She, a member of an old and staunchly Confederate family, a planter's family, had gone over to the enemy and by so doing had brought shame on every family in the County.
The mourners were seething with indignation and downcast with sorrow, especially three of them--old man McRae, who had been Gerald's crony since he came to the up-country from Savannah so many years before, Grandma Fontaine who loved him because he was Ellen's husband, and Mrs. Tarleton who had been closer to him than to any of her neighbors because, as she often said, he was the only man in the County who knew a stallion from a gelding.
The sight of the stormy faces of these three in the dim parlor where Gerald lay before the funeral had caused Ashley and Will some uneasiness and they had retired to Ellen's office for a consultation.
"Some of them are goin' to say somethin' about Suellen," said Will abruptly, biting his straw in half.
"They think they got just cause to say somethin'.
Maybe they have.
It ain't for me to say.
But, Ashley, whether they're right or not, we'll have to resent it, bein' the men of the family, and then there'll be trouble.
Can't nobody do nothin' with old man McRae because he's deaf as a post and can't hear folks tryin' to shut him up.
And you know there ain't nobody in God's world ever stopped Grandma Fontaine from speakin' her mind.
And as for Mrs. Tarleton--did you see her roll them russet eyes of hers every time she looked at Sue?
She's got her ears laid back and can't hardly wait.
If they say somethin', we got to take it up and we got enough trouble at Tara now without bein' at outs with our neighbors."
Ashley sighed worriedly.
He knew the tempers of his neighbors better than Will did and he remembered that fully half of the quarrels and some of the shootings of the days before the war had risen from the County custom of saying a few words over the coffins of departed neighbors.
Generally the words were eulogistic in the extreme but occasionally they were not.
Sometimes, words meant in the utmost respect were misconstrued by overstrung relatives of the dead and scarcely were the last shovels of earth mounded above the coffin before trouble began.
In the absence of a priest Ashley was to conduct the services with the aid of Carreen's Book of Devotions, the assistance of the Methodist and Baptist preachers of Jonesboro and Fayetteville having been tactfully refused.
Carreen, more devoutly Catholic than her sisters, had been very upset that Scarlett had neglected to bring a priest from Atlanta with her and had only been a little eased by the reminder that when the priest came down to marry Will and Suellen, he could read the services over Gerald.
It was she who objected to the neighboring Protestant preachers and gave the matter into Ashley's hands, marking passages in her book for him to read.
Ashley, leaning against the old secretary, knew that the responsibility for preventing trouble lay with him and, knowing the hair-trigger tempers of the County, was at a loss as to how to proceed.
"There's no help for it, Will," he said, rumpling his bright hair.
"I can't knock Grandma Fontaine down or old man McRae either, and I can't hold my hand over Mrs. Tarleton's mouth.
And the mildest thing they'll say is that Suellen is a murderess and a traitor and but for her Mr. O'Hara would still be alive.
Damn this custom of speaking over the dead.
It's barbarous."
"Look, Ash," said Will slowly.
"I ain't aimin' to have nobody say nothin' against Suellen, no matter what they think.
You leave it to me.
When you've finished with the readin' and the prayin' and you say:
'If anyone would like to say a few words,' you look right at me, so I can speak first."
But Scarlett, watching the pallbearers' difficulty in getting the coffin through the narrow entrance into the burying ground, had no thought of trouble to come after the funeral.
She was thinking with a leaden heart that in burying Gerald she was burying one of the last links that joined her to the old days of happiness and irresponsibility.
Finally the pallbearers set the coffin down near the grave and stood clenching and unclenching their aching fingers.
Ashley, Melanie and Will filed into the inclosure and stood behind the O'Hara girls.
All the closer neighbors who could crowd in were behind them and the others stood outside the brick wall.
Scarlett, really seeing them for the first time, was surprised and touched by the size of the crowd.
With transportation so limited it was kind of so many to come.
There were fifty or sixty people there, some of them from so far away she wondered how they had heard in time to come.
There were whole families from Jonesboro and Fayetteville and Lovejoy and with them a few negro servants.
Many small farmers from far across the river were present and Crackers from the backwoods and a scattering of swamp folk.
The swamp men were lean bearded giants in homespun, coon-skin caps on their heads, their rifles easy in the crooks of their arms, their wads of tobacco stilled in their cheeks.
Their women were with them, their bare feet sunk in the soft red earth, their lower lips full of snuff.
Their faces beneath their sun-bonnets were sallow and malarial- looking but shining clean and their freshly ironed calicoes glistened with starch.
The near neighbors were there in full force.
Grandma Fontaine, withered, wrinkled and yellow as an old molted bird, was leaning on her cane, and behind her were Sally Munroe Fontaine and Young Miss Fontaine.
They were trying vainly by whispered pleas and jerks at her skirt to make the old lady sit down on the brick wall.
Grandma's husband, the Old Doctor, was not there.
He had died two months before and much of the bright malicious joy of life had gone from her old eyes.
Cathleen Calvert Hilton stood alone as befitted one whose husband had helped bring about the present tragedy, her faded sunbonnet hiding her bowed face.