Then she got the sheriff, with Tull’s family sitting about the table, about the Sunday dinner.
“A dead man.
You pass Mr Tull’s about a mile and turn off to the right.……Yes, the Old Frenchman place.
Yes.
This is Mrs Goodwin talking.…Goodwin.
Yes.”
15
Benbow reached his sister’s home in the middle of the afternoon.
It was four miles from town, Jefferson.
He and his sister were born in Jefferson, seven years apart, in a house which they still owned, though his sister had wanted to sell the house when Benbow married the divorced wife of a man named Mitchell and moved to Kinston.
Benbow would not agree to sell, though he had built a new bungalow in Kinston on borrowed money upon which he was still paying interest.
When he arrived, there was no one about.
He entered the house and he was sitting in the dim parlor behind the closed blinds, when he heard his sister come down the stairs, still unaware of his arrival.
He made no sound.
She had almost crossed the parlor door and vanished when she paused and looked full at him, without outward surprise, with that serene and stupid impregnability of heroic statuary; she was in white.
“Oh, Horace,” she said.
He did not rise.
He sat with something of the air of a guilty small boy.
“How did you—” he said.
“Did Belle—”
“Of course.
She wired me Saturday.
That you had left, and if you came here, to tell you that she had gone back home to Kentucky and had sent for Little Belle.”
“Ah, damnation,” Benbow said.
“Why?” his sister said.
“You want to leave home yourself, but you dont want her to leave.”
He stayed at his sister’s two days.
She had never been given to talking, living a life of serene vegetation like perpetual corn or wheat in a sheltered garden instead of a field, and during those two days she came and went about the house with an air of tranquil and faintly ludicrous tragic disapproval.
After supper they sat in Miss Jenny’s room, where Narcissa would read the Memphis paper before taking the boy off to bed.
When she went out of the room, Miss Jenny looked at Benbow.
“Go back home, Horace,” she said.
“Not to Kinston,” Benbow said.
“I hadn’t intended to stay here, anyway.
It wasn’t Narcissa I was running to.
I haven’t quit one woman to run to the skirts of another.”
“If you keep on telling yourself that you may believe it, someday,” Miss Jenny said.
“Then what’ll you do?”
“You’re right,” Benbow said.
“Then I’d have to stay at home.”
His sister returned.
She entered the room with a definite air.
“Now for it,” Benbow said.
His sister had not spoken directly to him all day.
“What are you going to do, Horace?” she said.
“You must have business of some sort there in Kinston that should be attended to.”
“Even Horace must have,” Miss Jenny said.
“What I want to know is, why he left.
Did you find a man under the bed, Horace?”
“No such luck,” Benbow said.
“It was Friday, and all of a sudden I knew that I could not go to the station and get that box of shrimp and—”