Make her go away from here. Whatever he done, me and Judith and him have paid it out. You go and get her. Take her away from here." So he mounted the stairs, the worn bare treads, the cracked and scaling wall on one side, the balustrade with its intermittent missing spindles on the other. He remembered how he looked back and she was still sitting as he had left her, and that now (and he had not heard him enter) there stood in the hall below a hulking young lightcolored Negro man in clean faded overalls and shirt, his arms dangling, no surprise, no nothing in the saddle-colored and slack-mouthed idiot face. He remembered how he thought, "The scion, the heir, the apparent (though not obvious)" and how he heard Miss Coldfield's feet and saw the light of the torch approaching along the upper hall and how she came and passed him, how she stumbled a little and caught herself and looked full at him as if she had never seen him before — the eyes wide and unseeing like a sleepwalker's, the face which had always been tallow-hued now possessing some still profounder, some almost unbearable, quality of bloodlessness and he thought, "What? What is it now? It's not shock. And it never has been fear.
Can it be triumph?" and how she passed him and went on. He heard Clytie say to the man, "Take her to the gate, the buggy" and he stood there thinking, "I should go with her" and then, "But I must see too now. I will have to. Maybe I shall be sorry tomorrow, but I must see." So when he came back down the stairs (and he remembered how he thought, "Maybe my face looks like hers did, but it's not triumph") there was only Clytie in the hall, sitting still on the bottom step, sitting still in the attitude in which he had left her. She did not even look at him when he passed her. Nor did he overtake Miss Coldfield and the Negro. It was too dark to go fast, thought he could presently hear them ahead of him. She was not using the flashlight now; he remembered how he thought, "Surely she cant be afraid to show a light now." But she was not using it and he wondered if she were holding to the Negro's arm now; he wondered that until he heard the Negro's voice, flat, without emphasis or interest: "Wawkin better over here" and no answer from her, though he was close enough now to hear (or believe he did) her whimpering panting breath.
Then he heard the other sound and he knew that she had stumbled and fallen; he could almost see the hulking slack-faced Negro stopped in his tracks, looking toward the sound of the fall, waiting, without interest or curiosity, as he (Quentin) hurried forward, hurried toward the voices: 'You, nigger! What's your name?" 'Calls me Jim Bond."
'Help me up! You aint any Sutpen! You don't have to leave me lying in the dirt!"
When he stopped the buggy at her gate she did not offer to get out alone this time. She sat there until he got down and came round to her side; she still sat there, clutching the umbrella in one hand and the hatchet in the other, until he spoke her name. Then she stirred; he helped, lifted her down; she was almost as light as Clytie had been; when she moved it was like a mechanical doll, so that he supported and led her through the gate and up the short walk and into the dollsized house and turned on the light for her and looked at the fixed sleep-walking face, the wide dark eyes as she stood there, still clutching the umbrella and the hatchet, the shawl and the black dress both stained with dirt where she had fallen, the black bonnet jerked forward and awry by the shock of the fall. 'Are you all right now?" he said.
