Before the last year Suellen had never walked a hundred yards in her life and this prospect was anything but pleasing.So she stayed at home and nagged and cried and said,once too often:“Oh,if only Mother was here!”At that,Scarlett gave her the long-promised slap,hitting her so hard it knocked her screaming to the bed and caused great consternation throughout the house.Thereafter,Suellen whined the less,at least in Scarlett's presence.
Scarlett spoke truthfully when she said she wanted the horse to rest but that was only half of the truth.The other half was that she had paid one round of calls on the County in the first month after the surrender and the sight of old friends and old plantations had shaken her courage more than she liked to admit.
The Fontaines had fared best of any,thanks to Sally's hard ride,but it was flourishing only by comparison with the desperate situation of the other neighbors.Grandma Fontaine had never completely recovered from the heart attack she had the day she led the others in beating out the flames and saving the house.Old Dr.Fontaine was convalescing slowly from an amputated arm.Alex and Tony were turning awkward hands to plows and hoe handles.They leaned over the fence rail to shake hands with Scarlett when she called and they laughed at her rickety wagon,their black eyes bitter,for they were laughing at themselves as well as her.She asked to buy seed corn from them and they promised it and fell to discussing farm problems.They had twelve chickens,two cows,five hogs and the mule they brought home from the war.One of the hogs had just died and they were worried about losing the others.At hearing such serious words about hogs from these ex-dandies who had never given life a more serious thought than which cravat was most fashionable,Scarlett laughed and this time her laugh was bitter too.
They had all made her welcome at Mimosa and had insisted on giving,not selling,her the seed corn.The quick Fontaine tempers flared when she put a greenback on the table and they flatly refused payment.Scarlett took the corn and privately slipped a dollar bill into Sally's hand.Sally looked like a different person from the girl who had greeted her eight months before when Scarlett first came home to Tara.Then she had been pale and sad but there had been a buoyancy about her.Now that buoyancy had gone,as if the surrender had taken all hope from her.
“Scarlett,”she whispered as she clutched the bill,“what was the good of it all?Why did we ever fight?Oh,my poor Joe!Oh,my poor baby!”
“I don't know why we fought and I don't care,”said Scarlett.“And I'm not interested.I never was interested.War is a man's business,not a woman's.All I'm interested in now is a good cotton crop.Now take this dollar and buy little Joe a dress.God knows,he needs it.I'm not going to rob you of your corn,for all Alex and Tony's politeness.”
The boys followed her to the wagon and assisted her in,courtly for all their rags,gay with the volatile Fontaine gaiety,but with the picture of their destitution in her eyes,she shivered as she drove away from Mimosa.She was so tired of poverty and pinching.What a pleasure it would be to know people who were rich and not worried as to where the next meal was coming from!
Cade Calvert was at home at Pine Bloom and,as Scarlett came up the steps of the old house in which she had danced so often in happier days,she saw that death was in his face.He was emaciated and he coughed as he lay in an easy chair in the sunshine with a shawl across his knees,but his face lit up when he saw her.Just a little cold which had settled in his chest,he said,trying to rise to greet her.Got it from sleeping so much in the rain.But it would be gone soon and then he'd lend a hand in the work.
Cathleen Calvert,who came out of the house at the sound of voices,met Scarlett's eyes above her brother's head and in them Scarlett read knowledge and bitter despair.Cade might not know but Cathleen knew.Pine Bloom looked straggly and overgrown with weeds,seedling pines were beginning to show in the fields and the house was sagging and untidy.Cathleen was thin and taut.
The two of them,with their Yankee stepmother,their four little half-sisters,and Hilton,the Yankee overseer,remained in the silent,oddly echoing house.Scarlett had never liked Hilton any more than she liked their own overseer Jonas Wilkerson,and she liked him even less now,as he sauntered forward and greeted her like an equal.Formerly he had the same combination of servility and impertinence which Wilkerson possessed but now,with Mr.Calvert and Raiford dead in the war and Cade sick,he had dropped all servility.The second Mrs.Calvert had never known how to compel respect from negro servants and it was not to be expected that she could get it from a white man.
“Mr.Hilton has been so kind about staying with us through these difficult times,”said Mrs.Calvert nervously,casting quick glances at her silent stepdaughter.“Very kind.I suppose you heard how he saved our house twice when Sherman was here.I'm sure I don't know how we would have managed without him,with no money and Cade—”
A flush went over Cade's white face and Cathleen's long lashes veiled her eyes as her mouth hardened.Scarlett knew their souls were writhing in helpless rage at being under obligations to their Yankee overseer.Mrs.Calvert seemed ready to weep.She had somehow made a blunder.She was always blundering.She just couldn't understand Southerners,for all that she had lived in Georgia twenty years.She never knew what not to say to her stepchildren and,no matter what she said or did,they were always so exquisitely polite to her.Silently she vowed she would go North to her own people,taking her children with her,and leave these puzzling stiff-necked strangers.