She stepped onto the dark porch and closed the door behind her and the moist night air was cool upon her face.The rain had ceased and there was no sound except for the occasional drip of water from the eaves.The world was wrapped in a thick mist,a faintly chill mist that bore on its breath the smell of the dying year.All the houses across the street were dark except one,and the light from a lamp in the window,falling into the street,struggled feebly with the fog,golden particles floating in its rays.It was as if the whole world were enveloped in an unmoving blanket of gray smoke.And the whole world was still.
She leaned her head against one of the uprights of the porch and prepared to cry but no tears came.This was a calamity too deep for tears.Her body shook.There still reverberated in her mind the crashes of the two impregnable citadels of her life,thundering to dust about her ears.She stood for a while,trying to summon up her old charm:“I'll think of all this tomorrow when I can stand it better.”But the charm had lost its potency.She had to think of two things,now—Melanie and how much she loved and needed her;Ashley and the obstinate blindness that had made her refuse to see him as he really was.And she knew that thoughts of them would hurt just as much tomorrow and all the tomorrows of her life.
“I can't go back in there and talk to them now,”she thought.“I can't face Ashley tonight and comfort him.Not tonight!Tomorrow morning I'll come early and do the things I must do,say the comforting things I must say.But not tonight.I can't.I'm going home.”
Home was only five blocks away.She would not wait for the sobbing Peter to harness the buggy,would not wait for Dr.Meade to drive her home.She could not endure the tears of the one,the silent condemnation of the other.She went swiftly down the dark front steps without her coat or bonnet and into the misty night.She rounded the corner and started up the long hill toward Peachtree Street,walking in a still wet world,and even her footsteps were as noiseless as a dream.
As she went up the hill,her chest tight with tears that would not come,there crept over her an unreal feeling,a feeling that she had been in this same dim chill place before,under a like set of circumstances—not once but many times before.“How silly,”she thought uneasily,quickening her steps.Her nerves were playing her tricks.But the feeling persisted,stealthily pervading her mind.She peered about her uncertainly and the feeling grew,eerie but familiar,and her head went up sharply like an animal scenting danger.“It's just that I'm worn out,”she tried to soothe herself.“And the night's so queer,so misty.I never saw such thick mist before except—except!”
And then she knew and fear squeezed her heart.She knew now.In a hundred nightmares,she had fled through fog like this,through a haunted country without landmarks,thick with cold cloaking mist,peopled with clutching ghosts and shadows.Was she dreaming again or was this her dream come true?
For an instant,reality went out of her and she was lost.The old nightmare feeling was sweeping her,stronger than ever,and her heart began to race.She was standing again amid death and stillness,even as she had once stood at Tara.All that mattered in the world had gone out of it,life was in ruins and panic howled through her heart like a cold wind.The horror that was in the mist and was the mist laid hands upon her.And she began to run.As she had run a hundred times in dreams,she ran now,flying blindly she knew not where,driven by a nameless dread,seeking in the gray mist for the safety that lay somewhere.
Up the dim street she fled,her head down,her heart hammering,the night air wet on her lips,the trees overhead menacing.Somewhere,somewhere in this wild land of moist stillness,there was a refuge!She sped gasping up the long hill,her wet skirts wrapping coldly about her ankles,her lungs bursting,the tight-laced stays pressing her ribs into her heart.
Then before her eyes there loomed a light,a row of lights,dim and flickering but none the less real.In her nightmare,there had never been any lights,only gray fog.Her mind seized on those lights.Lights meant safety,people,reality.Suddenly she stopped running,her hands clenching,struggling to pull herself out of her panic,staring intently at the row of gas lamps which had signaled to her brain that this was Peachtree Street,Atlanta,and not the gray world of sleep and ghosts.
She sank down panting on a carriage block,clutching at her nerves as though they were ropes slipping swiftly through her hands.
“I was running—running like a crazy person!”she thought,her body shaking with lessening fear,her thudding heart making her sick.“But where was I running?”
Her breath came more easily now and she sat with her hand pressed to her side and looked up Peachtree Street.There,at the top of the hill,was her own house.It looked as though every window bore lights,lights defying the mist to dim their brilliance.Home!It was real!She looked at the dim far-off bulk of the house thankfully,longingly,and something like calm fell on her spirit.
Home!That was where she wanted to go.That was where she was running.Home to Rhett!
At this realization it was as though chains fell away from her and with them the fear which had haunted her dreams since the night she stumbled to Tara to find the world ended.At the end of the road to Tara she had found security gone,all strength,all wisdom,all loving tenderness,all understanding gone—all those things which,embodied in Ellen,had been the bulwark of her girlhood.And,though she had won material safety since that night,in her dreams she was still a frightened child,searching for the lost security of that lost world.