Gone With the Wind (14 page)

“Darling, I don’t care a thing about Brent,” declared Scarlett, happy enough to be generous. “And he doesn’t care a thing about me. Why, he’s waiting for you to grow up!”

Carreen’s round little face became pink, as pleasure struggled with incredulity.

“Oh, Scarlett, really?”

“Scarlett, you know Mother said Carreen was too young to think about beaux yet, and there you go putting ideas in her head.”

“Well, go and tattle and see if I care,” replied Scarlett. “You want to hold Sissy back, because you know she’s going to be prettier than you in a year or so.”

“You’ll be keeping civil tongues in your heads this day, or I’ll be taking me crop to you,” warned Gerald. “Now whist! Is it wheels I’m hearing? That’ll be the Tarletons or the Fontaines.”

As they neared the intersecting road that came down the thickly wooded hill from Mimosa and Fairhill, the sound of hooves and carriage wheels became plainer and clamorous feminine voices raised in pleasant dispute sounded from behind the screen of trees. Gerald, riding ahead, pulled up his hone and signed to Toby to stop the carriage where the two roads met.

“ ‘Tis the Tarleton ladies,” he announced to his daughters, his florid face abeam, for excepting Ellen there was no lady in the County he liked more than the red-haired Mrs. Tarleton. “And ‘tis herself at the reins. Ah, there’s a woman with fine hands for a horse! Feather light and strong as rawhide, and pretty enough to kiss for all that. More’s the pity none of you have such hands,” he added, casting fond but reproving glances at his girls. “With Carreen afraid of the poor beasts and Sue with hands tike sadirons when it comes to reins and you, Puss—”

“Well, at any rate I’ve never been thrown,” cried Scarlett indignantly. “And Mrs. Tarleton takes a toss at every hunt.”

“And breaks a collar bone like a man,” said Gerald. “No fainting, no fussing. Now, no more of it, for here she comes.”

He stood up in his stirrups and took off his hat with a sweep, as the Tarleton carriage, overflowing with girls in bright dresses and parasols and fluttering veils, came into view, with Mrs. Tarleton on the box as Gerald had said. With her four daughters, their mammy and their ball dresses in long cardboard boxes crowding the carriage, there was no room for the coachman. And, besides, Beatrice Tarleton never willingly permitted anyone, black or white, to hold reins when her arms were out of slings. Frail, fine-boned, so white of skin that her flaming hair seemed to have drawn all the color from her face into its vital burnished mass, she was nevertheless possessed of exuberant health and untiring energy. She had borne eight children, as red of hair and as full of life as she, and had raised them most successfully, so the County said, because she gave them all the loving neglect and the stem discipline she gave the colts she bred. “Curb them but don’t break their spirits,” was Mrs. Tarleton’s motto.

She loved horses and talked horses constantly. She understood them and handled them better than any man in the County. Colts overflowed the paddock onto the front lawn, even as her eight children overflowed the rambling house on the hill, and colts and sons and daughters and hunting dogs tagged after her as she went about the plantation. She credited her horses, especially her red mare, Nellie, with human intelligence; and if the cares of the house kept her busy beyond the time when she expected to take her daily ride, she put the sugar bowl in the hands of some small pickaninny and said: “Give Nellie a handful and tell her I’ll be out terrectly.”

Except on rare occasions she always wore her riding habit, for whether she rode or not she always expected to ride and in that expectation put on her habit upon arising. Each morning, rain or shine, Nellie was saddled and walked up and down in front of the house, waiting for the time when Mrs. Tarleton could spare an hour away from her duties. But Fairhill was a difficult plantation to manage and spare time hard to get, and more often than not Nellie walked up and down riderless hour after hour, while Beatrice Tarleton went through the day with the skirt of her habit absently looped over her arm and six inches of shining boot showing below it.

Today, dressed in dull black silk over unfashionably narrow hoops, she still looked as though in her habit, for the dress was as severely tailored as her riding costume and the small black hat with Ha long black plume perched over one warm, twinkling, brown eye was a replica of the battered old hat she used for hunting.

She waved her whip when she saw Gerald and drew her dancing pair of red horses to a halt, and the four girls in the back of the carriage leaned out and gave such vociferous cries of greeting that the team pranced in alarm. To a casual observer it would seem that years had passed since the Tarletons had seen the O’Haras, instead of only two days. But they were a sociable family and liked their neighbors, especially the O’Hara girls. That is, they liked Suellen and Carreen. No girl in the County, with the possible exception of the empty-headed Cathleen Calvert, really liked Scarlett.

In summers, the County averaged a barbecue and ball nearly every week, but to the red-haired Tarletons with their enormous capacity for enjoying themselves, each barbecue and each ball was as exciting as if it were the fast they had ever attended. They were a pretty, buxom quartette, so crammed into the carriage that their hoops and flounces overlapped and their parasols nudged and bumped together above their wide leghorn sun hats, crowned with roses and dangling with black velvet chin ribbons. All shades of red hair were represented beneath these hats, Hetty’s plain red hair, Camilla’s strawberry blonde, Randa’s coppery auburn and small Betsy’s carrot top.

“That’s a fine bevy. Ma’m,” said Gerald gallantly, reining his horse alongside the carriage. “But it’s far they’ll go to beat their mother.”

Mrs. Tarleton rolled her red-brown eyes and sucked in her tower lip in burlesqued appreciation, and the girls cried, “Ma, stop making, eyes or well tell Pa!” “I vow, Mr. O’Hara, she never gives us a chance when there’s a handsome man like you around!”

Scarlett laughed with the rest at these sallies but, as always, the freedom with which the Tarletons treated their mother came as a shock. They acted as if she were one of themselves and not a day over sixteen. To Scarlett, the very idea of saying such things to her own mother was almost sacrilegious. And yet—and yet—there was something very pleasant about the Tarleton girls’ relations with their mother, and they adored her for all that they criticized and scolded and teased her. Not, Scarlett loyally hastened to tell herself, that she would prefer a mother like Mrs. Tarleton to Ellen, but still it would be fun to romp with a mother. She knew that even that thought was disrespectful to Ellen and felt ashamed of it. She knew no such troublesome thoughts ever disturbed the brains under the four flaming thatches in the carriage and, as always when she felt herself different from her neighbors, an irritated confusion fell upon her.

Quick though her brain was, it was not made for analysis, but she half-consciously realized that, for all the Tarleton girls were as unruly as colts and wild as March hares, there was an unworried single-mindedness about them that was part of their inheritance. On both their mother’s and their father’s side they were Georgians, north Georgians, only a generation away from pioneers. They were sure of themselves and of their environment. They knew instinctively what they were about, as did the Wilkeses, though in widely divergent ways, and in them there was no such conflict as frequently raged in Scarlett’s bosom where the blood of a soft-voiced, overbred Coast aristocrat mingled with the shrewd, earthy blood of an Irish peasant. Scarlett wanted to respect and adore her mother like an idol and to rumple her hair and tease her too. And she knew she should be altogether one way or the other. It was the same conflicting emotion that made her desire to appear a delicate and high-bred lady with boys and to be, as well, a hoyden who was not above a few kisses.

“Where’s Ellen this morning?” asked Mrs. Tarleton.

“She’s after discharging our overseer and stayed home to go over the accounts with him. Where’s himself and the lads?”

“Oh, they rode over to Twelve Oaks hours ago—to sample the punch and see if it was strong enough, I dare say, as if they wouldn’t have from now till tomorrow morning to do it! I’m going to ask John Wilkes to keep them overnight, even if he has to bed them down in the stable. Five men in their cups are just too much for me. Up to three, I do very well but—”

Gerald hastily interrupted to change the subject He could feel his own daughters snickering behind his back as they remembered in what condition he had come home from the Wilkeses’ last barbecue the autumn before.

“And why aren’t you riding today, Mrs. Tarleton? Sure, you don’t look yourself at all without Nellie. It’s a stentor, you are.”

“A stentor, me ignorant broth of a boy!” cried Mrs. Tarleton, aping his brogue. “You mean a centaur. Stentor was a man with a voice like a brass gong.”

“Stentor or centaur, ‘tis no matter,” answered Gerald, unruffled by his error. “And ‘tis a voice like brass you have, Ma’m, when you’re urging on the hounds, so it is.”

“That’s one on you, Ma,” said Hetty. “I told you you yelled like a Comanche whenever you saw a fox.”

“But not as loud as you yell when Mammy washes your ears,” returned Mrs. Tarleton. “And you sixteen! Well, as to why I’m not riding today, Nellie foaled early this morning.”

“Did she now!” cried Gerald with real interest, his Irishman’s passion for horses shining in his eyes, and Scarlett again felt the sense of shock in comparing her mother with Mrs. Tarleton. To Ellen, mares never foaled nor cows calved. In fact, hens almost didn’t lay eggs. Ellen ignored these matters, completely. But Mrs. Tarleton had no such reticences.

“A little filly, was it?”

“No, a fine little stallion with legs two yards long. You must ride over and see him, Mr. O’Hara. He’s a real Tarleton horse. He’s as red as Hetty’s curls.”

“And looks a lot like Hetty, too,” said Camilla, and then disappeared shrieking amid a welter of skirts and pantalets and bobbing hats, as Hetty, who did have a long face, began pinching her.

“My fillies are feeling their oats this morning,” said Mrs. Tarleton. “They’ve been kicking up their heels ever since we heard the news this morning about Ashley and that little cousin of his from Atlanta. What’s her name? Melanie? Bless the child, she’s a sweet little thing, but I can never remember either her name or her face. Our cook is the broad wife of the Wilkes butler, and he was over last night with the news that the engagement would be announced tonight and Cookie told us this morning. The girls are all excited about it, though I can’t see why. Everybody’s known for years that Ashley would marry her, that is, if he didn’t marry one of his Burr cousins from Macon. Just like Honey Wilkes is going to marry Melanie’s brother, Charles. Now, tell me, Mr. O’Hara, is it illegal for the Wilkes to marry outside of their family? Because if—”

Scarlett did not hear the rest of the laughing words. For one short instant, it was as though the sun had ducked behind a cool cloud, leaving the world in shadow, taking the color out of things. The freshly green foliage looked sickly, the dogwood pallid, and the flowering crab, so beautifully pink a moment ago, faded and dreary. Scarlett dug her fingers into the upholstery of the carriage and for a moment her parasol wavered. It was one thing to know that Ashley was engaged but it was another to hear people talk about it so casually. Then her courage flowed strongly back and the sun came out again and the landscape glowed anew. She knew Ashley loved her. That was certain. And she smiled as she thought how surprised Mrs. Tarleton would be when no engagement was announced that night—how surprised if there were an elopement. And she’d tell neighbors what a sly boots Scarlett was to sit there and listen to her talk about Melanie when all the time she and Ashley—She dimpled at her own thoughts and Hetty, who had been watching sharply the effect of her mother’s words, sank back with a small puzzled frown.

“I don’t care what you say, Mr. O’Hara,” Mrs. Tarleton was saying emphatically. “It’s all wrong, this marrying of cousins. It’s bad enough for Ashley to be marrying the Hamilton child, but for Honey to be marrying that pale-looking Charles Hamilton—”

“Honey’ll never catch anybody else if she doesn’t marry Charlie,” said Randa, cruel and secure in her own popularity. “She’s never had another beau except him. And he’s never acted very sweet on her, for all that they’re engaged. Scarlett, you remember how he ran after you last Christmas—”

“Don’t be a cat, Miss,” said her mother. “Cousins shouldn’t marry, even second cousins. It weakens the strain. It isn’t like horses. You can breed a mare to a brother or a sire to a daughter and get good results if you know your blood strains, but in people it just doesn’t work. You get good lines, perhaps, but no stamina. You—”

“Now, Ma’m, I’m taking issue with you on that! Can you name me better people than the Wilkes? And they’ve been intermarrying since Brian Boru was a boy.”

“And high time they stopped it, for it’s beginning to show. Oh, not Ashley so much, for he’s a good-looking devil, though even he— But look at those two washed-out-looking Wilkes girls, poor things! Nice girls, of course, but washed out And look at little Miss Melanie. Thin as a rail and delicate enough for the wind to blow away and no spirit at all. Not a notion of her own. ‘No, Ma’m!’ ‘Yes, Ma’m!’ That’s all she has to say. You see what I mean? That family needs new blood, fine vigorous blood like my red heads or your Scarlett. Now, don’t misunderstand me. The Wilkes are fine folks in their way, and you know I’m fond of them all, but be frank! They are overbred and inbred too, aren’t they? They’ll do fine on a dry track, a fast track, but mark my words, I don’t believe the Wilkes can run on a mud track. I believe the stamina has been bred out of them, and when the emergency arises I don’t believe they can run against odds. Dry-weather stock. Give me a big horse who can run in any weather! And their intermarrying has made them different from other folks around here. Always fiddling with the piano or sticking their heads in a book. I do believe Ashley would rather read than hunt! Yes, I honestly believe that, Mr. O’Hara! And just look at the bones on them. Too slender. They need dams and sires with strength—”