CHAPTER IV

FOURTEEN YEARS LATER

“Dad” leaned right luxuriously against the bar of the Eagle House, a brimming whisky-skin in one hand, a long and ill-smelling cigar in the other.

His shining frock coat was thrown back wide from a vest that had once been white. A slouch hat was pushed far back on his head, and a mass of gray-white hair fell carelessly over his forehead. His somewhat bleared eyes gazed loftily upon the habitués of the place, and his aristocratic, but slightly reddened nose was curved in mild contempt at something one of them happened at that moment to be saying.

Dad was an imposing figure. There was not lacking those who declared he was even yet a fine figure of a man--even though a covert grin went with the praise.

And more than one woman was wont to follow, with a gaze almost as admiring as it was disapproving, his stately thrice-a-day progress down Main Street from his riverside cottage to the Eagle barroom.

No one in Ideala was so ignorant of Dad’s habits as to imagine for a moment that three daily visits to the Eagle entailed only three drinks thereat. Indeed, his regular evening sojourn at that hospitable tavern was often prolonged until closing time, and his return bedward was not infrequently under a highly necessary escort.

Still, though he might--and continuously did--drink with them, Dad could never be induced to regard the Eagle’s other patrons as his equals; either mentally or morally. And he took no pains to cloak his feelings.

Which did not add appreciably to his popularity among the convivial band.

To-day--on his first morning visit--Dad was unwontedly superior in his bearing toward his fellow tipplers.

For the talk was on war--the time was the summer of 1861--and the Civil War had already entered bloodily upon the first of its four years.

One company, three months earlier, had marched gayly forth from Ideala upon the calcium path of patriotism--to be shot to atoms in the first battle of Manassas. And now a second and a third were forming.

“Yes,” a crippled oldster was declaring from the far end of the bar, his words percolating ludicrously through a double set of misfit teeth, “yes, gentlemen, Uncle Sam will find he’s in for a good long siege of it before he’s done. He thought he’d have Jeff Davis licked to a standstill in three months. Well, the three months are up. And, so far, it’s been Uncle Jeff that’s done all the licking. I tell you, this war’s going to last out the year and maybe part of next.”

Dad, through his mildly rubicund nose, made a weird sound, variously and incorrectly expressed in print as “H-m!” or “Humph!” It was a sound as derisive as it was wordless.

The misfit-teeth man glowered at him.

“Well,” he drawled, “I take it, Dad, that you don’t agree with me. You generally don’t. But that don’t make it any the less true.”

“No, Mr. Stage,” returned Dad, “I don’t. This war will be wound up inside of another three months at longest. When the fighting spirit of the North is once aroused--when this glorious Union, one and indissoluble, once sets its foot down; the Confederacy will collapse like a pricked toy balloon. You must grant me credence, when I prophesy this. I know the United States and I know war.”

“Let me see,” mused Stage, scratching his chin in deep reflection. “Let me see--you _do_ know war, don’t you, now? I seem to remember you were in our little unpleasantness down in Mexico, some years back. And speaking of wars, I wonder you don’t enlist. You’re still a hearty man. And the North needs men. Why not go to the front again?”

Dad’s face flushed so hotly that his nose actually paled by contrast.

“I--I am forced to remain at home for business reasons,” he said, coldly. “Otherwise--”

“There’s a whole lot of ‘otherwises,’ these days,” commented Stage. “Some of ’em pleading business and some playing sick.”

“If you are questioning _my_ courage, Mr. Stage,” sternly interposed Dad, emptying his whisky-skin at a gulp, “let me tell you that when I was in Mexico--”

“Mexico,” echoed the cripple, chuckling as at some pleasant memory. “That’s right, Mexico. I’d forgot. You held a commission of some sort in our war down there, didn’t you? Queer you never showed it to any of us. It’d be inte_rest_ing to see. Did you stay out the whole war? I disremember, just now. Or did you skedaddle before it was over?”

A furtive snicker ran through the little knot of loungers. Someone guffawed.

Dad swept the assemblage with an eye whose hint of bleariness had momentarily been burned away by a blaze that startled them all.

Then, settling his hat farther forward on his head, he strode out into the street without answering. As he passed through the swing-door he heard Stage’s wheezy voice announce to nobody in particular:

“I guess that’s the time I scored one--or maybe a couple or more--on Mr. James Brinton, Esq. Another time he won’t crow quite so loud, now that I’ve took him down a peg. He needn’t think he can be cock-of-the-walk over us all the time. Him that slunk back here in rags fourteen years ago, after he was kicked out of the army for drunk and disorderly!”

The departing listener winced as he shuffled away out of ear-shot.

It was one thing to know that all the neighborhood must be aware of his past. It was another to have the knowledge supplemented by auricular proof. And the words, chuckled unctuously from between old Stage’s misfit teeth-sets, stung like so many hornets.

Fourteen years! It had been so long--so unbelievably long. Surely their space might well have dimmed the memory of a dead-and-gone disgrace. He himself--except at excruciating moments like this--had taught himself to forget. Why couldn’t others--especially such of them as consistently used the same form of bottled nepenthe as did he?

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.

The father soon felt himself an interloper in the business he himself had founded. And drink did not aid either his work therein nor his usefulness to the firm.

Wherefore he had eagerly seized upon his son’s tactful suggestion that the senior member retire from active business and receive a small yearly income from the concern’s revenues.

For the past twelve years he had lived thus; working not at all save daily in the garden plot that surrounded a cottage he occupied on the lower, or river, end of Main Street; a cottage that had belonged to his mother and that was renovated for his use.

Here, tended by an aged negro--a former slave--ex-Lieutenant-Colonel James Brinton rotted his years away; while at the far end of town, in the new residence, or “Hill” section, dwelt his son, his son’s wife, and their only child--the little grandson who had been born a few months before Brinton’s return from Mexico.

Through all those early nightmare times it had been this little grandson who formed James Brinton’s one worthy hold on life. He adored the child; and from the beginning, the dissolute human wreck had commanded from the youngster a greater and more complete love than did both the baby’s highly correct parents combined.

Grandfather and grandson had ever been inseparable--to the hopeless horror of the boy’s mother, who dared not for appearances’ sake prohibit the intimacy--and had found in each other an exhaustless fund of truly marvelous and worshipful traits.

From babyhood, the child, for some reason known to himself, had utterly eschewed the stately title of “Grandfather” or even the milder term “Grandpapa,” and had called Brinton “Dad.” His own male parent he always addressed decorously as “Father,” but his grandfather was invariably and lovingly “Dad.”

The quaint term from a child toward a grandsire had “caught the town.” Before many years, half the nine thousand inhabitants of Ideala were hailing, or referring to, Brinton as “Dad.” The phrase seemed to go aptly with his disreputable yet lovably patriarchal personality.

And “Dad” had long since become fixed upon him as a permanent nickname.

Since the name had originated with his grandson, Brinton willingly accepted it. His own son was perhaps the sole acquaintance who never used it toward him.

When the South seceded and the first call to arms rang from California to Maine, Dad’s blood had stirred like that of an ancient war horse. The warlike heritage of centuries of fighters blazed like fire in his veins. His impulse was to enlist at once.

Then had come the agony of second thought.

He had been “dishonorably dismissed from the service he had degraded.” How could he return to it? Once cashiered, forever cashiered.

His services would unquestionably be rejected; as, for example, had those of that young Captain Grant who had been so decent to him down in Mexico.

Grant had not been cashiered from the army nor had he left it in disgrace. He had merely resigned that he might better support his family.

Yet when at the war’s outbreak--so a common friend had told Brinton--Grant had written to the government offering his services, no heed had been given to the offer.

No, Brinton dared not risk a repulse; perhaps an insult. So he banished the tempting war-dream; and, to keep it banished, he had drunk a little deeper.

But now--The morning air was cold and bracing. Only a single drink stood between him, thus far to-day, and stark sobriety. On the square the two companies of recruits were drilling.

Stage’s gleefully malicious words rankled sharply under Dad’s thickened, yet vulnerable mental epidermis. Unconsciously his stooping shoulders flattened and his steps fell into time to the fife-and-drum notes to which the recruits were marching and counter-marching.

Up Main Street strode Dad. And the once-firm mouth under the straggling gray mustache grew firm and set as of old, as he walked. The eyes, too, took on a less dreamy look and lost their film.

Chagrin, sobriety, martial music and hereditary war-spirit were doing their work.

Half-way along Main Street, in front of an imposing mercantile establishment, Dad halted. Tightening his lips and setting his jaw, he turned in at the open double doors. Down a long aisle he walked, looking neither to left nor to right, nor seeing the amused and knowing glances of sundry clerks he passed.

At a door marked “Private,” at the far end of the store, he paused; his knuckles raised to knock on the glass. Then he changed his mind and, opening the door, entered unbidden.

He walked with something of swagger into a pleasantly appointed office, at whose fumed-oak desk sat a dapper man of early middle-age.

The man at the desk looked up in momentary vexation at this abrupt advent. Then, recognizing his visitor, his somewhat ascetic face took on a look of patient civility.

“Good-morning, father,” he said, rising. “Is anything the matter?”

“You ask because I came into a store I used to own?” inquired the older man.

“Why, no. Of course not. You are always welcome. I only asked--”

“All right. I’m sorry I spoke as I did. I’m not quite myself to-day, and--”

He paused as he saw an expression of worry replace the patient courteous look he had come to loathe on his son’s countenance.

“No,” he went on, in response to the unasked query, “I am not drunk. It is something else that has upset me. Can--can you give me a few minutes of your time, Joe?”

Mr. Joseph Brinton glanced longingly at a pile of unfinished work on his desk; then, seating himself and motioning his father to a chair, sighed imperceptibly in regret as he said:

“Certainly, sir. Sit down. My time is always at your disposal.”