done. No, more than that. Feeling a sense of satisfaction when others noted that a job had been well done.
She wanted praise for doing.
Praise from the sycophants of the excessively rich held no substance. There was a colourless, vague superficiality about it all and she knew she could imbibe no gratification from such applause.
She had found something.
She thought the finding of it would open doors to other long-held dreams, treasures of the imagination. Yet she had only found loss.