When he had sat in silence for a while he awoke to the fact that the interview had been nothing but a succession of shocks to him, and that he was bodily exhausted. He rose, and, walking feebly to the inner room, applied himself anew to the brandy bottle he kept there. He had gone much too often to that deceptive solace lately, and he knew it; but each successive visit carried its own excuses with it, and it had never in any individual instance been worth while to resist a habit which it was always easy to condemn in the main.
The brandy enlightened him and opened new sluices of emotion. Perhaps for the moment he was a better man because of it. He seemed to wake to a more determined sense of the enormity of the temptation which lay before him. He thought of his own son, and a shadow took him from head to foot as, in a brandified nervous vision, he beheld some shadowy supposititious creature in the act of telling the tale to Phil. The vice of drink has had the creation of many other vices laid to its charge, but for once in the world’s history the obfuscated vision was clearer than the natural, and Philip drunk a better man, and a more righteous and honourable, than Philip sober.
At bottom, Philip Bommaney knew himself too well to be at all sure that this phase of feeling would endure with him; and in a half-conscious dread of the return of that baser self, whose first appearance in his history had so affrighted him, he hurriedly attired himself for out-of-doors, crammed the bundle of notes into an inner pocket of his overcoat, and, after a final appeal to the decanter, left his room with a somewhat hysteric sense of courage and self-approval. He had been tempted--he was ready to recognise that the temptation was over, that he had well-nigh succumbed to it--but he had triumphed! He was a man again. He had been weighed in the balances and not found wanting. There were some tears in his eyes compounded of brandy and nerves and affections and remorses as he hurried into the street. Phil should never be ashamed of his father. Old Brown, who had trusted him like a brother, should never learn to shun and hate him. He had to go under--the thing was inevitable, unescapable, but he would at least go under like a man. His heart beat to the tune of the ‘Conquering Hero,’ where it might have beat to the ‘Rogue’s March,’ but for that friendly nip of brandy and the all-covering mercies of Heaven.