“Sure and we sounded like a choir of angels,” Rhett said, mimicking Gerald O’Hara’s brogue. “ ‘When first I saw sweet Peggy, ’twas on a market day . . .’ ” He sang the first verse of “Peg in a Low Back’d Car,” then admitted he didn’t know the rest. “You must know every word of it, Scarlett. Sing it for me.”
She tried, but couldn’t find the strength. “I’ve forgotten,” she said, to cover her weakness. She was so tired. If only she could rest her head against Rhett’s warmth and sleep. His arms felt so wonderful holding her. Her head dropped. It was too heavy to hold up any longer. Rhett shook her.
“Scarlett, do you hear me? Scarlett! I feel a change in the current, I swear it, we’re very near shore. You can’t give up now. Come on, my darling, let me see some more of that gumption of yours. Hold up your head, my pet, it’s almost over.”
“. . . so cold . . .”
“Damn you for a quitter, Scarlett O’Hara! I should have let Sherman get you in Atlanta. You weren’t worth saving.”
The words registered slowly in her fading consciousness, and produced only a feeble stirring of anger. But it was enough. Her eyes opened and her head lifted to meet the dimly sensed challenge.
“Take a deep breath,” Rhett commanded. “We’re going in.” He put his big hand over her nose and mouth and dove under the water with her feebly struggling body held close. They surfaced outside the hull, near a line of tall, cresting combers. “Almost there, my love,” Rhett gasped. He bent one arm around Scarlett’s neck and held her heavy head in his hand while he swam expertly through a breaking wave and used its power to carry them into the shallows.
A thin rain was falling, blown almost horizontal by the gusting wind. Rhett cradled Scarlett’s limp form to his chest and huddled over it, kneeling in the white frothing edge of the water. A comber rose far behind him and raced toward the beach. It began to curl over on itself, then the foam-streaked gray water crashed, surged toward land, and the rolling, roiling forces in it struck Rhett’s back and roared across his sheltering body.
When the wave had passed over and spent itself, he rose unsteadily to his feet and stumbled forward onto the beach, clasping Scarlett to him. His bare feet and legs were cut in a hundred places by the fragments of shell that the breaker had thrown against him, but he was uncaring. He ran clumsily through the deep clinging sand to an opening in the line of immense sand dunes and climbed a short way into a bowl-like area sheltered from the winds. There he gently placed Scarlett’s body on the soft sand.
His voice broke as he called Scarlett’s name over and over again while he tried to bring life into her chilled whiteness by rubbing every part of her with his two hands. Her snarled, glistening black hair was spilled around her head and shoulders and her black eyebrows and lashes were shocking streaks across her colorless wet face. Rhett slapped her cheeks softly and urgently with the backs of his fingers.
When her eyes opened their color looked as strong as emeralds. Rhett shouted in primitive triumph.
Scarlett’s fingers half closed around the shifting solidity of the rain-hardened sand. “Land,” she said. And she began to cry in gasping sobs.
Rhett put one arm under her shoulders and lifted her into the protection of his bent crouching body. With his free hand he touched her hair, her cheeks, mouth, chin. “My darling, my life. I thought I’d lost you. I thought I’d killed you. I thought—Oh, Scarlett, you’re alive. Don’t cry, my dearest, it’s all over. You’re safe. It’s all right. Everything—” He kissed her forehead, her throat, her cheeks. Scarlett’s pale skin warmed with color, and she turned her head to meet his kissed with her own.
And there was no cold, no rain, no weakness—only the burning of Rhett’s lips on her lips, on her body, the heat of his hands. And the power she felt under her fingers when she gripped his shoulders. And the pounding of her heart in her throat against his lips, the strong beat of his shirt beneath her palms when she tangled her fingers in the thick curling hair on his chest.
Yes! I did remember it, it wasn’t a dream. Yes, this is the dark swirling that draws me in and closes out the world and makes me alive, so alive, and free and spinning up to the heart of the sun. “Yes!” she shouted again and again, meeting Rhett’s passion with her own, her demands the same as his. Until in the swirling, spiraling rapture there were no longer words or thoughts, only a union beyond mind, beyond time, beyond the world.
32
He loves me! What a fool I was to doubt what I knew. Scarlett’s swollen lips curved in a lazy surfeited smile, and she slowly opened her eyes.
Rhett was sitting beside her. His arms were wrapped across his knees, his face hidden in the hollow they made.
Scarlett stretched luxuriantly. For the first time she felt the rasping sand against her skin, noticed her surroundings. Why, it’s pouring down rain. We’ll catch our death. We’ll have to find some shelter before we make love again. Her dimples flickered, and she stifled a giggle. Maybe not, we sure didn’t pay any attention to the weather just now.
She reached out her hand and traced Rhett’s spine with her fingernails.
He jerked away as if she’d burned him, turning in a rush to face her, then springing to his feet. She couldn’t read his expression.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” he said. “Try to get some more rest if you can. I’m going to look for some place to dry out and build a fire. There are shacks on all these islands.”
“I’ll go with you.” Scarlett struggled to get up. Rhett’s sweater was across her legs, and she was still wearing hers. She felt burdened by their water-laden weight.
“No. You stay here.” He was walking away, up the steep dunes. Scarlett gaped foolishly, not believing her eyes.
“Rhett! You can’t leave me. I won’t let you.”
But he kept climbing. She could see only his broad back with his wet shirt clinging to it.
At the top of the dune he halted. His head turned slowly from side to side. Then his hunched shoulders squared. He turned and slid recklessly down the steep slope.
“There’s a cottage. I know where we are. Get up.” Rhett held his hand out to help Scarlett rise. She clasped it eagerly.
The cottages that some Charlestonians had built on the nearby islands were designed to capture the cooler sea breezes in the hot humid days of the long Southern summer. They were retreats from the city and the city’s formality, little more than unornamented shacks with deep shaded porches and weathered clapboard siding perched on creosoted timbers to raise them above the blistering summer sands. In the cold driving rain the shelter Rhett had found looked derelict and inadequate to stand against the buffeting wind. But he knew these island houses had stood for generations, and had kitchen fireplaces where meals were prepared. Exactly the shelter needed for shipwreck survivors.
He broke open the door to the cottage with a single kick. Scarlett followed him inside. Why was he so silent? He’d hardly said a word to her, not even when he was carrying her in his arms through the thicket of low shrubs at the base of the sand dunes. I want him to talk, Scarlett thought, I want to hear his voice saying how much he loves me. Lord knows he made me wait long enough.
He found a worn patchwork quilt in a cupboard. “Take off those wet things and wrap up in this,” he said. He tossed the quilt onto her lap. “I’ll have a fire started in a minute.”
Scarlett dropped her torn pantalets on top of the soaked sweater and dried herself on the quilt. It was soft, and it felt good. She wrapped it shawl-fashion then sat down again on the hard kitchen chair. The quilt made an envelope for her feet on the floor. She was dry for the first time in hours, but she began to shiver.
Rhett brought dry wood in from a box on the porch outside the kitchen. In a few minutes there was a small fire in the big fireplace. Almost at once it bit into the teepee of logs and a tall orange burst of flame leapt into crackling life. It lit his brooding face.
Scarlett hobbled across the room to warm herself at the fire. “Why don’t you get out of your wet things, too, Rhett? I’ll let you have the quilt to dry off on; it feels wonderful.” She dropped her eyes as if she were embarrassed by her boldness. Her thick lashes fluttered on her cheeks. Rhett did not respond.
“I’ll just get soaked again when I go back out,” he said. “We’re only a couple of miles from Fort Moultrie. I’ll go get help.” Rhett walked into the small pantry adjoining the kitchen.
“Bother Fort Moultrie!” Scarlett wished he’d stop rooting around in the pantry like that. How could she talk to him when he was in another room?
Rhett emerged with a bottle of whiskey in one hand. “The shelves are pretty bare,” he said with a brief smile, “but the necessities are there.” He opened a cupboard and took down two cups. “Clean enough,” he said. “I’ll pour us a drink.” He set cups and bottle down on the table.
“I don’t want a drink. I want—”
He interrupted before she could tell him what she wanted. “I need a drink,” he said. He poured the cup half full, drank it in one long swallow, then shook his head. “No wonder they left it here; it’s real rotgut. Still . . .” He poured again.
Scarlett watched him with a look of amused indulgence. Poor darling, how nervous he is. When she spoke her voice was heavy with loving patience. “You don’t have to be so skittery, Rhett. It’s not like you compromised me or anything. We’re two married people who love each other, that’s all.”
Rhett stared at her over the rim of the cup, then put it carefully down on the table. “Scarlett, what happened out there had nothing to do with love. It was a celebration of survival, that’s all. You see it after every battle in wartime. The men who don’t get killed fall on the first woman they see and prove they’re still alive by using her body. In this case you used mine, too, because you’d narrowly escaped dying. It had nothing to do with love.”
The harshness of his words took Scarlett’s breath away.
But then she remembered his hoarse voice in her ear, the words “my darling,” “my life,” “I love you,” repeated a hundred times. No matter what Rhett might say, he loved her. She knew it in the innermost center of her soul, the place where there were no lies. He’s still afraid that I don’t really love him! That’s why he won’t admit how much he loves me.
She began to move toward him. “You can say anything you like, Rhett, but it won’t change the truth. I love you and you love me and we made love to prove it to each other.”
Rhett drank the whiskey. Then he laughed harshly. “I never thought you were a silly little romantic, Scarlett. You disappoint me. You used to have some sense in your hard little head. A primitive, hasty coupling should never be confused with love. Though God knows it happens often enough to fill churches with wedding ceremonies.”
Scarlett continued to walk. “You can talk till you’re blue, but that won’t change anything.” She put a hand to her face and wiped away the tears that were pouring from her eyes. She was very close to him now. She could smell the salt on his skin, the whiskey on his breath. “You do love me,” she sobbed, “you do, you do.” The quilt fell to the floor when she let go of it to reach out to Rhett. “Take me in your arms and tell me you don’t love me and then I’ll believe it.”
Rhett’s hands abruptly caught her head and he kissed her with bruising possessive strength. Scarlett’s arms closed behind his neck as his hands moved down her throat and her shoulders, and she gave herself up to abandonment.
But Rhett’s fingers suddenly closed around her wrists and he pried her arms apart, away from his neck, away from him, and his mouth was no longer seeking hers, his body was drawing away.
“Why?” she cried. “You want me.”
He cast her away, releasing her wrists, stumbling backwards in the first uncontrolled action she had ever seen him take. “Yes, by Christ! I do want you, and sicken for you. You’re a poison in my blood, Scarlett, a sickness of my soul. I’ve known men with a hunger for opium that was like my hunger for you. I know what happens to an addict. He becomes enslaved, then destroyed. It almost happened to me, but I escaped. I won’t risk it again. I won’t destroy myself for you.” He crashed through the door and out into the storm.
The wind howled through the open door, icy against Scarlett’s bare skin. She grabbed up the quilt from the floor and wrapped it around her. She pushed against the wind to the yawning doorway but could see nothing through the rain. It took all her strength to pull the door closed. She had very little strength left.
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