Gone with the Wind / Унесённые ветром

Their beauty she accepted as casually as the air she breathed and the water she drank, for she had never seen beauty in anything but women’s faces, horses, silk dresses and other things. Yet she loved this land so much, without even knowing, loved it as she loved her mother’s face under the lamp at prayer time.

Still there was no sign of Gerald on the quiet winding road. But finally, she heard a pounding of hooves at the bottom of the pasture hill and saw the horses and cows scatter in fright. Gerald O’Hara was coming home across country and at top speed.

She watched him with pride, for Gerald was an excellent horseman.

“I wonder why he always wants to jump fences when he’s had a few drinks,” she thought. “And after that fall here last year when he broke his knee and promised Mother on oath he’d never jump again.”

He dismounted with difficulty, because his knee was stiff. “Well, Missy,” he said, pinching her cheek, “so, you’ve been spying on me and, like your sister Suellen last week, you’ll be telling your mother on me?”

His breath in her face was strong with Bourbon whisky.

Accompanying him also were the smells of chewing tobacco, leather and horses – a combination of odors that she always associated with her father and instinctively liked in other men.

“No, Pa, I’m no tattletale like Suellen,” she assured him.

Gerald was a small man, little more than five feet tall. His thickset torso was supported by short sturdy legs. Most small people who take themselves seriously are a little ridiculous but no one would ever think of Gerald O’Hara as a ridiculous little figure.

He was sixty years old and his curly hair was silver-white, but his shrewd face was unlined and his little blue eyes were young. He had a typical Irish face of the homeland he had left so long ago – round, high colored, short nosed, wide mouthed and belligerent.

But inside, Gerald O’Hara had the tenderest of hearts. He could not bear to see a slave feeling hurt when told off, or hear a kitten mewing or a child crying; but he had a horror of having this weakness discovered.

It had never occurred to him that only one voice was obeyed on the plantation – the soft voice of his wife Ellen. It was a secret he would never learn, for everyone was in a conspiracy to keep him believing that his word was law.

Scarlett was his oldest child and more like her father than her sisters Carreen and Suellen.