This inscription had caused some furor on the part of the slayer’s family, and a formal protest followed. But in complying with opinion, old Bayard had his revenge: he caused the line ‘by man’s ingratitude he died’ to be chiseled crudely out and added beneath it: ‘Fell at the hand of—— Redlaw, Aug, 4, 1876.’
Miss Jenny stood for a time, musing, a slender, erect figure in black silk and a small uncompromising black bonnet. The wind drew among the cedars in long sighs, and steadily as pulses the sad hopeless reiteration of the doves came along the sunny air. Isom returned for the last armful of dead flowers, and looking out across the marble vistas where shadows of noon moved, she watched a group of children playing quietly and a little stiffly in their bright Sunday finery, among the tranquil dead. Well, it was the last one, at last, gathered in solemn conclave about the dying reverberation of their arrogant lusts, their dust moldering quietly beneath the pagan symbols oftheir vainglory and the carven gestures of it in enduring stone; and she .remembered something Narcissa had said once, about a world without men, and wondered if therein lay peaceful avenues and dwellings thatched with quiet; and she didn’t know.
Isom returned, and as she turned away Dr. Peabody called her name. He was dressed as usual in his shabby broadcloth trousers and his shiny alpaca coat and a floppy panama hat, and his son was with him.
“Well, boy,” Miss Jenny said, giving young Loosh her hand. His face was big-boned and roughly molded. He had a thatch of straight, stiff black hair and his eyes were steady and brown and his mouth was large; and in all his ugly face there was reliability and gentleness and humor. He was rawboned and he wore his clothing awkwardly, and his hands were large and bony and with them he performed delicate surgical operations with the deftness of a hunter skinning a squirrel and the celerity of a prestidigitator. He lived in New York, where he was associated with a surgeon whose name was a household word, and once a year and sometimes twice he rode thirty-six hours on the train, spent twenty hours with his father (which they passed walking about the town or riding over the countryside in the sagging buck-board all day, and sitting on the veranda or before the fire all the following night), took the train again and ninety-two hours later, was at his clinic again. He was thirty years old, only child of the woman Dr. Peabody had courted for fourteen years before he Was able to marry her. The courtship was during the days when he physicked and amputated the whole county by buckboard; often after a year’s separation he would drive thirty miles to see her, to be met on the way and deflected to a childbed or a mangledlimb, with only a scribbled message to assuage the interval of another year, “So you’re home again, are you?” Miss Jenny asked.
“Yes, ma’am. And find you as spry and handsome as ever.”
“Jenny’s too bad-tempered to ever do anything but dry up and blow away,”Dr. Peabody said.
“You’ll remember I never let you wait on me, when I’m not well,” she retorted. “I reckon you’ll be tearing off again on thenext train, won’t you?” she asked young Loosh.
“Yessum, I’m afraid so. My vacation hasn’t comedue, yet.”
‘Well, at this rate you’ll spend it at an old men’s home somewhere. Why don’t you all come out and have dinner, so he can see the boy?”
“I’d like to,” young Loosh answered, “but I don’t have time to do all the things I want to, so I just make up my mind not to do any of ‘em. Besides, I’ll have to spend this afternoon fishing” he added.
“Yes,” his father put in, “and choppin’ up good fish with a pocket knife just to see what makes ‘em go. Lemme tell you what he did this mawnin’: he grabbed that old lame hound of Abe’s and operated on its shoulder so quick that Abe not only didn’t know what he was doing, but even the dawg didn’t. Only you forgot to look for his soul,” he added.
“You don’t know if he hasn’t got one,” young Loosh said, unruffled. “Dr. Straud is trying to find the soul by electricity; he says—”
“Fiddlesticks,”Miss Jenny snapped. “You better get a jar of Will Falls’ salve and give it to him, Loosh. Well—” she glanced at the sun “—I’d better be going. If you won’t come out to dinner—?”
“Thank you,ma’am,” young Loosh answered. His father said:
“I brought him in to show him that collection of yours. We didn’t know we looked that underfed.”
“Help yourself,” Miss Jenny answered. She went on, and they stood and watched her trim back until it passed from view.
“And now there’s another one,” young Loosh said musingly. “Another one to grow up and keep his folks in a stew until he finally succeeds in doing what they all expect of him. Well, maybe that Benbow blood will sort of hold him down. They’re quiet folks, that girl; .and Horace sort of...and just women to raise him...”
Dr. Peabody grunted. “He’s got Sartoris blood in him, too.”
All of Narcissi’s instincts had been antipathetic to him; his idea was a threat and his presence a violation of the very depths of her nature: in the headlong violence of him she had been like a lily in a gale which rocked it to its roots in a sort of vacuum, without any actual laying-on of hands. And now the gale had gone on; the lily had forgotten it as its fury died away into fading vibrations of old terrors and dreads, and the stalk recovered and the bell itself was untarnished save by the friction of its own petals. The gale is gone, and though the lily is sad a little with vibrations of ancient fears, it is not sorry.
Miss Jenny had arrived home, looking a little spent, and Narcissa had scolded her and at last prevailed on her to lie down after dinner. And here she had dozed while the drowsy afternoon wore away, and waked to lengthening shadows and a sound of piano keys touched softly from downstairs. I’ve slept all afternoon she told herself, rising. In Narcissa’s room the child slept in his crib; beside him the nursedozed placidly; Miss Jenny tiptoed out and descended the stairs and drew her chair out from behind the piano. Narcissa ceased.
“Do you fed rested?”Narcissa asked. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Fiddlesticks,’? Miss Jenny said. “It always does me good to see all those fool pompous men lying there with their marble mottoes and things. Thank the Lord, none of them will have a chance at me. I reckon the Lord knows His business, but I declare, sometimes … Play something.”Narcissa obeyed, playing softly, and Miss Jenny sat listening for a while. But presently she began to talk of the child. Narcissa played quietly on, her white dress with itsv black ribbon at the waist vaguely luminous in the gloom. Jasmine drifted steadily in, and Miss Jenny talked on about little Johnny. Narcissa played with rapt inattention, as though she were not listening. Then, without ceasing and without turning her head, she said:
“He isn’t John. He’s Benbow Sartoris.”
“What?”
“His name is Benbow Sartoris “she repeated.
Miss Jenny sat quite still for a moment Twilight thickened slowly about them; Narcissa’s dress was pale as wax. In the next room Elnora moved about, laying the table for supper. “And do you think that’ll do any good?” Miss Jenny demanded. “Do you think you can change one of ‘em with a name?”
