Gone With the Wind (145 page)

“I had naturally suspected what your relations with that creature were.”

“Only suspected? Why didn’t you ask me and satisfy your curiosity? I’d have told you. I’ve been living with her ever since the day you and Ashley Wilkes decided that we should have separate bedrooms.”

“You have the gall to stand there and boast to me, your wife, that—”

“Oh, spare me your moral indignation. You never gave a damn what I did as long as I paid the bills. And you know I’ve been no angel recently. And as for you being my wife—you haven’t been much of a wife since Bonnie came, have you? You’ve been a poor investment, Scarlett. Belle’s been a better one.”

“Investment? You mean you gave her—?”

“ ‘Set her up in business’ is the correct term, I believe. Belle’s a smart woman. I wanted to see her get ahead and all she needed was money to start a house of her own. You ought to know what miracles a woman can perform when she has a bit of cash. Look at yourself.”

“You compare me—”

“Well, you are both hard-headed business women and both successful. Belle’s got the edge on you, of course, because she’s a kind-hearted, good-natured soul—”

“Will you get out of this room?”

He lounged toward the door, one eyebrow raised quizzically. How could he insult her so, she thought in rage and pain. He was going out of his way to hurt and humiliate her and she writhed as she thought how she had longed for his homecoming, while all the time he was drunk and brawling with police in a bawdy house.

“Get out of this room and don’t ever come back in it. I told you that once before and you weren’t enough of a gentleman to understand. Hereafter I will lock my door.”

“Don’t bother.”

“I will lock it After the way you acted the other night—so drunk, so disgusting—”

“Come now, darling! Not disgusting, surely!”

“Get out.”

“Don’t worry. I’m going. And I promise I’ll never bother you again. That’s final. And I just thought I’d tell you that if my infamous conduct was too much for you to bear, I’ll let you have a divorce. Just give me Bonnie and I won’t contest it.”

“I would not think of disgracing the family with a divorce.”

“You’d disgrace it quick enough if Miss Melly was dead, wouldn’t you? It makes my head spin to think how quickly you’d divorce me.”

“Will you go?”

“Yes, I’m going. That’s what I came home to tell you. I’m going to Charleston and New Orleans and—oh, well, a very extended trip. I’m leaving today.”

“Oh!”

“And I’m taking Bonnie with me. Get that foolish Prissy to pack her little duds. I’ll take Prissy too.”

“You’ll never take my child out of this house.”

“My child too, Mrs. Butler. Surely you do not mind me taking her to Charleston to see her grandmother?”

“Her grandmother, my foot! Do you think I’ll let you take that baby out of here when you’ll be drunk every night and most likely taking her to houses like that Belle’s—”

He threw down the cigar violently and it smoked acridly on the carpet, the smell of scorching wool rising to their nostrils. In an instant he was across the floor and by her side, his face black with fury.

“If you were a man, I would break your neck for that. As it is, all I can say is for you to shut your God-damn mouth. Do you think I do not love Bonnie, that I would take her where—my daughter! Good God, you fool! And as for you, giving yourself pious airs about your motherhood, why, a cat’s a better mother than you! What have you ever done for the children? Wade and Ella are frightened to death of you and if it wasn’t for Melanie Wilkes, they’d never know what love and affection are. But Bonnie, my Bonnie! Do you think I can’t take better care of her than you? Do you think I’ll ever let you bully her and break her spirit, as you’ve broken Wade’s and Ella’s? Hell, no! Have her packed up and ready for me in an hour or I warn you what happened the other night will be mild beside what will happen. I’ve always thought a good lashing with a buggy whip would benefit you immensely.”

He turned on his heel before she could speak and went out of the room on swift feet. She heard him cross the floor of the hall to the children’s play room and open the door. There was a glad, quick treble of childish voices and she heard Bonnie’s tones rise over Ella’s.

“Daddy, where you been?”

“Hunting for a rabbit’s skin to wrap my little Bonnie in. Give your best sweetheart a kiss, Bonnie—and you too, Ella.”

CHAPTER LV

“DARLING, I don’t want any explanation from you and I won’t listen to one,” said Melanie firmly as she gently laid a small hand across Scarlett’s tortured lips and stilled her words. “You insult yourself and Ashley and me by even thinking there could be need of explanations between us. Why, we three have been—have been like soldiers fighting the world together for so many years that I’m ashamed of you for thinking idle gossip could come between us. Do you think I’d believe that you and my Ashley— Why, the idea! Don’t you realize I know you better than anyone in the world knows you? Do you think I’ve forgotten all the wonderful, unselfish things you’ve done for Ashley and Beau and me—everything from saving my life to keeping us from starving! Do you think I could remember you walking in a furrow behind that Yankee’s horse almost barefooted and with your hands blistered—just so the baby and I could have something to eat—and then believe such dreadful things about you? I don’t want to hear a word out of you, Scarlett O’Hara. Not a word.”

“But—” Scarlett fumbled and stopped.

Rhett had left town the hour before with Bonnie and Prissy, and desolation was added to Scarlett’s shame and anger. The additional burden of her guilt with Ashley and Melanie’s defense was more than she could bear. Had Melanie believed India and Archie, cut her at the reception or even greeted her frigidly, then she could have held her head high and fought back with every weapon in her armory. But now, with the memory of Melanie standing between her and social ruin, standing like a thin, shining blade, with trust and a fighting light in her eyes, there seemed nothing honest to do but confess. Yes, blurt out everything from that far-off beginning on the sunny porch at Tara.

She was driven by a conscience which, though long suppressed, could still rise up, an active Catholic conscience. “Confess your sins and do penance for them in sorrow and contrition,” Ellen had told her a hundred times and, in this crisis, Ellen’s religious training came back and gripped her. She would confess—yes, everything, every look and word, those few caresses—and then God would ease her pain and give her peace. And, for her penance, there would be the dreadful sight of Melanie’s face changing from fond love and trust to incredulous horror and repulsion. Oh, that was too hard a penance, she thought in anguish, to have to live out her life remembering Melanie’s face, knowing that Melanie knew all the pettiness, the meanness, the two-faced disloyalty and the hypocrisy that were in her.

Once, the thought of flinging the truth tauntingly in Melanie’s face and seeing the collapse of her fool’s paradise had been an intoxicating one, a gesture worth everything she might lose thereby. But now, all that had changed overnight and there was nothing she desired less. Why this should be she did not know. There was too great a tumult of conflicting ideas in her mind for her to sort them out. She only knew that as she had once desired to keep her mother thinking her modest, kind, pure of heart, so she now passionately desired to keep Melanie’s high opinion. She only knew that she did not care what the world thought of her or what Ashley or Rhett thought of her, but Melanie must not think her other than she had always thought her.

She dreaded to tell Melanie the truth but one of her rare honest instincts arose, an instinct that would not let her masquerade in false colors before the woman who had fought her battles for her. So she had hurried to Melanie that morning, as soon as Rhett and Bonnie had left the house.

But at her first tumbled-out words: “Melly, I must explain about the other day—” Melanie had imperiously stopped her. Scarlett looking shamefaced into the dark eyes that were flashing with love and anger, knew with a sinking heart that the peace and calm following confession could never be hers. Melanie had forever cut off that line of action by her first words. With one of the few adult emotions Scarlett had ever had, she realized that to unburden her own tortured heart would be the purest selfishness. She would be ridding herself of her burden and laying it on the heart of an innocent and trusting person. She owed Melanie a debt for her championship and that debt could only be paid with silence. What cruel payment it would be to wreck Melanie’s life with the unwelcome knowledge that her husband was unfaithful to her, and her beloved friend a party to it!

“I can’t tell her,” she thought miserably. “Never, not even if my conscience kills me.” She remembered irrelevantly Rhett’s drunken remark: “She can’t conceive of dishonor in anyone she loves … let that be your cross.”

Yes, it would be her cross, until she died, to keep this torment silent within her, to wear the hair shirt of shame, to feel it chafing her at every tender look and gesture Melanie would make throughout the years, to subdue forever the impulse to cry: “Don’t be so kind! Don’t fight for me! I’m not worth it!”

“If you only weren’t such a fool, such a sweet, trusting, simple-minded fool, it wouldn’t be so hard,” she thought desperately. “I’ve toted lots of weary loads but this is going to be the heaviest and most galling load I’ve ever toted.”

Melanie sat facing her, in a low chair, her feet firmly planted on an ottoman so high that her knees stuck up like a child’s, a posture she would never now assumed had not rage possessed her to the point of forgetting proprieties. She held a line of tatting in her hands and she was driving the shining needle back and forth as furiously as though handling a rapier in a duel.

Had Scarlett been possessed of such an anger, she would have been stamping both feet and roaring like Gerald in his finest days, calling on God to witness the accursed duplicity and knavishness of mankind and uttering blood-curdling threats of retaliation. But only by the flashing needle and the delicate brows drawn down toward her nose did Melanie indicate that she was inwardly seething. Her voice was cool and her words were more close clipped than usual. But the forceful words she uttered were foreign to Melanie who seldom voiced an opinion at all and never an unkind word. Scarlett realized suddenly that the Wilkeses and the Hamiltons were capable of furies equal to and surpassing those of the O’Haras.

“I’ve gotten mighty tired of hearing people criticize you, darling,” Melanie said, “and this is the last straw and I’m going to do something about it. All this has happened because people are jealous of you, because you are so smart and successful. You’ve succeeded where lots of men, even, have failed. Now, don’t be vexed with me, dear, for saying that. I don’t mean you’ve ever been unwomanly or un-sexed yourself, as lots of folks have said. Because you haven’t. People just don’t understand you and people can’t bear for women to be smart. But your smartness and your success don’t give people the right to say that you and Ashley— Stars above!”

The soft vehemence of this last ejaculation would have been, upon a man’s lips, profanity of no uncertain meaning. Scarlett stared at her, alarmed by so unprecedented an outburst.

“And for them to come to me with the filthy lies they’d concocted—Archie, India, Mrs. Elsing! How did they dare? Of course, Mrs. Elsing didn’t come here. No, indeed, she didn’t have the courage. But she’s always hated you, darling, because you were more popular than Fanny. And she was so incensed at your demoting Hugh from the management of the mill. But you were quite right in demoting him. He’s just a piddling, do-less, good-for-nothing!” Swiftly Melanie dismissed the playmate of her childhood and the beau of her teen years. “I blame myself about Archie. I shouldn’t have given the old scoundrel shelter. Everyone told me so but I wouldn’t listen. He didn’t like you, dear, because of the convicts, but who is he to criticize you? A murderer, and the murderer of a woman, too! And after all I’ve done for him, he comes to me and tells me— I shouldn’t have been a bit sorry if Ashley had shot him. Well, I packed him off with a large flea in his ear, I can tell you! And he’s left town.

“And as for India, the vile thing! Darling, I couldn’t help noticing from the first time I saw you two together that she was jealous of you and hated you, because you were so much prettier and had so many beaux. And she hated you especially about Stuart Tarleton. And she’s brooded about Stuart so much that—well, I hate to say it about Ashley’s sister but I think her mind has broken with thinking so much! There’s no other explanation for her action. … I told her never to put foot in this house again and that if I heard her breathe so vile an insinuation I would—I would call her a liar in public!”

Melanie stopped speaking and abruptly the anger left her face and sorrow swamped it. Melanie had all that passionate clan loyalty peculiar to Georgians and the thought of a family quarrel tore her heart. She faltered for a moment. But Scarlett was dearest, Scarlett came first in her heart, and she went on loyally:

“She’s always been jealous because I loved you best, dear. She’ll never come in this house again and I’ll never put foot under any roof that receives her. Ashley agrees with me, but it’s just about broken his heart that his own sister should tell such a—”

At the mention of Ashley’s name, Scarlett’s overwrought nerves gave way and she burst into tears. Would she never stop stabbing him to the heart? Her only thought had been to make him happy and safe but at every turn she seemed to hurt him. She had wrecked his life, broken his pride and self-respect, shattered that inner peace, that calm based on integrity. And now she had alienated him from the sister he loved so dearly. To save her own reputation and his wife’s happiness, India had to be sacrificed, forced into the light of a lying, half-crazed, jealous old maid—India who was absolutely justified in every suspicion she had ever harbored and every accusing word she had uttered. Whenever Ashley looked into India’s eyes, he would see the truth shining there, truth and reproach and the cold contempt of which the Wilkeses were masters.