第47章

Some one else had said that: “Like must marry like or there’ll be no happiness.” Who was it? It seemed a million years since she had heard that, but it still did not make sense.

“But you said you cared.”

“I shouldn’t have said it.”

Somewhere in her brain, a slow fire rose and rage began to blot out everything else.

“Well, having been cad enough to say it—”

His face went white.

“I was a cad to say it, as I’m going to marry Melanie. I did you a wrong and Melanie a greater one. I should not have said it, for I knew you wouldn’t understand. How could I help caring for you—you who have all the passion for life that I have not? You who can love and hate with a violence impossible to me? Why you are as elemental as fire and wind and wild things and I—”

She thought of Melanie and saw suddenly her quiet brown eyes with their far-off look, her placid little hands in their black lace mitts, her gentle silences. And then her rage broke, the same rage that drove Gerald to murder and other Irish ancestors to misdeeds that cost them their necks. There was nothing in her now of the well-bred Robillards who could bear with white silence anything the world might cast.

“Why don’t you say it, you coward! You’re afraid to marry me! You’d rather live with that stupid little fool who can’t open her mouth except to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ and raise a passel of mealy-mouthed brats just like her! Why—”

“You must not say these things about Melanie!”

“ ‘I mustn’t’ be damned to you! Who are you to tell me I mustn’t? You coward, you cad, you— You made me believe you were going to marry me—”

“Be fair,” his voice pleaded. “Did I ever—”

She did not want to be fair, although she knew what he said was true. He had never once crossed the borders of friendliness with her and, when she thought of this fresh anger rose, the anger of hurt pride and feminine vanity. She had run after him and he would have none of her. He preferred a whey-faced little fool like Melanie to her. Oh, far better that she had followed Ellen and Mammy’s precepts and never, never revealed that she even liked him—better anything than to be faced with this scorching shame!

She sprang to her feet, her hands clenched and he rose towering over her. his face full of the mute misery of one forced to face realities when realities are agonies.

“I shall hate you till I die, you cad—you lowdown—lowdown—” What was the word she wanted? She could not think of any word bad enough.

“Scarlett—please—”

He put out his hand toward her and, as he did, she slapped him across the face with all the strength she had. The noise cracked like a whip in the still room and suddenly her rage was gone, and there was desolation in her heart.

The red mark of her hand showed plainly on his white tired face. He said nothing, but lifted her limp hand to his lips and kissed it. Then he was gone before she could speak again, closing the door softly behind him.

She sat down again very suddenly, the reaction from her rage making her knees feel weak. He was gone and the memory of his stricken face would haunt her till she died.

She heard the soft muffled sound of his footsteps dying away down the long hall, and the complete enormity of her actions came over her. She had lost him forever. Now he would hate her and every time he looked at her he would remember how she threw herself at him when he had given her no encouragement at all.

“I’m as bad as Honey Wilkes,” she thought suddenly, and remembered how everyone, and she more than anyone else, had laughed contemptuously at Honey’s forward conduct. She saw Honey’s awkward wigglings and heard her silly titters as she hung onto boys’ arms, and the thought stung her to new rage, rage at herself, at Ashley, at the world. Because she hated herself, she hated them all with the fury of the thwarted and humiliated love of sixteen. Only a little true tenderness had been mixed into her love. Mostly it had been compounded out of vanity and complacent confidence in her own charms. Now she had lost and, greater than her sense of loss, was the fear that she had made a public spectacle of herself. Had she been as obvious as Honey? Was everyone laughing at her? She began to shake at the thought.

Her hand dropped to a little table beside her, fingering a tiny china rose-bowl on which two china cherubs smirked. The room was so still she almost screamed to break the silence. She must do something or go mad. She picked up the bowl and hurled it viciously across the room toward the fireplace. It barely cleared the tall back of the sofa and splintered with a little crash against the marble mantelpiece.

“This,” said a voice from the depths of the sofa, “is too much.”

Nothing had ever startled or frightened her so much, and her mouth went too dry for her to utter a sound. She caught hold of the back of the chair, her knees going weak under her, as Rhett Butler rose from the sofa where he had been lying and made her a bow of exaggerated politeness.

“It is bad enough to have an afternoon nap disturbed by such a passage as I’ve been forced to hear, but why should my life be endangered?”

He was real. He wasn’t a ghost. But, saints preserve us, he had heard everything! She rallied her forces into a semblance of dignity.

“Sir, you should have made known your presence.”

“Indeed?” His white teeth gleamed and his bold dark eyes laughed at her. “But you were the intruder. I was forced to wait for Mr. Kennedy, and feeling that I was perhaps persona non grata in the back yard, I was thoughtful enough to remove my unwelcome presence here where I thought I would be undisturbed. But, alas!” he shrugged and laughed softly.

Her temper was beginning to rise again at the thought that this rude and impertinent man had heard everything—heard things she now wished she had died before she ever uttered.

“Eavesdroppers—” she began furiously.

“Eavesdroppers often hear highly entertaining and instructive things,” he grinned. “From a long experience in eavesdropping, I—”

“Sir,” she said, “you are no gentleman!”