William Faulkner, SANCTUARY â WordPress.com - literature save 2
William Faulkner, SANCTUARY â WordPress.com - literature save 2
William Faulkner, SANCTUARY â WordPress.com - literature save 2
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"You're just meddling!" his sister said, her serene face, her voice, furious. "When<br />
you took another man's wife and child away from him I thought it was dreadful, but I said<br />
At least he will not have the face to ever <strong>com</strong>e back here again. And when you just<br />
walked out of the house like a nigger and left her I thought that was dreadful too, but I<br />
would not let myself believe you meant to leave her for good. And then when you<br />
insisted without any reason at all on leaving here and opening the house, scrubbing it<br />
yourself and all the town looking on and living there like a tramp, refusing to stay here<br />
where everybody would expect you to stay and think it funny when you wouldn't; and<br />
now to deliberately mix yourself up with a woman you said yourself was a streetwalker, a<br />
murderer's woman."<br />
"I cant help it. She has nothing, no one. In a made-over dress all neatly about five<br />
years out of mode, and that child that never has been more than half alive, wrapped in a<br />
piece of blanket scrubbed almost cotton-white. Asking nothing of anyone except to be let<br />
alone, trying to make something out of her life when all you sheltered chaste women--"<br />
"Do you mean to say a moonshiner hasn't got the money to hire the best lawyer in<br />
the country?" Miss Jenny said.<br />
"It's not that," Horace said. "I'm sure he could get a better lawyer.<br />
It's that--"<br />
"Horace," his sister said. She had been watching him. "Where is that woman?"<br />
Miss Jenny was watching him too, sitting a little forward in the wheel chair. "Did you<br />
take that woman into my house?"<br />
"It's my house too, honey." She did not know that for ten years he had been lying<br />
to his wife in order to pay interest on a mortgage on the stucco house he had built for her<br />
in Kinston, so that his sister might not rent to strangers that other house in Jefferson<br />
which his wife did not know he still owned any share in. "As long as it's vacant, and with<br />
that child--"<br />
"The house where my father and mother and your father and mother, the house<br />
where I-I won't have it. I won't have it."<br />
"Just for one night, then. I'll take her to the hotel in the morning.<br />
Think of her, alone, with that baby. . . . Suppose it were you and Bory, and your<br />
husband accused of a murder you knew he didn't-"<br />
"I dont want to think about her. I wish I had never heard of the whole thing. To<br />
think that my brother--Dont you see that you are always having to clean up after<br />
yourself? It's not that there's a litter left; it's that you--that--But to bring a streetwalker, a<br />
murderess, into the house where I was born."<br />
"Fiddlesticks," Miss Jenny said. "But, Horace, aint that what the lawyers call<br />
collusion? connivance?" Horace looked at her. "It seems to me you've already had a little<br />
more to do with these folks than the lawyer in the case should have. You were out there<br />
where it happened yourself not long ago. Folks might begin to think you know more than<br />
you've told."<br />
"That's so," Horace said, "Mrs Blackstone. And sometimes I have wondered why<br />
I haven't got rich at the law. Maybe I will, when I get old enough to attend the same law<br />
school you did."<br />
"If I were you," Miss Jenny said, "I'd drive back to town now and take her to the<br />
hotel and get her settled. It's not late."