“At the time they left off using those heavy chains, they must have thought they ran a risk?”
He answered coldly: “I don’t know anything about that.”
“The present state of things is final, then?”
He put the bangles back upon their nail, and turning rather suddenly, as though fearing to be attacked behind, said:
“We don’t trouble about such things; we’re here to administer the system as we find it. We don’t use these, except when it’s necessary.”
“Have you not begged the question?”
He said with dignity: “That is not my business,” laying his hand upon the triangles. And as he did so there seemed to spring up once more that solid phalanx, man linked to man, all with the same schoolmaster’s eyes—a living pyramid, turned to stone by the force of its own shape. And a sound came forth from them as though they were assenting, but it was only the scraping of the triangles, as the old warder pushed them a little farther back.
He went to the door and opened it; and going out in answer to this invitation, I looked back at the jewels. They hung in perfect brightness, round about the triangles; and suddenly, with that same dreadful, silent, swift obsequiousness, the man in yellow clothing marked with arrows, with the yellow face, and the yellow leather in his hand, passed us and went in. The iron door closed on him with a clang; but before it closed, I saw him at work already, polishing those shining jewels.
In dreams I have seen him since, alone with those emblems of a perfect order, working without sound! And in dreams too, guiding me away, I see the old warder with his regular, grave face, and his eyes mourning for something he has lost.