"Sho, Mayor," Wash said, "In just a minute." So they waited in front of the dark house, and the next day Father said there were a hundred that remembered about the butcher knife that he kept hidden and razor-sharp — the one thing in his sloven life that he was ever known to take pride in or care of — only by the time they remembered all this it was too late. So they didn't know what he was about. They just heard him moving inside the dark house, then they heard the granddaughter's voice, fretful and querulous: "Who is it? Light the lamp, Grandpaw" then his voice: "Hit wont need no light, honey. Hit wont take but a minute" then de Spain drew his pistol and said, "You, Wash! Come out of there!" and still Wash didn't answer, murmuring still to the granddaughter: "Wher air you?" and the fretful voice answering, "Right here. Where else would I be?
What is — " then de Spain said, "Jones?" and he was already fumbling at the broken steps when the granddaughter screamed; and now all the men there claimed that they heard the knife on both the neckbones, though de Spain didn't. He just said he knew that Wash had come out onto the gallery and that he sprang back before he found out that it was not toward him Wash was running but toward the end of the gallery, where the body lay, but that he did not think about the scythe: he just ran backward a few feet when he saw Wash stoop and rise again and now Wash was running toward him.
Only he was running toward them all, de Spain said, running into the lanterns so that now they could see the scythe raised above his head; they could see his face, his eyes too, as he ran with the scythe above his head, straight into the lanterns and the gun barrels, making no sound, no outcry while de Spain ran backward before him, saying, "Jones! Stop! Stop, or I'll kill you.
Jones! Jones! Jones!"'
'Wait,' Shreve said. 'You mean that he got the son he wanted, after all that trouble, and then turned right around and — '
'Yes. Sitting in Grandfather's office that afternoon, with his head kind of flung back a little, explaining to Grandfather like he might have been explaining arithmetic to Henry back in the fourth grade: "You see, all I wanted was just a son. Which seems to me, when I look about at my contemporary scene, no exorbitant gift from nature or circumstance to demand — "
'will you wait?" Shreve said. ' — that with the son he went to all that trouble to get lying right there behind him in the cabin, he would have to taunt the grandfather into killing first him and then the child too ?"
' — What?" Quentin said. 'It wasn't a son. It was a girl."
'Oh,' Shreve said.
' — Come on. Let's get out of this damn icebox and go to bed."
There would be no deep breathing tonight. The window would remain closed above the frozen and empty quad beyond which the windows in the opposite wall were, with two or three exceptions, already dark; soon the chimes would ring for midnight, the notes melodious and tranquil, faint and clear as glass in the fierce (it had quit snowing) still air.
'So the old man sent the nigger for Henry,' Shreve said. 'And Henry came in and the old man said "They cannot marry because he is your brother" and Henry said "You lie" like that, that quick: no space, no interval, no nothing between like when you press the button and get light in the room.
And the old man just sat there, didn't even move and strike him and so Henry didn't say "You lie" again because he knew now it was so; he just said "It's not true," not "I don't believe it" but "It's not true" because he could maybe see the old man's face again now and demon or no it was a kind of grief and pity, not for himself but for Henry, because Henry was just young while he (the old man) knew that he still had the courage and even all the shrewdness too — ' Shreve stood beside the table, facing Quentin again though not seated now. In the overcoat buttoned awry over the bathrobe he looked huge and shapeless like a disheveled bear as he stared at Quentin (the Southerner, whose blood ran quick to cool, more supple to compensate for violent changes of temperature perhaps, perhaps merely nearer the surface) who sat hunched in his chair, his hands thrust into his pockets as if he were trying to hug himself warm between his arms, looking somehow fragile and even wan in the lamplight, the rosy glow which now had nothing of warmth, coziness, in it, while both their breathing vaporized faintly in the cold room where there was now not two of them but four, the two who breathed not individuals now yet something both more and less than twins, the heart and blood of youth.
