Narcissa’s eyes, Bayard went out with a shotgun andthe two dogs, to return just before dark, wet to the skin. And cold; his lips would be chill on hers, and his eyesbleak and haunted, and in the yellow firelight of their room she would cling to him, or lie crying quietly in the darkness beside his rigid body with a ghost between them.
“Look here,” Miss Jenny said, coming upon her as she sat brooding before the fire in old Bayard’s den.
“You spend too much time this way; you’re getting moony. Stop worrying about him: he’s spent half his life soaking wet, yet he never had a cold that I can remember.”
“Hasn’t he?” the answered listlessly. Miss Jenny stood beside her chair, watching her keenly. Then she laid her hand on Narcissa’s head, quite gently, for aSartoris.
“Are you worrying because maybe he don’t love you like you think he ought to?”
“It isn’t that,” she answered. “He doesn’t love anybody. He won’t even love the baby. He doesn’t seem to be glad, or sorry, or anything.”
“No,” Miss Jenny agreed The fire crackled and leaped among the resinous logs. Beyond the window the day dissolved endlessly. “listen,’? Miss Jenny said abruptly. “Don’t you ride in that car with him any more. You hear?”
“No. It won’t make him drive slowly. Nothing will.”
“Of course not. Nobody believes it will, not even Bayard. He goes along for the same reason that boy himself does. Sartoris. It’s in the blood. Savages, every one of ‘em. No earthly use to anyone” Together they gazed into the leaping flames, Miss Jenny’s hand still lying on Narcissa’s head. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“You didn’t do it. Nobody got me into it. I did it myself.”
“H’m,” Miss Jenny said. And then: “Would you do it over again?” The other didn’t answer, and she repeated the question. “Would you?”
“Yes,” Narcissa answered. “Don’t you know I would?” Again there was silence between them, in which without words they sealed their hopeless pact with that fine and passive courage of womenthroughput the world’s history. Narcissa rose. “Ibelieve I’ll go to town and spend the day with Horace, if you don’t mind,” she said.
“All right,” Miss Jenny agreed. “I believe I would, too. Horace probably needs a little looking after, by now. He looked sort of gaunt when he was out here last week. Like he wasn’t getting proper food.”
When she entered the kitchen door Eunice, the cook, turned from the bread board and lifted her daubed hands in a soft dark gesture. “Well, Miss Narcy,” she said, “we ain’t seed you in a month. Is you come all de way in de rain?”
“I came in the carriage. It was too wet for the car.” She entered the kitchen. Eunice watched her with grave pleasure. “How are you all getting along?”
“He gits enough to eat, all right,” Eunice answered. “I sees to dat. But I has to make ‘im eat it. He needs you back here.”
“I’m here, for the day, anyhow. What have you got for dinner?” Together they lifted lids and peered into the simmering vessels on the stove and in the oven. “Oh, chocolate pie!”
“I has to toll ‘im wid dat,” Eunice explained. “He’ll eat anything, ef I jes’ makes ‘im a chocolate pie,” she added proudly.
“I bet he does,” Narcissa agreed. “Nobody can make chocolate pies like yours.”
“Dis one ain’t turnt out so well,” Eunice said, deprecatory. “I ain’t so pleased wid it.”
‘Why, Eunice! It’s perfect.”
“No’m, it ain’t up to de mark,” Eunice insisted. But she beamed, gravely diffident, and for a few minutesthe two of them talked amicably while Narcissa pried into cupboards and boxes.
Then she returned to the house and mounted to her room. The dressing table was bare of its intimate silver and crystal, and the drawers were empty, and the entire room with its air of still and fading desolation, reproached her. Chill, too; there had been no fire in the grate since last spring, arid on the table beside the bed, in a blue vase, was a small faded bunch of flowers, forgotten and withered and dead. Touching them, they crumbled in her fingers, leaving a stain, and the water in the vase smelled of rank decay. She opened a window and threw them out.
The room was too chill to stop in long, and she decided to ask Eunice to build a fire on the hearth, for the sake of that part of her which still lingered here, soberly and a little sorrowful in the chill and reproachful desolation. At her chest of drawers she paused again and remembered those letters, fretfully and with a little brooding alarm, deprecating anew her carelessness in not destroying them. But maybe she had, and so entered again into the closed circle of her first fear and bewilderment, tryingto remember what she had done with them. But she was certain she had left them in the drawer with her under-things, positive that she had put them there. Yet she had never been able to find them, nor had Eunice nor Horace seen them. The day she had missed them was the day before her wedding, when she packed her things. That day she had missed them, finding in their stead one in a different handwriting, which shedid not remember having received. The gist of it was plain enough, although she had not understood some of it literally. But on that day, she read it with tranquil detachment: it and all it implied was definitelybehind her now. And lacking even this, she would not have been shocked if she had comprehended it. Curious, a little perhaps, at some, of the words, but that is all,
But what she had done with those other letters she could not remember, and not being able to gave her moments of definite fear when she considered the possibility that people might learn that someone had thought such things about her and put them into words. Well, they were gone; there was nothing to do save hope that she had destroyed them as she had the last one, or if she had not, to trust that they would never be found. Yet that brought back the original distaste and dread: the possibility that the intactness of her deep and heretofore inviolate serenity might be the sport of circumstance; that she must trust to chance against the eventuality of a stranger casually raising a stray bit of paper from the ground...
But she would put this firmly aside, for the time being, at least. This should be Horace’s day, and her -own too; a surcease from that ghost-ridden dream to which she clung, waking. She descended the stairs. There was a fire in the living room. It had burned down to embers, however, and she put coal on it and punched it to a blaze. That would be the first thing he’d see when he entered; perhaps he’d wonder; perhaps he’d know before he entered, having sensed her presence. Then she considered ‘phoning him, and she mused indecisively for a moment before the fire; then decided to let it be a surprise. But supposing he didn’t come home to dinner. She considered
