But that was before his son left him in so unaccountable a manner;
before--yes, all were agreed on this point--before that other
bitter ordeal of his middle age, the trial and condemnation of the
man who had waylaid and murdered his best friend.
Though the effect of these combined sorrows had not seemed to be
immediate (one month had seen both); though a half-year had
elapsed before all sociability was lost in extreme self-
absorption, and a full one before he took down the picket-fence
which had hitherto been considered a sufficient protection to his
simple grounds, and put up these boards which had so completely
isolated him from the rest of the world, it was evident enough to
the friends who recalled his look and step as he walked the
streets with Algernon Etheridge on one side and his brilliant,
ever-successful son on the other, that the change now observable
in him was due to the violent sundering of these two ties.
Affections so centred wreck the lives from which they are torn;
and Time, which reconciles most men to their losses, had failed to
reconcile him to his. Grief slowly settled into confirmed
melancholy, and melancholy into the eccentricities of which I have
spoken and upon which I must now enlarge a trifle further, in
order that the curiosity and subsequent action of the small group
of people in whom we are interested may be fully understood and,
possibly, in some degree pardoned.
Judge Ostrander was, as I have certainly made you see, a recluse
of the most uncompromising type; but he was such for only half his
time.
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