In the matter of coolness, George met Lucy upon her own predetermined ground; in fact, he was there first, and, at their next encounter, proved loftier and more formal than she did. Their estrangement lasted three weeks, and then disappeared without any preliminary treaty: it had worn itself out, and they forgot it.
At times, however, George found other disturbances to the friendship. Lucy was “too much the village belle,” he complained; and took a satiric attitude toward his competitors, referring to them as her “local swains and bumpkins,” sulking for an afternoon when she reminded him that he, too, was at least “local.” She was a belle with older people as well; Isabel and Fanny were continually taking her driving, bringing her home with them to lunch or dinner, and making a hundred little engagements with her, and the Major had taken a great fancy to her, insisting upon her presence and her father’s at the Amberson family dinner at the Mansion every Sunday evening. She knew how to flirt with old people, he said, as she sat next him at the table on one of these Sunday occasions; and he had always liked her father, even when Eugene was a “terror” long ago. “Oh, yes, he was!” the Major laughed, when she remonstrated. “He came up here with my son George and some others for a serenade one night, and Eugene stepped into a bass fiddle, and the poor musicians just gave up! I had a pretty half-hour getting my son George upstairs. I remember! It was the last time Eugene ever touched a drop—but he’d touched plenty before that, young lady, and he daren’t deny it! Well, well; there’s another thing that’s changed: hardly anybody drinks nowadays. Perhaps it’s just as well, but things used to be livelier. That serenade was just before Isabel was married—and don’t you fret, Miss Lucy: your father remembers it well enough!” The old gentleman burst into laughter, and shook his finger at Eugene across the table. “The fact is,” the Major went on hilariously, “I believe if Eugene hadn’t broken that bass fiddle and given himself away, Isabel would never have taken Wilbur! I shouldn’t be surprised if that was about all the reason that Wilbur got her! What do you think. Wilbur?”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Wilbur placidly. “If your notion is right, I’m glad ’Gene broke the fiddle. He was giving me a hard run!”
The Major always drank three glasses of champagne at his Sunday dinner, and he was finishing the third. “What do you say about it, Isabel? By Jove!” he cried, pounding the table. “She’s blushing!”
Isabel did blush, but she laughed. “Who wouldn’t blush!” she cried, and her sister-in-law came to her assistance.
“The important thing,” said Fanny jovially, “is that Wilbur did get her, and not only got her, but kept her!”
Eugene was as pink as Isabel, but he laughed without any sign of embarrassment other than his heightened colour. “There’s another important thing—that is, for me,” he said. “It’s the only thing that makes me forgive that bass viol for getting in my way.”
“What is it?” the Major asked.
“Lucy,” said Morgan gently.
Isabel gave him a quick glance, all warm approval, and there was a murmur of friendliness round the table.
George was not one of those who joined in this applause. He considered his grandfather’s nonsense indelicate, even for second childhood, and he thought that the sooner the subject was dropped the better. However, he had only a slight recurrence of the resentment which had assailed him during the winter at every sign of his mother’s interest in Morgan; though he was still ashamed of his aunt sometimes, when it seemed to him that Fanny was almost publicly throwing herself at the widower’s head. Fanny and he had one or two arguments in which her fierceness again astonished and amused him.
“You drop your criticisms of your relatives,” she bade him, hotly, one day, “and begin thinking a little about your own behaviour! You say people will ‘talk’ about my—about my merely being pleasant to an old friend! What do I care how they talk? I guess if people are talking about anybody in this family they’re talking about the impertinent little snippet that hasn’t any respect for anything, and doesn’t even know enough to attend to his own affairs!”
“‘Snippet,’ Aunt Fanny!” George laughed. “How elegant! And ‘little snippet’—when I’m over five-feet-eleven?”
“I said it!” she snapped, departing. “I don’t see how Lucy can stand you!”
“You’d make an amiable stepmother-in-law!” he called after her. “I’ll be careful about proposing to Lucy!”
These were but roughish spots in a summer that glided by evenly and quickly enough, for the most part, and, at the end, seemed to fly. On the last night before George went back to be a Junior, his mother asked him confidently if it had not been a happy summer.
He hadn’t thought about it, he answered. “Oh, I suppose so. Why?”
“I just thought it would be nice to hear you say so,” she said, smiling. “I mean, it’s pleasant for people of my age to know that people of your age realize that they’re happy.”
“People of your age!” he repeated. “You know you don’t look precisely like an old woman, mother. Not precisely!”
“No,” she said. “And I suppose I feel about as young as you do, inside, but it won’t be many years before I must begin to look old. It does come!” She sighed, still smiling. “It’s seemed to me that, it must have been a happy summer for you—a real ‘summer of roses and wine’—without the wine, perhaps. ‘Gather ye roses while ye may’—or was it primroses? Time does really fly, or perhaps it’s more like the sky—and smoke—”
George was puzzled. “What do you mean: time being like the sky and smoke?”
“I mean the things that we have and that we think are so solid—they’re like smoke, and time is like the sky that the smoke disappears into. You know how a wreath of smoke goes up from a chimney, and seems all thick and black and busy against the sky, as if it were going to do such important things and last forever, and you see it getting thinner and thinner—and then, in such a little while, it isn’t there at all; nothing is left but the sky, and the sky keeps on being just the same forever.”
“It strikes me you’re getting mixed up,” said George cheerfully. “I don’t see much resemblance between time and the sky, or between things and smoke-wreaths; but I do see one reason you like Lucy Morgan so much. She talks that same kind of wistful, moony way sometimes—I don’t mean to say I mind it in either of you, because I rather like to listen to it, and you’ve got a very good voice, mother. It’s nice to listen to, no matter how much smoke and sky, and so on, you talk. So’s Lucy’s for that matter; and I see why you’re congenial. She talks that way to her father, too; and he’s right there with the same kind of guff. Well, it’s all right with me!” He laughed, teasingly, and allowed her to retain his hand, which she had fondly seized. “I’ve got plenty to think about when people drool along!”
She pressed his hand to her cheek, and a tear made a tiny warm streak across one of his knuckles.
“For heaven’s sake!” he said. “What’s the matter? Isn’t everything all right?”
“You’re going away!”
“Well, I’m coming back, don’t you suppose? Is that all that worries you?”
She cheered up, and smiled again, but shook her head. “I never can bear to see you go—that’s the most of it. I’m a little bothered about your father, too.”
“Why?”
“It seems to me he looks so badly. Everybody thinks so.”
“What nonsense!” George laughed. “He’s been looking that way all summer. He isn’t much different from the way he’s looked all his life, that I can see. What’s the matter with him?”
“He never talks much about his business to me but I think he’s been worrying about some investments he made last year. I think his worry has affected his health.”
“What investments?” George demanded. “He hasn’t gone into Mr. Morgan’s automobile concern, has he?”
“No,” Isabel smiled. “The ‘automobile concern’ is all Eugene’s, and it’s so small I understand it’s taken hardly anything. No; your father has always prided himself on making only the most absolutely safe investments, but two or three years ago he and your Uncle George both put a great deal—pretty much everything they could get together, I think—into the stock of rolling-mills some friends of theirs owned, and I’m afraid the mills haven’t been doing well.”
“What of that? Father needn’t worry. You and I could take care of him the rest of his life on what grandfather—”
“Of course,” she agreed. “But your father’s always lived so for his business and taken such pride in his sound investments; it’s a passion with him. I—”
“Pshaw! He needn’t worry! You tell him we’ll look after him: we’ll build him a little stone bank in the backyard, if he busts up, and he can go and put his pennies in it every morning. That’ll keep him just as happy as he ever was!” He kissed her. “Good-night, I’m going to tell Lucy good-bye. Don’t sit up for me.”
She walked to the front gate with him, still holding his hand, and he told her again not to “sit up” for him.
“Yes, I will,” she laughed. “You won’t be very late.”
“Well—it’s my last night.”
“But I know Lucy, and she knows I want to see you, too, your last night. You’ll see: she’ll send you home promptly at eleven!”
But she was mistaken: Lucy sent him home promptly at ten.
Isabel’s uneasiness about her husband’s health—sometimes reflected in her letters to George during the winter that followed—had not been alleviated when the accredited Senior returned for his next summer vacation, and she confided to him in his room, soon after his arrival, that “something” the doctor had said to her lately had made her more uneasy than ever.
“Still worrying over his rolling-mills investments?” George asked, not seriously impressed.
“I’m afraid it’s past that stage from what Dr. Rainey says. His worries only aggravate his condition now. Dr. Rainey says we ought to get him away.”
“Well, let’s do it, then.”
“He won’t go.”
“He’s a man awfully set in his ways; that’s true,” said George. “I don’t think there’s anything much the matter with him, though, and he looks just the same to me. Have you seen Lucy lately? How is she?”
“Hasn’t she written you?”
“Oh, about once a month,” he answered carelessly. “Never says much about herself. How’s she look?”
“She looks—pretty!” said Isabel. “I suppose she wrote you they’ve moved?”
“Yes; I’ve got her address. She said they were building.”
“They did. It’s all finished, and they’ve been in it a month. Lucy is so capable; she keeps house exquisitely. It’s small, but oh, such a pretty little house!”
“Well, that’s fortunate,” George said. “One thing I’ve always felt they didn’t know a great deal about is architecture.”
“Don’t they?” asked Isabel, surprised. “Anyhow, their house is charming. It’s way out beyond the end of Amberson Boulevard; it’s quite near that big white house with a gray-green roof somebody built out there a year or so ago. There are any number of houses going up, out that way; and the trolley-line runs within a block of them now, on the next street, and the traction people are laying tracks more than three miles beyond. I suppose you’ll be driving out to see Lucy to-morrow.”
“I thought—” George hesitated. “I thought perhaps I’d go after dinner this evening.”
At this his mother laughed, not astonished. “It was only my feeble joke about ‘to-morrow,’ Georgie! I was pretty sure you couldn’t wait that long. Did Lucy write you about the factory?”
“No. What factory?”
“The automobile shops. They had rather a dubious time at first, I’m afraid, and some of Eugene’s experiments turned out badly, but this spring they’ve finished eight automobiles and sold them all, and they’ve got twelve more almost finished, and they’re sold already! Eugene’s so gay over it!”
“What do his old sewing-machines look like? Like that first one he had when they came here?”
“No, indeed! These have rubber tires blown up with air—pneumatic! And they aren’t so high; they’re very easy to get into, and the engine’s in front—Eugene thinks that’s a great improvement. They’re very interesting to look at; behind the driver’s seat there’s a sort of box where four people can sit, with a step and a little door in the rear, and—”
“I know all about it,” said George. “I’ve seen any number like that, East. You can see all you want of ’em, if you stand on Fifth Avenue half an hour, any afternoon. I’ve seen half-a-dozen go by almost at the same time—within a few minutes, anyhow; and of course electric hansoms are a common sight there any day. I hired one, myself, the last time I was there. How fast do Mr. Morgan’s machines go?”
“Much too fast! It’s very exhilarating—but rather frightening; and they do make a fearful uproar. He says, though, he thinks he sees a way to get around the noisiness in time.”
“I don’t mind the noise,” said George. “Give me a horse, for mine, though, any day. I must get up a race with one of these things: Pendennis’ll leave it one mile behind in a two-mile run. How’s grandfather?”
“He looks well, but he complains sometimes of his heart: I suppose that’s natural at his age—and it’s an Amberson trouble.” Having mentioned this, she looked anxious instantly. “Did you ever feel any weakness there, Georgie?”
“No!” he laughed.
“Are you sure, dear?”
“No!” And he laughed again. “Did you?”
“Oh, I think not—at least, the doctor told me he thought my heart was about all right. He said I needn’t be alarmed.”
“I should think not! Women do seem to be always talking about health: I suppose they haven’t got enough else to think of!”
“That must be it,” she said gayly. “We’re an idle lot!”
George had taken off his coat. “I don’t like to hint to a lady,” he said, “but I do want to dress before dinner.”
“Don’t be long; I’ve got to do a lot of looking at you, dear!” She kissed him and ran away singing.
But his Aunt Fanny was not so fond; and at the dinner-table there came a spark of liveliness into her eye when George patronizingly asked her what was the news in her own “particular line of sport.”
“What do you mean, Georgie?” she asked quietly.
“Oh I mean: What’s the news in the fast set generally? You been causing any divorces lately?”
“No,” said Fanny, the spark in her eye getting brighter. “I haven’t been causing anything.”
“Well, what’s the gossip? You usually hear pretty much everything that goes on around the nooks and crannies in this town, I hear. What’s the last from the gossips’ corner, auntie?”
Fanny dropped her eyes, and the spark was concealed, but a movement of her lower lip betokened a tendency to laugh, as she replied. “There hasn’t been much gossip lately, except the report that Lucy Morgan and Fred Kinney are engaged—and that’s quite old, by this time.”
Undeniably, this bit of mischief was entirely successful, for there was a clatter upon George’s plate. “What—what do you think you’re talking about?” he gasped.
Miss Fanny looked up innocently. “About the report of Lucy Morgan’s engagement to Fred Kinney.”
George turned dumbly to his mother, and Isabel shook her head reassuringly. “People are always starting rumours,” she said. “I haven’t paid any attention to this one.”
“But you—you’ve heard it?” he stammered.
“Oh, one hears all sorts of nonsense, dear. I haven’t the slightest idea that it’s true.”
“Then you have heard it!”
“I wouldn’t let it take my appetite,” his father suggested drily. “There are plenty of girls in the world!”
George turned pale.
“Eat your dinner, Georgie,” his aunt said sweetly. “Food will do you good. I didn’t say I knew this rumour was true. I only said I’d heard it.”
“When? When did you hear it!”
“Oh, months ago!” And Fanny found any further postponement of laughter impossible.
“Fanny, you’re a hard-hearted creature,” Isabel said gently. “You really are. Don’t pay any attention to her, George. Fred Kinney’s only a clerk in his uncle’s hardware place: he couldn’t marry for ages—even if anybody would accept him!”
George breathed tumultuously. “I don’t care anything about ‘ages’! What’s that got to do with it?” he said, his thoughts appearing to be somewhat disconnected. “‘Ages,’ don’t mean anything! I only want to know—I want to know—I want—” He stopped.
“What do you want?” his father asked crossly. “Why don’t you say it? Don’t make such a fuss.”
“I’m not—not at all,” George declared, pushing his chair back from the table.
“You must finish your dinner, dear,” his mother urged. “Don’t—”
“I have finished. I’ve eaten all I want. I don’t want any more than I wanted. I don’t want—I—” He rose, still incoherent. “I prefer—I want—Please excuse me!”
He left the room, and a moment later the screens outside the open front door were heard to slam:
“Fanny! You shouldn’t—”
“Isabel, don’t reproach me, he did have plenty of dinner, and I only told the truth: everybody has been saying—”
“But there isn’t any truth in it.”
“We don’t actually know there isn’t,” Miss Fanny insisted, giggling. “We’ve never asked Lucy.”
“I wouldn’t ask her anything so absurd!”
“George would,” George’s father remarked. “That’s what he’s gone to do.”
Mr. Minafer was not mistaken: that was what his son had gone to do. Lucy and her father were just rising from their dinner table when the stirred youth arrived at the front door of the new house. It was a cottage, however, rather than a house; and Lucy had taken a free hand with the architect, achieving results in white and green, outside, and white and blue, inside, to such effect of youth and daintiness that her father complained of “too much spring-time!” The whole place, including his own bedroom, was a young damsel’s boudoir, he said, so that nowhere could he smoke a cigar without feeling like a ruffian. However, he was smoking when George arrived, and he encouraged George to join him in the pastime, but the caller, whose air was both tense and preoccupied, declined with something like agitation.
“I never smoke—that is, I’m seldom—I mean, no thanks,” he said. “I mean not at all. I’d rather not.”
“Aren’t you well, George?” Eugene asked, looking at him in perplexity. “Have you been overworking at college? You do look rather pa—”
“I don’t work,” said George. “I mean I don’t work. I think, but I don’t work. I only work at the end of the term. There isn’t much to do.”
Eugene’s perplexity was little decreased, and a tinkle of the door-bell afforded him obvious relief. “It’s my foreman,” he said, looking at his watch. “I’ll take him out in the yard to talk. This is no place for a foreman.” And he departed, leaving the “living room” to Lucy and George. It was a pretty room, white panelled and blue curtained—and no place for a foreman, as Eugene said. There was a grand piano, and Lucy stood leaning back against it, looking intently at George, while her fingers, behind her, absently struck a chord or two. And her dress was the dress for that room, being of blue and white, too; and the high colour in her cheeks was far from interfering with the general harmony of things—George saw with dismay that she was prettier than ever, and naturally he missed the reassurance he might have felt had he been able to guess that Lucy, on her part, was finding him better looking than ever. For, however unusual the scope of George’s pride, vanity of beauty was not included; he did not think about his looks.
“What’s wrong, George?” she asked softly.
“What do you mean: ‘What’s wrong?’”
“You’re awfully upset about something. Didn’t you get though your examination all right?”
“Certainly I did. What makes you think anything’s ‘wrong’ with me?”
“You do look pale, as papa said, and it seemed to me that the way you talked sounded—well, a little confused.”
“‘Confused’! I said I didn’t care to smoke. What in the world is confused about that?”
“Nothing. But—”
“See here!” George stepped close to her. “Are you glad to see me?”
“You needn’t be so fierce about it!” Lucy protested, laughing at his dramatic intensity. “Of course I am! How long have I been looking forward to it?”
“I don’t know,” he said sharply, abating nothing of his fierceness. “How long have you?”
“Why—ever since you went away!”
“Is that true? Lucy, is that true?”
“You are funny!” she said. “Of course it’s true. Do tell me what’s the matter with you, George!”
“I will!” he exclaimed. “I was a boy when I saw you last. I see that now, though I didn’t then. Well, I’m not a boy any longer. I’m a man, and a man has a right to demand a totally different treatment.”
“Why has he?”
“What?”
“I don’t seem to be able to understand you at all, George. Why shouldn’t a boy be treated just as well as a man?”
George seemed to find himself at a loss. “Why shouldn’t—Well, he shouldn’t, because a man has a right to certain explanations.”
“What explanations?”
“Whether he’s been made a toy of!” George almost shouted. “That’s what I want to know!”
Lucy shook her head despairingly. “You are the queerest person! You say you’re a man now, but you talk more like a boy than ever. What does make you so excited?”
“‘Excited!’” he stormed. “Do you dare to stand there and call me ‘excited’? I tell you, I never have been more calm or calmer in my life! I don’t know that a person needs to be called ‘excited’ because he demands explanations that are his simple due!”
“What in the world do you want me to explain?”
“Your conduct with Fred Kinney!” George shouted.
Lucy uttered a sudden cry of laughter; she was delighted. “It’s been awful!” she said. “I don’t know that I ever heard of worse misbehaviour! Papa and I have been twice to dinner with his family, and I’ve been three times to church with Fred—and once to the circus! I don’t know when they’ll be here to arrest me!”
“Stop that!” George commanded fiercely. “I want to know just one thing, and I mean to know it, too!”
“Whether I enjoyed the circus?”
“I want to know if you’re engaged to him!”
“No!” she cried and lifting her face close to his for the shortest instant possible, she gave him a look half merry, half defiant, but all fond. It was an adorable look.
“Lucy!” he said huskily.
But she turned quickly from him, and ran to the other end of the room. He followed awkwardly, stammering:
“Lucy, I want—I want to ask you. Will you—will you—will you be engaged to me?”
She stood at a window, seeming to look out into the summer darkness, her back to him.
“Will you, Lucy?”
“No,” she murmured, just audibly.
“Why not?”
“I’m older than you.”
“Eight months!”
“You’re too young.”
“Is that—” he said, gulping—“is that the only reason you won’t?”
She did not answer.
As she stood, persistently staring out of the window, with her back to him, she did not see how humble his attitude had become; but his voice was low, and it shook so that she could have no doubt of his emotion. “Lucy, please forgive me for making such a row,” he said, thus gently. “I’ve been—I’ve been terribly upset—terribly! You know how I feel about you, and always have felt about you. I’ve shown it in every single thing I’ve done since the first time I met you, and I know you know it. Don’t you?”
Still she did not move or speak.
“Is the only reason you won’t be engaged to me you think I’m too young, Lucy?”
“It’s—it’s reason enough,” she said faintly.
At that he caught one of her hands, and she turned to him: there were tears in her eyes, tears which he did not understand at all.
“Lucy, you little dear!” he cried. “I knew you—”
“No, no!” she said, and she pushed him away, withdrawing her hand. “George, let’s not talk of solemn things.”
“‘Solemn things!’ Like what?”
“Like—being engaged.”
But George had become altogether jubilant, and he laughed triumphantly. “Good gracious, that isn’t solemn!”
“It is, too!” she said, wiping her eyes. “It’s too solemn for us.”
“No, it isn’t! I—”
“Let’s sit down and be sensible, dear,” she said. “You sit over there—”
“I will if you’ll call me, ‘dear’ again.”
“No,” she said. “I’ll only call you that once again this summer—the night before you go away.”
“That will have to do, then,” he laughed, “so long as I know we’re engaged.”
“But we’re not!” she protested. “And we never will be, if you don’t promise not to speak of it again until—until I tell you to!”
“I won’t promise that,” said the happy George. “I’ll only promise not to speak of it till the next time you call me ‘dear’; and you’ve promised to call me that the night before I leave for my senior year.”
“Oh, but I didn’t!” she said earnestly, then hesitated. “Did I?”
“Didn’t you?”
“I don’t think I meant it,” she murmured, her wet lashes flickering above troubled eyes.
“I know one thing about you,” he said gayly, his triumph increasing. “You never went back on anything you said, yet, and I’m not afraid of this being the first time!”
“But we mustn’t let—” she faltered; then went on tremulously, “George, we’ve got on so well together, we won’t let this make a difference between us, will we?” And she joined in his laughter.
“It will all depend on what you tell me the night before I go away. You agree we’re going to settle things then, don’t you, Lucy?”
“I don’t promise.”
“Yes, you do! Don’t you?”
“Well—”
Tonight George began a jubilant warfare upon his Aunt Fanny, opening the campaign upon his return home at about eleven o’clock. Fanny had retired, and was presumably asleep, but George, on the way to his own room, paused before her door, and serenaded her in a full baritone:
“As I walk along the Boy de BalongWith my independent air,The people all declare,‘He must be a millionaire!’Oh, you hear them sigh, and wish to die,And see them wink the other eye.At the man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo!”
Isabel came from George’s room, where she had been reading, waiting for him. “I’m afraid you’ll disturb your father, dear. I wish you’d sing more, though—in the daytime! You have a splendid voice.”
“Good-night, old lady!”
“I thought perhaps I—Didn’t you want me to come in with you and talk a little?”
“Not to-night. You go to bed. Good-night, old lady!”
He kissed her hilariously, entered his room with a skip, closed his door noisily; and then he could be heard tossing things about, loudly humming “The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.”
Smiling, his mother knelt outside his door to pray; then, with her “Amen,” pressed her lips to the bronze door-knob; and went silently to her own apartment.
After breakfasting in bed, George spent the next morning at his grandfather’s and did not encounter his Aunt Fanny until lunch, when she seemed to be ready for him.
“Thank you so much for the serenade, George!” she said. “Your poor father tells me he’d just got to sleep for the first time in two nights, but after your kind attentions he lay awake the rest of last night.”
“Perfectly true,” Mr. Minafer said grimly.
“Of course, I didn’t know, sir,” George hastened to assure him. “I’m awfully sorry. But Aunt Fanny was so gloomy and excited before I went out, last evening, I thought she needed cheering up.”
“I!” Fanny jeered. “I was gloomy? I was excited? You mean about that engagement?”
“Yes. Weren’t you? I thought I heard you worrying over somebody’s being engaged. Didn’t I hear you say you’d heard Mr. Eugene Morgan was engaged to marry some pretty little seventeen-year-old girl?”
Fanny was stung, but she made a brave effort. “Did you ask Lucy?” she said, her voice almost refusing the teasing laugh she tried to make it utter. “Did you ask her when Fred Kinney and she—”
“Yes. That story wasn’t true. But the other one—” Here he stared at Fanny, and then affected dismay. “Why, what’s the matter with your face, Aunt Fanny? It seems agitated!”
“Agitated!” Fanny said disdainfully, but her voice undeniably lacked steadiness. “Agitated!”
“Oh, come!” Mr. Minafer interposed. “Let’s have a little peace!”
“I’m willing,” said George. “I don’t want to see poor Aunt Fanny all stirred up over a rumour I just this minute invented myself. She’s so excitable—about certain subjects—it’s hard to control her.” He turned to his mother. “What’s the matter with grandfather?”
“Didn’t you see him this morning?” Isabel asked.
“Yes. He was glad to see me, and all that, but he seemed pretty fidgety. Has he been having trouble with his heart again?”
“Not lately. No.”
“Well, he’s not himself. I tried to talk to him about the estate; it’s disgraceful—it really is—the way things are looking. He wouldn’t listen, and he seemed upset. What’s he upset over?”
Isabel looked serious; however, it was her husband who suggested gloomily, “I suppose the Major’s bothered about this Sydney and Amelia business, most likely.”
“What Sydney and Amelia business?” George asked.
“Your mother can tell you, if she wants to,” Minafer said. “It’s not my side of the family, so I keep off.”
“It’s rather disagreeable for all of us, Georgie,” Isabel began. “You see, your Uncle Sydney wanted a diplomatic position, and he thought brother George, being in Congress, could arrange it. George did get him the offer of a South American ministry, but Sydney wanted a European ambassadorship, and he got quite indignant with poor George for thinking he’d take anything smaller—and he believes George didn’t work hard enough for him. George had done his best, of course, and now he’s out of Congress, and won’t run again—so there’s Sydney’s idea of a big diplomatic position gone for good. Well, Sydney and your Aunt Amelia are terribly disappointed, and they say they’ve been thinking for years that this town isn’t really fit to live in—‘for a gentleman,’ Sydney says—and it is getting rather big and dirty. So they’ve sold their house and decided to go abroad to live permanently; there’s a villa near Florence they’ve often talked of buying. And they want father to let them have their share of the estate now, instead of waiting for him to leave it to them in his will.”
“Well, I suppose that’s fair enough,” George said. “That is, in case he intended to leave them a certain amount in his will.”
“Of course that’s understood, Georgie. Father explained his will to us long ago; a third to them, and a third to brother George, and a third to us.”
Her son made a simple calculation in his mind. Uncle George was a bachelor, and probably would never marry; Sydney and Amelia were childless. The Major’s only grandchild appeared to remain the eventual heir of the entire property, no matter if the Major did turn over to Sydney a third of it now. And George had a fragmentary vision of himself, in mourning, arriving to take possession of a historic Florentine villa—he saw himself walking up a cypress-bordered path, with ancient carven stone balustrades in the distance, and servants in mourning livery greeting the new signore. “Well, I suppose it’s grandfather’s own affair. He can do it or not, just as he likes. I don’t see why he’d mind much.”
“He seemed rather confused and pained about it,” Isabel said. “I think they oughtn’t to urge it. George says that the estate won’t stand taking out the third that Sydney wants, and that Sydney and Amelia are behaving like a couple of pigs.” She laughed, continuing, “Of course I don’t know whether they are or not: I never have understood any more about business myself than a little pig would! But I’m on George’s side, whether he’s right or wrong; I always was from the time we were children: and Sydney and Amelia are hurt with me about it, I’m afraid. They’ve stopped speaking to George entirely. Poor father. Family rows at his time of life.”
George became thoughtful. If Sydney and Amelia were behaving like pigs, things might not be so simple as at first they seemed to be. Uncle Sydney and Aunt Amelia might live an awful long while, he thought; and besides, people didn’t always leave their fortunes to relatives. Sydney might die first, leaving everything to his widow, and some curly-haired Italian adventurer might get round her, over there in Florence; she might be fool enough to marry again—or even adopt somebody!
He became more and more thoughtful, forgetting entirely a plan he had formed for the continued teasing of his Aunt Fanny; and, an hour after lunch, he strolled over to his grandfather’s, intending to apply for further information, as a party rightfully interested.
He did not carry out this intention, however. Going into the big house by a side entrance, he was informed that the Major was upstairs in his bedroom, that his sons Sydney and George were both with him, and that a serious argument was in progress. “You kin stan’ right in de middle dat big, sta’y-way,” said Old Sam, the ancient negro, who was his informant, “an’ you kin heah all you a-mind to wivout goin’ on up no fudda. Mist’ Sydney an’ Mist’ Jawge talkin’ louduh’n I evuh heah nobody ca’y on in nish heah house! Quollin’, honey, big quollin’!”
“All right,” said George shortly. “You go on back to your own part of the house, and don’t make any talk. Hear me?”
“Yessuh, yessuh,” Sam chuckled, as he shuffled away. “Plenty talkin’ wivout Sam! Yessuh!”
George went to the foot of the great stairway. He could hear angry voices overhead—those of his two uncles—and a plaintive murmur, as if the Major tried to keep the peace. Such sounds were far from encouraging to callers, and George decided not to go upstairs until this interview was over. His decision was the result of no timidity, nor of a too sensitive delicacy. What he felt was, that if he interrupted the scene in his grandfather’s room, just at this time, one of the three gentlemen engaging in it might speak to him in a peremptory manner (in the heat of the moment) and George saw no reason for exposing his dignity to such mischances. Therefore he turned from the stairway, and going quietly into the library, picked up a magazine—but he did not open it, for his attention was instantly arrested by his Aunt Amelia’s voice, speaking in the next room. The door was open and George heard her distinctly.
“Isabel does? Isabel!” she exclaimed, her tone high and shrewish. “You needn’t tell me anything about Isabel Minafer, I guess, my dear old Frank Bronson! I know her a little better than you do, don’t you think?”
George heard the voice of Mr. Bronson replying—a voice familiar to him as that of his grandfather’s attorney-in-chief and chief intimate as well. He was a contemporary of the Major’s, being over seventy, and they had been through three years of the War in the same regiment. Amelia addressed him now, with an effect of angry mockery, as “my dear old Frank Bronson”; but that (without the mockery) was how the Amberson family almost always spoke of him: “dear old Frank Bronson.” He was a hale, thin old man, six feet three inches tall, and without a stoop.
“I doubt your knowing Isabel,” he said stiffly. “You speak of her as you do because she sides with her brother George, instead of with you and Sydney.”
“Pooh!” Aunt Amelia was evidently in a passion. “You know what’s been going on over there, well enough, Frank Bronson!”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, you don’t? You don’t know that Isabel takes George’s side simply because he’s Eugene Morgan’s best friend?”
“It seems to me you’re talking pure nonsense,” said Bronson sharply. “Not impure nonsense, I hope!”
Amelia became shrill. “I thought you were a man of the world: don’t tell me you’re blind! For nearly two years Isabel’s been pretending to chaperone Fanny Minafer with Eugene, and all the time she’s been dragging that poor fool Fanny around to chaperone her and Eugene! Under the circumstances, she knows people will get to thinking Fanny’s a pretty slim kind of chaperone, and Isabel wants to please George because she thinks there’ll be less talk if she can keep her own brother around, seeming to approve. ‘Talk!’ She’d better look out! The whole town will be talking, the first thing she knows! She—”
Amelia stopped, and stared at the doorway in a panic, for her nephew stood there.
She kept her eyes upon his white face for a few strained moments, then, regaining her nerve, looked away and shrugged her shoulders.
“You weren’t intended to hear what I’ve been saying, George,” she said quietly. “But since you seem to—”
“Yes, I did.”
“So!” She shrugged her shoulders again. “After all, I don’t know but it’s just as well, in the long run.”
He walked up to where she sat. “You—you—” he said thickly. “It seems—it seems to me you’re—you’re pretty common!”
Amelia tried to give the impression of an unconcerned person laughing with complete indifference, but the sounds she produced were disjointed and uneasy. She fanned herself, looking out of the open window near her. “Of course, if you want to make more trouble in the family than we’ve already got, George, with your eavesdropping, you can go and repeat—”
Old Bronson had risen from his chair in great distress. “Your aunt was talking nonsense because she’s piqued over a business matter, George,” he said. “She doesn’t mean what she said, and neither she nor any one else gives the slightest credit to such foolishness—no one in the world!”
George gulped, and wet lines shone suddenly along his lower eyelids. “They—they’d better not!” he said, then stalked out of the room, and out of the house. He stamped fiercely across the stone slabs of the front porch, descended the steps, and halted abruptly, blinking in the strong sunshine.
In front of his own gate, beyond the Major’s broad lawn, his mother was just getting into her victoria, where sat already his Aunt Fanny and Lucy Morgan. It was a summer fashion-picture: the three ladies charmingly dressed, delicate parasols aloft; the lines of the victoria graceful as those of a violin; the trim pair of bays in glistening harness picked out with silver, and the serious black driver whom Isabel, being an Amberson, dared even in that town to put into a black livery coat, boots, white breeches, and cockaded hat. They jingled smartly away, and, seeing George standing on the Major’s lawn, Lucy waved, and Isabel threw him a kiss.
But George shuddered, pretending not to see them, and stooped as if searching for something lost in the grass, protracting that posture until the victoria was out of hearing. And ten minutes later, George Amberson, somewhat in the semblance of an angry person plunging out of the Mansion, found a pale nephew waiting to accost him.
“I haven’t time to talk, Georgie.”
“Yes, you have. You’d better!”
“What’s the matter, then?”
His namesake drew him away from the vicinity of the house. “I want to tell you something I just heard Aunt Amelia say, in there.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” said Amberson. “I’ve been hearing entirely too much of what ‘Aunt Amelia’ says, lately.”
“She says my mother’s on your side about this division of the property because you’re Eugene Morgan’s best friend.”
“What in the name of heaven has that got to do with your mother’s being on my side?”
“She said—” George paused to swallow. “She said—” He faltered.
“You look sick,” said his uncle; and laughed shortly. “If it’s because of anything Amelia’s been saying, I don’t blame you! What else did she say?”
George swallowed again, as with nausea, but under his uncle’s encouragement he was able to be explicit. “She said my mother wanted you to be friendly to her about Eugene Morgan. She said my mother had been using Aunt Fanny as a chaperone.”
Amberson emitted a laugh of disgust. “It’s wonderful what tommy-rot a woman in a state of spite can think of! I suppose you don’t doubt that Amelia Amberson created this specimen of tommy-rot herself?”
“I know she did.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
“She said—” George faltered again. “She said—she implied people were—were talking about it.”
“Of all the damn nonsense!” his uncle exclaimed.
George looked at him haggardly. “You’re sure they’re not?”
“Rubbish! Your mother’s on my side about this division because she knows Sydney’s a pig and always has been a pig, and so has his spiteful wife. I’m trying to keep them from getting the better of your mother as well as from getting the better of me, don’t you suppose? Well, they’re in a rage because Sydney always could do what he liked with father unless your mother interfered, and they know I got Isabel to ask him not to do what they wanted. They’re keeping up the fight and they’re sore—and Amelia’s a woman who always says any damn thing that comes into her head! That’s all there is to it.”
“But she said,” George persisted wretchedly; “she said there was talk. She said—”
“Look here, young fellow!” Amberson laughed good-naturedly. “There probably is some harmless talk about the way your Aunt Fanny goes after poor Eugene, and I’ve no doubt I’ve abetted it myself. People can’t help being amused by a thing like that. Fanny was always languishing at him, twenty-odd years ago, before he left here. Well, we can’t blame the poor thing if she’s got her hopes up again, and I don’t know that I blame her, myself, for using your mother the way she does.”
“How do you mean?”
Amberson put his hand on George’s shoulder. “You like to tease Fanny,” he said, “but I wouldn’t tease her about this, if I were you. Fanny hasn’t got much in her life. You know, Georgie, just being an aunt isn’t really the great career it may sometimes appear to you! In fact, I don’t know of anything much that Fanny has got, except her feeling about Eugene. She’s always had it—and what’s funny to us is pretty much life-and-death to her, I suspect. Now, I’ll not deny that Eugene Morgan is attracted to your mother. He is; and that’s another case of ‘always was’; but I know him, and he’s a knight, George—a crazy one, perhaps, if you’ve read ‘Don Quixote.’ And I think your mother likes him better than she likes any man outside her own family, and that he interests her more than anybody else—and ‘always has.’ And that’s all there is to it, except—”
“Except what?” George asked quickly, as he paused.
“Except that I suspect—” Amberson chuckled, and began over: “I’ll tell you in confidence. I think Fanny’s a fairly tricky customer, for such an innocent old girl! There isn’t any real harm in her, but she’s a great diplomatist—lots of cards up her lace sleeves, Georgie! By the way, did you ever notice how proud she is of her arms? Always flashing ’em at poor Eugene!” And he stopped to laugh again.
“I don’t see anything confidential about that,” George complained. “I thought—”
“Wait a minute! My idea is—don’t forget it’s a confidential one, but I’m devilish right about it, young Georgie!—it’s this: Fanny uses your mother for a decoy duck. She does everything in the world she can to keep your mother’s friendship with Eugene going, because she thinks that’s what keeps Eugene about the place, so to speak. Fanny’s always with your mother, you see; and whenever he sees Isabel he sees Fanny. Fanny thinks he’ll get used to the idea of her being around, and some day her chance may come! You see, she’s probably afraid—perhaps she even knows, poor thing!—that she wouldn’t get to see much of Eugene if it weren’t for Isabel’s being such a friend of his. There! D’you see?”
“Well—I suppose so.” George’s brow was still dark, however. “If you’re sure whatever talk there is, is about Aunt Fanny. If that’s so—”
“Don’t be an ass,” his uncle advised him lightly, moving away. “I’m off for a week’s fishing to forget that woman in there, and her pig of a husband.” (His gesture toward the Mansion indicated Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Amberson.) “I recommend a like course to you, if you’re silly enough to pay any attention to such rubbishings! Good-bye!”
George was partially reassured, but still troubled: a word haunted him like the recollection of a nightmare. “Talk!”
He stood looking at the houses across the street from the Mansion; and though the sunshine was bright upon them, they seemed mysteriously threatening. He had always despised them, except the largest of them, which was the home of his henchman, Charlie Johnson. The Johnsons had originally owned a lot three hundred feet wide, but they had sold all of it except the meager frontage before the house itself, and five houses were now crowded into the space where one used to squire it so spaciously. Up and down the street, the same transformation had taken place: every big, comfortable old brick house now had two or three smaller frame neighbours crowding up to it on each side, cheap-looking neighbours, most of them needing paint and not clean—and yet, though they were cheap looking, they had cost as much to build as the big brick houses, whose former ample yards they occupied. Only where George stood was there left a sward as of yore; the great, level, green lawn that served for both the Major’s house and his daughter’s. This serene domain—unbroken, except for the two gravelled carriage-drives—alone remained as it had been during the early glories of the Amberson Addition.
George stared at the ugly houses opposite, and hated them more than ever; but he shivered. Perhaps the riffraff living in those houses sat at the windows to watch their betters; perhaps they dared to gossip—
He uttered an exclamation, and walked rapidly toward his own front gate. The victoria had returned with Miss Fanny alone; she jumped out briskly and the victoria waited.
“Where’s mother?” George asked sharply, as he met her.
“At Lucy’s. I only came back to get some embroidery, because we found the sun too hot for driving. I’m in a hurry.”
But, going into the house with her, he detained her when she would have hastened upstairs.
“I haven’t time to talk now, Georgie; I’m going right back. I promised your mother—”
“You listen!” said George.
“What on earth—”
He repeated what Amelia had said. This time, however, he spoke coldly, and without the emotion he had exhibited during the recital to his uncle: Fanny was the one who showed agitation during this interview, for she grew fiery red, and her eyes dilated. “What on earth do you want to bring such trash to me for?” she demanded, breathing fast.
“I merely wished to know two things: whether it is your duty or mine to speak to father of what Aunt Amelia—”
Fanny stamped her foot. “You little fool!” she cried. “You awful little fool!”
“I decline—”
“Decline, my hat! Your father’s a sick man, and you—”
“He doesn’t seem so to me.”
“Well, he does to me! And you want to go troubling him with an Amberson family row! It’s just what that cat would love you to do!”
“Well, I—”
“Tell your father if you like! It will only make him a little sicker to think he’s got a son silly enough to listen to such craziness!”
“Then you’re sure there isn’t any talk?” Fanny disdained a reply in words. She made a hissing sound of utter contempt and snapped her fingers. Then she asked scornfully: “What’s the other thing you wanted to know?”
George’s pallor increased. “Whether it mightn’t be better, under the circumstances,” he said, “if this family were not so intimate with the Morgan family—at least for a time. It might be better—”
Fanny stared at him incredulously. “You mean you’d quit seeing Lucy?”
“I hadn’t thought of that side of it, but if such a thing were necessary on account of talk about my mother, I—I—” He hesitated unhappily. “I suggested that if all of us—for a time—perhaps only for a time—it might be better if—”
“See here,” she interrupted. “We’ll settle this nonsense right now. If Eugene Morgan comes to this house, for instance, to see me, your mother can’t get up and leave the place the minute he gets here, can she? What do you want her to do: insult him? Or perhaps you’d prefer she’d insult Lucy? That would do just as well. What is it you’re up to, anyhow? Do you really love your Aunt Amelia so much that you want to please her? Or do you really hate your Aunt Fanny so much that you want to—that you want to—”
She choked and sought for her handkerchief; suddenly she began to cry.
“Oh, see here,” George said. “I don’t hate you,” Aunt Fanny. “That’s silly. I don’t—”
“You do! You do! You want to—you want to destroy the only thing—that I—that I ever—” And, unable to continue, she became inaudible in her handkerchief.
George felt remorseful, and his own troubles were lightened: all at once it became clear to him that he had been worrying about nothing. He perceived that his Aunt Amelia was indeed an old cat, and that to give her scandalous meanderings another thought would be the height of folly. By no means unsusceptible to such pathos as that now exposed before him, he did not lack pity for Fanny, whose almost spoken confession was lamentable; and he was granted the vision to understand that his mother also pitied Fanny infinitely more than he did. This seemed to explain everything.
He patted the unhappy lady awkwardly upon her shoulder. “There, there!” he said. “I didn’t mean anything. Of course the only thing to do about Aunt Amelia is to pay no attention to her. It’s all right, Aunt Fanny. Don’t cry. I feel a lot better now, myself. Come on; I’ll drive back there with you. It’s all over, and nothing’s the matter. Can’t you cheer up?”
Fanny cheered up; and presently the customarily hostile aunt and nephew were driving out Amberson Boulevard amiably together in the hot sunshine.