She had started up the steps in search of him when she saw that the door of the dining room was closed. Her heart contracted a little with shame at the sight of that closed door, remembering the many nights of this last summer when Rhett had sat there alone, drinking until he was sodden and Pork came to urge him to bed. That had been her fault but she’d change it all. Everything was to be different from now on—but, please God, don’t let him be too drunk tonight. If he’s too drunk he won’t believe me and he’ll laugh at me and that will break my heart.
She quietly opened the dining-room door a crack and peered in. He was seated before the table, slumped in his chair, and a full decanter stood before him with the stopper in place, the glass unused. Thank God, he was sober! She pulled open the door, holding herself back from running to him. But when he looked up at her, something in his gaze stopped her dead on the threshold, stilled the words on her lips.
He looked at her steadily with dark eyes that were heavy with fatigue and there was no leaping light in them. Though her hair was tumbling about her shoulders, her bosom heaving breathlessly and her skirts mud splattered to the knees, his face did not change with surprise or question or his lips twist with mockery. He was sunken in his chair, his suit wrinkling untidily against his thickening waist, every line of him proclaiming the ruin of a fine body and the coarsening of a strong face. Drink and dissipation had done their work on the coin-clean profile and now it was no longer the head of a young pagan prince on new-minted gold but a decadent, tired Caesar on copper debased by long usage. He looked up at her as she stood there, hand on heart, looked quietly, almost in a kindly way, that frightened her.
“Come and sit down,” he said. “She is dead?”
She nodded and advanced hesitantly toward him, uncertainty taking form in her mind at this new expression on his face. Without rising, he pushed back a chair with his foot and she sank into it. She wished he had not spoken of Melanie so soon. She did not want to talk of her now, to re-live the agony of the last hour. There was all the rest of her life in which to speak of Melanie. But it seemed to her now, driven by a fierce desire to cry: “I love you,” that there was only this night, this hour, in which to tell Rhett what was in her mind. But there was something in his face that stopped her and she was suddenly ashamed to speak of love when Melanie was hardly cold.
“Well, God rest her,” he said heavily. “She was the only completely kind person I ever knew.”
“Oh, Rhett!” she cried miserably, for his words brought up too vividly all the kind things Melanie had ever done for her. “Why didn’t you come in with me? It was dreadful—and I needed you so!”
“I couldn’t have borne it,” he said simply and for a moment he was silent. Then he spoke with an effort and said, softly: “A very great lady.”
His somber gaze went past her and in his eyes was the same look she had seen in the light of the flames the night Atlanta fell, when he told her he was going off with the retreating army—the surprise of a man who knows himself utterly, yet discovers in himself unexpected loyalties and emotions and feels a faint self-ridicule at the discovery.
His moody eyes went over her shoulder as though he saw Melanie silently passing through the room to the door. In the look of farewell on his face there was no sorrow, no pain, only a speculative wonder at himself, only a poignant stirring of emotions dead since boyhood, as he said again: “A very great lady.”
Scarlett shivered and the glow went from her heart, the fine warmth, the splendor which had sent her home on winged feet. She half-grasped what was in Rhett’s mind as he said farewell to the only person in the world he respected and she was desolate again with a terrible sense of loss that was no longer personal. She could not wholly understand or analyze what he was feeling, but it seemed almost as if she too had been brushed by whispering skirts, touching her softly in a last caress. She was seeing through Rhett’s eyes the passing, not of a woman but of a legend—the gentle, self-effacing but steel-spined women on whom the South had builded its house in war and to whose proud and loving arms it had returned in defeatHis eyes came back to her and his voice changed. Now it was light and cool.
“So she’s dead. That makes it nice for you, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, how can you say such things,” she cried, stung, the quick tears coming to her eyes. “You know how I loved her!”
“No, I can’t say I did. Most unexpected and it’s to your credit, considering your passion for white trash, that you could appreciate her at last.”
“How can you talk so? Of course I appreciated her! You didn’t. You didn’t know her like I did! It isn’t in you to understand her—how good she was—”
“Indeed? Perhaps not.”
“She thought of everybody except herself—why, her last words were about you.”
There was a flash of genuine feeling in his eyes as he turned to her.
“What did she say?”
“Oh, not now, Rhett.”
“Tell me.”
His voice was cool but the hand he put on her wrist hurt. She did not want to tell, this was not the way she had intended to lead up to the subject of her love but his hand was urgent.
“She said—she said— ‘Be kind to Captain Butler. He loves you so much.’ ”
He stared at her and dropped her wrist. His eyelids went down, leaving his face dark and blank. Suddenly he rose and going to the window, he drew the curtains and looked out intently as if there were something to see outside except blinding mist.
“Did she say anything else?” he questioned, not turning his head.
“She asked me to take care of little Beau and I said I would, like he was my own boy.”
“What else?”
“She said—Ashley—she asked me to look after Ashley, too.”
He was silent for a moment and then he laughed softly.
“It’s convenient to have the first wife’s permission, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
