She now spoke across the room to the hostess. “I’m going home, Belle,” she stated. “I think we are all tired of your party. I know I am.” The hostess was a plump, youngish woman and her cleverly-rouged face showed now a hysterical immersion that was almost repose, but when Miss Jenny broke into her consciousness with the imminence of departure, this faded quickly and her face resumed its familiar expression of strained and vague dissatisfaction and she protested conventionally but with a petulant sincerity, as a well-bred child might.
But Miss Jenny was adamant. She rose and her slender wrinkled hand brushed invisible crumbs from the bosom of her black silk dress. “If I stay any longer, I’ll miss Bayard’s toddy-time,” she explained with her usual forthrightness. “Come on, Narcissa, and I’ll drive you home.”
“I have my car, thank you, Miss Jenny,” the young woman to whom she spoke replied in a grave contralto, rising also; and the others got up with sibilant gathering motions above the petulant modulation of the hostess’ protests, and they drifted slowly into the hall and clotted again before various mirrors, colorful and shrill. Miss Jenny pushed steadily toward the door.
“Come along, come along,” she repeated. “Harry Mitchell won’t want to run into all this gabble when he comes home from work.”
“Then he can sit in the car out in the garage,” the hostess rejoined sharply. “I do wish you wouldn’t go, Miss Jenny; I don’t think I’ll ask you again.”
But Miss Jenny only said “Good-bye, good-bye” with cold affability, and with her delicate replica of the Sartoris nose and that straight, grenadier’s back of hers which gave the pas for erectness to only one back in town—that of her nephew Bayard—she stood at the steps, where Narcissa Benbow joined her, bringing with her like an odor that aura of grave and serene repose in which she dwelt. “Belle meant that, too,” Miss Jenny said.
“Meant what, Miss Jenny?”
“About Harry. . . . Now, where do you suppose that damn nigger went to?” They descended the steps and from the parked motors along the curb came muffled starting explosions, and the two women traversed the brief flower-bordered walk to the street. “Did you see which way my driver went?” Miss Jenny asked of the negro in the nearest car.
“He went to’ds de back, ma’am.” The negro opened the door and slid his legs, clad in army O.D. and a pair of linoleum putties, to the ground. “I’ll go git ’im.”
“Thank you. Well, thank the Lord, that’s over,” she added. “It’s too bad folks haven’t the sense or courage to send out invitations, then shut up the house and go away. All the fun of parties is in dressing up and getting there.” Ladies came steadily in shrill groups down the walk and got into cars or departed on foot with bright, not quite musical calls to one another. The sun was down behind Belle’s house, and when the women passed from the shadow into the level bar of sunlight beyond, they became delicately brilliant as paroquets. Narcissa Benbow wore gray, and her eyes were violet, and in her face was that tranquil repose of lilies.
“Not children’s parties,” she protested.
“I’m talking about parties, not about having fun,” Miss Jenny said. “Speaking of children—what’s the news from Horace?”
“Oh, hadn’t I told you?” the other said quickly. “I had a wire yesterday. He landed in New York Wednesday. It was such a mixed-up sort of message, I never could understand what he was trying to tell me, except that he would have to stay in New York for a week or so. It was over fifty words long.”
“Was it a straight message?” Miss Jenny asked. The other said yes and she added: “Horace must have got rich, like the soldiers say all the Y.M.C.A. did. Well, if it has taught a man like Horace to make money, the war was a pretty good thing, after all.”
“Miss Jenny! How can you talk that way, after John’s—after . . .”
“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said. “The war just gave John a good excuse to get himself killed. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been some other way that would have been a bother to everybody around.”
“Miss Jenny!”
“I know, my dear. I’ve lived with these bullheaded Sartorises for eighty years, and I’ll never give a single ghost of ’em the satisfaction of shedding a tear over him. What did Horace’s message say?”
“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, between which sunlight fell in spaced tiger bars. “Do you suppose he could have adopted a war orphan?”
“War orphan,” Miss Jenny repeated. “More likely it’s some war-orphan’s mamma.”
Simon appeared at the corner of the house, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, and crossed the lawn with shuffling celerity. His cigar was not visible.
“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? A thing like that?”
“Hmph,” 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 women? 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 somebody was keeping his supper on the stove when he was late, or holding out sugar on the other men to sweeten his coffee with. Some men are born to always have a 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 horses and he stood now beside the carriage in his Miss Jenny attitude. It differed from the bank one; there was now in it a gallant and protective deference. Miss Jenny examined the still serenity of the other’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 months 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 got in her carriage and Simon mounted and gathered up the reins. “Let me know when you hear again,” she called as the carriage moved forward. “Drive out and get some more flowers when you want ’em.”
“Thank you. Good-bye.”
“All right, Simon.” The carriage moved on again, and again Simon withheld his news until they were out of town.
“Mist’ Bayard done got home,” he remarked, in his former conversational tone.
“Where is he?” Miss Jenny demanded immediately.
“He ain’t come out to de place yit,” Simon answered. “I speck he went to de graveyard.”
“Nonsense,” Miss Jenny snapped. “No Sartoris ever goes to the cemetery but once. . . . Does Colonel know he’s home?”
“Yessum. I tole him, but he don’t ack like he believed I wuz tellin’ him de troof.”
“You mean nobody’s seen him but you?”
“I ain’t seed ’im neither,” Simon disclaimed. “Section han’ seed ’im 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 ’im,” Simon repeated stubbornly. “I reckon he knowed Mist’ Bayard when he seed ’im.”
“Well, where is he, then?”
“He mought have gone to de graveyard,” Simon suggested.
“Drive on!”
Miss Jenny found her nephew with two bird dogs in his office. 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’s 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 on various occasions and anniversaries and which he had never used, inexplicable bits of rock and desiccated roots and grain pods-all collected one at a time
