Miss Jenny had been a little curious about that day, but Narcissa was gravely and demurely noncommittal about it, nor had Bayard ever talked of it. And so there was another bond between them, but unirksome. Miss Jenny had heard gossip about Horace and Belle, but on this subject also Narcissa had nothing to say.
“Have it your own way,” Miss Jenny said tartly; “I can draw my own conclusions. I imagine Belle and Horace can produce quite a mess together. And I’m glad of it. That man is making an old maid out of you. It isn’t too late now, but if he’d waited five years later to play the fool, there wouldn’t have been anything left for you except to give music lessons. But you can get married, now.”
“Would you advise me to marry?” Narcissa asked.
“I wouldn’t advise anybody to marry. You won’t be happy, but then, women haven’t got civilized enough yet to be happy unmarried, so you might as well try it. We can stand anything, anyhow. And change is good for folks. They say it is, at least.”
But Narcissa didn’t believe that. “I shall never marry,” she told. herself. Men . . . that was where unhappiness lay, getting men into your life. “And if I couldn’t keep Horace, loving him as I did . . .” Bayard slept. She picked up the book and read on to herself, about antic people in an antic world where things happened as they should happen. The shadows lengthened eastward. She read on, lost from mutable things.
After a while Bayard waked, and she fetched him a cigarette and a match. “You won’t have to do this any more,” he said. “I reckon you’re sorry.”
His cast would come off tomorrow, he meant, and he lay smoking his cigarette and talking of what he would do when he was about again. He would see about getting his car repaired first thing; have to take it in to Memphis, probably. And he planned a trip for the three of them—Miss Jenny, Narcissa and himself—while the car was in the shop. “It’ll take about a week,” he added. “She must be in pretty bad shape. Hope I didn’t hurt her guts any.”
“But you aren’t going to drive it fast any more,” she reminded him. He lay still, his cigarette burning in his fingers. “You promised,” she insisted.
“When did I promise?”
“Don’t you remember? That . . . afternoon, when they were . . .”
“When I scared you?” She sat watching him with her grave, troubled eyes. “Come here,” he said. She rose and went to the bed and he took her hand.
“You won’t drive it fast again?” she persisted.
“No,” he answered, “I promise.” And they were still so, her hand in his. The curtains stirred in the breeze, and the leaves on the branch beyond the window twinkled and turned and lisped against one another. Sunset was not far away. The breeze would cease then. He moved.
“Narcissa,” he said. She looked at him. “Lean your face down here.”
She looked away, and for a while there was no movement, no sound between them.
“I must go,” she said at last, quietly, and he released her hand.
His cast was gone, and he was up and about again, moving a little gingerly, to be sure, but already Miss Jenny was beginning to contemplate him a little anxiously. “If we could just arrange to have one of his minor bones broken every month or so, just enough to keep him in the house . . .”
“That won’t be necessary,” Narcissa told her. “He’s going to behave from now on.”
“How do you know?” Miss Jenny demanded. “What in the world makes you think that?”
“He promised he would.”
“He’ll promise anything when he’s flat on his back,” Miss Jenny retorted. “They all will; always have. But what makes you think he’ll keep it?”
“He promised me he would,” Narcissa replied serenely.
His first act was to see about his car. It had been pulled into town and patched up after a fashion until it would run under its own power, but it would be necessary to take it to Memphis to have the frame straightened and the body repaired.
Bayard was all for doing this himself, fresh-knit ribs and all, but Miss Jenny put her foot down, and after a furious half hour he was vanquished. And so the car was driven in to Memphis by a youth who hung around one of the garages in town. “Narcissa’ll take you driving in her car, if you must ride,” Miss Jenny told him.
“In that little peanut-parcher?” Bayard said derisively. “It won’t do better than twenty-one miles.”
“No, thank God,” Miss Jenny answered. “And I’ve written to Memphis and asked ’em to fix yours so it’ll run just like that, too.”
Bayard stared at her with humorless bleakness. “Did you do any such damn thing as that?”
“Oh, take him away, Narcissa,” Miss Jenny exclaimed. “Get him out of my sight. I’m so tired looking at you.”
But he wouldn’t ride in Narcissa’s car at first. He missed no opportunity to speak of it with heavy, facetious disparagement, but he wouldn’t ride in it. Dr. Alford had evolved a tight elastic bandage for his chest so that he could ride his horse, but he had developed an astonishing propensity for lounging about the house when Narcissa was there. And Narcissa came quite often. Miss Jenny thought it was on Bayard’s account and pinned the guest down in her forthright way; whereupon Narcissa told her about Horace and Belle while Miss Jenny sat indomitably erect on her straight chair beside the piano.
“Poor child,” she said, and: “Lord, ain’t they fools?” And then: “Well, you’re right; I wouldn’t marry one of ’em either.”
“I’m not,” Narcissa answered. “I wish there weren’t any of them in the world.”
Miss Jenny said “Hmph.”
And then one afternoon they were in Narcissa’s car and Bayard was driving, over her protest at first. But he was behaving himself quite sensibly, and at last she relaxed. They drove down the valley road and turned into the hills and she asked where they were going, but his answer was vague. So she sat quietly beside him and the road mounted presently in long curves among dark pines in the slanting afternoon. The road wound on, with changing sun-shot vistas of the valley and the opposite hills at every turn, and always the somber pines and their faint, exhilarating odor.
After a time they topped a hill and Bayard slowed the car. Beneath them the road sank, then flattened away toward a line of willows. crossed a stone bridge, and rose again, curving redly from sight among the dark trees.
“There’s the place,” he said.
“The place?” she repeated dreamily; then as the car rolled forward again, gaining speed, she roused herself and understood what he meant. “You promised!” she cried, but he jerked the throttle down the ratchet, and she clutched him and tried to scream. But she could make no sound, nor could she close her eyes as the narrow bridge hurtled dancing toward them.
And then her breath stopped and her heart as they flashed, with a sharp reverberation like hail on a tin roof, between willows and a crashing glint of water and shot on up the next hill. The small car swayed on the curve, lost its footing and went into the ditch, bounded out and hurled across the road. Then Bayard straightened it out and with diminishing speed it rocked on up the hill, and stopped. She sat beside him, her bloodless mouth open, beseeching him with her wide, hopeless eyes. Then she caught her breath, wailing.
“I didn’t mean—” he began awkwardly. “I just wanted to see if I could do it,” and he put his arms around her and she clung to him, moving her hands crazily about his shoulders. “I didn’t mean—” he essayed again, and then her crazed hands were on his face and she was sobbing wildly against his mouth.
9
All the forenoon he bent over his ledgers, watching his hand pen the neat figures into the ruled columns with a sort of astonishment. After his sleepless night he labored in a kind of stupor, his mind too spent even to contemplate the coiling images of his lust, thwarted now for all time, save with a dull astonishment that the images no longer filled his blood with fury and despair, so that it was some time before his dulled nerves reacted to a fresh threat and caused him to raise his head. Virgil Beard was just entering the door.
He slid hurriedly from his stool and slipped around the corner and darted through the door of old Bayard’s office. He crouched within the door, heard the boy ask politely for him, heard the cashier say that he was there a minute ago but that he reckoned he had stepped out; heard the boy say, well, he reckoned he’d wait for him. And he crouched within the door, wiping his drooling mouth with his handkerchief.
After a while he opened the door cautiously. The boy squatted patiently and blandly on his heels against the wall, and Snopes stood again with his clenched and trembling hands. He did not curse: his desperate fury was beyond words, but his breath came and went with a swift ah-ah-ah sound in his throat and it seemed to him that his eyeballs were being drawn back into his skull, turning further and further
