Instead of mounting the stairs, however, Miss Jenny heard his footsteps die away down the hall, and presently she rose and followed to the back porch, where he stood in the darkness there. The night was dark, myriad with drifting odors of the spring, and with insects. Dark upon lesser dark, the barn loomed against the sky.
“He hasn’t come in yet,” she said impatiently, touching his arm. “I could have told you. Go on up and go to bed, now; don’t you know he’ll let you know when he comes in? You’re going to think him into a ditch somewhere, with these fool notions of yours.” Then, more gently: “You’re too childish about that car. It’s no more dangerous at night than it is in daytime. Come on, now.”
He shook her hand off, but he turned obediently and entered the house. This time he mounted the stairs and she could hear him in his bedroom, thumping about. Presently he ceased slamming doors and drawers and lay beneath the reading lamp with his Dumas. After a time the door opened and young Bayard entered and came into the radius of the light with his bleak eyes.
His grandfather did not remark his presence and he touched his arm. Old Bayard looked up, and when he did so young Bayard turned and quitted the room.
After the shades on the bank windows were drawn at three o’clock old Bayard retired to the office. Inside the grille the cashier and the bookkeeper could hear him clattering and banging around beyond the door. The cashier paused, a stack of silver clipped neatly in his fingers.
“Hear ’im?” he said. “Something on his mind here, lately. Used to be he was quiet as a mouse back there until they come for him, but last few days he tromples and thumps around back there like he was fighting hornets.”
The bookkeeper said nothing. The cashier set the stack of silver aside, built up another one.
“Something on his mind lately. That examiner must ’a’ put a bug in his ear, I reckon.”
The bookkeeper said nothing. He swung the adding machine to his desk and clicked the lever over. In the back room old Bayard moved audibly about. The cashier stacked the remaining silver neatly and rolled a cigarette. The bookkeeper bent above the steady clicking of the machine, and the cashier sealed his cigarette and lit it and waddled to the window and lifted the curtain.
“Simon’s brought the carriage, today,” he said. “That boy finally wrecked that car, I reckon. Better call Colonel.”
The bookkeeper slid from his stool and went back to the door and opened it. Old Bayard glanced up from his desk, with his hat on.
“All right, Byron,” he said. The bookkeeper returned to his desk.
Old Bayard stalked through the bank and opened the street door and stopped utterly, the doorknob in his hand.
“Where’s Bayard?” he said.
“He ain’t comin’,” Simon answered. Old Bayard crossed to the carriage.
“What? Where is he?”
“Him en Isom off somewhar in dat cyar,” Simon said.
“Lawd knows whar dey is by now. Takin’ dat boy away fum his work in de middle of de day, cyar-ridin’.” Old Bayard laid his hand on the stanchion, the spot on his face coming again into white relief. “Atter all de time I spend tryin’ to git some sense inter Isom’s haid,” Simon continued. He held the horses’ heads up, waiting for his employer to enter. “Cyar-ridin’,” he said. “Cyar-ridin’.”
Old Bayard got in and sank heavily into the seat.
“I’ll be damned,” he said, “if I haven’t got the triflingest set of folks to make a living for God ever made. There’s one thing about it: when I finally have to go to the poorhouse, every damned one of you’ll be there when I come.”
“Now, here you quoilin’ too,” Simon said, “Miss Jenny yellin’ at me twell I wuz plum out de gate, and now you already started at dis en’. But ef Mist’ Bayard don’t leave dat boy alone, he ain’t gwine ter be no better’n a town nigger spite of all I kin do.”
“Jenny’s already ruined him,” old Bayard said. “Even Bayard can’t hurt him much.”
“You sho’ tole de troof den,” Simon agreed. He shook the reins. “Come up, dar.”
“Here, Simon,” old Bayard said. “Hold up a minute.” Simon reined the horses back. “Whut you want now?” The spot on old Bayard’s cheek had resumed its normal appearance.
“Go back to my office and get me a cigar out of that jar on the mantel,” he said.
Two days later, as he and Simon tooled sedately homeward through the afternoon, simultaneously almost with the warning thunder of it, the car burst upon him on a curve, slewed into the ditch and on to the road again and rushed on, and in the flashing instant he and Simon saw the whites of Isom’s eyes and the ivory cropping of his teeth behind the steering wheel. When the car returned home that afternoon Simon conducted Isom to the barn and whipped him with a harness strap.
That night they sat in the office after supper. Old Bayard held his cigar unlighted in his fingers. Miss Jenny read the paper. Faint airs blew in, laden with spring.
Suddenly old Bayard said, “Maybe he’ll get tired of it after a while.”
Miss Jenny raised her head. “And when he does, don’t you know what he’ll get then?—when he finds that car won’t go fast enough?” she demanded, staring at him across the paper. He sat with his unlighted cigar, his head bent a little, not looking at her. “He’ll buy an aeroplane.” She rattled the paper, turned the page. “He ought to have a wife,” she added, reading again.
“Let him get a son, then he can break his neck as soon and as often as he pleases. Providence doesn’t seem to have any judgment at all,” she said, thinking of the two of them, of his dead brother. She said: “But Lord knows, I’d hate to see any girl I was fond of married to him.”
She rattled the paper again, turned another page. “I don’t know what else you expect of him. Of any Sartoris. You don’t waste your afternoons riding with him just because you think it’ll keep him from turning that car over. You go because when it does happen, you want to be in it, too. So do you think you’ve got any more consideration for folks than he has?”
He held his cigar, his face still averted. Miss Jenny was watching him again across the paper.
“I’m coming down town in the morning and we’re going and have the doctor look at that bump on your face, you hear?”
In his room, as he removed his collar and tie before his chest of drawers, his eye fell upon the pipe which he had laid there four weeks ago, and he put the collar and tie down and picked up the pipe and held it in his hand, rubbing the charred bowl slowly with his thumb.
Then with sudden decision he quitted the room and tramped down the hall, at the end of which a stair mounted into the darkness. He fumbled the light switch beside it and mounted, following the cramped turnings cautiously in the dark, to a door set at a difficult angle, and opened it upon a broad, low room with a pitched ceiling, smelling of dust and silence and ancient disused things.
The room was cluttered with indiscriminate furniture—chairs and sofas like patient ghosts holding lightly in dry and rigid embrace yet other ghosts—a fitting place for dead Sartorises to gather and speak among themselves of glamorous and old disastrous days. The unshaded light swung on a single cord from the center of the ceiling. He unknotted it and drew it across to a nail in the wall above a cedar chest and fastened it here, and drew a chair to the chest and sat down.
The chest had not been opened since 1901, when his son John had succumbed to yellow fever and an old Spanish bullet wound. There had been two occasions since, in July and in October of last year, but the other grandson still possessed quickness and all the incalculable portent of his heritage. So he had forborne for the time being, expecting to be able to kill two birds with one stone, as it were.
The lock was stiff, and he struggled patiently with it for some time. Rust shaled off, rubbed off, onto his hands, and he desisted and rose and rummaged about and returned to the chest with a heavy, cast-iron candlestick and hammered the lock free and removed it and raised the lid. From the chest there rose a thin exhilarating odor of cedar, and something else: a scent drily and muskily nostalgic, as of old ashes.
The first object was a garment. The brocade was richly hushed, and the fall of fine Mechlin was dustily yellow, pale and textureless as February sunlight. He lifted the garment carefully out. The lace cascaded mellow and pale as spilled wine upon his hands, and he laid it aside and lifted out next a rapier. It was a Toledo, a blade delicate and fine as
