You don’t know how it helps me. Every time I give some poor man my share I think that maybe, somewhere on the road up north, some woman is giving my Ashley a share of her dinner and it’s helping him to get home to me!”
“My Ashley.”
“Beloved, I am coming home to you.”
Scarlett turned away, wordless.
After that, Melanie noticed there was more food on the table when guests were present, even though Scarlett might grudge them every mouthful.
When the soldiers were too ill to go on, and there were many such, Scarlett put them to bed with none too good grace.
Each sick man meant another mouth to feed.
Someone had to nurse him and that meant one less worker at the business of fence building, hoeing, weeding and plowing.
One boy, on whose face a blond fuzz had just begun to sprout, was dumped on the front porch by a mounted soldier bound for Fayetteville. He had found him unconscious by the roadside and had brought him, across his saddle, to Tara, the nearest house.
The girls thought he must be one of the little cadets who had been called out of military school when Sherman approached Milledgeville but they never knew, for he died without regaining consciousness and a search of his pockets yielded no information.
A nice-looking boy, obviously a gentleman, and somewhere to the south, some woman was watching the roads, wondering where he was and when he was coming home, just as she and Melanie, with a wild hope in their hearts, watched every bearded figure that came up their walk.
They buried the cadet in the family burying ground, next to the three little O’Hara boys, and Melanie cried sharply as Pork filled in the grave, wondering in her heart if strangers were doing this same thing to the tall body of Ashley.
Will Benteen was another soldier, like the nameless boy, who arrived unconscious across the saddle of a comrade.
Will was acutely ill with pneumonia and when the girls put him to bed, they feared he would soon join the boy in the burying ground.
He had the sallow malarial face of the south Georgia Cracker, pale pinkish hair and washed-out blue eyes which even in delirium were patient and mild.
One of his legs was gone at the knee and to the stump was fitted a roughly whittled wooden peg.
He was obviously a Cracker, just as the boy they had buried so short a while ago was obviously a planter’s son.
Just how the girls knew this they could not say.
Certainly Will was no dirtier, no more hairy, no more lice infested than many fine gentlemen who came to Tara.
Certainly the language he used in his delirium was no less grammatical than that of the Tarleton twins.
But they knew instinctively, as they knew thoroughbred horses from scrubs, that he was not of their class.
But this knowledge did not keep them from laboring to save him.
Emaciated from a year in a Yankee prison, exhausted by his long tramp on his ill-fitting wooden peg, he had little strength to combat pneumonia and for days he lay in the bed moaning, trying to get up, fighting battles over again.
Never once did he call for mother, wife, sister or sweetheart and this omission worried Carreen.
“A man ought to have some folks,” she said.
“And he sounds like he didn’t have a soul in the world.”
For all his lankiness he was tough, and good nursing pulled him through.
The day came when his pale blue eyes, perfectly cognizant of his surroundings, fell upon Carreen sitting beside him, telling her rosary beads, the morning sun shining through her fair hair.
“Then you warn’t a dream, after all,” he said, in his flat toneless voice.
“I hope I ain’t troubled you too much, Ma’m.”
His convalescence was a long one and he lay quietly looking out of the window at the magnolias and causing very little trouble to anyone.
Carreen liked him because of his placid and unembarrassed silences.
She would sit beside him through the long hot afternoons, fanning him and saying nothing.
Carreen had very little to say these days as she moved, delicate and wraithlike, about the tasks which were within her strength.
She prayed a good deal, for when Scarlett came into her room without knocking, she always found her on her knees by her bed.
The sight never failed to annoy her, for Scarlett felt that the time for prayer had passed.
If God had seen fit to punish them so, then God could very well do without prayers.
Religion had always been a bargaining process with Scarlett.
She promised God good behavior in exchange for favors.
God had broken the bargain time and again, to her way of thinking, and she felt that she owed Him nothing at all now.
And whenever she found Carreen on her knees when she should have been taking an afternoon nap or doing the mending, she felt that Carreen was shirking her share of the burdens.
She said as much to Will Benteen one afternoon when he was able to sit up in a chair and was startled when he said in his flat voice:
“Let her be, Miss Scarlett.
It comforts her.”
“Comforts her?”
“Yes, she’s prayin’ for your ma and him.”
“Who is ‘him'?”
His faded blue eyes looked at her from under sandy lashes without surprise.
Nothing seemed to surprise or excite him.
Perhaps he had seen too much of the unexpected ever to be startled again.