“How Miss Melley done it beyon’ me. De angels fight on her side, Ah specs. Ah’ll tell Miss Scarlett de fune’l termorrer but Ah specs Ah better keep hid dat Miss Melly settin’ up wid Lil Miss. Miss Scarlett ain’ gwine lak dat a-tall.”
CHAPTER LX
SOMETHING WAS WRONG with the world, a somber, frightening wrongness that pervaded everything like a dark impenetrable mist, stealthily closing around Scarlett. This wrongness went even deeper than Bonnie’s death, for now the first unbearable anguish was fading into resigned acceptance of her loss. Yet this eerie sense of disaster to come persisted, as though something black and hooded stood just at her shoulder, as though the ground beneath her feet might turn to quicksand as she trod upon it.
She had never before known this type of fear. All her life her feet had been firmly planted in common sense and the only things she had ever feared had been the things she could see, injury, hunger, poverty, loss of Ashley’s love. Unanalytical she was trying to analyze now and with no success. She had lost her dearest child but she could stand that, somehow, as she had stood other crushing losses. She had her health, she had as much money as she could wish and she still had Ashley, though she saw less and less of him these days. Even the constraint which had been between them since the day of Melanie’s ill-starred surprise party did not worry her, for she knew it would pass. No, her fear was not of pain or hunger or loss of love. Those fears had never weighed her down as this feeling of wrongness was doing—this blighting fear that was oddly like that which she knew in her old nightmare, a thick, swimming mist through which she ran with bursting heart, a lost child seeking a haven that was hidden from her.
She remembered how Rhett had always been able to laugh her out of her fears. She remembered the comfort of his broad brown chest and his strong arms. And so she turned to him with eyes that really saw him for the first time in weeks. And the change she saw shocked her. This man was not going to laugh, nor was he going to comfort her.
For some time after Bonnie’s death she had been too angry with him, too preoccupied with her own grief to do more than speak politely in front of the servants. She had been too busy remembering the swift running patter of Bonnie’s feet and her bubbling laugh to think that he, too, might be remembering and with pain even greater than her own. Throughout these weeks they had met and spoken as courteously as strangers meeting in the impersonal walls of a hotel, sharing the same roof, the same table, but never sharing the thoughts of each other.
Now that she was frightened and lonely, she would have broken through this barrier if she could, but she found that he was holding her at arm’s length, as though he wished to have no words with her that went beneath the surface. Now that her anger was fading she wanted to tell him that she held him guiltless of Bonnie’s death. She wanted to cry in his arms and say that she, too, had been overly proud of the child’s horsemanship, overly indulgent to her wheedlings. Now she would willingly have humbled herself and admitted that she had only hurled that accusation at him out of her misery, hoping by hurting him to alleviate her own hurt. But there never seemed an opportune moment. He looked at her out of black blank eyes that made no opportunity for her to speak. And apologies, once postponed, became harder and harder to make, and finally impossible.
She wondered why this should be. Rhett was her husband and between them there was the unbreakable bond of two people who have shared the same bed, begotten and borne a loved child and seen that child, too soon, laid away in the dark. Only in the arms of the father of that child could she find comfort, in the exchange of memories and grief that might hurt at first but would help to heal. But, now, as matters stood between them, she would as soon go to the arms of a complete stranger.
He was seldom at home. When they did sit down to supper together, he was usually drunk. He was not drinking as he had formerly, becoming increasingly more polished and biting as the liquor took hold of him, saving amusing, malicious things that made her laugh in spite of herself. Now he was silently, morosely drunk and, as the evenings progressed, soddenly drunk. Sometimes, in the early hours of the dawn, she heard him ride into the back yard and beat on the door of the servants’ house so that Pork might help him up the back stairs and put him to bed. Put him to bed! Rhett who had always drunk others under the table without turning a hair and then put them to bed.
He was untidy now, where once he had been well groomed, and it took all Pork’s scandalized arguing even to make him change his linen before supper. Whisky was showing in his face and the hard line of his long jaw was being obscured under an unhealthy bloat and puffs rising under his bloodshot eyes. His big body with its hard swelling muscles looked soft and slack and his waist line began to thicken.
Often he did not come home at all or even send word that he would be away overnight. Of course, he might be snoring drunkenly in some room above a saloon, but Scarlett always believed that he was at Belle Watling’s house on these occasions. Once she had seen Belle in a store, a coarse overblown woman now, with most of her good looks gone. But, for all her paint and flashy domes, she was buxom and almost motherly looking. Instead of dropping her eyes or glaring defiantly, as did other light women when confronted by ladies, Belle gave her stare for stare, searching her face with an intent, almost pitying look that brought a flush to Scarlett’s cheek.