behind and before and about them pervading, the dark warm cave of Belle’s rich discontent and the tiger-reek of it.
But the world was opening out before him fearsome and sad and richly moribund, as though he were again an adolescent, and filled with shadowyshapes of dread and of delight not to be denied: he must go on, though the other footsteps sounded fainter and fainter in the darkness behind him and then not at all. Perhaps they had ceased, or turned intoabyway.
This byway led her back to Miss Jenny. It was now well into June, and the scent of Miss Jenny’s transplanted jasmine drifted steadily into the house and surrounded it with constant cumulate Waves more grave and simple than a fading resonance of viols. The earlier flowers were gone, and the birds had ~ finished eating the strawberries and now sat about the fig bushes all day, waiting for them to ripen; zinnia and delphinium bloomed without any assistance from Isom who, since Caspey had more or less returned to normalcy (with the exception of Saturday nights) and laying-by time was yet a while away, now spent the lazy long days sleeping peacefully with a cane fishing pole on the creek bank Old Simon pottered querulously about the place. His linen duster and tophat gathered chaff on the nail in the harness room and the carriage horses waxed fat and insolent and lazy in the pasture. The duster and hat came down from their nail and the horses were harnessed to the carriage but once a week, now—on Sundays, to drive in to town to church. Miss Jenny said she was too far along to risk salvation by driving to church at fifty miles an hour; that she. had as many sins as her ordinary behavior could take care of, particularly as she had old Bayard’s soul to get into heaven somehow, also, what with him and young Bayard tearing around the country every afternoon at the imminent risk of their necks. About youngBayard’s soul Miss Jenny did not alarm herself at all: he had no soul
Meanwhile he rode about the farm and harried the negro tenants in his cold fashion, and in two-dollar khaki breeches and a pair of field boots that had cost him fourteen guineas he tinkered with farming machinery and with the tractor he had persuaded old Bayard to buy: for the time being he had become almost civilized again. He went to town only occasionally now, and often on horseback, and all in all his days had become so usefully innocuous that both his aunt and his grandfather were growing a little nervously anticipatory.
“Mark my words,” Miss Jenny told Narcissa on the day she drove out again. “He’s storing up devilment that’s going to burst loose all at once, someday, and then there’ll be hell to pay. Lord knows what it’ll be—maybe he and Isom will take his car and that tractor and hold a steeple chase with ‘em...What did you come out for? Got another letter?”
“I’ve got several more,” Narcissa answered lightly. “I’m saving them until I get enough for a book, then I’ll bring diem all out for you to read.” Miss Jenny sat opposite her, erect as a crack guardsman, with that cold briskness of hers that caused agents and strangers to stumble through their errands with premonitions of failure ere they began. But to Narcissa it was like emerging into the fresh air from a stale room. “I just came to see you,” she added, and for a moment her serene face held such grave and still despair that Miss Jenny sat more erect yet and stared at her guest with her piercing eyes.
“Why, what is it, child? Did the man walk into your house?”
“No, no.” The look was gone, but still Miss Jennywatched her with those keen old eyes that seemed to see so much more than you thought—or hoped. “Shall I play a while? It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“Well,” Miss Jenny agreed, “if you want to.”
There was dust on the piano; Narcissa opened it with a fine gesture, and brushed her fingertips on her skirt “If you’ll let me get a cloth—”
“Here, lemme dust it,” Miss Jenny said, and she caught up her skirt by the hem and mopped the keyboard violently. “There, that’ll do.” Then she drew her chair from behind the instrument and seated herself. She still watched the other’s profile with cold speculation, but presently the old tunes stirred her memory again, and in a while her eyes grew more and more remote and the other and the trouble that had shown momentarily in her face, was lost in Miss Jenny’s own dead young nights and days and vanquished abiding griefs, and it was some time before she realized that the other was weeping quietly while she played.
Without rising Miss Jenny leaned forward and touched Narcissa’s arm. “Now, you tell me what it is,” she commanded, And Narcissa told her, quietly in her grave contralto while her eyes still wept.
“Hmph,” Miss Jenny said. “That’s to be expected of a man that hasn’t any more to do than Horace. I don’t see why you are so upset over it.”
“But that woman,”Narcissa wailed suddenly, like a little girl, burying her face in her hands. “She’s so dirty!”
Miss Jenny dug into the pocket of her skirt and handed the other a man’s handkerchief.
“What do you mean?” she asked. “Don’t she wash often enough?”
“Not that way. I m-mean she’s—she’s—’’ Narcissa turned suddenly and laid her head on the piano.
“Oh,” Miss Jenny said. “All women are, if that’s what you mean.” She sat stiffly indomitable, musing on the younger woman’s shaking shoulders. “Hmph,” she said again, “Horace has spent so much time being educated thathe never has learned anything...Why didn’t you break it up in time? Didn’t you see it coming?”
The other wept more quietly now. She sat up and dried her eyes on Miss Jenny’shandkerchief. “It started before he went away. Don’t you remember?”
“That’s so. I do sort of remember at lot of women’s gabble. Who told you about it, anyway? Horace?”
“Mrs. Marders did. And then Horace did But I never thought that he’d—I never thought— ” again her head dropped to the piano, hidden in her arms. “I wouldn’t have treated Horace that way.”
“Sarah Marders, was it? I might have known.... I admire strong character, even if it is bad,” Miss Jenny stated. “Well, crying won’t help any.” She rose briskly. “We’ll think what to do about it. Only I’d let him go ahead; it’ll do him good if she’ll just turn around and make a doormat of him...Too bad Harry hasn’t got spunk enough to... But I reckon he’ll be glad; I know I would—There, there,” she said, at the other’s movement of shocked alarm, “I don’t reckon Harry’ll hurt him. Dry your face, now. You better go to the bathroom and fix up. Bayard’ll be coming in soon, and you don’t want him to see you’ve been crying, you know.” Narcissa glanced swiftly and a little fearfully toward the door and dabbed hastily at her cheeks with Miss Jenny’s handkerchief.
At times the dark lifted, the black trees were no longer sinister, and then Horace and Narcissa walked the road in sunlight, as of old. Then he would seek her through the house and cross the drive and descend the lawn in the sunny afternoon to where she sat in the white dresses he loved beneath the oak into which a mockingbird came each afternoon and sang, bringing her the result of his latest venture in glass-blowing. lie had five now, in different colors and all nearly perfect, and each of them had a name. And as he finished them and before they were scarce cooled, he must bring them across the lawn to where she sat with a book or with a startled caller perhaps, in his stained disheveled clothes and his sooty hands in which the vase lay demure and fragile as a bubble, and with his
