And as he sat late into the night beside the fire, that died down to dust and ashes before his absent eyes, ghosts of other heavy hours, ghosts of the past, which he had long since buried out of his sight, came back and would not be denied.
To live much in the past, is a want of faith in the Power that gives the present. Comparatively few men walk through their lives looking backward. Women more frequently do so from a false estimate of life fostered by romantic feeling in youth, which leads them, if the life of the affections is ended, resolutely to refuse to regard existence in any other maturer aspect, and to persist in wandering aimlessly forward, with eyes turned ever on the dim flowery paths of former days.
"Let the dead past bury its dead."
But there comes a time, when the grass has grown over those graves, when we may do well to go and look at them once more; to stand once again in that solitary burial-ground, "where," as an earnest man has said, "are buried broken vows, worn-out hopes, joys blind and deaf, faiths betrayed or gone astray—lost, lost love; silent spaces where only one mourner ever comes."
And to the last retrospective of us our dead past yet speaks at times, and speaks as one having authority.
Such a time had come for Charles now. From the open grave of his love for Ruth he turned to look at others by which he had stood long ago, in grief as sharp, but which yet in all its bitterness had never struck as deep as this.
Memory pointed back to a time twenty years ago, when he had hurried home through a long summer night to arrive at Stoke Moreton too late; to find only the solemn shadow of the mother whom he had loved, and whom he had grieved; too late to ask for forgiveness; too late for anything but a wild passion of grief and remorse, and frantic self-accusation.
The scene shifted to ten years later. It was a sultry July evening of the day on which the woman whom he had loved for years had married his brother. He was standing on the deck of the steamer which was taking him from England, looking back at the gray town dwindling against the tawny curtain of the sunset. In his brain was a wild clamor of wedding-bells, and across the water, marking the pulse of the sea, came to his outward ears the slow tolling of a bell on a sunken rock near the harbor mouth.
It seemed to be tolling for the death of all that remained of good in him. In losing Evelyn, whom he had loved with all the idealism and reverence of a reckless man for a good woman, he believed, in the bitterness of his spirit, that he had lost all; that he had been cut adrift from the last mooring to a better future, that nothing could hold him back now. And for a time it had been so, and he had drowned his trouble in a sea in which he wellnigh drowned himself as well.
Once more memory pointed—pointed across five dark years to an evening when he had sat as he was sitting now, alone by the wide stone hearth in the hall at Stoke Moreton, after his father's death, and after the reading of the will. He was the possessor of the old home, which he had always passionately loved, from which he had been virtually banished so long. His father, who had never liked him, but who of late years had hated him as men only hate their eldest sons, had left all in his power to his second son, had entailed every acre of the Stoke Moreton and other family properties upon him and his children. Charles could touch nothing, and over him hung a millstone of debt, from which there was now no escape. He sat with his head in his hands—the man whom his friends were envying on his accession to supposed wealth and position—ruined.