It was so profitless to conjure up ghosts. Why not “let the dead past bury its dead,” as this new Eastern poet, Longfellow, had recently put it in a poem reprinted in the Ideala Herald?
Yet Stage’s slur had awakened memories as fierce as they were infrequent. And they dogged Dad’s lagging steps as he shambled up Main Street, goading him into an unwontedly lively pace.
Morbidly he forced his memory to cast back to that horror trip across Mexico; to the shamefaced and semi-delirious return of the travel-beaten outcast to his old home.
And now as though it were but a day before, instead of fourteen endless years, he recalled that return: The grins or contempt of his old neighbors; his son’s disgust, veiled in solicitude for the half-dead wanderer; the totally unveiled scorn of his son’s rich young wife.
It had all been a hideous nightmare. To soften its horror he had—for the first time in his life—willfully gotten drunk.
And liquor had laid a kindly benumbing hand on the shame-torn spirit. So kindly and so benumbing a touch that he had sought its comfort again and yet again.
His was not the drunkard temperament. He drank, at first not for what drink could give him, but for what it could and did forgive him. So that, in time, under the comforter’s aid, life had lost its razor-edge, and the man was well content to drift on in not unhappy worthlessness.
In the beginning he had striven to take up his business where, two years earlier, he had dropped it; the business that in his absence had thriven and grown right flourishingly under the wise management of his splendidly faultless son.
But two years in the open and the aftermath of disgrace had done much to unfit the older man for every-day counting-room routine.
New methods, too, had come into vogue; methods to which he could not readily adapt himself and which were as second nature to his son. The latter, helped by his wife’s money, had branched out vigorously and wisely in many lines of commerce.