“And me in me prime!” cried Gerald stung.
James spoke gently.
“Jerry, there’s no girl in Savannah you’d have less chance of marrying.
Her father is a Robillard, and those French are proud as Lucifer.
And her mother—God rest her soul—was a very great lady.”
“I care not,” said Gerald heatedly.
“Besides, her mother is dead, and old man Robillard likes me.”
“As a man, yes, but as a son-in-law, no.”
“The girl wouldn’t have you anyway,” interposed Andrew.
“She’s been in love with that wild buck of a cousin of hers, Philippe Robillard, for a year now, despite her family being at her morning and night to give him up.”
“He’s been gone to Louisiana this month now,” said Gerald.
“And how do you know?”
“I know,” answered Gerald, who did not care to disclose that Pork had supplied this valuable bit of information, or that Philippe had departed for the West at the express desire of his family.
“And I do not think she’s been so much in love with him that she won’t forget him.
Fifteen is too young to know much about love.”
“They’d rather have that breakneck cousin for her than you.”
So, James and Andrew were as startled as anyone when the news came out that the daughter of Pierre Robillard was to marry the little Irishman from up the country.
Savannah buzzed behind its doors and speculated about Philippe Robillard, who had gone West, but the gossiping brought no answer. Why the loveliest of the Robillard daughters should marry a loud-voiced, red-faced little man who came hardly up to her ears remained a mystery to all.
Gerald himself never quite knew how it all came about.
He only knew that a miracle had happened.
And, for once in his life, he was utterly humble when Ellen, very white but very calm, put a light hand on his arm and said:
“I will marry you, Mr. O’Hara.”
The thunderstruck Robillards knew the answer in part, but only Ellen and her mammy ever knew the whole story of the night when the girl sobbed till the dawn like a broken-hearted child and rose up in the morning a woman with her mind made up.
With foreboding, Mammy had brought her young mistress a small package, addressed in a strange hand from New Orleans, a package containing a miniature of Ellen, which she flung to the floor with a cry, four letters in her own handwriting to Philippe Robillard, and a brief letter from a New Orleans priest, announcing the death of her cousin in a barroom brawl.
“They drove him away, Father and Pauline and Eulalie.
They drove him away.
I hate them.
I hate them all.
I never want to see them again.
I want to get away.
I will go away where I’ll never see them again, or this town, or anyone who reminds me of—of-him.”
And when the night was nearly spent, Mammy, who had cried herself out over her mistress’ dark head, protested,
“But, honey, you kain do dat!”
“I will do it.
He is a kind man.
I will do it or go into the convent at Charleston.”
It was the threat of the convent that finally won the assent of bewildered and heartstricken Pierre Robillard.
He was staunchly Presbyterian, even though his family were Catholic, and the thought of his daughter becoming a nun was even worse than that of her marrying Gerald O’Hara.
After all, the man had nothing against him but a lack of family.
So, Ellen, no longer Robillard, turned her back on Savannah, never to see it again, and with a middle-aged husband, Mammy, and twenty “house niggers” journeyed toward Tara.
The next year, their first child was born and they named her Katie Scarlett, after Gerald’s mother.
Gerald was disappointed, for he had wanted a son, but he nevertheless was pleased enough over his small black-haired daughter to serve rum to every slave at Tara and to get roaringly, happily drunk himself.
If Ellen had ever regretted her sudden decision to marry him, no one ever knew it, certainly not Gerald, who almost burst with pride whenever he looked at her.
She had put Savannah and its memories behind her when she left that gently mannered city by the sea, and, from the moment of her arrival in the County, north Georgia was her home.
When she departed from her father’s house forever, she had left a home whose lines were as beautiful and flowing as a woman’s body, as a ship in full sail; a pale pink stucco house built in the French colonial style, set high from the ground in a dainty manner, approached by swirling stairs, banistered with wrought iron as delicate as lace; a dim, rich house, gracious but aloof.
She had left not only that graceful dwelling but also the entire civilization that was behind the building of it, and she found herself in a world that was as strange and different as if she had crossed a continent. Here in north Georgia was a rugged section held by a hardy people.
High up on the plateau at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, she saw rolling red hills wherever she looked, with huge outcroppings of the underlying granite and gaunt pines towering somberly everywhere.
It all seemed wild and untamed to her coastbred eyes accustomed to the quiet jungle beauty of the sea islands draped in their gray moss and tangled green, the white stretches of beach hot beneath a semitropic sun, the long flat vistas of sandy land studded with palmetto and palm.
This was a section that knew the chill of winter, as well as the heat of summer, and there was a vigor and energy in the people that was strange to her.
They were a kindly people, courteous, generous, filled with abounding good nature, but sturdy, virile, easy to anger.