“Ashley, Ashley! I can’t let you go away!
I simply can’t be brave about it!”
“You must be brave,” he said, and his voice changed subtly.
It was resonant, deeper, and his words fell swiftly as though hurried with some inner urgency.
“You must be brave.
For how else can I stand it?”
Her eyes sought his face quickly and with joy, wondering if he meant that leaving her was breaking his heart, even as it was breaking hers.
His face was as drawn as when he came down from bidding Melanie good-by, but she could read nothing in his eyes.
He leaned down, took her face in his hands, and kissed her lightly on the forehead.
“Scarlett!
Scarlett!
You are so fine and strong and good.
So beautiful, not just your sweet face, my dear, but all of you, your body and your mind and your soul.” “Oh, Ashley,” she whispered happily, thrilling at his words and his touch on her face.
“Nobody else but you ever—”
“I like to think that perhaps I know you better than most people and that I can see beautiful things buried deep in you that others are too careless and too hurried to notice.”
He stopped speaking and his hands dropped from her face, but his eyes still clung to her eyes.
She waited a moment, breathless for him to continue, a-tiptoe to hear him say the magic three words.
But they did not come.
She searched his face frantically, her lips quivering, for she saw he had finished speaking.
This second blighting of her hopes was more than heart could bear and she cried
“Oh!” in a childish whisper and sat down, tears stinging her eyes.
Then she heard an ominous sound in the driveway, outside the window, a sound that brought home to her even more sharply the imminence of Ashley’s departure.
A pagan hearing the lapping of the waters around Charon’s boat could not have felt more desolate.
Uncle Peter, muffled in a quilt, was bringing out the carriage to take Ashley to the train.
Ashley said “Good-by,” very softly, caught up from the table the wide felt hat she had inveigled from Rhett and walked into the dark front hall.
His hand on the doorknob, he turned and looked at her, a long, desperate look, as if he wanted to carry away with him every detail of her face and figure.
Through a blinding mist of tears she saw his face and with a strangling pain in her throat she knew that he was going away, away from her care, away from the safe haven of this house, and out of her life, perhaps forever, without having spoken the words she so yearned to hear.
Time was going by like a mill race, and now it was too late.
She ran stumbling across the parlor and into the hall and clutched the ends of his sash.
“Kiss me,” she whispered.
“Kiss me good-by.”
His arms went around her gently, and he bent his head to her face.
At the first touch of his lips on hers, her arms were about his neck in a strangling grip.
For a fleeting immeasurable instant, he pressed her body close to his.
Then she felt a sudden tensing of all his muscles. Swiftly, he dropped the hat to the floor and, reaching up, detached her arms from his neck.
“No, Scarlett, no,” he said in a low voice, holding her crossed wrists in a grip that hurt.
“I love you,” she said choking.
“I’ve always loved you.
I’ve never loved anybody else.
I just married Charlie to—to try to hurt you.
Oh, Ashley, I love you so much I’d walk every step of the way to Virginia just to be near you!
And I’d cook for you and polish your boots and groom your horse—Ashley, say you love me!
I’ll live on it for the rest of my life!”
He bent suddenly to retrieve his hat and she had one glimpse of his face.
It was the unhappiest face she was ever to see, a face from which all aloofness had fled.
Written on it were his love for and joy that she loved him, but battling them both were shame and despair.
“Good-by,” he said hoarsely.
The door clicked open and a gust of cold wind swept the house, fluttering the curtains.
Scarlett shivered as she watched him run down the walk to the carriage, his saber glinting in the feeble winter sunlight, the fringe of his sash dancing jauntily.
CHAPTER XVI