It excited her as if she were on the brink of a discovery.
"It's a curse--this not wanting to look on naked realities.
Until the war, life was never more real to me than a shadow show on a curtain.
And I preferred it so.
I do not like the outlines of things to be too sharp.
I like them gently blurred, a little hazy."
He stopped and smiled faintly, shivering a little as the cold wind went through his thin shirt.
"In other words, Scarlett, I am a coward."
His talk of shadow shows and hazy outlines conveyed no meaning to her but his last words were in language she could understand.
She knew they were untrue. Cowardice was not in him.
Every line of his slender body spoke of generations of brave and gallant men and Scarlett knew his war record by heart.
"Why, that's not so!
Would a coward have climbed on the cannon at Gettysburg and rallied the men?
Would the General himself have written Melanie a letter about a coward?
And--"
"That's not courage," he said tiredly.
"Fighting is like champagne.
It goes to the heads of cowards as quickly as of heroes.
Any fool can be brave on a battle field when it's be brave or else be killed.
I'm talking of something else.
And my kind of cowardice is infinitely worse than if I had run the first time I heard a cannon fired."
His words came slowly and with difficulty as if it hurt to speak them and he seemed to stand off and look with a sad heart at what he had said.
Had any other man spoken so, Scarlett would have dismissed such protestations contemptuously as mock modesty and a bid for praise.
But Ashley seemed to mean them and there was a look in his eyes which eluded her--not fear, not apology, but the bracing to a strain which was inevitable and overwhelming.
The wintry wind swept her damp ankles and she shivered again but her shiver was less from the wind than from the dread his words evoked in her heart.
"But, Ashley, what are you afraid of?"
"Oh, nameless things.
Things which sound very silly when they are put into words.
Mostly of having life suddenly become too real, of being brought into personal, too personal, contact with some of the simple facts of life.
It isn't that I mind splitting logs here in the mud, but I do mind what it stands for.
I do mind, very much, the loss of the beauty of the old life I loved.
Scarlett, before the war, life was beautiful.
There was a glamor to it, a perfection and a completeness and a symmetry to it like Grecian art.
Maybe it wasn't so to everyone.
I know that now.
But to me, living at Twelve Oaks, there was a real beauty to living.
I belonged in that life.
I was a part of it.
And now it is gone and I am out of place in this new life, and I am afraid.
Now, I know that in the old days it was a shadow show I watched.
I avoided everything which was not shadowy, people and situations which were too real, too vital.
I resented their intrusion.
I tried to avoid you too, Scarlett.
You were too full of living and too real and I was cowardly enough to prefer shadows and dreams."
"But--but--Melly?"
"Melanie is the gentlest of dreams and a part of my dreaming.
And if the war had not come I would have lived out my life, happily buried at Twelve Oaks, contentedly watching life go by and never being a part of it.
But when the war came, life as it really is thrust itself against me.
The first time I went into action--it was at Bull Run, you remember--I saw my boyhood friends blown to bits and heard dying horses scream and learned the sickeningly horrible feeling of seeing men crumple up and spit blood when I shot them.
But those weren't the worst things about the war, Scarlett.