“Mother, Scarlett's new dress is prettier than mine and I look like a fright in pink. Why can't she wear my pink and let me wear her green?She looks all right in pink.”
“Mother, can I stay up for the ball tomorrow night?I'm thirteen now—”
“Mrs. O'Hara, would you believe it—Hush, you girls, before I take me crop to you!Cade Calvert was in Atlanta this morning and he says—will you be quiet and let me be hearing me own voice?—and he says it's all upset they are there and talking nothing but war, militia drilling, troops forming.And he says the news from Charleston is that they will be putting up with no more Yankee insults.”
Ellen's tired mouth smiled into the tumult as she addressed herself first to her husband, as a wife should.
“If the nice people of Charleston feel that way, I'm sure we will all feel thesame way soon,”she said, for she had a deeply rooted belief that, excepting only Savannah, most of the gentle blood of the whole continent could be found in that small seaport city, a belief shared largely by Charlestonians.
“No, Carreen, next year, dear. Then you can stay up for balls and wear grown-up dresses, and what a good time my little pink cheeks will have!Don't pout, dear.You can go to the barbecue, remember that, and stay up through supper, but no balls till you are fourteen.
“Give me your gown, Scarlett. I will whip the lace for you after prayers.
“Suellen, I do not like your tone, dear. Your pink gown is lovely and suitable to your complexion, as Scarlett's is to hers.But you may wear my garnet necklace tomorrow night.”
Suellen, behind her mother's back, wrinkled her nose triumphantly at Scarlett, who had been planning to beg the necklace for herself. Scarlett put out her tongue at her.Suellen was an annoying sister with her whining and selfishness, and had it not been for Ellen's restraining hand, Scarlett would frequently have boxed her ears.
“Now, Mr. O'Hara, tell me more about what Mr.Calvert said about Charleston,”said Ellen.
Scarlett knew her mother cared nothing at all about war and politics and thought them masculine matters about which no lady could intelligently concern herself. But it gave Gerald pleasure to air his views, and Ellen was unfailingly thoughtful of her husband's pleasure.
While Gerald launched forth on his news, Mammy set the plates before her mistress, golden-topped biscuits, breast of fried chicken and a yellow yam open and steaming, with melted butter dripping from it. Mammy pinched small Jack, and he hastened to his business of slowly swishing the paper ribbons back and forth behind Ellen.Mammy stood beside the table, watching every forkful that traveled from plate to mouth, as though she intended to force the food down Ellen's throat should she see signs of flagging.Ellen ate diligently, but Scarlett could see that she was too tired to know what she was eating.Only Mammy's implacable face forced her to it.
When the dish was empty and Gerald only midway in his remarks on the thievishness of Yankees who wanted to free darkies and yet offered no penny topay for their freedom, Ellen rose.
“We'll be having prayers?”he questioned, reluctantly.
“Yes. It is so late—why, it is actually ten o'clock,”as the clock with coughing and tinny thumps marked the hour.“Carreen should have been asleep long ago.The lamp, please, Pork, and my prayer book, Mammy.”
Prompted by Mammy's hoarse whisper, Jack set his fly-brush in the corner and removed the dishes, while Mammy fumbled in the sideboard drawer for Ellen's worn prayer book. Pork, tiptoeing, reached the ring in the chain and drew the lamp slowly down until the table top was brightly bathed in light and the ceiling receded into shadows.Ellen arranged her skirts and sank to the floor on her knees, laying the open prayer book on the table before her and clasping her hands upon it.Gerald knelt beside her, and Scarlett and Suellen took their accustomed places on the opposite side of the table, folding their voluminous petticoats in pads under their knees, so they would ache less from contact with the hard floor.Carreen, who was small for her age, could not kneel comfortably at the table and so knelt facing a chair, her elbows on the seat.She liked this position, for she seldom failed to go to sleep during prayers and, in this posture, it escaped her mother's notice.
The house servants shuffled and rustled in the hall to kneel by the doorway, Mammy groaning aloud as she sank down, Pork straight as a ramrod, Rosa and Teena, the maids, graceful in their spreading bright calicoes, Cookie gaunt and yellow beneath her snowy head rag, and Jack, stupid with sleep, as far away from Mammy's pinching fingers as possible. Their dark eyes gleamed expectantly, for praying with their white folks was one of the events of the day.The old and colorful phrases of the litany with its Oriental imagery meant little to them but it satisfied something in their hearts, and they always swayed when they chanted the responses:“Lord, have mercy on us,”“Christ, have mercy on us.”
Ellen closed her eyes and began praying, her voice rising and falling, lulling and soothing. Heads bowed in the circle of yeltow light as Ellen thanked God for the health and happiness of her home, her family and her negroes.
When she had finished her prayers for those beneath the roof of Tara, her father, mother, sisters, three dead babies and“all the poor souls in Purgatory,”she clasped her white beads between long fingers and began the Rosary. Like the rushing of a soft wind, the responses from black throats and white throats rolled back:
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death.”
