She dreaded to tell Melanie the truth but one of her rare honest instincts arose, an instinct that would not let her masquerade in false colors before the woman who had fought her battles for her.
So she had hurried to Melanie that morning, as soon as Rhett and Bonnie had left the house.
But at her first tumbled-out words:
"Melly, I must explain about the other day--" Melanie had imperiously stopped her.
Scarlett looking shamefaced into the dark eyes that were flashing with love and anger, knew with a sinking heart that the peace and calm following confession could never be hers.
Melanie had forever cut off that line of action by her first words.
With one of the few adult emotions Scarlett had ever had, she realized that to unburden her own tortured heart would be the purest selfishness.
She would be ridding herself of her burden and laying it on the heart of an innocent and trusting person.
She owed Melanie a debt for her championship and that debt could only be paid with silence.
What cruel payment it would be to wreck Melanie's life with the unwelcome knowledge that her husband was unfaithful to her, and her beloved friend a party to it!
"I can't tell her," she thought miserably.
"Never, not even if my conscience kills me."
She remembered irrelevantly Rhett's drunken remark: "She can't conceive of dishonor in anyone she loves . . . let that be your cross."
Yes, it would be her cross, until she died, to keep this torment silent within her, to wear the hair shirt of shame, to feel it chafing her at every tender look and gesture Melanie would make throughout the years, to subdue forever the impulse to cry:
"Don't be so kind!
Don't fight for me!
I'm not worth it!"
"If you only weren't such a fool, such a sweet, trusting, simple- minded fool, it wouldn't be so hard," she thought desperately.
"I've toted lots of weary loads but this is going to be the heaviest and most galling load I've ever toted."
Melanie sat facing her, in a low chair, her feet firmly planted on an ottoman so high that her knees stuck up like a child's, a posture she would never have assumed had not rage possessed her to the point of forgetting proprieties.
She held a line of tatting in her hands and she was driving the shining needle back and forth as furiously as though handling a rapier in a duel.
Had Scarlett been possessed of such an anger, she would have been stamping both feet and roaring like Gerald in his finest days, calling on God to witness the accursed duplicity and knavishness of mankind and uttering blood-curdling threats of retaliation.
But only by the flashing needle and the delicate brows drawn down toward her nose did Melanie indicate that she was inwardly seething.
Her voice was cool and her words were more close clipped than usual.
But the forceful words she uttered were foreign to Melanie who seldom voiced an opinion at all and never an unkind word.
Scarlett realized suddenly that the Wilkeses and the Hamiltons were capable of furies equal to and surpassing those of the O'Haras.
"I've gotten mighty tired of hearing people criticize you, darling," Melanie said, "and this is the last straw and I'm going to do something about it.
All this has happened because people are jealous of you, because you are so smart and successful.
You've succeeded where lots of men, even, have failed.
Now, don't be vexed with me, dear, for saying that.
I don't mean you've ever been unwomanly or unsexed yourself, as lots of folks have said.
Because you haven't.
People just don't understand you and people can't bear for women to be smart.
But your smartness and your success don't give people the right to say that you and Ashley-- Stars above!"
The soft vehemence of this last ejaculation would have been, upon a man's lips, profanity of no uncertain meaning.
Scarlett stared at her, alarmed by so unprecedented an outburst.
"And for them to come to me with the filthy lies they'd concocted-- Archie, India, Mrs. Elsing!
How did they dare?
Of course, Mrs. Elsing didn't come here.
No, indeed, she didn't have the courage.
But she's always hated you, darling, because you were more popular than Fanny.
And she was so incensed at your demoting Hugh from the management of the mill.
But you were quite right in demoting him.
He's just a piddling, do-less, good-for-nothing!"
Swiftly Melanie dismissed the playmate of her childhood and the beau of her teen years.
"I blame myself about Archie.
I shouldn't have given the old scoundrel shelter.
Everyone told me so but I wouldn't listen.
He didn't like you, dear, because of the convicts, but who is he to criticize you?
A murderer, and the murderer of a woman, too!