第25章

“Mist’ Gerald,” he announced, breathing hard, the pride of a bridegroom all over his shining face, “you’ new ‘oman done come.”

“New woman? I didn’t buy any new woman,” declared Gerald, pretending to glare.

“Yassah, you did, Mist’ Gerald! Yassah! An’ she out hyah now wanting ter speak wid you,” answered Pork, giggling and twisting his hands in excitement.

“Well, bring in the bride,” said Gerald, and Pork, turning, beckoned into the hall to his wife, newly arrived from the Wilkes plantation to become part of the household of Tara. She entered, and behind her, almost hidden by her voluminous calico skirts, came her twelve-year-old daughter, squirming against her mother’s legs.

Dilcey was tall and bore herself erectly. She might have been any age from thirty to sixty, so unlined was her immobile bronze face. Indian blood was plain in her features, overbalancing the negroid characteristics. The red color of her skin, narrow high forehead, prominent cheek bones, and the hawk-bridged nose which flattened at the end above thick negro lips, all showed the mixture of two races. She was self-possessed and walked with a dignity that surpassed even Mammy’s, for Mammy had acquired her dignity and Dilcey’s was in her blood.

When she spoke, her voice was not so slurred as most negroes’ and she chose her words more carefully.

“Good evenin’, young Misses. Mist’ Gerald, I is sorry to ‘sturb you, but I wanted to come here and thank you agin fo’ buyin’ me and my chile. Lots of gentlemens might a’ bought me but they wouldn’t a’ bought my Prissy, too, jes’ to keep me frum grievin’ and I thanks you. I’m gwine do my bes’ fo’ you and show you I ain’t forgettin’.”

“Hum—hurrump,” said Gerald, clearing his throat in embarrassment at being caught openly in an act of kindness.

Dilcey turned to Scarlett and something like a smile wrinkled the corners of her eyes. “Miss Scarlett, Poke done tole me how you ast Mist Gerald to buy me. And so I’m gwine give you my Prissy fo’ yo’ own maid.”

She reached behind her and jerked the little girl forward. She was a brown little creature, with skinny legs like a bird and a myriad of pigtails carefully wrapped with twine sticking stiffly out from her head. She had sharp, knowing eyes that missed nothing and a studiedly stupid look on her face.

“Thank you, Dilcey,” Scarlett replied, “but I’m afraid Mammy will have something to say about that. She’s been my maid ever since I was born.”

“Mammy getting ole,” said Dilcey, with a calmness that would have enraged Mammy. “She a good mammy, but you a young lady now and needs a good maid, and my Prissy been maidin’ fo’ Miss India fo’ a year now. She kin sew and fix hair good as a grown pusson.”

Prodded by her mother, Prissy bobbed a sudden curtsy and grinned at Scarlett, who could not help grinning back.

“A sharp little wench,” she thought, and said aloud: “Thank you, Dilcey, we’ll see about it when Mother comes home.”

“Thankee, Ma’m. I gives you a good night,” said Dilcey and, turning, left the room with her child, Pork dancing attendance. The supper things cleared away, Gerald resumed his oration, but with little satisfaction to himself and none at all to his audience. His thunderous predictions of immediate war and his rhetorical questions as to whether the South would stand for further insults from the Yankees only produced faintly bored, “Yes, Papas” and “No, Pas.” Carreen, sitting on a hassock under the big lamp, was deep in the romance of a girl who had taken the veil after her lover’s death and, with silent tears of enjoyment oozing from her eyes, was pleasurably picturing herself in a white coif. Suellen, embroidering on what she gigglingly called her “hope chest,” was wondering if she could possibly detach Stuart Tarleton from her sister’s side at the barbecue tomorrow and fascinate him with the sweet womanly qualities which she possessed and Scarlett did not. And Scarlett was in a tumult about Ashley.

How could Pa talk on and on about Fort Sumter and the Yankees when he knew her heart was breaking? As usual in the very young, she marveled that people could be so selfishly oblivious to her pain and the world rock along just the same, in spite of her heartbreak.

Her mind was as if a cyclone had gone through it, and it seemed strange that the dining room where they sat should be so placid, so unchanged from what it had always been. The heavy mahogany table and sideboards, the massive silver, the bright rag rugs on the shining floor were all in their accustomed places, just as if nothing had happened. It was a friendly and comfortable room and, ordinarily, Scarlett loved the quiet hours which the family spent there after supper; but tonight she hated the sight of it and, if she had not feared her father’s loudly bawled questions, she would have slipped away, down the dark hall to Ellen’s little office and cried out her sorrow on the old sofa.

That was the room that Scarlett liked the best in all the house. There, Ellen sat before her tall secretary each morning, keeping the accounts of the plantation and listening to the reports of Jonas Wilkerson, the overseer. There also the family idled while Ellen’s quill scratched across her ledgers, Gerald in the old rocker, the girls on the sagging cushions of the sofa that was too battered and worn for the front of the house. Scarlett longed to be there now, alone with Ellen, so she could put her head in her mother’s lap and cry in peace. Wouldn’t Mother ever come home?