"We've all been talking," said Lydia, with a frank simplicity, "Farvie and Anne and I. Of course we've talked. Especially Anne and I. We knew you weren't to blame."
Jeff turned away from her and went back into his room. He shut the door, and yet so quietly that she could not feel reproved. Only she was sad. The way of being a sister was a harder one than she had looked for. But she felt bound to him, even by stronger and stronger cords. He was hers, Farvie's and Anne's and hers, however unlikely he was to take hold of his innocence with firm hands and shake it in the public face.
Jeff, in his room, stood for a minute or more, hands in his pockets, staring at the wall and absently thinking he remembered the paper on it from his college days. But he recalled himself from the obvious. He looked into his inner chamber of mind where he had forbidden himself to glance since he had come home, lest he see there a confusion of idea and desire that should make him the weaker in carrying out the inevitabilities of his return. There was one thing in decency to be expected of him at this point: to give his father a period of satisfaction before he left him to do what he had not yet clearly determined on. It was sufficiently convincing to tell Lydia he intended to make good, but he had not much idea what he meant by it. He was conscious chiefly that he felt marred somehow, jaded, harassed by life, smeared by his experience of living in a gentlemanly jail. The fact that he had left it did not restore to him his old feeling of owning the earth. He had, from the moment of his conviction and sentence, been outside, and his present liberty could not at once convey him inside.
He was, he knew, for one thing, profoundly tired. Nothing, he felt sure, could give him back the old sense of air in his lungs. Confinement had not deprived him of air. He had smiled grimly to himself once or twice, as he thought what the sisters' idea of his prison was likely to be. They probably had conjured up fetid dungeons. There were chains of a surety, certainly a clank or two. As he remembered it, there was a clanking in his mind, quite sufficient to fulfil the prison ideal. And then he thought, with a sudden desire for man's company, the expectation that would take you for granted, that he'd go down and see old Reardon. Reardon had not been to call, but Jeff was too sick of solitariness to mind that.
He went out without seeing anybody, the colonel, he knew, being at his gentle task of cramming for Mary Nellen's evening lesson. Jeff had not been in the street since the walk he had cut short with Madame Beattie. He felt strange out in the world now, as if the light blinded him or the sun burned him, or there were an air too chill—all, he reflected, in a grim discovery, the consequence of being outside and not wanting houses to see you or persons to bow and offer friendly hands. Reardon would blow such vapours away with a breath of his bluff voice. But as he reached the vestibule of the yellow house, Reardon himself was coming out and Jeff, with a sick surprise, understood that Reardon was not prepared to see him.
XI
Reardon stood there in his middle-aged ease, the picture of a man who has nothing to do more hazardous than to take care of himself. His hands were exceedingly well-kept. His cravat, of a dull blue, was suited to his fresh-coloured face, and, though this is too far a quest for the casual eye, his socks also were blue, an admirable match. Jeff was not accustomed, certainly in these later years, to noting clothes; but he did feel actually unkempt before this mirror of the time. Yet why? For in the old days also Reardon had been rather vain of outward conformity. He had striven then to make up by every last nicety of dress and manner for the something his origin had lacked. It was not indeed the perfection of his dress that disconcerted; it was the kind of man Reardon had grown to be: for of him the clothes did, in their degree, testify. Jeffrey was conscious that every muscle in Reardon's body had its just measure of attention. Reardon had organised the care of that being who was himself. He had provided richly for his future, wiped out his past where it threatened to gall him, and was giving due consideration to his present. He meant supremely to be safe, and to that end he had entrenched himself on every side. Jeff felt a very disorganised, haphazard sort of being indeed before so complete a creature. And Reardon, so far from breaking into the old intimacy that Jeff had seen still living behind them in a sunny calm, only waiting for the gate to be opened on it again, stood there distinctly embarrassed and nothing more.
"Jeff!" said he. "How are you?" That was not enough. He found it lacking, and added, with a deepened shade of warmth, "How are you, old man?"
Now he put out his hand, but it had been so long in coming that Jeff gave no sign of seeing it.