When Gerald was forty-three, so thickset of body and florid of face that he looked like a hunting squire out of a sporting print, it came to him that Tara, dear though it was, and the County folk, with their open hearts and open houses, were not enough. He wanted a wife.
Tara cried out for a mistress. The fat cook, a yard negro elevated by necessity to the
kitchen, never had the meals on time, and the chambermaid, formerly a field hand, let dust accumulate on the furniture and never seemed to have clean linen on hand, so that the arrival of guests was always the occasion of much stirring and to-do. Pork, the only trained house negro on the place, had general supervision over the other servants, but even he had grown slack and careless after several years of exposure to Gerald's happy-go-lucky mode of living. As valet, he kept Gerald's bedroom in order, and, as butler, he served the meals with dignity and style, but otherwise he pretty well let matters follow their own course.
With unerring African instinct, the negroes had all discovered that Gerald had a loud bark and no bite at all, and they took shameless advantage of him. The air was always thick with threats of selling slaves south and of direful whippings, but there never had been a slave sold
from Tara and only one whipping, and that administered for not grooming down Gerald's pet horse after, a long day's hunting.
Gerald's sharp blue eyes noticed how efficiently his neighbors' houses were run and with
what ease the smooth-haired wives in rustling skirts managed their servants. He had no
knowledge of the dawn-till-midnight activities of these women, chained to supervision of
cooking, nursing, sewing and laundering. He only saw the outward results, and those results impressed him.
The urgent need of a wife became clear to him one morning when he was dressing to ride
to town for Court Day. Pork brought forth his favorite ruffled shirt, so inexpertly mended by the chambermaid as to be unwearable by anyone except his valet
"Mist' Gerald," said Pork, gratefully rolling up the shirt as Gerald fumed, "whut you needs is a wife, and a wife whut has got plen'y of house niggers."
Gerald upbraided Pork for his impertinence, hut he knew that he was right He wanted a
wife and he wanted children and, if he did not acquire them soon, it would be too late. But he was not going to marry just anyone, as Mr. Calvert had done, taking to wife the Yankee governess of his motherless children. His wife must be a lady and a lady of blood, with as many airs and graces as Mrs. Wilkes and the ability to manage Tara as well as Mrs. Wilkes ordered her own domain.
But there were two difficulties in the way of marriage into the County families. The first was the scarcity of girls of marriageable age. The second, and more serious one, was that Gerald was a "new man," despite his nearly ten years' residence, and a foreigner. No one knew anything about his family. While the society of up-country Georgia was not so impregnable as that of the Coast aristocrats, no family wanted a daughter to wed a man about whose grandfather nothing was known.
Gerald knew that despite the genuine liking of the County men with whom he hunted,
drank and talked politics there was hardly one whose daughter he could marry. And he did not intend to have it gossiped about over supper tables that this, that or the other father had regretfully refused to let Gerald O'Hara pay court to his daughter. This knowledge did not make Gerald feel inferior to his neighbors: Nothing could ever make Gerald feel that he was inferior in any way to anyone. It was merely a quaint custom of the County that daughters only married into families who had lived in the South much longer than twenty-two years, had owned land and slaves and been addicted only to the fashionable vices during that time.
"Pack up. We're going to Savannah," he told Pork. "And if I hear you say 'Whist!' or
'Faith!' but once, it's selling you I'll be doing, for they are words I seldom say meself."
James and Andrew might have some advice to offer on this subject of marriage, and there
might be daughters among their old friends who would both meet his requirements and find him acceptable as a husband. James and Andrew listened to his story patiently but they gave him little encouragement. They had no Savannah relatives to whom they might look for assistance, for they had been married when they came to America. And the daughters of their old friends had long since married and were raising small children of their own.
"You're not a rich man and you haven't a great family," said James.
"I've made me money and I can make a great family. And I won't be marrying just
anyone."
"You fly high," observed Andrew, dryly.