The Prisoner

								

that their minds often beat accordingly. Anne hesitatingly voiced the
question.
"Do you think Esther'll meet him?"
"Impossible to say," the colonel returned, and Lydia's nipped lips and
warlike glance indicated that she found it hideously impossible to say.
"I intend to find out," said she.
"I have an idea," said her father, as if he were in the kindest manner
heading her off from a useless project, "that I'd better make a call on
her myself, perhaps at once."
"She wouldn't see you when you came before," Lydia reminded him, in a
hot rebellion against Jeff's wife who had not stood by him in his
downfall. In the space of time that he had been outside the line of
civilised life, an ideal of Jeff had been growing up in her own mind as
in Anne's. They saw him as the wronged young chevalier without reproach
whom a woman had forsaken in his need. Only a transcript of their
girlish dreams could have told them what they thought of Jeff. His
father's desolation without him, the crumbling of his father's life from
hale middle age to fragile eld, this whirling of the leaves of time had
seemed to bring them to a blazoned page where Jeff's rehabilitation
should be wrought out in a magnificent sequence. The finish to that
volume only: Jeff's life would begin again in the second volume, to be
annotated with the approbation of his fellows. He would be lifted on the
hands of men, their plaudits would upbear his soul, and he would at last
triumph, sealed by the sanction of his kind. They grew intoxicated over
it sometimes, in warm talks when their father was not there. He talked
very little: a few words now and then to show what he thought of Jeff, a
phrase or two where he unconsciously turned for them the page of the
past and explained obscurities in the text they couldn't possibly
elucidate alone--these they treasured and made much of, as the
antiquary interprets his stone language. He never knew what importance
they laid on every shred of evidence about Jeff. Perhaps if he had known
he would have given them clearer expositions. To him Jeff was the
dearest of sons that ever man begot, strangely pursued by a malign
destiny accomplished only through the very chivalry and softness of the
boy's nature. No hero, though; he would never have allowed his girls to
build on that. And in all this rehabilitation of Jeff, as the girls saw
it, there was one dark figure like the black-clad mourner at the grave
who seems to deny the tenet of immortality: his wife, who had not stood
by him and who was living here in Addington with her grandmother, had
insisted on living with grandmother, in fact, as a cloak for her
hardness. Sometimes they felt if they could sweep the black-clad figure
away from the grave of Jeff's hopes, Jeff, in glorious apotheosis, would
rise again.
"What a name for her--Esther!" Lydia ejaculated, with an intensity of
hatred Anne tried to waft away by a little qualifying murmur. "Esther!
Esthers are all gentle and humble and beautiful."