Not my babies--"
"You must stop!"
"You don't understand.
She didn't want a baby and I made her.
This--this baby--it's all my damned fault.
We hadn't been sleeping together--"
"Hush, Captain Butler!
It is not fit--"
"And I was drunk and insane and I wanted to hurt her--because she had hurt me.
I wanted to--and I did--but she didn't want me.
She's never wanted me.
She never has and I tried--I tried so hard and--"
"Oh, please!"
"And I didn't know about this baby till the other day--when she fell.
She didn't know where I was to write to me and tell me--but she wouldn't have written me if she had known.
I tell you--I tell you I'd have come straight home--if I'd only known--whether she wanted me home or not. . . ."
"Oh, yes, I know you would!"
"God, I've been crazy these weeks, crazy and drunk!
And when she told me, there on the steps--what did I do?
What did I say?
I laughed and said:
'Cheer up.
Maybe you'll have a miscarriage.'
And she--"
Melanie suddenly went white and her eyes widened with horror as she looked down at the black tormented head writhing in her lap.
The afternoon sun streamed in through the open window and suddenly she saw, as for the first time, how large and brown and strong his hands were and how thickly the black hairs grew along the backs of them.
Involuntarily, she recoiled from them.
They seemed so predatory, so ruthless and yet, twined in her skirt, so broken, so helpless.
Could it be possible that he had heard and believed the preposterous lie about Scarlett and Ashley and become jealous?
True, he had left town immediately after the scandal broke but-- No, it couldn't be that.
Captain Butler was always going off abruptly on journeys.
He couldn't have believed the gossip.
He was too sensible.
If that had been the cause of the trouble, wouldn't he have tried to shoot Ashley?
Or at least demanded an explanation?
No, it couldn't be that.
It was only that he was drunk and sick from strain and his mind was running wild, like a man delirious, babbling wild fantasies.
Men couldn't stand strains as well as women.
Something had upset him, perhaps he had had a small quarrel with Scarlett and magnified it.
Perhaps some of the awful things he said were true.
But all of them could not be true.
Oh, not that last, certainly!
No man could say such a thing to a woman he loved as passionately as this man loved Scarlett.
Melanie had never seen evil, never seen cruelty, and now that she looked on them for the first time she found them too inconceivable to believe.
He was drunk and sick.
And sick children must be humored.
"There!
There!" she said crooningly.
"Hush, now.
I understand."