“ ‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?’ ”
“What?”
“No matter. Go on.”
“Go on? That’s all. Isn’t it enough? I married him, I made him unhappy and I killed him. Oh, my God! I don’t see how I could have done it! I lied to him and I married him. It all seemed so right when I did it but now I see how wrong it was. Rhett, it doesn’t seem like it was me who did all these things. I was so mean to him but I’m not really mean. I wasn’t raised that way. Mother—” She stopped and swallowed. She had avoided thinking of Ellen all day but she could no longer blot out her image.
“I often wondered what she was like. You seemed to me so like your father.”
“Mother was— Oh, Rhett, for the first time I’m glad she’s dead, so she can’t see me. She didn’t raise me to be mean. She was so kind to everybody, so good. She’d rather I’d have starved than done this. And I so wanted to be just like her in every way and I’m not like her one bit I hadn’t thought of that—there’s been so much else to think about—but I wanted to be like her. I didn’t want to be like Pa. I loved him but he was—so—so thoughtless. Rhett, sometimes I did try so hard to be nice to people and kind to Frank, but then the nightmare would come back and scare me so bad I’d want to rush out and just grab money away from people, whether it was mine or not.”
Tears were streaming unheeded down her face and she clutched his hand so hard that her nails dug into his flesh.
“What nightmare?” His voice was calm and soothing.
“Oh—I forgot you didn’t know. Well, just when I would try to be nice to folks and tell myself that money wasn’t everything, I’d go to bed and dream that I was back at Tara right after Mother died, right after the Yankees went through. Rhett, you can’t imagine— I get cold when I think about it. I can see how everything is burned and so still and there’s nothing to eat. Oh, Rhett, in my dream I’m hungry again.”
“Go on.”
“I’m hungry and everybody, Pa and the girls and the darkies, are starving and they keep saying over and over: ‘We’re hungry’ and I’m so empty it hurts, and so frightened. My mind keeps saying: ‘If I ever get out of this, I’ll never, never be hungry again’ and then the dream goes off into a gray mist and I’m running, running in the mist, running so hard my heart’s about to burst and something is chasing me, and I can’t breathe but I keep thinking that if I can just get there, I’ll be safe. But I don’t know where I’m trying to get to. And then I’d wake up and I’d be cold with fright and so afraid that I’d be hungry again. When I wake up from that dream, it seems like there’s not enough money in the world to keep me from being afraid of being hungry again. And then Frank would be so mealy mouthed and slow poky that he would make me mad and I’d lose my temper. He didn’t understand, I guess, and I couldn’t make him understand. I kept thinking that I’d make it up to him some day when we had money and I wasn’t so afraid of being hungry. And now he’s dead and it’s too late. Oh, it seemed so right when I did it but it was all so wrong. If I had it to do over again, I’d do it so differently.”
“Hush,” he said, disentangling her frantic grip and pulling a clean handkerchief from his pocket. “Wipe your face. There is no sense in your tearing yourself to pieces this way.”
She took the handkerchief and wiped her damp cheeks, a little relief stealing over her as if she had shifted some of her burden to his broad shoulders. He looked so capable and calm and even the slight twist of his mouth was comforting as though it proved her agony and confusion unwarranted.
“Feel better now? Then let’s get to the bottom of this. You say if you had it to do over again, you’d do it differently. But would you? Think, now. Would you?”
“Well—”
“No, you’d do the same things again. Did you have any other choice?”
“No.”
“Then what are you sorry about?”
“I was so mean and now he’s dead.”
“And if he wasn’t dead, you’d still be mean. As I understand it, you are not really sorry for marrying Frank and bullying him and inadvertently causing his death. You are only sorry because you are afraid of going to hell. Is that right?”
“Well—that sounds so mixed up.”
“Your ethics are considerably mixed up too. You are in the exact position of a thief who’s been caught red handed and isn’t sorry he stole but is terribly, terribly sorry he’s going to jail.”
“A thief—”
“Oh, don’t be so literal! In other words if you didn’t have this silly idea that you were damned to hell fire eternal, you’d think you were well rid of Frank.”
“Oh, Rhett!”
“Oh, come! You are confessing and you might as well confess the truth as a decorous lie. Did your—er—conscience bother you much when you offered to—shall we say—part with that jewel which is dearer than life for three hundred dollars?”
The brandy was spinning in her head now and she felt giddy and a little reckless. What was the use in lying to him? He always seemed to read her mind.
“I really didn’t think about God much then—or hell. And when I did think—well, I just reckoned God would understand.”
“But you don’t credit God with understanding why you married Frank?”
“Rhett, how can you talk so about God when you know you don’t believe there is one?”
“But you believe in a God of Wrath and that’s what’s important at present. Why shouldn’t the Lord understand? Are you sorry you still own Tara and there aren’t Carpetbaggers living there? Are you sorry you aren’t hungry and ragged?”
“Oh, no!”
“Well, did you have any alternative except marrying Frank?”
“No.”
“He didn’t have to marry you, did he? Men are free agents. And he didn’t have to let you bully him into doing things he didn’t want to, did he?”
“Well—”
“Scarlett, why worry about it? If you had it to do over again you would be driven to the lie and he to marrying you. You would still have run yourself into danger and he would have had to avenge you. If he had married Sister Sue, she might not have caused his death but she’d probably have made him twice as unhappy as you did. It couldn’t have happened differently.”
“But I could have been nicer to him.”