He was a great and powerful man to the people who knew him. He had always worked hard to help his community; to try to do the right thing. He had been a good family man for all these many years as well, not marrying himself, but putting food on the table and a stout roof over the heads of brothers, sisters, their husbands and wives, various assorted children, and even his parents in their old age. He had come out of his mother’s womb as the responsible, mature adult-thinking person he’d always been, and even as a child had been known to forsake the simple games of youth, to help his father in the mercantile, and to while away his time doing ledgers and such. He’d never really had friends, not in the true sense of the word. But he’d had acquaintances aplenty, and all had come to know him as a shrewd but fair man; the kind who holds his good standing in life to be the result of hard work and good business and not a natural way of things.
But as he came upon his fiftieth year, and had made his fortune, those around him came to sense a difference in him. He could sometimes be seen staring absently off, a look of apparent longing and desolation in his eyes, as if something important had lost its way and could not be found. And he started to take long walks out and about in the countryside, again almost seeming to search for something. And those who considered that they knew him best, knew that something was afoot. He came home one night in a state of drunken disrepair, his whereabouts unknown for several hours, and this only confirmed their fears.
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