It was more the vanishing of hope from his own life than a sense of his father's fate that oppressed him.
He cast his eyes, as in a hungry despair, around the empty room--or, rather, I should have said, in that faintness which makes food at once essential and loathsome; for despair has no proper hunger in it.

The room seemed as empty as his life.

There was nothing for his eyes to rest upon but those bundles and bundles of dust-browned papers on the shelves before him.

What were they all about?
He understood that they were his father's: now that he was dead, it would be no sacrilege to look at them.

Nobody cared about them.