Soon Atlanta became accustomed to seeing Scarlett and her bodyguard and, from being accustomed, the ladies grew to envy her her freedom of movement. Since the Ku Klux lynching, the ladies had been practically immured, not even going to town to shop unless there were half a dozen in their group. Naturally social minded, they became restless and, putting their pride in their pockets, they began to beg the loan of Archie from Scarlett. And whenever she did not need him, she was gracious enough to spare him for the use of other ladies.
Soon Archie became an Atlanta institution and the ladies competed for his free time. There was seldom a morning when a child or a negro servant did not arrive at breakfast time with a note saying: “If you aren’t using Archie this afternoon, do let me have him. I want to drive to the cemetery with flowers.” “I must go to the milliners.” “I should like Archie to drive Aunt Nelly for an airing.” “I must go calling on Peters Street and Grandpa is not feeling well enough to take me. Could Archie-”
He drove them all, maids, matrons and widows, and toward all he evidenced the same uncompromising contempt. It was obvious that he did not like women, Melanie excepted, any better than he liked negroes and Yankees. Shocked at first by his rudeness, the ladies finally became accustomed to him and, as he was so silent, except for intermittent explosions of tobacco juice, they took him as much for granted as the horses he drove and forgot his very existence. In fact, Mrs. Merriwether related to Mrs. Meade the complete details of her niece’s confinement before she even remembered Archie’s presence on the front seat of the carriage.
At no other time than this could such a situation have been possible. Before the war, he would not have been permitted even in the ladies’ kitchens. They would have handed him food through the back door and sent him about his business. But now they welcomed his reassuring presence. Rude, illiterate, dirty, he was a bulwark between the ladies and the terrors of Reconstruction. He was neither friend nor servant. He was a hired bodyguard, protecting the women while their men worked by day or were absent from home at night.
It seemed to Scarlett that after Archie came to work for her Frank was away at night very frequently. He said the books at the store had to be balanced and business was brisk enough now to give him little time to attend to this in working hours. And there were sick friends with whom he had to sit. Then there was the organization of Democrats who forgathered every Wednesday night to devise ways of regaining the ballot and Frank never missed a meeting. Scarlett thought this organization did little else except argue the merits of General John B. Gordon over every other general, except General Lee, and refight the war. Certainly she could observe no progress in the direction of the recovery of the ballot. But Frank evidently enjoyed the meetings for he stayed out until all hours on those nights.
Ashley also sat up with the sick and he, too, attended the Democratic meetings and he was usually away on the same nights as Frank. On these nights, Archie escorted Pitty, Scarlett, Wade and little Ella though the back yard to Melanie’s house and the two families spent the evenings together. The ladies sewed while Archie lay full length on the parlor sofa snoring, his gray whiskers fluttering at each rumble. No one had invited him to dispose himself on the sofa and as it was the finest piece of furniture in the house, the ladies secretly moaned every time he lay down on it, planting his boot on the pretty upholstery. But none of them had the courage to remonstrate with him. Especially after he remarked that it was lucky he went to sleep easy, for otherwise the sound of women clattering like a flock of guinea hens would certainly drive him crazy.
Scarlett sometimes wondered where Archie had come from and what his life had been before he came to live in Melly’s cellar but she asked no questions. There was that about his grim one-eyed face which discouraged curiosity. All she knew was that his voice bespoke the mountains to the north and that he had been in the army and had lost both leg and eye shortly before the surrender. It was words spoken in a fit of anger against Hugh Elsing which brought out the truth of Archie’s past.
One morning, the old man had driven her to Hugh’s mill and she had found it idle, the negroes gone and Hugh sitting despondently under a tree. His crew had not made their appearance that morning and he was at a loss as to what to do. Scarlett was in a furious temper and did not scruple to expend it on Hugh, for she had just received an order for a large amount of lumber-a rush order at that. She had used energy and charm and bargaining to get that order and now the mill was quiet.
“Drive me out to the other mill,” she directed Archie. “Yes, I know it’ll take a long time and we won’t get any dinner but what am I paying you for? I’ll have to make Mr. Wilkes stop what he’s doing and run me off this lumber. Like as not, his crew won’t be working either. Great balls of fire! I never saw such a nincompoop as Hugh Elsing! I’m going to get rid of him just as soon as that Johnnie Gallegher finishes the stores he’s building. What do I care if Gallegher was in the Yankee Army? He’ll work. I never saw a lazy Irishman yet. And I’m through with free issue darkies. You just can’t depend on them. I’m going to get Johnnie Gallegher and lease me some convicts. He’ll get work out of them. He’ll-”
Archie turned to her, his eye malevolent, and when he spoke there was cold anger in his rusty voice.
“The day you gits convicts is the day I quits you,” he said.
Scarlett was startled. “Good heavens! Why?”
“I knows about convict leasin’. I calls it convict murderin’. Buyin’ men like they was mules. Treatin’ them worse than mules ever was treated. Beatin’ them, starvin’ them, killin’ them. And who cares? The State don’t care. It’s got the lease money. The folks that gits the convicts, they don’t care. All they want is to feed them cheap and git all the work they can out of them. Hell, Ma’m. I never thought much of women and I think less of them now.”
“Is it any of your business?”
“I reckon,” said Archie laconically and, after a pause, “I was a convict for nigh on to forty years.”
Scarlett gasped, and, for a moment, shrank back against the cushions. This then was the answer to the riddle of Archie, his unwillingness to tell his last name or the place of his birth or any scrap of his past life, the answer to the difficulty with which he spoke and his cold hatred of the world. Forty years! He must have gone into prison a young man. Forty years! Why-he must have been a life prisoner and lifers were-
“Was it-murder?”
“Yes,” answered Archie briefly, as he flapped the reins. “M’ wife.”
Scarlett’s eyelids batted rapidly with fright.
The mouth beneath the beard seemed to move, as if he were smiling grimly at her fear. “I ain’t goin’ to kill you, Ma’m, if that’s what’s frettin’ you. Thar ain’t but one reason for killin’ a woman.”
“You killed your wife!”
“She was layin’ with my brother. He got away. I ain’t sorry none that I kilt her. Loose women ought to be kilt. The law ain’t got no right to put a man in jail for that but I was sont.”
“But-how did you get out? Did you escape? Were you pardoned?”
“You might call it a pardon.” His thick gray brows writhed together as though the effort of stringing words together was difficult.
“’Long in ’sixty-four when Sherman come through, I was at Milledgeville jail, like I had been for forty years. And the warden he called all us prisoners together and he says the Yankees are a-comin’ a-burnin’ and a-killin’. Now if thar’s one thing I hates worse than a nigger or a woman, it’s a Yankee.”
“Why? Had you-Did you ever know any Yankees?”
“No’m. But I’d hearn tell of them. I’d hearn tell they couldn’t never mind their own bizness. I hates folks who can’t mind their own bizness. What was they doin’ in Georgia, freein’ our niggers and burnin’ our houses and killin’ our stock? Well, the warden he said the army needed more soldiers bad, and any of us who’d jine up would be free at the end of the war-if we come out alive. But us lifers-us murderers, the warden he said the army didn’t want us. We was to be sont somewheres else to another jail. But I said to the warden I ain’t like most lifers. I’m just in for killin’ my wife and she needed killin’. And I wants to fight the Yankees. And the warden he saw my side of it and he slipped me out with the other prisoners.”
He paused and grunted.
“Huh. That was right funny. They put me in jail for killin’ and they let me out with a gun in my hand and a free pardon to do more killin’. It shore was good to be a free man with a rifle in my hand again. Us men from Milledgeville did good fightin’ and killin’-and a lot of us was kilt. I never knowed one who deserted. And when the surrender come, we was free. I lost this here leg and this here eye. But I ain’t sorry.”
“Oh,” said Scarlett, weakly.
She tried to remember what she had heard about the releasing of the Milledgeville convicts in that last desperate effort to stem the tide of Sherman’s army. Frank had mentioned it that Christmas of 1864. What had he said? But her memories of that time were too chaotic. Again she felt the wild terror of those days, heard the siege guns, saw the line of wagons dripping blood into the red roads, saw the Home Guard marching off, the little cadets and the children like Phil Meade and the old men like Uncle Henry and Grandpa Merriwether. And the convicts had marched out too, to die in the twilight of the Confederacy, to freeze in the snow and sleet of that last campaign in Tennessee.
For a brief moment she thought what a fool this old man was, to fight for a state which had taken forty years from his life. Georgia had taken his youth and his middle years for a crime that was no crime to him, yet he had freely given a leg and an eye to Georgia. The bitter words Rhett had spoken in the early days of the war came back to her, and she remembered him saying he would never fight for a society that had made him an outcast. But when the emergency had arisen he had gone off to fight for that same society, even as Archie had done. It seemed to her that all Southern men, high or low, were sentimental fools and cared less for their hides than for words which had no meaning.
She looked at Archie’s gnarled old hands, his two pistols and his knife, and fear pricked her again. Were there other ex-convicts at large, like Archie, murderers, desperadoes, thieves, pardoned for their crimes, in the name of the Confederacy? Why, any stranger on the street might be a murderer! If Frank ever learned the truth about Archie, there would be the devil to pay. Or if Aunt Pitty-but the shock would kill Pitty. And as for Melanie-Scarlett almost wished she could tell Melanie the truth about Archie. It would serve her right for picking up trash and foisting it off on her friends and relatives.
“I’m-I’m glad you told me, Archie. I-I won’t tell anyone. It would be a great shock to Mrs. Wilkes and the other ladies if they knew.”
“Huh. Miz Wilkes knows. I told her the night she fuss let me sleep in her cellar. You don’t think I’d let a nice lady like her take me into her house not knowin’?”
“Saints preserve us!” cried Scarlet, aghast.
Melanie knew this man was a murderer and a woman murderer at that and she hadn’t ejected him from her house. She had trusted her son with him and her aunt and sister-in-law and all her friends. And she, the most timid of females, had not been frightened to be alone with him in her house.
“Miz Wilkes is right sensible, for a woman. She ‘lowed that I was all right. She ‘lowed that a liar allus kept on lyin’ and a thief kept on stealin’ but folks don’t do more’n one murder in a lifetime. And she reckoned as how anybody who’d fought for the Confederacy had wiped out anything bad they’d done. Though I don’t hold that I done nothin’ bad, killin’ my wife… Yes, Miz Wilkes is right sensible, for a woman… And I’m tellin’ you, the day you leases convicts is the day I quits you.”
Scarlett made no reply but she thought,
“The sooner you quit me the better it will suit me. A murderer!”
How could Melly have been so-so-Well, there was no word for Melanie’s action in taking in this old ruffian and not telling her friends he was a jailbird. So service in the army wiped out past sins! Melanie had that mixed up with baptism! But then Melly was utterly silly about the Confederacy, its veterans, and anything pertaining to them. Scarlett silently damned the Yankees and added another mark on her score against them. They were responsible for a situation that forced a woman to keep a murderer at her side to protect her.
Driving home with Archie in the chill twilight, Scarlett saw a clutter of saddle horses, buggies and wagons outside the Girl of the Period Saloon. Ashley was sitting on his horse, a strained alert look on his face; the Simmons boys were leaning from their buggy, making emphatic gestures; Hugh Elsing, his lock of brown hair falling in his eyes, was waving his hands. Grandpa Merriwether’s pie wagon was in the center of the tangle and, as she came closer, Scarlett saw that Tommy Wellburn and Uncle Henry Hamilton were crowded on the seat with him.
“I wish,” thought Scarlett irritably, “that Uncle Henry wouldn’t ride home in that contraption. He ought to be ashamed to be seen in it. It isn’t as though he didn’t have a horse of his own. He just does it so he and Grandpa can go to the saloon together every night.”
As she came abreast the crowd something of their tenseness reached her, insensitive though she was, and made fear clutch at her heart.
“Oh!” she thought. “I hope no one else has been raped! If the Ku Klux lynch just one more darky the Yankees will wipe us out!” And she spoke to Archie. “Pull up. Something’s wrong.”
“You ain’t goin’ to stop outside a saloon,” said Archie.
“You heard me. Pull up. Good evening, everybody. Ashley-Uncle Henry-is something wrong? You all look so-”
The crowd turned to her, tipping their hats and smiling, but there was a driving excitement in their eyes.
“Something’s right and something’s wrong,” barked Uncle Henry. “Depends on how you look at it. The way I figure is the legislature couldn’t have done different.”
The legislature? thought Scarlett in relief. She had little interest in the legislature, feeling that its doings could hardly affect her. It was the prospect of the Yankee soldiers on a rampage again that frightened her.
“What’s the legislature been up to now?”
“They’ve flatly refused to ratify the amendment,” said Grandpa Merriwether and there was pride in his voice. “That’ll show the Yankees.”
“And there’ll be hell to pay for it-I beg your pardon, Scarlett,” said Ashley.
“Oh, the amendment?” questioned Scarlett, trying to look intelligent.
Politics were beyond her and she seldom wasted time thinking about them. There had been a Thirteenth Amendment ratified sometime before or maybe it had been the Sixteenth Amendment but what ratification meant she had no idea. Men were always getting excited about such things. Something of her lack of comprehension showed in her face and Ashley smiled.
“It’s the amendment letting the darkies vote, you know,” he explained. “It was submitted to the legislature and they refused to ratify it.”
“How silly of them! You know the Yankees are going to force it down our throats!”
“That’s what I meant by saying there’d be hell to pay,” said Ashley.
“I’m proud of the legislature, proud of their gumption!” shouted Uncle Henry. “The Yankees can’t force it down our throats if we won’t have it.”
“They can and they will.” Ashley’s voice was calm but there was worry in his eyes. “And it’ll make things just that much harder for us.”
“Oh, Ashley, surely not! Things couldn’t be any harder than they are now!”
“Yes, things can get worse, even worse than they are now. Suppose we have a darky legislature? A darky governor? Suppose we have a worse military rule than we now have?”
Scarlett’s eyes grew large with fear as some understanding entered her mind.
“I’ve been trying to think what would be best for Georgia, best for all of us.” Ashley’s face was drawn. “Whether it’s wisest to fight this thing like the legislature has done, rouse the North against us and bring the whole Yankee Army on us to cram the darky vote down us, whether we want it or not. Or-swallow our pride as best we can, submit gracefully and get the whole matter over with as easily as possible. It will amount to the same thing in the end. We’re helpless. We’ve got to take the dose they’re determined to give us. Maybe it would be better for us to take it without kicking.”
Scarlett hardly heard his words, certainly their full import went over her head. She knew that Ashley, as usual, was seeing both sides of a question. She was seeing only one side-how this slap in the Yankees’ faces might affect her.
“Going to turn Radical and vote the Republican ticket, Ashley?” jeered Grandpa Merriwether harshly.
There was a tense silence. Scarlett saw Archie’s hand make a swift move toward his pistol and then stop. Archie thought, and frequently said, that Grandpa was an old bag of wind and Archie had no intention of letting him insult Miss Melanie’s husband, even if Miss Melanie’s husband was talking like a fool.
The perplexity vanished suddenly from Ashley’s eyes and hot anger flared. But before he could speak, Uncle Henry charged Grandpa.
“You God-you blast-I beg your pardon, Scarlett-Grandpa, you jackass, don’t you say that to Ashley!”
“Ashley can take care of himself without you defending him,” said Grandpa coldly. “And he is talking like a Scallawag. Submit, hell! I beg your pardon, Scarlett.”
“I didn’t believe in secession,” said Ashley and his voice shook with anger. “But when Georgia seceded, I went with her. And I didn’t believe in war but I fought in the war. And I don’t believe in making the Yankees madder than they already are. But if the legislature has decided to do it, I’ll stand by the legislature. I-”
“Archie,” said Uncle Henry abruptly, “drive Miss Scarlett on home. This isn’t any place for her. Politics aren’t for women folks anyway, and there’s going to be cussing in a minute. Go on, Archie. Good night, Scarlett.”
As they drove off down Peachtree Street, Scarlett’s heart was beating fast with fear. Would this foolish action of the legislature have any effect on her safety? Would it so enrage the Yankees that she might lose her mills?
“Well, sir,” rumbled Archie, “I’ve hearn tell of rabbits spittin’ in bulldogs’ faces but I ain’t never seen it till now. Them legislatures might just as well have hollered ‘Hurray for Jeff Davis and the Southern Confederacy’ for all the good it’ll do them-and us. Them nigger-lovin’ Yankees have made up their mind to make the niggers our bosses. But you got to admire them legislatures’ sperrit!”
“Admire them? Great balls of fire! Admire them? They ought to be shot! It’ll bring the Yankees down on us like a duck on a June bug. Why couldn’t they have rati-radi-whatever they were supposed to do to it and smoothed the Yankees down instead of stirring them up again? They’re going to make us knuckle under and we may as well knuckle now as later.”
Archie fixed her with a cold eye.
“Knuckle under without a fight? Women ain’t got no more pride than goats.”
When Scarlett leased ten convicts, five for each of her mills, Archie made good his threat and refused to have anything further to do with her. Not all Melanie’s pleading or Frank’s promises of higher pay would induce him to take up the reins again. He willingly escorted Melanie and Pitty and India and their friends about the town but not Scarlett. He would not even drive for the other ladies if Scarlett was in the carriage. It was an embarrassing situation, having the old desperado sitting in judgment upon her, and it was still more embarrassing to know that her family and friends agreed with the old man.
Frank pleaded with her against taking the step. Ashley at first refused to work convicts and was persuaded, against his will, only after tears and supplications and promises that when times were better she would hire free darkies. Neighbors were so outspoken in their disapproval that Frank, Pitty and Melanie found it hard to hold up their heads. Even Peter and Mammy declared that it was bad luck to work convicts and no good would come of it. Everyone said it was wrong to take advantage of the miseries and misfortunes of others.
“You didn’t have any objections to working slaves!” Scarlett cried indignantly.
Ah, but that was different. Slaves were neither miserable nor unfortunate. The negroes were far better off under slavery than they were now under freedom, and if she didn’t believe it, just look about her! But, as usual, opposition had the effect of making Scarlett more determined on her course. She removed Hugh from the management of the mill, put him to driving a lumber wagon and closed the final details of hiring Johnnie Gallegher.
He seemed to be the only person she knew who approved of the convicts. He nodded his bullet head briefly and said it was a smart move. Scarlett, looking at the little ex-jockey, planted firmly on his short bowed legs, his gnomish face hard and businesslike, thought: “Whoever let him ride their horses didn’t care much for horse flesh. I wouldn’t let him get within ten feet of any horse of mine.”
But she had no qualms in trusting him with a convict gang.
“And I’m to have a free hand with the gang?” he questioned, his eyes as cold as gray agates.
“A free hand. All I ask is that you keep that mill running and deliver my lumber when I want it and as much as I want.”
“I’m your man,” said Johnnie shortly. “I’ll tell Mr. Wellburn I’m leaving him.”
As he rolled off through the crowd of masons and carpenters and hod carriers Scarlett felt relieved and her spirits rose. Johnnie was indeed her man. He was tough and hard and there was no nonsense about him. “Shanty Irish on the make,” Frank had contemptuously called him, but for that very reason Scarlett valued him. She knew that an Irishman with a determination to get somewhere was a valuable man to have, regardless of what his personal characteristics might be. And she felt a closer kinship with him than with many men of her own class, for Johnnie knew the value of money.
The first week he took over the mill he justified all her hopes, for he accomplished more with five convicts than Hugh had ever done with his crew of ten free negroes. More than that, he gave Scarlett greater leisure than she had had since she came to Atlanta the year before, because he had no liking for her presence at the mill and said so frankly.
“You tend to your end of selling and let me tend to my end of lumbering,” he said shortly. “A convict camp ain’t any place for a lady and if nobody else’ll tell you so, Johnnie Gallegher’s telling you now. I’m delivering your lumber, ain’t I? Well, I’ve got no notion to be pestered every day like Mr. Wilkes. He needs pestering. I don’t.”
So Scarlett reluctantly stayed away from Johnnie’s mill, fearing that if she came too often he might quit and that would be ruinous. His remark that Ashley needed pestering stung her, for there was more truth in it than she liked to admit. Ashley was doing little better with convicts than he had done with free labor, although why, he was unable to tell. Moreover, he looked as if he were ashamed to be working convicts and he had little to say to her these days.
Scarlett was worried by the change that was coming over him. There were gray hairs in his bright head now and a tired slump in his shoulders. And he seldom smiled. He no longer looked the debonaire Ashley who had caught her fancy so many years before. He looked like a man secretly gnawed by a scarcely endurable pain and there was a grim tight look about his mouth that baffled and hurt her. She wanted to drag his head fiercely down on her shoulder, stroke the graying hair and cry: “Tell me what’s worrying you! I’ll fix it! I’ll make it right for you!”
But his formal, remote air kept her at arm’s length.
Chapter XLIII
It was one of those rare December days when the sun was almost as warm as Indian summer. Dry red leaves still clung to the oak in Aunt Pitty’s yard and a faint yellow green still persisted in the dying grass. Scarlett, with the baby in her arms, stepped out onto the side porch and sat down in a rocking chair in a patch of sunshine. She was wearing a new green challis dress trimmed with yards and yards of black rickrack braid and a new lace house cap which Aunt Pitty had made for her. Both were very becoming to her and she knew it and took great pleasure in them. How good it was to look pretty again after the long months of looking so dreadful!
As she sat rocking the baby and humming to herself, she heard the sound of hooves coming up the side street and, peering curiously through the tangle of dead vines on the porch, she saw Rhett Butler riding toward the house.
He had been away from Atlanta for months, since just after Gerald died, since long before Ella Lorena was born. She had missed him but she now wished ardently that there was some way to avoid seeing him. In fact, the sight of his dark face brought a feeling of guilty panic to her breast. A matter in which Ashley was concerned lay on her conscience and she did not wish to discuss it with Rhett, but she knew he would force the discussion, no matter how disinclined she might be.
He drew up at the gate and swung lightly to the ground and she thought, staring nervously at him, that he looked just like an illustration in a book Wade was always pestering her to read aloud.
“All he needs is earrings and a cutlass between his teeth,” she thought. “Well, pirate or no, he’s not going to cut my throat today if I can help it.”
As he came up the walk she called a greeting to him, summoning her sweetest smile. How lucky that she had on her new dress and the becoming cap and looked so pretty! As his eyes went swiftly over her, she knew he thought her pretty, too.
“A new baby! Why, Scarlett, this is a surprise!” he laughed, leaning down to push the blanket away from Ella Lorena’s small ugly face.
“Don’t be silly,” she said, blushing. “How are you, Rhett? You’ve been away a long time.”
“So I have. Let me hold the baby, Scarlett. Oh, I know how to hold babies. I have many strange accomplishments. Well, he certainly looks like Frank. All except the whiskers, but give him time.”
“I hope not. It’s a girl.”
“A girl? That’s better still. Boys are such nuisances. Don’t ever have any more boys, Scarlett.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to reply tartly that she never intended to have any more babies, boys or girls, but she caught herself in time and smiled, casting about quickly in her mind for some topic of conversation that would put off the bad moment when the subject she feared would come up for discussion.
“Did you have a nice trip, Rhett? Where did you go this time?”
“Oh-Cuba-New Orleans-other places. Here, Scarlett, take the baby. She’s beginning to slobber and I can’t get to my handkerchief. She’s a fine baby, I’m sure, but she’s wetting my shirt bosom.”
She took the child back into her lap and Rhett settled himself lazily on the banister and took a cigar from a silver case.
“You are always going to New Orleans,” she said and pouted a little. “And you never will tell me what you do there.”
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