Scarlett could not even find voice to say "Oh!" but Cathleen, peering down suddenly at Melanie, said in a low savage voice: "If you cry, Melly, I can't stand it. I shall die!"
Melanie said nothing but patted the foot in its awkward homemade shoe which hung from the stirrup. Her bead was low.
"And don't pat me! I can't stand that either."
Melanie dropped her hand but still did not look up.
"Well, I must go. I only came to tell you." The white brittle mask was back again and she picked up the reins.
"How is Cade?" asked Scarlett, utterly at a loss but fumbling for some words to break the awkward silence.
"He is dying," said Cathleen shortly. There seemed to be no feeling in her voice. "And he is going to die in some comfort and peace if I can manage it, without worry about who will take care of me when he's gone. You see, my stepmother and the children are going North for good, tomorrow. Well, I must be going."
Melanie looked up and met Cathleen's hard eyes. There were bright tears on Melanie's lashes and understanding in her eyes, and before them, Cathleen's lips curved into the crooked smile of a brave child who tries not to cry. It was all very bewildering to Scarlett who was still trying to grasp the idea that Cathleen Calvert was going to marry an overseer-- Cathleen, daughter of a rich planter, Cathleen who, next to Scarlett, had had more beaux than any girl in the County.
Cathleen bent down and Melanie tiptoed. They kissed. Then Cathleen flapped the bridle reins sharply and the old mule moved off.
Melanie looked after her, the tears streaming down her face. Scarlett stared, still dazed.
"Melly, is she crazy? You know she can't be in love with him."
"In love? Oh, Scarlett, don't even suggest such a horrid thing! Oh, poor Cathleen! Poor Cade!"
"Fiddle-dee-dee!" cried Scarlett, beginning to be irritated. It was annoying that Melanie always seemed to grasp more of situations than she herself did. Cathleen's plight seemed to her more startling than catastrophic. Of course it was no pleasant thought, marrying Yankee white trash, but after all a girl couldn't live alone on a plantation; she had to have a husband to help her run it
"Melly, it's like I said the other day. There isn't anybody for girls to marry and they've got to marry someone."
"Oh, they don't have to marry! There's nothing shameful in being a spinster. Look at Aunt Pitty. Oh, I'd rather see Cathleen dead! I know Cade would rather see her dead. It's the end of the Calverts. Just think what her-- what their children will be. Oh, Scarlett, have Pork saddle the horse quickly and you ride after her and tell her to come live with us!"
"Good Lord!" cried Scarlett, shocked at the matter-of-fact way in which Melanie was offering Tara. Scarlett certainly had no intention of feeding another mouth. She started to say this but something in Melanie's stricken face halted the words.
"She wouldn't come, Melly," she amended. "You know she wouldn't. She's so proud and she'd think it was charity."
"That's true, that's true!" said Melanie distractedly, watching the small cloud of red dust disappear down the road.
"You've been with me for months," thought Scarlett grimly, looking at her sister-in-law, "and it's never occurred to you that it's charity you're living on. And I guess it never will. You're one of those people the war didn't change and you go right on thinking and acting just like nothing had happened-- like we were still rich as Croesus and had more food than we know what to do with and guests didn't matter. I guess I've got you on my neck for the rest of my life. But I won't have Cathleen too."
CHAPTER XXX
IN THAT warm summer after peace came, Tara suddenly lost its isolation. And for months thereafter a stream of scarecrows, bearded, ragged, footsore and always hungry, toiled up the red hill to Tara and came to rest on the shady front steps, wanting food and a night's lodging. They were Confederate soldiers walking home. The railroad had carried the remains of Johnston's army from North Carolina to Atlanta and dumped them there, and from Atlanta they began their pilgrimages afoot. When the wave of Johnston's men had passed, the weary veterans from the Army of Virginia arrived and then men from the Western troops, beating
their way south toward homes which might not exist and families which might be scattered or dead. Most of them were walking, a few fortunate ones rode bony horses and mules which the terms of the surrender had permitted them to keep, gaunt animals which even an untrained eye could tell would never reach far-away Florida and south Georgia.
Going home! Going home! That was the only thought in the soldiers' minds. Some were sad and silent, others gay and contemptuous of hardships, but the thought that it was all over and they were going home was the one thing that sustained them. Few of them were bitter. They left bitterness to their women and their old people. They had fought a good fight, had been licked and were willing to settle down peaceably to plowing beneath the flag they had fought.
Going home! Going home! They could talk of nothing else, neither battles nor wounds, nor imprisonment nor the future. Later, they would refight battles and tell children and grandchildren of pranks and forays and charges, of hunger, forced marches and wounds, but not now. Some of them lacked an arm or a leg or an eye, many had scars which would ache in rainy weather if they lived for seventy years but these seemed small matters now. Later it would be different.
Old and young, talkative and taciturn, rich planter and sallow Cracker, they all had two things in common, lice and dysentery. The Confederate soldier was so accustomed to his verminous state he did not give it a thought and scratched unconcernedly even in the presence of ladies. As for dysentery -- the "bloody flux" as the ladies delicately called it -- it seemed to have spared no one from private to general. Four years of half-starvation, four years of rations which were coarse or green or half-putrefied, had done its work with them, and every soldier who stopped at Tara was either just recovering or was actively suffering from it.
"Dey ain' a soun' set of bowels in de whole Confedrut ahmy," observed Mammy darkly as she sweated over the fire, brewing a bitter concoction of blackberry roots which had been Ellen's sovereign remedy for such afflictions. "It's mah notion dat 'twarn't de Yankees whut beat our gempmum. Twuz dey own innards. Kain no gempmum fight wid his bowels tuhnin' ter water."
One and all, Mammy dosed them, never waiting to ask foolish questions about the state of their organs and, one and all, they drank her doses meekly and with wry faces, remembering, perhaps, other stern black faces in far-off places and other inexorable black hands holding medicine spoons.
In the matter of "comp'ny" Mammy was equally adamant. No lice-ridden soldier should come into Tara. She marched them behind a clump of thick bushes, relieved them of their uniforms, gave them a basin of water and strong lye soap to wash with and provided them with quilts and blankets to cover their nakedness, while she boiled their clothing in her huge wash pot. It was useless for the girls to argue hotly that such conduct humiliated the soldiers. Mammy replied that the girls would be a sight more humiliated if they found lice upon themselves.
When the soldiers began arriving almost daily, Mammy protested against their being allowed to use the bedrooms. Always she feared lest some louse had escaped her. Rather than argue the matter, Scarlett turned the parlor with its deep velvet rug into a dormitory. Mammy cried out equally loudly at the sacrilege of soldiers being permitted to sleep on Miss Ellen's rug but Scarlett was firm. They had to sleep somewhere. And, in the months after the surrender, the deep soft nap began to show signs of wear and finally the heavy warp and woof showed through in spots where heels had worn it and spurs dug carelessly.
Of each soldier, they asked eagerly of Ashley. Suellen, bridling, always asked news of Mr. Kennedy. But none of the soldiers had ever heard of them nor were they inclined to talk about the missing. It was enough that they themselves were alive, and they did not care to think of the thousands in unmarked graves who would never come home.