If he threw Miss Rosa over, I wouldn't think she would want to tell anybody about it Quentin said. Ah Mr Compson said again. After Mr Coldfield died in '64, Miss Rosa moved out to Sutpen's Hundred to live with Judith. She was twenty then, four years younger than her niece whom, in obedience to her sister's dying request, she set out to save from the family's doom which Sutpen seemed bent on accomplishing, apparently by the process of marrying him. She (Miss Rosa) was born in 1845, with her sister already seven years married and the mother of two children and Miss Rosa born into her parents' middle age (her mother must have been at least forty and she died in that childbed and Miss Rosa never forgave her father for it) and at a time when — granted that Miss Rosa merely mirrored her parents' attitude toward the son-in-law — the family wanted only peace and quiet and probably did not expect and maybe did not even want another child. But she was born, at the price of her mother's life and was never to be permitted to forget it. She was raised by the same spinster aunt who tried to force not only the older sister's bridegroom but the wedding too down the throat of a town which did not want it, growing up in that closed masonry of females to see in the fact of her own breathing not only the lone justification for the sacrifice of her mother's life, not only a living and walking reproach to her father, but a breathing indictment, ubiquitous and even transferable, of the entire male principle (that principle which had left the aunt a virgin at thirty-five). So for the first sixteen years of her life she lived in that grim tight little house with the father whom she hated without knowing it — that queer silent man whose only companion and friend seems to have been his conscience and the only thing he cared about his reputation for probity among his fellow men that man who was later to nail himself in his attic and starve to death rather than look upon his native land in the throes of repelling an invading army — and the aunt who even ten years later was still taking revenge for the fiasco of Ellen's wedding by striking at the town, the human race, through any and all of its creatures brother nieces nephew-in-law herself and all — with the blind irrational fury of a shedding snake. The aunt had taught Miss Rosa to look upon her sister as a woman who had vanished, not only out of the family and the house but out of life too, into an edifice like Bluebeard's and there transmogrified into a mask looking back with passive and hopeless grief upon the irrevocable world, held there not in durance but in a kind of jeering suspension by a man who had entered hers and her family's life before she was born with the abruptness of a tornado, done irrevocable and incalculable damage, and gone on. In a grim mausoleum air of Puritan righteousness and outraged female vindictiveness Miss Rosa's childhood was passed, that aged and ancient and timeless absence of youth which consisted of a Cassandralike listening beyond closed doors, of lurking in dim halls filled with that presbyterian effluvium of lugubrious and vindictive anticipation, while she waited for the infancy and childhood with which nature had confounded and betrayed her to overtake the disapprobation regarding any and every thing which could penetrate the walls of that house through the agency of any man, particularly her father, which the aunt seems to have invested her with at birth along with the swaddling clothes.
Perhaps she saw in her father's death, in the resulting necessity upon her as an orphan and a pauper, to turn to her next of kin for food and shelter and protection — and this kin the niece whom she had been asked to save — perhaps in this she saw fate itself supplying her with the opportunity to observe her sister's dying request.
Perhaps she even saw herself as an instrument of retribution: if not in herself an active instrument strong enough to cope with him, at least as a kind of passive symbol of inescapable reminding to rise bloodless and without dimension from the sacrificial stone of the marriagebed. Because until he came back from Virginia in '66 and found her living there with Judith and Clytie (Yes, Clytie was his daughter too: Clytemnestra. He named her himself. He named them all himself: all his own get and all the get of his wild niggers after the country began to assimilate them. Miss Rosa didn't tell you that two of the niggers in the wagon that day were women? No, sir, Quentin said.
