The Prisoner

								

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