[Part 10] "Gone With The Wind" by Margaret Mitchell

----------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------

𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐗𝐕𝐈𝐈𝐈.

----------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------

FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE THE WAR BEGAN, Atlanta could hear the sound of battle.

In the early morning hours before the noises of the town awoke, the cannon at Kennesaw Mountain could be heard faintly, far away, a low dim booming that might have passed for summer thunder.

Occasionally it was loud enough to be heard even above the rattle of traffic at noon.

People tried not to listen to it, tried to talk, to laugh, to carry on their business, just as though the Yankees were not there, twenty-two miles away, but always no matter what occupied their hands, all were listening, listening, their hearts leaping suddenly a hundred times a day.

Was the booming louder?

Or did they only think it was louder?

Would General Johnston hold them this time?

Would he?

Panic lay just beneath the surface.

Nerves which had been stretched tighter and tighter each day of the retreat began to reach the breaking point.

No one spoke of fears.

That subject was taboo, but strained nerves found expression in loud criticism of the General.

Public feeling was at fever heat.

Sherman was at the very doors of Atlanta.

Another retreat might bring the Confederates into the town.

Give us a general who won’t retreat!

Give us a man who will stand and fight!

With the far-off rumbling of cannon in their ears, the state militia, “Joe Brown’s Pets,” and the Home Guard marched out of Atlanta, to defend the bridges and ferries of the Chattahoochee River at Johnston’s back.

It was a gray, overcast day and, as they marched through Five Points and out the Marietta road, a fine rain began to fall.

The whole town had turned out to see them off and they stood, close packed, under the wooden awnings of the stores on Peachtree Street and tried to cheer.

Scarlett and Maybelle Merriwether Picard had been given permission to leave the hospital and watch the men go out, because Uncle Henry Hamilton and Grandpa Merriwether were in the Home Guard, and they stood with Mrs. Meade, pressing in the crowd, tiptoeing to get a better view.

Scarlett, though filled with the universal Southern desire to believe only the pleasantest and most reassuring things about the progress of the fighting, felt cold as she watched the motley ranks go by.

Surely, things must be in a desperate pass if this rabble of bombproofers, old men and little boys were being called out!

To be sure there were young and able-bodied men in the passing lines, tricked out in the bright uniforms of socially select militia units, plumes waving, sashes dancing.

But there were so many old men and young boys, and the sight of them made her heart contract with pity and with fear.

There were graybeards older than her father trying to step jauntily along in the needle-fine rain to the rhythm of the fife and drum corps.

Grandpa Merriwether, with Mrs. Merriwether’s best plaid shawl laid across his shoulders to keep out the rain, was in the first rank and he saluted the girls with a grin.

They waved their handkerchiefs and cried gay good-bys to him; but Maybelle, gripping Scarlett’s arm, whispered: “Oh, the poor old darling!

A real good rainstorm will just about finish him!

His lumbago—”

Uncle Henry Hamilton marched in the rank behind Grandpa Merriwether, the collar of his long black coat turned up about his ears, two Mexican War pistols in his belt and a small carpetbag in his hand.

Beside him marched his black valet who was nearly as old as Uncle Henry, with an open umbrella held over them both.

Shoulder to shoulder with their elders came the young boys, none of them looking over sixteen.

Many of them had run away from school to join the army, and here and there were clumps of them in the cadet uniforms of military academies, the black cock feathers on their tight gray caps wet with rain, the clean white canvas straps crossing their chests sodden.

Phil Meade was among them, proudly wearing his dead brother’s saber and horse pistols, his hat bravely pinned up on one side.

Mrs. Meade managed to smile and wave until he had passed and then she leaned her head on the back of Scarlett’s shoulder for a moment as though her strength had suddenly left her.

Many of the men were totally unarmed, for the Confederacy had neither rifles nor ammunition to issue to them.

These men hoped to equip themselves from killed and captured Yankees.

Many carried bowie knives in their boots and bore in their hands long thick poles with iron-pointed tips known as “Joe Brown pikes.”

The lucky ones had old flintlock muskets slung over their shoulders and powder horns at their belts.

Johnston had lost around ten thousand men in his retreat.

He needed ten thousand more fresh troops.

“And this,” thought Scarlett frightened, “is what he is getting!”

As the artillery rumbled by, splashing mud into the watching crowds, a negro on a mule, riding close to a cannon caught her eye.

He was a young, saddle-colored negro with a serious face, and when Scarlett saw him she cried: “It’s Mose!

Ashley’s Mose!

Whatever is he doing here?”

She fought her way through the crowd to the curb and called: “Mose!

Stop!”

The boy seeing her, drew rein, smiled delightedly and started to dismount.

A soaking sergeant, riding behind him, called: “Stay on that mule, boy, or I’ll light a fire under you!

We got to git to the mountain some time.”

Uncertainly, Mose looked from the sergeant to Scarlett and she, splashing through the mud, close to the passing wheels, caught at Mose’s stirrup strap.

“Oh, just a minute, Sergeant!

Don’t get down, Mose.

What on earth are you doing here?”

“Ah’s off ter de war, agin, Miss Scarlett.

Dis time wid Ole Mist’ John ’stead ob Mist’ Ashley.”

“Mr. Wilkes!”

Scarlett was stunned.

Mr. Wilkes was nearly seventy.

“Where is he?”

“Back wid de las’ cannon, Miss Scarlett.

Back dar!”

“Sorry, lady.

Move on, boy!”

Scarlett stood for a moment, ankle deep in mud as the guns lurched by.

“Oh, no!” she thought.

“It can’t be.

He’s too old.

And he doesn’t like war any more than Ashley did!”

She retreated back a few paces toward the curb and scanned each face that passed.

Then, as the last cannon and limber chest came groaning and splashing up, she saw him, slender, erect, his long silver hair upon his neck, riding easily upon a little strawberry mare that picked her way as daintily through the mud holes as a lady in a satin dress.

Why—that mare was Nellie!

Mrs. Tarleton’s Nellie!

Beatrice Tarleton’s treasured darling!

When he saw her standing in the mud, Mr. Wilkes drew rein with a smile of pleasure and, dismounting, came toward her.

“I had hoped to see you, Scarlett.

I was charged with so many messages from your people.

But there was no time.

We just got in this morning and they are rushing us out immediately, as you see.”

“Oh, Mr. Wilkes,” she cried desperately, holding his hand.

“Don’t go!

Why must you go?”

“Ah, so you think I’m too old!”

He smiled, and it was Ashley’s smile in an older face.

----------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------

“Perhaps I am too old to march but not to ride and to shoot.

And Mrs. Tarleton so kindly lent me Nellie, so I am well mounted.

I hope nothing happens to Nellie, for if something should happen to her, I could never go home and face Mrs. Tarleton.

Nellie was the last horse she had left.”

He was laughing now, turning away her fears.

“Your mother and father and the girls are well and they sent you their love.

Your father nearly came up with us today!”

“Oh, not Pa!” cried Scarlett in terror.

“Not Pa!

He isn’t going to the war, is he?”

“No, but he was.

Of course, he can’t walk far with his stiff knee, but he was all for riding away with us.

Your mother agreed, providing he was able to jump the pasture fence, for, she said, there would be a lot of rough riding to be done in the army.

Your father thought that easy, but—would you believe it?

When his horse came to the fence, he stopped dead and over his head went your father!

It’s a wonder it didn’t break his neck!

You know how obstinate he is.

He got right up and tried it again.

Well, Scarlett, he came off three times before Mrs. O’Hara and Pork assisted him to bed.

He was in a taking about it, swearing that your mother had ‘spoken a wee word in the beast’s ear.’

He just isn’t up to active service, Scarlett.

You need have no shame about it.

After all, someone must stay home and raise crops for the army.”

Scarlett had no shame at all, only an active feeling of relief.

“I’ve sent India and Honey to Macon to stay with the Burrs and Mr. O’Hara is looking after Twelve Oaks as well as Tara….

I must go, my dear.

Let me kiss your pretty face.”

Scarlett turned up her lips and there was a choking in her throat.

She was so fond of Mr. Wilkes.

Once, long ago, she had hoped to be his daughter-in-law.

“And you must deliver this kiss to Pittypat and this to Melanie,” he said, kissing her lightly two more times.

“And how is Melanie?”

“She is well.”

“Ah!”

His eyes looked at her but through her, past her as Ashley’s had done, remote gray eyes looking on another world.

“I should have liked to see my first grandchild.

Good-by, my dear.”

He swung onto Nellie and cantered off, his hat in his hand, his silver hair bare to the rain.

Scarlett had rejoined Maybelle and Mrs. Meade before the import of his last words broke upon her.

Then in superstitious terror she crossed herself and tried to say a prayer.

He had spoken of death, just as Ashley had done, and now Ashley—No one should ever speak of death!

It was tempting Providence to mention death.

As the three women started silently back to the hospital in the rain, Scarlett was praying: “Not him, too, God.

Not him and Ashley, too!”

The retreat from Dalton to Kennesaw Mountain had taken from early May to mid-June and as the hot rainy days of June passed and Sherman failed to dislodge the Confederates from the steep slippery slopes, hope again raised its head.

Everyone grew more cheerful and spoke more kindly of General Johnston.

As wet June days passed into a wetter July and the Confederates, fighting desperately around the entrenched heights, still held Sherman at bay, a wild gaiety took hold of Atlanta.

Hope went to their heads like champagne.

Hurrah!

Hurrah!

We’re holding them!

An epidemic of parties and dances broke out.

Whenever groups of men from the fighting were in town for the night, dinners were given for them and afterwards there was dancing and the girls, outnumbering the men ten to one, made much of them and fought to dance with them.

Atlanta was crowded with visitors, refugees, families of wounded men in the hospitals, wives and mothers of soldiers fighting at the mountain who wished to be near them in case of wounds.

In addition, bevies of belles from the country districts, where all remaining men were under sixteen or over sixty, descended upon the town.

Aunt Pitty disapproved highly of these last, for she felt they had come to Atlanta for no reason at all except to catch husbands, and the shamelessness of it made her wonder what the world was coming to.

Scarlett disapproved, too.

She did not care for the eager competition furnished by the sixteen-year-olds whose fresh cheeks and bright smiles made one forget their twice-turned frocks and patched shoes.

Her own clothes were prettier and newer than most, thanks to the material Rhett Butler had brought her on the last boat he ran in, but, after all, she was nineteen and getting along and men had a way of chasing silly young things.

A widow with a child was at a disadvantage with these pretty minxes, she thought.

But in these exciting days her widowhood and her motherhood weighed less heavily upon her than ever before.

Between hospital duties in the day time and parties at night, she hardly ever saw Wade.

Sometimes she actually forgot, for long stretches, that she had a child.

In the warm wet summer nights, Atlanta’s homes stood open to the soldiers, the town’s defenders.

The big houses from Washington Street to Peachtree Street blazed with lights, as the muddy fighters in from the rifle pits were entertained, and the sound of banjo and fiddle and the scrape of dancing feet and light laughter carried far on the night air.

Groups hung over pianos and voices sang lustily the sad words of “Your Letter Came but Came Too Late” while ragged gallants looked meaningly at girls who laughed from behind turkey-tail fans, begging them not to wait until it was too late.

None of the girls waited, if they could help it.

With the tide of hysterical gaiety and excitement flooding the city, they rushed into matrimony.

There were so many marriages that month while Johnston was holding the enemy at Kennesaw Mountain, marriages with the bride turned out in blushing happiness and the hastily borrowed finery of a dozen friends and the groom with saber banging at patched knees.

So much excitement, so many parties, so many thrills!

Hurrah!

Johnston is holding the Yanks twenty-two miles away!

*********

Yes, the lines around Kennesaw Mountain were impregnable.

After twenty-five days of fighting, even General Sherman was convinced of this, for his losses were enormous.

Instead of continuing the direct assault, he swung his army in a wide circle again and tried to come between the Confederates and Atlanta.

Again, the strategy worked.

Johnston was forced to abandon the heights he had held so well, in order to protect his rear.

He had lost a third of his men in that fight and the remainder slogged tiredly through the rain across the country toward the Chattahoochee River.

The Confederates could expect no more reinforcements, whereas the railroad, which the Yankees now held from Tennessee south to the battle line, brought Sherman fresh troops and supplies daily.

So the gray lines went back through the muddy fields, back toward Atlanta.

With the loss of the supposedly unconquerable position, a fresh wave of terror swept the town.

For twenty-five wild, happy days, everyone had assured everyone else that this could not possibly happen.

And now it had happened!

But surely the General would hold the Yankees on the opposite bank of the river.

Though God knows the river was close enough, only seven miles away!

But Sherman flanked them again, crossing the stream above them, and the weary gray files were forced to hurry across the yellow water and throw themselves again between the invaders and Atlanta.

They dug in hastily in shallow pits to the north of the town in the valley of Peachtree Creek.

Atlanta was in agony and panic.

Fight and fall back!

Fight and fall back!

And every retreat was bringing the Yankees closer to the town.

Peachtree Creek was only five miles away!

What was the General thinking about?

The cries of “Give us a man who will stand and fight!” penetrated even to Richmond.

Richmond knew that if Atlanta was lost, the war was lost, and after the army had crossed the Chattahoochee, General Johnston was removed from command.

General Hood, one of his corps commanders, took over the army, and the town breathed a little easier.

Hood wouldn’t retreat.

Not that tall Kentuckian, with his flowing beard and flashing eye!

He had the reputation of a bulldog.

He’d drive the Yankees back from the creek, yes, back across the river and on up the road every step of the way back to Dalton.

But the army cried: “Give us back Old Joe!” for they had been with Old Joe all the weary miles from Dalton and they knew, as the civilians could not know, the odds that opposed them.

Sherman did not wait for Hood to get himself in readiness to attack.

On the day after the change in command, the Yankee general struck swiftly at the little town of Decatur, six miles beyond Atlanta, captured it and cut the railroad there.

This was the railroad connecting Atlanta with Augusta, with Charleston, with Wilmington and with Virginia.

Sherman had dealt the Confederacy a crippling blow.

The time had come for action!

Atlanta screamed for action!

Then, on a July afternoon of steaming heat, Atlanta had its wish.

General Hood did more than stand and fight.

He assaulted the Yankees fiercely at Peachtree Creek, hurling his men from their rifle pits against the blue lines where Sherman’s men outnumbered him more than two to one.

Frightened, praying that Hood’s attack would drive the Yankees back, everyone listened to the sound of booming cannon and the crackling of thousands of rifles, which, though five miles away from the center of town, were so loud as to seem almost in the next block.

They could hear the rumbling of the batteries, see the smoke which rolled like low-hanging clouds above the trees, but for hours no one knew how the battle was going.

By late afternoon the first news came, but it was uncertain, contradictory, frightening, brought as it was by men wounded in the early hours of the battle.

These men began straggling in, singly and in groups, the less seriously wounded supporting those who limped and staggered.

Soon a steady stream of them was established, making their painful way into town toward the hospitals, their faces black as negroes’ from powder stains, dust and sweat, their wounds unbandaged, blood drying, flies swarming about them.

Aunt Pitty’s was one of the first houses which the wounded reached as they struggled in from the north of the town, and one after another, they tottered to the gate, sank down on the green lawn and croaked:

“Water!”

All that burning afternoon, Aunt Pitty and her family, black and white, stood in the sun with buckets of water and bandages, ladling drinks, binding wounds until the bandages gave out and even the torn sheets and towels were exhausted.

Aunt Pitty completely forgot that the sight of blood always made her faint and she worked until her little feet in their too small shoes swelled and would no longer support her.

Even Melanie, now great with child, forgot her modesty and worked feverishly side by side with Prissy, Cookie and Scarlett, her face as tense as any of the wounded.

When at last she fainted, there was no place to lay her except on the kitchen table, as every bed, chair and sofa in the house was filled with wounded.

Forgotten in the tumult, little Wade crouched behind the banisters on the front porch, peering out onto the lawn like a caged, frightened rabbit, his eyes wide with terror, sucking his thumb and hiccoughing.

Once Scarlett saw him and cried sharply: “Go play in the back yard, Wade Hampton!” but he was too terrified, too fascinated by the mad scene before him to obey.

The lawn was covered with prostrate men, too tired to walk farther, too weak from wounds to move.

These Uncle Peter loaded into the carriage and drove to the hospital, making trip after trip until the old horse was lathered.

Mrs. Meade and Mrs. Merriwether sent their carriages and they, too, drove off, springs sagging beneath the weight of wounded.

Later, in the long, hot summer twilight, the ambulances came rumbling down the road from the battle field and commissary wagons, covered with muddy canvas.

Then farm wagons, ox carts and even private carriages commandeered by the medical corps.

They passed Aunt Pitty’s house, jolting over the bumpy road, packed with wounded and dying men, dripping blood into the red dust.

At the sight of the women with buckets and dippers, the conveyances halted and the chorus went up in cries, in whispers:

“Water!”

Scarlett held wobbling heads that parched lips might drink, poured buckets of water over dusty, feverish bodies and into open wounds that the men might enjoy a brief moment’s relief.

She tiptoed to hand dippers to ambulance drivers and of each she questioned, her heart in her throat:

“What news?

What news?”

From all came back the answer: “Don’t know fer sartin, lady.

It’s too soon to tell.”

Night came and it was sultry.

No air moved and the flaring pine knots the negroes held made the air hotter.

Dust clogged Scarlett’s nostrils and dried her lips.

Her lavender calico dress, so freshly clean and starched that morning, was streaked with blood, dirt and sweat.

This, then, was what Ashley had meant when he wrote that war was not glory but dirt and misery.

Fatigue gave an unreal, nightmarish cast to the whole scene.

It couldn’t be real—or if it was real, then the world had gone mad.

If not, why should she be standing here in Aunt Pitty’s peaceful front yard, amid wavering lights, pouring water over dying beaux?

For so many of them were her beaux and they tried to smile when they saw her.

There were so many men jolting down this dark, dusty road whom she knew so well, so many men dying here before her eyes, mosquitoes and gnats swarming their bloody faces, men with whom she had danced and laughed, for whom she had played music and sung songs, teased, comforted and loved—a little.

She found Carey Ashburn on the bottom layer of wounded in an ox cart, barely alive from a bullet wound in his head.

But she could not extricate him without disturbing six other wounded men, so she let him go on to the hospital.

Later she heard he had died before a doctor ever saw him and was buried somewhere, no one knew exactly.

So many men had been buried that month, in shallow, hastily dug graves at Oakland Cemetery.

Melanie felt it keenly that they had not been able to get a lock of Carey’s hair to send to his mother in Alabama.

----------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------

As the hot night wore on and their backs were aching and their knees buckling from weariness, Scarlett and Pitty cried to man after man: “What news?

What news?”

And as the long hours dragged past, they had their answer, an answer that made them look whitely into each other’s eyes.

“We’re falling back.”

“We’ve got to fall back.”

“They outnumber us by thousands.”

“The Yankees have got Wheeler’s cavalry cut off near Decatur.

We got to reinforce them.”

“Our boys will all be in town soon.”

Scarlett and Pitty clutched each other’s arms for support.

“Are—are the Yankees coming?”

“Yes’m, they’re comin’ all right but they ain’t goin’ ter git fer, lady.”

“Don’t fret, Miss, they can’t take Atlanta.”

“No, Ma’m, we got a million miles of breastworks ’round this town.”

“I heard Old Joe say it myself: ‘I can hold Atlanta forever.’”

“But we ain’t got Old Joe.

We got—”

“Shut up, you fool!

Do you want to scare the ladies?”

“The Yankees will never take this place, Ma’m.”

“Whyn’t you ladies go ter Macon or somewheres that’s safer?

Ain’t you got no kinfolks there?”

“The Yankees ain’t goin’ ter take Atlanta but still it ain’t goin’ ter be so healthy for ladies whilst they’re tryin’ it.”

“There’s goin’ ter be a powerful lot of shellin’.”

In a warm steaming rain the next day, the defeated army poured through Atlanta by thousands, exhausted by hunger and weariness, depleted by seventy-six days of battle and retreat, their horses starved scarecrows, their cannon and caissons harnessed with odds and ends of rope and strips of rawhide.

But they did not come in as a disorderly rabble, in full rout.

They marched in good order, jaunty for all their rags, their torn red battle flags flying in the rain.

They had learned retreating under Old Joe, who had made it as great a feat of strategy as advancing.

The bearded, shabby file swung down Peachtree Street to the tune of “Maryland! My Maryland!” and all the town turned out to cheer them.

In victory or defeat, they were their boys.

The state militia who had gone out so short a time before, resplendent in new uniforms, could hardly be distinguished from the seasoned troops, so dirty and unkempt were they.

There was a new look in their eyes.

Three years of apologizing, of explaining why they were not at the front was behind them now.

They had traded security behind the lines for the hardships of battle.

Many of their number had traded easy living for hard death.

They were veterans now, veterans of brief service, but veterans just the same, and they had acquitted themselves well.

They searched out the faces of friends in the crowd and stared at them proudly, defiantly.

They could hold up their heads now.

The old men and boys of the Home Guard marched by, the graybeards almost too weary to lift their feet, the boys wearing the faces of tired children, confronted too early with adult problems.

Scarlett caught sight of Phil Meade and hardly recognized him, so black was his face with powder and grime, so taut with strain and weariness.

Uncle Henry went limping by, hatless in the rain, his head stuck through a hole in a piece of old oilcloth.

Grandpa Merriwether rode in on a gun carriage, his bare feet tied in quilt scraps.

But search though she might, she saw no sign of John Wilkes.

Johnston’s veterans, however, went by with the tireless, careless step which had carried them for three years, and they still had the energy to grin and wave at pretty girls and to call rude gibes to men not in uniform.

They were on their way to the entrenchments that ringed the town—no shallow, hastily dug trenches, these, but earthworks, breast high, reinforced with sandbags and tipped with sharpened staves of wood.

For mile after mile the trenches encircled the town, red gashes surmounted by red mounds, waiting for the men who would fill them.

The crowd cheered the troops as they would have cheered them in victory.

There was fear in every heart but, now that they knew the truth, now that the worst had happened, now that the war was in their front yard, a change came over the town.

There was no panic now, no hysteria.

Whatever lay in hearts did not show on faces.

Everyone looked cheerful even if the cheer was strained.

Everyone tried to show brave, confident faces to the troops.

Everyone repeated what Old Joe had said, just before he was relieved of command: “I can hold Atlanta forever.”

Now that Hood had had to retreat, quite a number wished, with the soldiers, that they had Old Joe back, but they forbore saying it and took courage from Old Joe’s remark:

“I can hold Atlanta forever!”

********

Not for Hood the cautious tactics of General Johnston.

He assaulted the Yankees on the east, he assaulted them on the west.

Sherman was circling the town like a wrestler seeking a fresh hold on an opponent’s body, and Hood did not remain behind his rifle pits waiting for the Yankees to attack.

He went out boldly to meet them and savagely fell upon them.

Within the space of a few days the battles of Atlanta and of Ezra Church were fought, and both of them were major engagements which made Peachtree Creek seem like a skirmish.

But the Yankees kept coming back for more.

They had suffered heavy losses but they could afford to lose.

And all the while their batteries poured shells into Atlanta, killing people in their homes, ripping roofs off buildings, tearing huge craters in the streets.

The townsfolk sheltered as best they could in cellars, in holes in the ground and in shallow tunnels dug in railroad cuts.

Atlanta was under siege.

Within eleven days after he had taken command, General Hood had lost almost as many men as Johnston had lost in seventy-four days of battle and retreat, and Atlanta was hemmed in on three sides.

The railroad from Atlanta to Tennessee was now in Sherman’s hands for its full length.

His army was across the railroad to the east and he had cut the railroad running southwest to Alabama.

Only the one railroad to the south, to Macon and Savannah, was still open.

The town was crowded with soldiers, swamped with wounded, jammed with refugees, and this one line was inadequate for the crying needs of the stricken city.

But as long as this railroad could be held, Atlanta could still stand.

Scarlett was terrified when she realized how important this line had become, how fiercely Sherman would fight to take it, how desperately Hood would fight to defend it.

For this was the railroad which ran through the County, through Jonesboro.

And Tara was only five miles from Jonesboro!

Tara seemed like a haven of refuge by comparison with the screaming hell of Atlanta, but Tara was only five miles from Jonesboro!

********

Scarlett and many other ladies sat on the flat roofs of stores, shaded by their tiny parasols, and watched the fighting on the day of the battle of Atlanta.

But when shells began falling in the streets for the first time, they fled to the cellars, and that night the exodus of women, children and old people from the city began.

Macon was their destination and many of those who took the train that night had already refugeed five and six times before, as Johnston fell back from Dalton.

They were traveling lighter now than when they arrived in Atlanta.

Most of them carried only a carpetbag and a scanty lunch done up in a bandana handkerchief.

Here and there, frightened servants carried silver pitchers, knives and forks and a family portrait or two which had been salvaged in the first flight.

Mrs. Merriwether and Mrs. Elsing refused to leave.

They were needed at the hospital and furthermore, they said proudly, they weren’t afraid and no Yankees were going to run them out of their homes.

But Maybelle and her baby and Fanny Elsing went to Macon.

Mrs. Meade was disobedient for the first time in her married life and flatly refused to yield to the doctor’s command that she take the train to safety.

The doctor needed her, she said.

Moreover, Phil was somewhere in the trenches and she wanted to be near by in case…

But Mrs. Whiting went and many other ladies of Scarlett’s circle.

Aunt Pitty, who had been the first to denounce Old Joe for his policy of retreat, was among the first to pack her trunks.

Her nerves, she said, were delicate and she could not endure noises.

She feared she might faint at an explosion and not be able to reach the cellar.

No, she was not afraid.

Her baby mouth tried to set in martial lines but failed.

She’d go to Macon and stay with her cousin, Old Mrs. Burr, and the girls should come with her.

Scarlett did not want to go to Macon.

Frightened as she was of the shells, she’d rather stay in Atlanta than go to Macon, for she hated old Mrs. Burr cordially.

Years ago, Mrs. Burr had said she was “fast” after catching her kissing her son Willie at one of the Wilkeses’ house parties.

No, she told Aunt Pitty, I’ll go home to Tara and Melly can go to Macon with you.

At this Melanie began to cry in a frightened, heartbroken way.

When Aunt Pitty fled to get Dr. Meade, Melanie caught Scarlett’s hand in hers, pleading:

“Dear, don’t go to Tara and leave me!

I’ll be so lonely without you.

Oh, Scarlett, I’d just die if you weren’t with me when the baby came!

Yes—Yes, I know I’ve got Aunt Pitty and she is sweet.

But after all, she’s never had a baby, and sometimes she makes me so nervous I could scream.

Don’t desert me, darling.

You’ve been just like a sister to me, and besides,” she smiled wanly, “you promised Ashley you’d take care of me.

He told me he was going to ask you.”

Scarlett stared down at her in wonderment.

With her own dislike of this woman so strong she could barely conceal it, how could Melly love her so?

How could Melly be so stupid as not to guess the secret of her love of Ashley?

She had given herself away a hundred times during these months of torment, waiting for news of him.

But Melanie saw nothing.

Melanie who could see nothing but good in anyone she loved….

Yes, she had promised Ashley she would look out for Melanie.

Oh, Ashley!

Ashley! you must be dead, dead these many months!

And now your promise reaches out and clutches me!

“Well,” she said shortly, “I did promise him that and I don’t go back on my promises.

But I won’t go to Macon and stay with that old Burr cat.

I’d claw her eyes out in five minutes.

I’m going home to Tara and you can come with me.

Mother would love to have you.”

“Oh, I’d like that!

Your mother is so sweet.

But you know Auntie would just die if she wasn’t with me when the baby came, and I know she won’t go to Tara.

It’s too close to the fighting, and Auntie wants to be safe.”

Dr. Meade, who had arrived out of breath, expecting to find Melanie in premature labor at least, judging by Aunt Pitty’s alarmed summoning, was indignant and said as much.

And upon learning the cause of the upset, he settled the matter with words that left no room for argument.

“It’s out of the question for you to go to Macon, Miss Melly.

I won’t answer for you if you move.

The trains are crowded and uncertain and the passengers are liable to be put off in the woods at any time, if the trains are needed for the wounded or troops and supplies.

In your condition—”

“But if I went to Tara with Scarlett—”

“I tell you I won’t have you moved.

The train to Tara is the train to Macon and the same conditions prevail.

Moreover, no one knows just where the Yankees are now, but they are all over everywhere.

Your train might even be captured.

And even if you reached Jonesboro safely, there’d be a five-mile ride over a rough road before you ever reached Tara.

It’s no trip for a woman in a delicate condition.

Besides, there’s not a doctor in the County since old Dr. Fontaine joined the army.”

“But there are midwives—”

“I said a doctor,” he answered brusquely and his eyes unconsciously went over her tiny frame.

“I won’t have you moved.

It might be dangerous.

You don’t want to have the baby on the train or in a buggy, do you?”

This medical frankness reduced the ladies to embarrassed blushes and silence.

“You’ve got to stay right here where I can watch you, and you must stay in bed.

No running up and down stairs to cellars.

No, not even if shells come right in the window.

After all, there’s not so much danger here.

We’ll have the Yankees beaten back in no time….

Now, Miss Pitty, you go right on to Macon and leave the young ladies here.”

“Unchaperoned?” she cried, aghast.

“They are matrons,” said the doctor testily.

“And Mrs. Meade is just two houses away.

They won’t be receiving any male company anyway with Miss Melly in her condition.

Good Heavens, Miss Pitty!

This is war time.

We can’t think of the proprieties now.

We must think of Miss Melly.”

He stamped out of the room and waited on the front porch until Scarlett joined him.

“I shall talk frankly to you, Miss Scarlett,” he began, jerking at his gray beard.

“You seem to be a young woman of common sense, so spare me your blushes.

I do not want to hear any further talk about Miss Melly being moved.

I doubt if she could stand the trip.

She is going to have a difficult time, even in the best of circumstances—very narrow in the hips, as you know, and probably will need forceps for her delivery, so I don’t want any ignorant darky midwife meddling with her.

Women like her should never have children, but—Anyway, you pack Miss Pitty’s trunk and send her to Macon.

She’s so scared she’ll upset Miss Melly and that won’t do any good.

And now, Miss,” he fixed her with a piercing glance, “I don’t want to hear about you going home, either.

You stay with Miss Melly till the baby comes.

Not afraid, are you?”

“Oh, no!” lied Scarlett, stoutly.

“That’s a brave girl.

Mrs. Meade will give you whatever chaperonage you need and I’ll send over old Betsy to cook for you, if Miss Pitty wants to take her servants with her.

It won’t be for long.

The baby ought to be here in another five weeks, but you never can tell with first babies and all this shelling going on.

It may come any day.”

So Aunt Pittypat went to Macon, in floods of tears, taking Uncle Peter and Cookie with her.

The carriage and horse she donated to the hospital in a burst of patriotism which she immediately regretted and that brought on more tears.

And Scarlett and Melanie were left alone with Wade and Prissy in a house that was much quieter, even though the cannonading continued.

----------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------

𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐗𝐈𝐗.

----------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------

IN THOSE FIRST DAYS OF THE SIEGE, when the Yankees crashed here and there against the defenses of the city, Scarlett was so frightened by the bursting shells she could only cower helplessly, her hands over her ears, expecting every moment to be blown into eternity.

When she heard the whistling screams that heralded their approach, she rushed to Melanie’s room and flung herself on the bed beside her, and the two clutched each other, screaming “Oh!

Oh!” as they buried their heads in the pillows.

Prissy and Wade scurried for the cellar and crouched in the cobwebbed darkness, Prissy squalling at the top of her voice and Wade sobbing and hiccoughing.

Suffocating under feather pillows while death screamed overhead, Scarlett silently cursed Melanie for keeping her from the safer regions below stairs.

But the doctor had forbidden Melanie to walk and Scarlett had to stay with her.

Added to her terror of being blown to pieces was her equally active terror that Melanie’s baby might arrive at any moment.

Sweat broke out on Scarlett with clammy dampness, whenever this thought entered her mind.

What would she do if the baby started coming?

She knew she’d rather let Melanie die than go out on the streets to hunt for the doctor when the shells were falling like April rain.

And she knew Prissy could be beaten to death before she would venture forth.

What would she do if the baby came?

These matters she discussed with Prissy in whispers one evening, as they prepared Melanie’s supper tray, and Prissy, surprisingly enough, calmed her fears.

“Miss Scarlett, effen we kain git de doctah w’en Miss Melly’s time come, doan you bodder.

Ah kin manage.

Ah knows all ’bout birthin’.

Ain’ mah ma a midwife?

Ain’ she raise me ter be a midwife, too?

Jes’ you leave it ter me.”

Scarlett breathed more easily knowing that experienced hands were near, but she nevertheless yearned to have the ordeal over and done with.

Mad to be away from exploding shells, desperate to get home to the quiet of Tara, she prayed every night that the baby would arrive the next day, so she would be released from her promise and could leave Atlanta.

Tara seemed so safe, so far away from all this misery.

Scarlett longed for home and her mother as she had never longed for anything in all her life.

If she were just near Ellen she wouldn’t be afraid, no matter what happened.

Every night after a day of screeching, earsplitting shells, she went to bed determined to tell Melanie the next morning that she could not stand Atlanta another day, that she would have to go home and Melanie would have to go to Mrs. Meade’s.

But, as she lay on her pillow, there always rose the memory of Ashley’s face as it had looked when she last saw him, drawn as with an inner pain but with a smile on his lips: “You’ll take care of Melanie, won’t you?

You’re so strong….

Promise me.”

And she had promised.

Somewhere, Ashley lay dead.

Wherever he was, he was watching her, holding her to that promise.

Living or dead, she could not fail him, no matter what the cost.

So she remained day after day.

In response to Ellen’s letters, pleading with her to come home, she wrote minimizing the dangers of the siege, explaining Melanie’s predicament and promising to come as soon as the baby was born.

Ellen, sensitive to the bonds of kin, be they blood or marriage, wrote back reluctantly agreeing that she must stay but demanding that Wade and Prissy be sent home immediately.

This suggestion met with the complete approval of Prissy, who was now reduced to teeth-chattering idiocy at every unexpected sound.

She spent so much time crouching in the cellar that the girls would have fared badly but for Mrs. Meade’s stolid old Betsy.

Scarlett was as anxious as her mother to have Wade out of Atlanta, not only for the child’s safety, but because his constant fear irritated her.

Wade was terrified to speechlessness by the shelling, and even when lulls came he clung to Scarlett’s skirts, too terrified to cry.

He was afraid to go to bed at night, afraid of the dark, afraid to sleep lest the Yankees should come and get him, and the sound of his soft nervous whimpering in the night grated unendurably on her nerves.

Secretly she was just as frightened as he was, but it angered her to be reminded of it every minute by his tense, drawn face.

Yes, Tara was the place for Wade.

Prissy should take him there and return immediately to be present when the baby came.

But before Scarlett could start the two on their homeward journey, news came that the Yankees had swung to the south and were skirmishing along the railroad between Atlanta and Jonesboro.

Suppose the Yankees should capture the train on which Wade and Prissy were riding—Scarlett and Melanie turned pale at the thought, for everyone knew that Yankee atrocities on helpless children were even more dreadful than on women.

So she feared to send him home and he remained in Atlanta, a frightened, silent little ghost, pattering about desperately after his mother, fearing to have her skirt out of his hand for even a minute.

The siege went on through the hot days of July, thundering days following nights of sullen, ominous stillness, and the town began to adjust itself.

It was as though, the worst having happened, they had nothing more to fear.

They had feared a siege and now they had a siege and, after all, it wasn’t so bad.

Life could and did go on almost as usual.

They knew they were sitting on a volcano, but until that volcano erupted there was nothing they could do.

So why worry now?

And probably it wouldn’t erupt anyway.

Just look how General Hood is holding the Yankees out of the city!

And see how the cavalry is holding the railroad to Macon!

Sherman will never take it!

But for all their apparent insouciance in the face of falling shells and shorter rations, for all their ignoring the Yankees, barely half a mile away, and for all their boundless confidence in the ragged line of gray men in the rifle pits, there pulsed, just below the skin of Atlanta, a wild uncertainty over what the next day would bring.

Suspense, worry, sorrow, hunger and the torment of rising, falling, rising hope was wearing that skin thin.

Gradually, Scarlett drew courage from the brave faces of her friends and from the merciful adjustment which nature makes when what cannot be cured must be endured.

To be sure, she still jumped at the sound of explosions but she did not run screaming to burrow her head under Melanie’s pillow.

She could now gulp and say weakly: “That one was close, wasn’t it?”

She was less frightened also because life had taken on the quality of a dream, a dream too terrible to be real.

It wasn’t possible that she, Scarlett O’Hara, should be in such a predicament, with the danger of death about her every hour, every minute.

It wasn’t possible that the quiet tenor of life could have changed so completely in so short a time.

It was unreal, grotesquely unreal, that morning skies which dawned so tenderly blue could be profaned with cannon smoke that hung over the town like low thunder clouds, that warm noontides filled with the piercing sweetness of massed honeysuckle and climbing roses could be so fearful, as shells screamed into the streets, bursting like the crack of doom, throwing iron splinters hundreds of yards, blowing people and animals to bits.

Quiet, drowsy afternoon siestas had ceased to be for, though the clamor of battle might lull from time to time, Peachtree Street was alive and noisy at all hours, cannon and ambulances rumbling by, wounded stumbling in from the rifle pits, regiments hurrying past at double-quick, ordered from the ditches on one side of town to the defense of some hard-pressed earthworks on the other, and couriers dashing headlong down the streets toward headquarters as though the fate of the Confederacy hung on them.

The hot nights brought a measure of quiet but it was a sinister quiet.

When the night was still, it was too still—as though the tree frogs, katydids and sleepy mockingbirds were too frightened to raise their voices in the usual summer-night chorus.

Now and again, the quiet was broken sharply by the crack-cracking of musket fire in the last line of defenses.

Often in the late night hours, when the lamps were out and Melanie asleep and deathly silence pressed over the town, Scarlett, lying awake, heard the latch of the front gate click and the soft urgent tappings on the front door.

----------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------

Always, faceless soldiers stood on the dark porch and from the darkness many different voices spoke to her.

Sometimes a cultured voice came from the shadows: “Madam, my abject apologies for disturbing you, but could I have water for myself and my horse?”

Sometimes it was the hard burring of a mountain voice, sometimes the odd nasals of the flat Wiregrass country to the far south, occasionally the lulling drawl of the Coast that caught at her heart, reminding her of Ellen’s voice.

“Missy, I got a pardner here who I wuz aimin’ ter git ter the horsepittle but looks like he ain’t goin’ ter last that fer.

Kin you take him in?”

“Lady, I shore could do with some vittles.

I’d shore relish a corn pone if it didn’t deprive you none.”

“Madam, forgive my intrusion but—could I spend the night on your porch?

I saw the roses and smelled the honeysuckle and it was so much like home that I was emboldened—”

No, these nights were not real!

They were a nightmare and the men were part of that nightmare, men without bodies or faces, only tired voices speaking to her from the warm dark.

Draw water, serve food, lay pillows on the front porch, bind wounds, hold the dirty heads of the dying.

No, this could not be happening to her!

Once, late in July, it was Uncle Henry Hamilton who came tapping in the night.

Uncle Henry was minus his umbrella and carpetbag now, and his fat stomach as well.

The skin of his pink fat face hung down in loose folds like the dewlaps of a bulldog and his long white hair was indescribably dirty.

He was almost barefoot, crawling with lice, and he was hungry, but his irascible spirit was unimpaired.

Despite his remark: “It’s a foolish war when old fools like me are out toting guns,” the girls received the impression that Uncle Henry was enjoying himself.

He was needed, like the young men, and he was doing a young man’s work.

Moreover, he could keep up with the young men, which was more than Grandpa Merriwether could do, he told them gleefully.

Grandpa’s lumbago was troubling him greatly and the Captain wanted to discharge him.

But Grandpa wouldn’t go home.

He said frankly that he preferred the Captain’s swearing and bullying to his daughter-in-law’s coddling, and her incessant demands that he give up chewing tobacco and launder his beard every day.

Uncle Henry’s visit was brief, for he had only a four-hour furlough and he needed half of it for the long walk in from the breastworks and back.

“Girls, I’m not going to see you all for a while,” he announced as he sat in Melanie’s bedroom, luxuriously wriggling his blistered feet in the tub of cold water Scarlett had set before him.

“Our company is going out in the morning.”

“Where?” questioned Melanie frightened, clutching his arm.

“Don’t put your hand on me,” said Uncle Henry irritably.

“I’m crawling with lice.

War would be a picnic if it wasn’t for lice and dysentery.

Where’m I going?

Well, I haven’t been told but I’ve got a good idea.

We’re marching south, toward Jonesboro, in the morning, unless I’m greatly in error.”

“Oh, why toward Jonesboro?”

“Because there’s going to be big fighting there, Missy.

The Yankees are going to take that railroad if they possibly can.

And if they do take it, it’s good-by, Atlanta!”

“Oh, Uncle Henry, do you think they will?”

“Shucks, girls!

No!

How can they when I’m there?”

Uncle Henry grinned at their frightened faces and then, becoming serious again: “It’s going to be a hard fight, girls.

We’ve got to win it.

You know, of course, that the Yankees have got all the railroads except the one to Macon, but that isn’t all they’ve got.

Maybe you girls didn’t know it, but they’ve got every road, too, every wagon lane and bridle path, except the McDonough road.

Atlanta’s in a bag and the strings of the bag are at Jonesboro.

And if the Yankees can take the railroad there, they can pull up the strings and have us, just like a possum in a poke.

So, we don’t aim to let them get that railroad….

I may be gone a while, girls.

I just came in to tell you all good-by and to make sure Scarlett was still with you, Melly.”

“Of course, she’s with me,” said Melanie fondly.

“Don’t you worry about us, Uncle Henry, and do take care of yourself.”

Uncle Henry wiped his wet feet on the rag rug and groaned as he drew on his tattered shoes.

“I got to be going,” he said.

“I’ve got five miles to walk.

Scarlett, you fix me up some kind of lunch to take.

Anything you’ve got.”

After he had kissed Melanie good-by, he went down to the kitchen where Scarlett was wrapping a corn pone and some apples in a napkin.

“Uncle Henry—is it—is it really so serious?”

“Serious?

God’lmighty, yes!

Don’t be a goose.

We’re in the last ditch.”

“Do you think they’ll get to Tara?”

“Why—” began Uncle Henry, irritated at the feminine mind which thought only of personal things when broad issues were involved.

Then, seeing her frightened, woebegone face, he softened.

“Of course they won’t.

Tara’s five miles from the railroad and it’s the railroad the Yankees want.

You’ve got no more sense than a June bug, Missy.”

He broke off abruptly.

“I didn’t walk all this way here tonight just to tell you all good-by.

I came to bring Melly some bad news, but when I got up to it I just couldn’t tell her.

So I’m going to leave it to you to do.”

“Ashley isn’t—you haven’t heard anything—that he’s—dead?”

“Now, how would I be hearing about Ashley when I’ve been standing in rifle pits up to the seat of my pants in mud?” the old gentleman asked testily.

“No.

It’s about his father.

John Wilkes is dead.”

Scarlett sat down suddenly, the half-wrapped lunch in her hand.

“I came to tell Melly—but I couldn’t.

You must do it.

And give her these.”

He hauled from his pockets a heavy gold watch with dangling seals, a small miniature of the long dead Mrs. Wilkes and a pair of massive cuff buttons.

At the sight of the watch which she had seen in John Wilkes’ hands a thousand times, the full realization came over Scarlett that Ashley’s father was really dead.

And she was too stunned to cry or to speak.

Uncle Henry fidgeted, coughed and did not look at her, lest he catch sight of a tear that would upset him.

“He was a brave man, Scarlett.

Tell Melly that.

Tell her to write it to his girls.

And a good soldier for all his years.

A shell got him.

Came right down on him and his horse.

Tore the horse’s—I shot the horse myself, poor creature.

A fine little mare she was.

You’d better write Mrs. Tarleton about that, too.

She set a store on that mare.

Wrap up my lunch, child.

I must be going.

There, dear, don’t take it so hard.

What better way can an old man die than doing a young man’s work?”

“Oh, he shouldn’t have died!

He shouldn’t ever have gone to the war.

He should have lived and seen his grandchild grow up and died peacefully in bed.

Oh, why did he go?

He didn’t believe in secession and he hated the war and—”

“Plenty of us think that way, but what of it?”

Uncle Henry blew his nose grumpily.

“Do you think I enjoy letting Yankee riflemen use me for a target at my age?

But there’s no other choice for a gentleman these days.

Kiss me good-by, child, and don’t worry about me.

I’ll come through this war safely.”

Scarlett kissed him and heard him go down the steps into the dark, heard the latch click on the front gate.

She stood for a minute looking at the keepsakes in her hand.

And then she went up the stairs to tell Melanie.

********

At the end of July came the unwelcome news, predicted by Uncle Henry, that the Yankees had swung around again toward Jonesboro.

They had cut the railroad four miles below the town, but they had been beaten off by the Confederate cavalry; and the engineering corps, sweating in the broiling sun, had repaired the line.

Scarlett was frantic with anxiety.

For three days she waited, fear growing in her heart.

Then a reassuring letter came from Gerald.

The enemy had not reached Tara.

They had heard the sound of the fight but they had seen no Yankees.

Gerald’s letter was so full of brag and bluster as to how the Yankees had been driven from the railroad that one would have thought he personally had accomplished the feat, single handed.

He wrote for three pages about the gallantry of the troops and then, at the end of his letter, mentioned briefly that Carreen was ill.

The typhoid, Mrs. O’Hara said it was.

She was not very ill and Scarlett was not to worry about her, but on no condition must she come home now, even if the railroad should become safe.

Mrs. O’Hara was very glad now that Scarlett and Wade had not come home when the siege began.

Mrs. O’Hara said Scarlett must go to church and say some Rosaries for Carreen’s recovery.

Scarlett’s conscience smote her at this last, for it had been months since she had been to church.

Once she would have thought this omission a mortal sin but, somehow, staying away from church did not seem so sinful now as it formerly had.

But she obeyed her mother and going to her room gabbled a hasty Rosary.

When she rose from her knees she did not feel as comforted as she had formerly felt after prayer.

For some time she had felt that God was not watching out for her, the Confederates or the South, in spite of the millions of prayers ascending to Him daily.

That night she sat on the front porch with Gerald’s letter in her bosom where she could touch it occasionally and bring Tara and Ellen closer to her.

The lamp in the parlor window threw odd golden shadows onto the dark vine-shrouded porch, and the matted tangle of yellow climbing roses and honeysuckle made a wall of mingled fragrance about her.

The night was utterly still.

Not even the crack of a rifle had sounded since sunset and the world seemed far away.

Scarlett rocked back and forth, lonely, miserable since reading the news from Tara, wishing that someone, anyone, even Mrs. Merriwether, were with her.

But Mrs. Merriwether was on night duty at the hospital, Mrs. Meade was at home making a feast for Phil, who was in from the front lines, and Melanie was asleep.

There was not even the hope of a chance caller.

Visitors had fallen off to nothing this last week, for every man who could walk was in the rifle pits or chasing the Yankees about the countryside near Jonesboro.

It was not often that she was alone like this and she did not like it.

When she was alone she had to think and, these days, thoughts were not so pleasant.

Like everyone else, she had fallen into the habit of thinking of the past, the dead.

Tonight when Atlanta was so quiet, she could close her eyes and imagine she was back in the rural stillness of Tara and that life was unchanged, unchanging.

But she knew that life in the County would never be the same again.

She thought of the four Tarletons, the red-haired twins and Tom and Boyd, and a passionate sadness caught at her throat.

Why, either Stu or Brent might have been her husband.

But now, when the war was over and she went back to Tara to live, she would never again hear their wild halloos as they dashed up the avenue of cedars.

And Raiford Calvert, who danced so divinely, would never again choose her to be his partner.

And the Munroe boys and little Joe Fontaine and—

“Oh, Ashley!” she sobbed, dropping her head into her hands.

“I’ll never get used to you being gone!”

She heard the front gate click and she hastily raised her head and dashed her hand across her wet eyes.

She rose and saw it was Rhett Butler coming up the walk, carrying his wide Panama hat in his hand.

She had not seen him since the day when she had alighted from his carriage so precipitously at Five Points.

On that occasion, she had expressed the desire never to lay eyes on him again.

But she was so glad now to have someone to talk to, someone to divert her thoughts from Ashley, that she hastily put the memory from her mind.

Evidently he had forgotten the contretemps, or pretended to have forgotten it, for he settled himself on the top step at her feet without mention of their late difference.

“So you didn’t refugee to Macon!

I heard that Miss Pitty had retreated and, of course, I thought you had gone too.

So, when I saw your light I came here to investigate.

Why did you stay?”

“To keep Melanie company.

You see, she—well, she can’t refugee just now.”

“Thunderation,” he said, and in the lamplight she saw that he was frowning.

“You don’t mean to tell me Mrs. Wilkes is still here?

I never heard of such idiocy.

It’s quite dangerous for her in her condition.”

Scarlett was silent, embarrassed, for Melanie’s condition was not a subject she could discuss with a man.

She was embarrassed, too, that Rhett should know it was dangerous for Melanie.

Such knowledge sat ill upon a bachelor.

“It’s quite ungallant of you not to think that I might get hurt, too,” she said tartly.

His eyes flickered with amusement.

“I’d back you against the Yankees any day.”

“I’m not sure that that’s a compliment,” she said uncertainly.

“It isn’t,” he answered.

“When will you stop looking for compliments in men’s lightest utterances?”

“When I’m on my deathbed,” she replied and smiled, thinking that there would always be men to compliment her, even if Rhett never did.

“Vanity, vanity,” he said.

“At least, you are frank about it.”

He opened his cigar case, extracted a black cigar and held it to his nose for a moment.

A match flared, he leaned back against a post and, clasping his hands about his knees, smoked a while in silence.

Scarlett resumed her rocking and the still darkness of the warm night closed about them.

The mockingbird, which nested in the tangle of roses and honeysuckle, roused from slumber and gave one timid, liquid note.

Then, as if thinking better of the matter, it was silent again.

From the shadow of the porch, Rhett suddenly laughed, a low, soft laugh.

“So you stayed with Mrs. Wilkes!

This is the strangest situation I ever encountered!”

“I see nothing strange about it,” she answered uncomfortably, immediately on the alert.

“No?

But then you lack the impersonal viewpoint.

My impression has been for some time past that you could hardly endure Mrs. Wilkes.

You think her silly and stupid and her patriotic notions bore you.

You seldom pass by the opportunity to slip in some belittling remark about her, so naturally it seems strange to me that you should elect to do the unselfish thing and stay here with her during this shelling.

Now, just why did you do it?”

“Because she’s Charlie’s sister—and like a sister to me,” answered Scarlett with as much dignity as possible though her cheeks were growing hot.

“You mean because she’s Ashley Wilkes’ widow.”

Scarlett rose quickly, struggling with her anger.

“I was almost on the point of forgiving you for your former boorish conduct but now I shan’t do it.

I wouldn’t have ever let you come upon this porch at all, if I hadn’t been feeling so blue and—”

“Sit down and smooth your ruffled fur,” he said, and his voice changed.

He reached up and taking her hand pulled her back into her chair.

“Why are you blue?”

“Oh, I had a letter from Tara today.

The Yankees are close to home and my little sister is ill with typhoid and—and—so now, even if I could go home, like I want to, Mother wouldn’t let me for fear I’d catch it too.

Oh, dear, and I do so want to go home!”

“Well, don’t cry about it,” he said, but his voice was kinder.

“You are much safer here in Atlanta even if the Yankees do come than you’d be at Tara.

The Yankees won’t hurt you and typhoid would.”

“The Yankees wouldn’t hurt me!

How can you say such a lie?”

“My dear girl, the Yankees aren’t fiends.

They haven’t horns and hoofs, as you seem to think.

They are pretty much like Southerners—except with worse manners, of course, and terrible accents.”

“Why, the Yankees would—”

“Rape you?

I think not.

Though, of course, they’d want to.”

“If you are going to talk vilely I shall go into the house,” she cried, grateful that the shadows hid her crimson face.

“Be frank.

Wasn’t that what you were thinking?”

“Oh, certainly not!”

“Oh, but it was!

No use getting mad at me for reading your thoughts.

That’s what all our delicately nurtured and pure-minded Southern ladies think.

They have it on their minds constantly.

I’ll wager even dowagers like Mrs. Merriwether…”

Scarlett gulped in silence, remembering that wherever two or more matrons were gathered together, in these trying days, they whispered of such happenings, always in Virginia or Tennessee or Louisiana, never very close to home.

The Yankees raped women and ran bayonets through children’s stomachs and burned houses over the heads of old people.

Everyone knew these things were true even if they didn’t shout them on the street corners.

And if Rhett had any decency he would realize they were true.

And not talk about them.

And it wasn’t any laughing matter either.

----------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------

She could hear him chuckling softly.

Sometimes he was odious.

In fact, most of the time he was odious.

It was awful for a man to know what women really thought about and talked about.

It made a girl feel positively undressed.

And no man ever learned such things from good women either.

She was indignant that he had read her mind.

She liked to believe herself a thing of mystery to men, but she knew Rhett thought her as transparent as glass.

“Speaking of such matters,” he continued, “have you a protector or chaperon in the house?

The admirable Mrs. Merriwether or Mrs. Meade?

They always look at me as if they knew I was here for no good purpose.”

“Mrs. Meade usually comes over at night,” answered Scarlett, glad to change the subject.

“But she couldn’t tonight.

Phil, her boy, is home.”

“What luck,” he said softly, “to find you alone.”

Something in his voice made her heart beat pleasantly faster and she felt her face flush.

She had heard that note in men’s voices often enough to know that it presaged a declaration of love.

Oh, what fun!

If he would just say he loved her, how she would torment him and get even with him for all the sarcastic remarks he had flung at her these past three years.

She would lead him a chase that would make up for even that awful humiliation of the day he witnessed her slapping Ashley.

And then she’d tell him sweetly she could only be a sister to him and retire with the full honors of war.

She laughed nervously in pleasant anticipation.

“Don’t giggle,” he said, and taking her hand, he turned it over and pressed his lips into the palm.

Something vital, electric, leaped from him to her at the touch of his warm mouth, something that caressed her whole body thrillingly.

His lips traveled to her wrist and she knew that he must feel the leap of her pulse as her heart quickened and she tried to draw back her hand.

She had not bargained on this—this treacherous warm tide of feeling that made her want to run her hands through his hair, to feel his lips upon her mouth.

She wasn’t in love with him, she told herself confusedly.

She was in love with Ashley.

But how to explain this feeling that made her hands shake and the pit of her stomach grow cold?

He laughed softly.

“Don’t pull away!

I won’t hurt you!”

“Hurt me?

I’m not afraid of you, Rhett Butler, or of any man in shoe leather!” she cried, furious that her voice shook as well as her hands.

“An admirable sentiment, but do lower your voice.

Mrs. Wilkes might hear you.

And pray compose yourself.”

He sounded as though delighted at her flurry.

“Scarlett, you do like me, don’t you?”

That was more like what she was expecting.

“Well, sometimes,” she answered cautiously.

“When you aren’t acting like a varmint.”

He laughed again and held the palm of her hand against his hard cheek.

“I think you like me because I am a varmint.

You’ve known so few dyed-in-the-wool varmints in your sheltered life that my very difference holds a quaint charm for you.”

This was not the turn she had anticipated and she tried again without success to pull her hand free.

“That’s not true!

I like nice men—men you can depend on to always be gentlemanly.”

“You mean men you can always bully.

It’s merely a matter of definition.

But no matter.”

He kissed her palm again, and again the skin on the back of her neck crawled excitingly.

“But you do like me.

Could you ever love me, Scarlett?”

“Ah!” she thought, triumphantly.

“Now I’ve got him!”

And she answered with studied coolness: “Indeed, no.

That is—not unless you mended your manners considerably.”

“And I have no intention of mending them.

So you could not love me?

That is as I hoped.

For while I like you immensely, I do not love you and it would be tragic indeed for you to suffer twice from unrequited love, wouldn’t it, dear?

May I call you ‘dear,’ Mrs. Hamilton?

I shall call you ‘dear’ whether you like it or not, so no matter, but the proprieties must be observed.”

“You don’t love me?”

“No, indeed.

Did you hope that I did?”

“Don’t be so presumptuous!”

“You hoped!

Alas, to blight your hopes!

I should love you, for you are charming and talented at many useless accomplishments.

But many ladies have charm and accomplishments and are just as useless as you are.

No, I don’t love you.

But I do like you tremendously—for the elasticity of your conscience, for the selfishness which you seldom trouble to hide, and for the shrewd practicality in you which, I fear, you get from some not too remote Irish-peasant ancestor.”

Peasant!

Why, he was insulting her!

She began to splutter wordlessly.

“Don’t interrupt,” he begged, squeezing her hand.

“I like you because I have those same qualities in me and like begets liking.

I realize you still cherish the memory of the godlike and wooden-headed Mr. Wilkes, who’s probably been in his grave these six months.

But there must be room in your heart for me too.

Scarlett, do stop wriggling!

I am making you a declaration.

I have wanted you since the first time I laid eyes on you, in the hall at Twelve Oaks, when you were bewitching poor Charlie Hamilton.

I want you more than I have ever wanted any woman—and I’ve waited longer for you than I’ve ever waited for any woman.”

She was breathless with surprise at his last words.

In spite of all his insults, he did love her and he was just so contrary he didn’t want to come out frankly and put it into words, for fear she’d laugh.

Well, she’d show him and right quickly.

“Are you asking me to marry you?”

He dropped her hand and laughed so loudly she shrank back in her chair.

“Good Lord, no!

Didn’t I tell you I wasn’t a marrying man?”

“But—but—what—”

He rose to his feet and, hand on heart, made her a burlesque bow.

“Dear,” he said quietly, “I am complimenting your intelligence by asking you to be my mistress without having first seduced you.”

Mistress!

Her mind shouted the word, shouted that she had been vilely insulted.

But in that first startled moment she did not feel insulted.

She only felt a furious surge of indignation that he should think her such a fool.

He must think her a fool if he offered a proposition like that, instead of the proposal of matrimony she had been expecting.

Rage, punctured vanity and disappointment threw her mind into a turmoil and, before she even thought of the high moral grounds on which she should upbraid him, she blurted out the first words which came to her lips—

“Mistress!

What would I get out of that except a passel of brats?”

And then her jaw dropped in horror as she realized what she had said.

He laughed until he choked, peering at her in the shadows as she sat, stricken dumb, pressing her handkerchief to her mouth.

“That’s why I like you!

You are the only frank woman I know, the only woman who looks on the practical side of matters without beclouding the issue with mouthings about sin and morality.

Any other woman would have swooned first and then shown me the door.”

Scarlett leaped to her feet, her face red with shame.

How could she have said such a thing!

How could she, Ellen’s daughter, with her upbringing, have sat there and listened to such debasing words and then made such a shameless reply?

She should have screamed.

She should have fainted.

She should have turned coldly away in silence and swept from the porch.

Too late now!

“I will show you the door,” she shouted, not caring if Melanie or the Meades, down the street, did hear her.

“Get out!

How dare you say such things to me!

What have I ever done to encourage you—to make you suppose….

Get out and don’t ever come back here.

I mean it this time.

Don’t you ever come back here with any of your piddling papers of pins and ribbons, thinking I’ll forgive you.

I’ll—I’ll tell my father and he’ll kill you!”

He picked up his hat and bowed and she saw in the light of the lamp that his teeth were showing in a smile beneath his mustache.

He was not ashamed, he was amused at what she had said, and he was watching her with alert interest.

Oh, he was detestable!

She swung round on her heel and marched into the house.

She grabbed hold of the door to shut it with a bang, but the hook which held it open was too heavy for her.

She struggled with it, panting.

“May I help you?” he asked.

Feeling that she would burst a blood vessel if she stayed another minute, she stormed up the stairs.

And as she reached the upper floor, she heard him obligingly slam the door for her.

----------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------

𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐗𝐗.

----------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------

AS THE HOT NOISY DAYS OF AUGUST were drawing to a close the bombardment abruptly ceased.

The quiet that fell on the town was startling.

Neighbors met on the streets and stared at one another, uncertain, uneasy, as to what might be impending.

The stillness, after the screaming days, brought no surcease to strained nerves but, if possible, made the strain even worse.

No one knew why the Yankee batteries were silent; there was no news of the troops except that they had been withdrawn in large numbers from the breastworks about the town and had marched off toward the south to defend the railroad.

No one knew where the fighting was, if indeed there was any fighting, or how the battle was going if there was a battle.

Nowadays the only news was that which passed from mouth to mouth.

Short of paper, short of ink, short of men, the newspapers had suspended publication after the siege began, and the wildest rumors appeared from nowhere and swept through the town.

Now, in the anxious quiet, crowds stormed General Hood’s headquarters demanding information, crowds massed about the telegraph office and the depot hoping for tidings, good tidings, for everyone hoped that the silence of Sherman’s cannon meant that the Yankees were in full retreat and the Confederates chasing them back up the road to Dalton.

But no news came.

The telegraph wires were still, no trains came in on the one remaining railroad from the south and the mail service was broken.

Autumn with its dusty, breathless heat was slipping in to choke the suddenly quiet town, adding its dry, panting weight to tired, anxious hearts.

To Scarlett, mad to hear from Tara, yet trying to keep up a brave face, it seemed an eternity since the siege began, seemed as though she had always lived with the sound of cannon in her ears until this sinister quiet had fallen.

And yet, it was only thirty days since the siege began.

Thirty days of siege!

The city ringed with red-clay rifle pits, the monotonous booming of cannon that never rested, the long lines of ambulances and ox carts dripping blood down the dusty streets toward the hospitals, the overworked burial squads dragging out men when they were hardly cold and dumping them like so many logs in endless rows of shallow ditches.

Only thirty days!

And it was only four months since the Yankees moved south from Dalton!

Only four months!

Scarlett thought, looking back on that far day, that it had occurred in another life.

Oh, no!

Surely not just four months.

It had been a lifetime.

Four months ago!

Why, four months ago Dalton, Resaca, Kennesaw Mountain had been to her only names of places on the railroad.

Now they were battles, battles desperately, vainly fought as Johnston fell back toward Atlanta.

And now, Peachtree Creek, Decatur, Ezra Church and Utoy Creek were no longer pleasant names of pleasant places.

Never again could she think of them as quiet villages full of welcoming friends, as green places where she picnicked with handsome officers on the soft banks of slow-moving streams.

These names meant battles too, and the soft green grasses where she had sat were cut to bits by heavy cannon wheels, trampled by desperate feet when bayonet met bayonet and flattened where bodies threshed in agonies….

And the lazy streams were redder now than ever Georgia clay could make them.

Peachtree Creek was crimson, so they said, after the Yankees crossed it.

Peachtree Creek, Decatur, Ezra Church, Utoy Creek.

Never names of places any more.

Names of graves where friends lay buried, names of tangled underbrush and thick woods where bodies rotted unburied, names of the four sides of Atlanta where Sherman had tried to force his army in and Hood’s men had doggedly beaten him back.

At last, news came from the south to the strained town and it was alarming news, especially to Scarlett.

General Sherman was trying the fourth side of the town again, striking again at the railroad at Jonesboro.

Yankees in large numbers were on that fourth side of the town now, no skirmishing units or cavalry detachments but the massed Yankee forces.

And thousands of Confederate troops had been withdrawn from the lines close about the city to hurl themselves against them.

And that explained the sudden silence.

“Why Jonesboro?” thought Scarlett, terror striking at her heart at the thought of Tara’s nearness.

“Why must they always hit Jonesboro?

Why can’t they find some other place to attack the railroad?”

For a week she had not heard from Tara and the last brief note from Gerald had added to her fears.

Carreen had taken a turn for the worse and was very, very sick.

Now it might be days before the mails came through, days before she heard whether Carreen was alive or dead.

Oh, if she had only gone home at the beginning of the siege, Melanie or no Melanie!

There was fighting at Jonesboro—that much Atlanta knew, but how the battle went no one could tell and the most insane rumors tortured the town.

Finally a courier came up from Jonesboro with the reassuring news that the Yankees had been beaten back.

But they had made a sortie into Jonesboro, burned the depot, cut the telegraph wires and torn up three miles of track before they retreated.

The engineering corps was working like mad, repairing the line, but it would take some time because the Yankees had torn up the crossties, made bonfires of them, laid the wrenched-up rails across them until they were red hot and then twisted them around telegraph poles until they looked like giant corkscrews.

These days it was so hard to replace iron rails, to replace anything made of iron.

No, the Yankees hadn’t gotten to Tara.

The same courier who brought the dispatches to General Hood assured Scarlett of that.

He had met Gerald in Jonesboro after the battle, just as he was starting to Atlanta, and Gerald had begged him to bring a letter to her.

But what was Pa doing in Jonesboro?

The young courier looked ill at ease as he made answer.

Gerald was hunting for an army doctor to go to Tara with him.

As she stood in the sunshine on the front porch, thanking the young man for his trouble, Scarlett felt her knees go weak.

Carreen must be dying if she was so far beyond Ellen’s medical skill that Gerald was hunting a doctor!

As the courier went off in a small whirlwind of red dust, Scarlett tore open Gerald’s letter with fingers that trembled.

So great was the shortage of paper in the Confederacy now that Gerald’s note was written between the lines of her last letter to him and reading it was difficult.

“Dear Daughter, Your Mother and both girls have the typhoid.

They are very ill but we must hope for the best.

When your mother took to her bed she bade me write you that under no condition were you to come home and expose yourself and Wade to the disease.

She sends her love and bids you pray for her.”

“Pray for her!”

Scarlett flew up the stairs to her room and, dropping on her knees by the bed, prayed as she had never prayed before.

No formal Rosaries now but the same words over and over: “Mother of God, don’t let her die!

I’ll be so good if you don’t let her die!

Please, don’t let her die!”

For the next week Scarlett crept about the house like a stricken animal, waiting for news, starting at every sound of horses’ hooves, rushing down the dark stairs at night when soldiers came tapping at the door, but no news came from Tara.

The width of the continent might have spread between her and home instead of twenty-five miles of dusty road.

The mails were still disrupted, no one knew where the Confederates were or what the Yankees were up to.

No one knew anything except that thousands of soldiers, gray and blue, were somewhere between Atlanta and Jonesboro.

Not a word from Tara in a week.

Scarlett had seen enough typhoid in the Atlanta hospital to know what a week meant in that dread disease.

Ellen was ill, perhaps dying, and here was Scarlett helpless in Atlanta with a pregnant woman on her hands and two armies between her and home.

Ellen was ill—perhaps dying.

But Ellen couldn’t be ill!

She had never been ill.

The very thought was incredible and it struck at the very foundations of the security of Scarlett’s life.

Everyone else got sick, but never Ellen.

Ellen looked after sick people and made them well again.

She couldn’t be sick.

Scarlett wanted to be home.

She wanted Tara with the desperate desire of a frightened child frantic for the only haven it had ever known.

Home!

The sprawling white house with fluttering white curtains at the windows, the thick clover on the lawn with the bees busy in it, the little black boy on the front steps shooing the ducks and turkeys from the flower beds, the serene red fields and the miles and miles of cotton turning white in the sun!

Home!

If she had only gone home at the beginning of the siege, when everyone else was refugeeing!

She could have taken Melanie with her in safety with weeks to spare.

“Oh, damn Melanie!” she thought a thousand times.

“Why couldn’t she have gone to Macon with Aunt Pitty?

That’s where she belongs, with her own kinfolks, not with me.

I’m none of her blood.

Why does she hang onto me so hard?

If she’d only gone to Macon, then I could have gone home to Mother.

Even now—even now, I’d take a chance on getting home in spite of the Yankees, if it wasn’t for this baby.

Maybe General Hood would give me an escort.

He’s a nice man, General Hood, and I know I could make him give me an escort and a flag of truce to get me through the lines.

But I have to wait for this baby!…

Oh, Mother!

Mother!

Don’t die!…

Why don’t this baby ever come?

I’ll see Dr. Meade today and ask him if there’s any way to hurry babies up so I can go home—if I can get an escort.

Dr. Meade said she’d have a bad time.

Dear God!

Suppose she should die!

Melanie dead.

Melanie dead.

And Ashley—No, I mustn’t think about that, it isn’t nice.

But Ashley—No, I mustn’t think about that because he’s probably dead, anyway.

But he made me promise I’d take care of her.

But—if I didn’t take care of her and she died and Ashley is still alive—No, I mustn’t think about that.

It’s sinful.

And I promised God I’d be good if He would just not let Mother die.

Oh, if the baby would only come.

If I could only get away from here—get home—get anywhere but here.”

Scarlett hated the sight of the ominously still town now and once she had loved it.

Atlanta was no longer the gay, the desperately gay place she had loved.

It was a hideous place like a plague-stricken city, so quiet, so dreadfully quiet after the din of the siege.

There had been stimulation in the noise and the danger of the shelling.

There was only horror in the quiet that followed.

The town seemed haunted, haunted with fear and uncertainty and memories.

People’s faces looked pinched and the few soldiers Scarlett saw wore the exhausted look of racers forcing themselves on through the last lap of a race already lost.

The last day of August came and with it convincing rumors that the fiercest fighting since the battle of Atlanta was taking place.

Somewhere to the south.

Atlanta, waiting for news of the turn of battle, stopped even trying to laugh and joke.

Everyone knew now what the soldiers had known two weeks before—that Atlanta was in the last ditch, that if the Macon railroad fell, Atlanta would fall too.

********

On the morning of the first of September, Scarlett awoke with a suffocating sense of dread upon her, a dread she had taken to her pillow the night before.

She thought, dulled with sleep: “What was it I was worrying about when I went to bed last night?

Oh, yes, the fighting.

There was a battle, somewhere, yesterday!

Oh, who won?”

She sat up hastily, rubbing her eyes, and her worried heart took up yesterday’s load again.

The air was oppressive even in the early morning hour, hot with the scorching promise of a noon of glaring blue sky and pitiless bronze sun.

The road outside lay silent.

No wagons creaked by.

No troops raised the red dust with their tramping feet.

There were no sounds of negroes’ lazy voices in neighboring kitchens, no pleasant sounds of breakfasts being prepared, for all the near neighbors except Mrs. Meade and Mrs. Merriwether had refugeed to Macon.

And she could hear nothing from their houses either.

Farther down the street the business section was quiet and many of the stores and offices were locked and boarded up, while their occupants were somewhere about the countryside with rifles in their hands.

The stillness that greeted her seemed even more sinister this morning than on any of the mornings of the queer quiet week preceding it.

She rose hastily, without her usual preliminary burrowings and stretchings, and went to the window, hoping to see some neighbor’s face, some heartening sight.

But the road was empty.

She noted how the leaves on the trees were still dark green but dry and heavily coated with red dust, and how withered and sad the untended flowers in the front yard looked.

As she stood, looking out of the window, there came to her ears a far-off sound, faint and sullen as the first distant thunder of an approaching storm.

“Rain,” she thought in the first moment, and her country-bred mind added, “we certainly need it.”

But, in a split instant: “Rain?

No!

Not rain!

Cannon!”

Her heart racing she leaned from the window, her ear cocked to the far-off roaring, trying to discover from which direction it came.

But the dim thundering was so distant that, for a moment, she could not tell.

“Make it from Marietta, Lord!” she prayed.

“Or Decatur.

Or Peachtree Creek.

But not from the south!

Not from the south!”

She gripped the window sill tighter and strained her ears and the far-away booming seemed louder.

And it was coming from the south.

Cannon to the south!

And to the south lay Jonesboro and Tara—and Ellen.

Yankees perhaps at Tara, now, this minute!

She listened again but the blood thudding in her ears all but blurred out the sound of far-off firing.

No, they couldn’t be at Jonesboro yet.

If they were that far away, the sound would be fainter, more indistinct.

But they must be at least ten miles down the road toward Jonesboro, probably near the little settlement of Rough and Ready.

But Jonesboro was scarcely more than ten miles below Rough and Ready.

Cannon to the south, and they might be tolling the knell of Atlanta’s fall.

But to Scarlett, sick for her mother’s safety, fighting to the south only meant fighting near Tara.

She walked the floor and wrung her hands and for the first time the thought in all its implications came to her that the gray army might be defeated.

It was the thought of Sherman’s thousands so close to Tara that brought it all home to her, brought the full horror of the war to her as no sound of siege guns shattering windowpanes, no privations of food and clothing and no endless rows of dying men had done.

Sherman’s army within a few miles of Tara!

And even if the Yankees should be defeated, they might fall back down the road to Tara.

And Gerald couldn’t possibly refugee out of their way with three sick women.

Oh, if she were only there now, Yankees or not.

She paced the floor in her bare feet, her nightgown clinging to her legs and the more she walked the stronger became her foreboding.

She wanted to be at home.

She wanted to be near Ellen.

From the kitchen below, she heard the rattle of china as Prissy prepared breakfast, but no sound of Mrs. Meade’s Betsy.

The shrill, melancholy minor of Prissy was raised, “Jes’ a few mo’ days, ter tote de wee-ry load…”

The song grated on Scarlett, its sad implications frightening her, and slipping on a wrapper she pattered out into the hall and to the back stairs and shouted: “Shut up that singing, Prissy!”

A sullen “Yas’m” drifted up to her and she drew a deep breath, feeling suddenly ashamed of herself.

“Where’s Betsy?”

“Ah doan know.

She ain’ came.”

Scarlett walked to Melanie’s door and opened it a crack, peering into the sunny room.

Melanie lay in bed in her nightgown, her eyes closed and circled with black, her heart-shaped face bloated, her slender body hideous and distorted.

Scarlett wished viciously that Ashley could see her now.

She looked worse than any pregnant woman she had ever seen.

As she looked Melanie’s eyes opened and a soft warm smile lit her face.

“Come in,” she invited, turning awkwardly on her side.

“I’ve been awake since sun-up, thinking, and, Scarlett, there’s something I want to ask you.”

She entered the room and sat down on the bed that was glaring with harsh sunshine.

Melanie reached out and took Scarlett’s hand in a gentle confiding clasp.

“Dear,” she said, “I’m sorry about the cannon.

It’s toward Jonesboro, isn’t it?”

Scarlett said “Um,” her heart beginning to beat faster as the thought recurred.

“I know how worried you are.

I know you’d have gone home last week when you heard about your mother, if it hadn’t been for me.

Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Scarlett, ungraciously.

“Scarlett, darling.

You’ve been so good to me.

No sister could have been sweeter or braver.

And I love you for it.

I’m so sorry I’m in the way.”

Scarlett stared.

Loved her, did she?

The fool!

“And Scarlett, I’ve been lying here thinking and I want to ask a very great favor of you.”

Her clasp tightened.

“If I should die, will you take my baby?”

Melanie’s eyes were wide and bright with soft urgency.

“Will you?”

Scarlett jerked her hand away as fear swamped her.

Fear roughened her voice as she spoke.

“Oh, don’t be a goose, Melly.

You aren’t going to die.

Every woman thinks she’s going to die with her first baby.

I know I did.”

“No, you didn’t.

You’ve never been afraid of anything.

You are just saying that to try to cheer me up.

I’m not afraid to die but I’m so afraid to leave the baby, if Ashley is—Scarlett, promise me that you’ll take my baby if I should die.

Then I won’t be afraid.

Aunt Pittypat is too old to raise a child and Honey and India are sweet but—I want you to have my baby.

Promise me, Scarlett.

And if it’s a boy, bring him up like Ashley, and if it’s a girl—dear, I’d like her to be like you.”

“God’s nightgown!” cried Scarlett, leaping from the bed.

“Aren’t things bad enough without you talking about dying?”

“I’m sorry, dear.

But promise me.

I think it’ll be today.

I’m sure it’ll be today.

Please promise me.”

“Oh, all right, I promise,” said Scarlett, looking down at her in bewilderment.

Was Melanie such a fool she really didn’t know how she cared for Ashley?

Or did she know everything and feel that because of that love, Scarlett would take good care of Ashley’s child?

Scarlett had a wild impulse to cry out questions, but they died on her lips as Melanie took her hand and held it for an instant against her cheek.

Tranquillity had come back into her eyes.

“Why do you think it will be today, Melly?”

“I’ve been having pains since dawn—but not very bad ones.”

“You have?

Well, why didn’t you call me?

I’ll send Prissy for Dr. Meade.”

“No, don’t do that yet, Scarlett.

You know how busy he is, how busy they all are.

Just send word to him that we’ll need him some time today.

Send over to Mrs. Meade’s and tell her and ask her to come over and sit with me.

She’ll know when to really send for him.”

“Oh, stop being so unselfish.

You know you need a doctor as much as anybody in the hospital.

I’ll send for him right away.”

“No, please don’t.

Sometimes it takes all day having a baby and I just couldn’t let the doctor sit here for hours when all those poor boys need him so much.

Just send for Mrs. Meade.

She’ll know.”

“Oh, all right,” said Scarlett.