“It was about something he was bringing home with him” the other answered, and her serene face filled with a sort of fond exasperation. “It was such an incoherent message...Horace never could say anything clearly from a distance.” She mused again, gazing down the street with its tunnel of oaks and elms through which sunlight fell in spaced tiger bars. “Do you suppose he could have adopted a war-orphan?”
“War-orphan,” repeated Miss Jenny. “More likely it’s some war-orphan’s mamma.” Simon appeared atthe corner of the house, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, and came with shuffling celerity across the lawn. His cigar was not in view.
“No,” the other said quickly, with grave concern. “You don’t believe he would have done that? No, no, he wouldn’t have. Horace wouldn’t have done that. He never does anything without telling me about it first He would have written: I know he would. You really don’t think that sounds like Horace, do you?”
“Humph,” Miss Jenny said through her high-bridged Norman nose, “an innocent like Horace straying with that trusting air of his among all those man-starved European wimmen? He wouldn’t know it himself, until it was too late; especially in a foreign language. I bet in every town he was in over seven days his landlady or someone was keeping his supper warm on the stove when he was late, or holding sugar out on the other men to sweeten his coffee with. Horace was born to have some woman making a doormat of herself for him, just as some men are born cuckolded...How old are you?”
“I’m still twenty-six, Miss Jenny,” the younger woman replied equably. Simon unhitched the team and stood at the carriage step in his Miss Jenny attitude. It differed from the bank one; in place of that leashed military imminence, it was now a gallant and slightly patronizing deference. Miss Jenny gazed at the still serenity of the younger woman’s face.
“Why don’t you get married, and let that baby look after himself for a while? Mark my words, it won’t be six weeks before some other woman will be falling all over herself for the privilege of keeping his feet dry, and he won’t even miss you.”
“I promised mother,” the other replied quietly and without offense...“I don’t see why he couldn’t have sent an intelligible message.”
“Well,” Miss Jenny turned to her carriage, “Maybe it’s only an orphan, after all,” she said with comfortless reassurance.
“I’ll know soon, anyway,” the other agreed, and she crossed to a small car at the curb and opened the door. Miss Jenny mounted with Simon’s assistance, and Simon got in and gathered up the reins.
“Let us know when he does get home,” she called as the carriage moved forward. “Drive out and get some more jasmine when you want it.”
“Thankyou. Goodbye.”
“All right, Simon.” The carriage moved on again, and again Simon waited until they were out of town to impart his news.
“Mist’ Bayard done come home,” he remarked, in his former conversational tone.
“Whereis he?” Miss Jenny demanded immediately;
“He ain’t come out home yit,” Simon answered. “I ‘speck he went to de graveyard.”
“Fiddlesticks!” Miss Jenny snapped. “No Sartoris ever goes to the cemetery but one time…Does Colonel know he’s home?”
“Yessum, I tole him, but he don’t ack like he believed Iwuz tellin’ him de troof.”
“You mean, nobody’s seen him but you?”
“I ain’t seed him neither,” Simon disclaimed. “Section han’ seed him jump off de train and tole me—”
“You damn fool nigger!” Miss Jenny stormed. “And you went and blurted a fool thing like that to Bayard? Haven’t you got any more sense than that?”
“Section han’ seed him,” Simon repeated stubbornly. “I reckon he knowed Mist’ Bayard when he seed him.”
“Well, where is he, then?”
“He mought have gone out to de graveyard,” Simon suggested.
“Drive on!” Miss Jenny said sharply.
Miss Jenny found her nephew sitting with two bird-dogs in his library. The room was lined with bookcases containing rows of heavy legal tomes bound in dun calf and emanating an atmosphere of dusty and undisturbed meditation, and a miscellany of fiction of the historical-romantic school (all Dumas was there, and the steady progression of the volumes now constituted Bayard Sartoris’ entire reading, and one volume lay always on the night-table beside his bed) and a collection of indiscriminate objects—small packets of seed, old rusted spurs and bits and harness buckles, brochures on animal and vegetable diseases, ornate tobacco containers which people had given him oh various occasions and which he had never used, inexplicable bits of rock and desiccated roots and grain pods—all collected one at a time and for reasons which had long since escaped his mind, yet preserved just the same. The room contained an enormous closet with a padlocked door, and a big table littered with yet other casual objects, and a locked roll-top desk (keys and locks were an obsession with him) and a divan and three big leather chairs. This room was always referred to as the office, and Bayard Sartoris now sat in it with his hat on and still wearing his riding-boots, transferring bourbon whisky from a small compact keg to a silver-stoppered decanter while the two dogs watched him with majestic gravity.
One of the dogs was quite old and nearly blind. It spent most of the day lying in the sun in the backyard, or during the hot summer days, in the cool dusty obscurity beneath the kitchen floor. But toward the middle of the afternoon it went to the front of the house and waited there quietly until it heard the carriage coming up the drive, and when Bayard Sartoris had descended and passed into the house it returned to the back and waited again until Isom led the mare up to the back porch and Bayard Sartoris came out and mounted. Then together they spent the afternoon going quietly and unhurriedly about the grazing meadows and the planting or harvesting fields and the peaceful woodlands in their dreaming seasonal mutations—the man on his horse and the ticked setter gravely beside him, while the descending evening of their fives drew toward its peaceful close upon the kind land that had bred them both. The other dog was a two-year-old; his net was too hasty for the sedateness of their society overlong, and though at times he set forth with them or came quartering up, splashed and eager, from somewhere to join them in mid procession, he never remained very long but must presently dash away with lolling tongue and the tense delicate feathering of his tail in pursuit of the maddening elusive smells with which the world surrounded
