The Prisoner. Alice Brown
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out things for herself, just as he must. I should tell her he particularly asked us not to meet him. But I don't think that would apply to her. I think it would be a beautiful thing for her to do. If reporters are there——"
"They will be," Lydia interjected savagely.
"Well, if they are, it wouldn't be a bad thing for them to report that his wife was waiting for him. It would be right and simple and beautiful. But if she doesn't meet him, certainly we can't. That would give rise to all kinds of publicity and pain. I think she'll see that."
"I don't think she'll see anything," said Lydia. "She's got a heart like a stone."
"Oh, don't say that," Anne besought her, "in advance."
"It isn't in advance," said Lydia. "It's after all these years."
III
The next day, after an early dinner—nobody in Addington dined at night—the colonel, though not sitting down to a definite conclave, went over with Anne and Lydia every step of his proposed call on Esther, as if they were planning a difficult route and a diplomatic mission at the end, and later, in a state of even more exquisite personal fitness than usual, the call being virtually one of state, he set off to find his daughter-in-law. Anne and Lydia walked with him down the drive. They had the air of upholding him to the last.
The way to Esther's house, which was really her grandmother's, he had trodden through all his earlier life. His own family and Esther's had been neighbours intimately at one, and, turning the familiar corner, he felt, with a poignancy cruel in its force, youth recalled and age confirmed. Here were associations almost living, they were so vivid, yet wraithlike in sheer removedness. It was all very subtle, in its equal-sided force, this resurrection of the forms of youth, to be met by the cold welcome of a change in him. The heart did quicken over its recognition of the stability of things, but with no robust urge such as it knew in other years; indeed it fluttered rather pathetically, as if it begged him to put no unwonted strain upon it now, as in that time foregone, when every beat cried out, "Heave the weight! charge up the hill! We're equal to it. If we're not, we'll die submerged in our own red fount." He was not taking age with any sense of egotistical rebellion; but it irked him like an unfamiliar weight patiently borne and for no reward. The sense of the morning of life was upon him; yet here he was fettered to his traitorous body which was surely going to betray him in the end. No miracle could save him from atomic downfall. However exultantly he might live again, here he should live no more, and though there was in him no fervency either of rebellion or belief, he did look gravely now at the pack of mortality he carried. It was carefully poised and handled. His life was precious to him, for he wanted this present coil of circumstance made plain before he should go hence and be seen no more.
The streets just now were empty. It was an hour of mid-afternoon when ladies had not dawned, in calling raiment, upon a world of other expectant ladies, and when the business man is under bonds to keep sequestered with at least the pretext of arduous tasks. The colonel had ample opportunity to linger by yards where shrubbery was coming out in shining buds, and draw into his grave consciousness the sense of spring. Every house had associations for him, as every foot of the road. Now he was passing the great yellow mansion where James Reardon lived. Reardon, of Irish blood and American public school training, had been Jeffrey's intimate, the sophisticated elder who had shown him, with a cool practicality that challenged emulation, the world and how it was to be bought. When there were magnates in Addington, James had been a poor boy. There were still magnates, and now he was one of them, so far as club life went and monetary transactions. He had never tried to marry an Addington girl, and therefore could not be said to have put his social merit absolutely to the touch. But luck had always served him. Perhaps it would even have done it there. He had gone into a broker's office, had made a strike with his savings and then another with no warning reversal, and got the gay habit of rolling up money like a snowball on a damp day. When the ball got too heavy for him to handle deftly, Jim dropped the game, only starting the ball down hill—if one may find symbolism for sedate investments—gathering weight as it went and, it was thought, at obstructive points persuading other little boys to push. The colonel had often wondered if Jeffrey had been one of those little boys. Now, at forty-five, Reardon lived a quiet, pottering life, a bachelor with a housekeeper and servants enough to keep the big yellow house in form. He read in a methodical way, really the same books over and over, collected prints with a conviction that a print is a print, exercised his big frame in the club gymnasium, took a walk of sanitary length morning and afternoon and went abroad once in two years.
"I've got money enough," he was accustomed to say, when the adventurous petitioned him to bolster new projects for swift returns, "all in gilt-edged securities. That's why I don't propose to lay awake an hour in my life, muddling over stocks. Why, it's destruction, man! it's death. It eats up your tissues faster than old age." The eccentricity of his verb indicated only the perfection of his tact. He had a perfect command of the English language, but a wilful lapse into colloquialisms endeared him, he knew, to his rougher kind. There was no more popular man. He was blond and open-featured. He spoke in a loud yet always sympathetic voice, and in skilfully different fashions he called every man brother.
Yet the colonel, his fancy entering the seclusion of the yellow house, rich in books that would have been sealed to even Jim's immediate forebears, rich in all possible mechanical appliances for the ease of life, speculated whether Reardon had, in the old days, been good for Jeff. Could he, with his infernal luck, have been good for any youth of Jeff's impetuous credulity? Mightn't Jeff have got the idea that life is an easy job? The colonel felt now that he had always distrusted Reardon's bluff bonhomie, his sympathetic voice, his booming implication that he was letting you into his absolutely habitable heart. He knew, too, that without word of his own his distrust had filtered out to Anne and Lydia, and that they were prepared, while they stood by Jeff to unformulated issues, to trip up Reardon, somehow bring him low and set Jeff up impeccable. Of this he was thinking gravely now, the different points of it starting up in his mind like sparks of light while he regarded Reardon's neat shrubs healthily growing, as if the last drop of fertilising had been poured into them at this spring awakening, and all pruned to a wholesome symmetry. Then, hearing the sound of a door and painfully averse to meeting Reardon, he went on and mounted the steps of the great brick house where his daughter-in-law lived. And here the adventure came to an abrupt stop. The maid, perfectly courteous and yet with an air of readiness even he, the most unsuspecting of men, could not fail to recognise, told him, almost before he had finished his inquiry, that Mrs. Blake was not at home. She would not be at home that afternoon. No, sir, not the next day. Madam Bell, Esther's grandmother, he asked for then. No, sir, she was not at home. Looking in the smooth sanguine face of the girl, noting mechanically her light eyelashes and the spaces between her teeth, he knew she lied. Yet he was a courteous gentleman, and did not report that to his inner mind. He bestowed his card upon Sapphira, and walked away at his sedate pace, more than anything puzzled. Esther was not proposing to take part in their coming drama. He couldn't count on her. He was doubly sorry because this defection was going to make Anne and Lydia hate her more than ever, and he was averse to the intensification of hatred. He was no mollycoddle, but he had an intuition that hatred is of no use. It hindered things, all sorts of things: kindliness, even justice.
The girls were waiting for him at the door, but reading his face, they seemed, while not withdrawing themselves bodily, really to slip away, in order not even tacitly to question him. They had a marvellous unwillingness to bring a man to the bar. There was no over-tactful display of absence, but their minds simply would not set upon and interrogate his, nor skulk round corners to spy upon it. But he had to tell them, and he was anxious to get it over. Just as they seemed now about to melt away to urgent tasks, he called them back.
"She's not at home," said he.
Anne looked a species of defeated interest. Lydia's eyes said unmistakably, "I don't believe it." The colonel was tired enough to want to say, "I don't either," but he never felt at liberty to encourage Lydia's too exuberant candour.
"She's not to be at home to-morrow," he said.