A few days passed through her fingers like wheat. Rhett's physical recovery progressed smoothly, and very soon all that reminded them of the fall was a dark bruise over his left eye and the clean gash on his temple. Scarlett spent her days with Rosemary and Miss Eleanor, enjoying the lighter air that had descended on the late August days. The horses gallopped with Garreth over the meadow. Ella and her friends giggled under the huge shading trees, crisp and young, sharing their loves, their hopes and their secrets. Junebugs danced in the twilight when Scarlett and Rosemary sat on the porch in the evening. And along with the rest of the household, Scarlett was watching Rhett.
He had not, as she would have expected, simply picked up the dropped thread of their marriage and continued weaving its tranquil if indifferent tapestry. He never alluded to the scene in the bedroom, and he had refused to be baited into further outbursts even though she had thrown a few additional barbs at him out of sheer overwrought nerves. In some ways, it was as if it had never happened.
But something had changed. Ever since he arose from his sick-bed there was a new restlessness in his bearing, a distracted tone to his voice, and the emotions that she would see flicker in his eyes when he believed no one was watching him were as novel to her as they were undecipherable. Initially she was hopeful, that there was now something other than aloofness in their dark depth, something alive, but she soon conceded that whatever it was that had his mind in its grip was sharp-clawed and unpleasant. He was short-tempered where he had been cool and polite. He snapped at Ella for minor provocations, was curt with the servants and barely civil to his family. Only Garreth remained untouched by his fey moods, but a few times she caught Rhett staring at him with an expression that she had never seen before but made the fine hairs stand up on her arms and neck.
Had Scarlett been more experienced she might have likened his demeanor to an addict pining for his particular brand of poison; but as it was she only felt his discomfort and did not know how to soothe it.
She had taken to sleeping in their bed again and saw the restlessness follow him into his dreams, calling out words in languages she did not understand, calling out names that had no meaning to her. She slept lightly now and at times saw him get up from their bed and stare out of the window, hands clenched into fists, his swarthy knuckles turned white in the moonlight. Scarlett, although she would not yet admit this to herself, was beginning to fear for his sanity.
One of those nights, desperate to console him, she offered him her body as she had so often in the past; offered it because she had nothing else she could give him, because there was nothing else he would take. Newly arrived in adulthood she found that there were words that went with such offerings, soft words that rose naturally to her lips where before there had been only silence. He took her, took her words with an almost savage intensity, not like a man slacking his lust but, Scarlett thought, like a sinner seeking absolution, or the survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a lone piece of driftwood. In the morning, he could not look her in the eyes, but it happened again that night and again in those that followed, and she had no idea what to make of him. The growing understanding she had believed herself to have of his mind, the insight she had so assuredly thrown into his face a mere few days ago, had dissolved into a sea of confusion.
She was young, woefully under-educated, and the product of a society that sheltered its females from many harsher realities. She could not have guessed that Garreth, who she had believed to be Rhett's sacrifice to indifference, had been an offering to a much darker God.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Just playing with the characters in an angsty sort of way. Helen, regarding your comment: my thought was that they did have a regular sex life even after he returned, albeit not a passionate one, and that Rhett went back to using preventatives after Garreth's birth because he wanted to give her just that one child.