“Why, Eunice! It’s perfect.”
“No’rn, it ain’t up to de mark,” Eunice insisted. But she beamed, gravely diffident, and for a few minutes the 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, and on the table beside the bed, forgotten and withered and dead, was a small bunch of flowers in a blue vase. Touching them, they crumbled in her fingers, leaving a stain, and the water in the vase smelled of rank decay. She opened the 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 comfort 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 musing alarm, deprecating anew her carelessness in not destroying them.
But maybe she had, and so she entered again into the closed circle of her bewilderment and first fear, trying to remember what she had done with them. But she was certain that 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 had packed her things.
That day she had missed them, finding in their stead one in a different handwriting, which she did 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 had read it with tranquil detachment: it and all it brought to mind was definitely behind 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 had such thoughts 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 picking 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. She considered telephoning 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 because of the rain. She considered this, and pictured him walking along a street in the rain, and immediately and with instinctive foreknowledge, she went to the closet beneath the stairs and opened the door.
It was as she had known; his overcoat and his raincoat both hung there, and the chances were he didn’t even have an umbrella; and again irritation and exasperation and untroubled affection welled within her and it was as it had been of old again, and all that had since come between them rolled away like clouds.
Heretofore her piano had always been rolled into the living room when cold weather came. But now it stood yet in the smaller alcove. There was a fireplace here, but no fire had been lighted yet, and the room was chilly. Beneath her hands the cold keys gave forth a sluggish chord, accusing, reproving too, and she returned to the fire and stood where she could see, through the window, the drive beneath its somber, dripping cedars.
The small clock on the mantel behind her chimed twelve, and she went to the window and stood with her nose touching the chill glass and her breath frosting it over. Soon, now; he was erratic in his hours, but never tardy, and every time an umbrella came into sight her heart leaped a little.
But it was not he, and she followed the bearer’s plodding passage until he shifted the umbrella enough for her to recognize him, and so she did not see Horace until he was halfway up the drive. His hat was turned down about his face and his coat collar was hunched to his ears, and as she had known, he didn’t even have an umbrella.
“Oh, you idiot,” she said and ran to the door and through the curtained glass she saw his shadowy shape come leaping up the steps. He flung the door open and entered, whipping his sodden hat against his leg, and so did not see her until she stepped forth. “You idiot,” she said, “where’s your raincoat?”
For a moment he stared at her with his wild and diffident unrepose; then he said “Narcy!” and his face lighted and he swept her into his wet arms.
“Don’t” she cried. “You’re wet!” But he swung her from the floor, against his sopping chest, repeating “Narcy, Narcy”; then his cold nose was against her face and she tasted rain.
“Narcy,” he said again, hugging her, and she ceased resisting and clung to him. Then abruptly he released her and jerked his head up and stared at her with sober intensity. “Narcy,” he said, still staring at her, “has that surly blackguard—”
“No, of course not,” she answered sharply. “Have you gone crazy?” Then she clung to him again, wet clothes and all, as though she would never let him go. “Oh, Horry,” she said, “I’ve been a beast to you!”
3
This time it was a Ford car, and Bayard saw its wild skid as the driver tried to jerk it across the treacherous, thawing road, and in the flashing moment and with swift amusement, he saw, between the driver’s cravatless collar and the woman’s stocking bound around his head beneath his hat and tied under his chin, his Adam’s apple like a scared puppy in a tow sack.
This flashed on and behind, and Bayard wrenched the wheel. The stalled Ford swam sickeningly into view again as the big car slewed on the greasy surface, its declutched engine roaring.
Then the Ford swam from sight again as he wrenched the wheel over and slammed the clutch in for more stability; and once more that sickening, unhurried rush as the car refused to regain its feet and the frosty December world swept laterally across his vision.
Old Bayard lurched against him; from the comer of his eye he could see the old fellow’s hand clutching the top of the door. Now they were facing the bluff on which the cemetery lay; directly above them John Sartoris’ effigy lifted its florid stone gesture and from amid motionless cedars gazed out on the valley where for two miles the railroad he had built ran beneath his carven eyes. Bayard wrenched the wheel once more.
On the other side of the road a precipice dropped sheer away, among scrub cedars and corroded ridges skeletoned brittlely with frost and muddy ice where the sun had not yet reached. The rear end of the car hung timelessly over this before it swung again, with the power full on, swung on until its nose pointed downhill again, with never a slackening of its speed.
But still it would not come into the ruts, and it had lost the crown of the road, and although they had almost reached the foot of the hill, Bayard saw that they would not make it. Just before they slipped off he wrenched the steering wheel over and swung the nose straight over the bank, and the car poised lazily for a moment, as though taking breath. “Hang on,” he shouted to his grandfather; then they plunged.
An interval utterly without sound, in which all sensation of motion was lost. Then scrub cedar burst crackling about them and whipping branches of it exploded on the radiator and slapped viciously at them as they leaned with braced feet, and the car slewed in a long bounce.
Another vacuumlike interval, then a shock that banged the wheel into Bayard’s chest and jerked it in his tight hands, wrenching his arm-sockets. Beside him his grandfather lurched forward and Bayard threw out his arm just in time to keep the other from crashing through the windshield. “Hang on,” he shouted.
The car had never faltered and he dragged the leaping wheel over and swung it down the ravine and opened the engine, and with the engine and the momentum of the plunge, they rocked and crashed on down the
