For an hour she had watched Rhett hold the yarn Melanie was winding for knitting, had noted the blank inscrutable expression when Melanie talked at length and with pride of Ashley and his promotion. Scarlett knew Rhett had no exalted opinion of Ashley and cared nothing at all about the fact that he had been made a major. Yet he made polite replies and murmured the correct things about Ashley’s gallantry.
And if I so much as mention Ashley’s name, she had thought irritably, he cocks his eyebrow up and smiles that nasty, knowing smile!
“I’m much prettier than she is,” she continued, “and I don’t see why you’re nicer to her.”
“Dare I hope that you are jealous?”
“Oh, don’t presume!”
“Another hope crushed. If I am ‘nicer’ to Mrs. Wilkes, it is because she deserves it. She is one of the very few kind, sincere and unselfish persons I have ever known. But perhaps you have failed to note these qualities. And moreover, for all her youth, she is one of the few great ladies I have ever been privileged to know.”
“Do you mean to say you don’t think I’m a great lady, too?”
“I think we agreed on the occasion of our first meeting that you were no lady at all.”
“Oh, if you are going to be hateful and rude enough to bring that up again! How can you hold that bit of childish temper against me? That was so long ago and I’ve grown up since then and I’d forget all about it if you weren’t always harping and hinting about it.”
“I don’t think it was childish temper and I don’t believe you’ve changed. You are just as capable now as then of throwing vases if you don’t get your own way. But you usually get your way now. And so there’s no necessity for broken bric-a-brac.”
“Oh, you are—I wish I was a man! I’d call you out and—”
“And get killed for your pains. I can drill a dime at fifty yards. Better stick to your own weapons—dimples, vases and the like.”
“You are just a rascal.”
“Do you expect me to fly into a rage at that? I am sorry to disappoint you. You can’t make me mad by calling me names that are true. Certainly I’m a rascal, and why not? It’s a free country and a man may be a rascal if he chooses. It’s only hypocrites like you, my dear lady, just as black at heart but trying to hide it, who become enraged when called by their right names.”
She was helpless before his calm smile and his drawling remarks, for she had never before met anyone who was so completely impregnable. Her weapons of scorn, coldness and abuse blunted in her hands, for nothing she could say would shame him. It had been her experience that the liar was the hottest to defend his veracity, the coward his courage, the ill-bred his gentlemanliness, and the cad his honor. But not Rhett. He admitted everything and laughed and dared her to say more.
He came and went during these months, arriving unheralded and leaving without saying good-by. Scarlett never discovered just what business brought him to Atlanta, for few other blockaders found it necessary to come so far away from the coast. They landed their cargoes at Wilmington or Charleston, where they were met by swarms of merchants and speculators from all over the South who assembled to buy blockaded goods at auction. It would have pleased her to think that he made these trips to see her, but even her abnormal vanity refused to believe this. If he had ever once made love to her, seemed jealous of the other men who crowded about her, even tried to hold her hand or begged for a picture or a handkerchief to cherish, she would have thought triumphantly he had been caught by her charms. But he remained annoyingly unloverlike and, worst of all, seemed to see through all her maneuverings to bring him to his knees.
Whenever he came to town, there was a feminine fluttering. Not only did the romantic aura of the dashing blockader hang about him but there was also the titillating element of the wicked and the forbidden. He had such a bad reputation! And every time the matrons of Atlanta gathered together to gossip, his reputation grew worse, which only made him all the more glamorous to the young girls. As most of them were quite innocent, they had heard little more than that he was “quite loose with women”—and exactly how a man went about the business of being “loose” they did not know. They also heard whispers that no girt was safe with him. With such a reputation, it was strange that he had never so much as kissed the hand of an unmarried girl since he first appeared in Atlanta. But that only served to make him more mysterious and more exciting.
Outside of the army heroes, he was the most talked-about man in Atlanta. Everyone knew in detail how he had been expelled from West Point for drunkenness and “something about women.” That terrific scandal concerning the Charleston girl he had compromised and the brother he had killed was public property. Correspondence with Charleston friends elicited the further information that his father, a charming old gentleman with an iron will and a ramrod for a backbone, had cast him out without a penny when he was twenty and even stricken his name from the family Bible. After that he had wandered to California in the gold rush of 1849 and thence to South America and Cuba, and the reports of his activities in these parts were none too savory. Scrapes about women, several shootings, gun running to the revolutionists in Central America and, worst of all, professional gambling were included in his career, as Atlanta heard it.
There was hardly a family in Georgia who could not own to their sorrow at least one male member or relative who gambled, losing money, houses, land and slaves. But that was different. A man could gamble himself to poverty and still be a gentleman, but a professional gambler could never be anything but an outcast.