The Prisoner

								

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