Lucy did not quite understand, but she laughed as a friend should, and, taking his arm, showed him through vasty rooms where ivory-panelled walls and trim window hangings were reflected dimly in dark, rugless floors, and the sparse furniture showed that Lucy had been "collecting" with a long purse. "By Jove!" he said. "You have been going it! Fanny tells me you had a great 'house-warming' dance, and you keep right on being the belle of the ball, not any softer-hearted than you used to be. Fred Kinney's father says you've refused Fred so often that he got engaged to Janie Sharon just to prove that someone would have him in spite of his hair. Well, the material world do move, and you've got the new kind of house it moves into nowadays--if it has the new price! And even the grand old expanses of plate glass we used to be so proud of at the other Amberson Mansion--they've gone, too, with the crowded heavy gold and red stuff. Curious! We've still got the plate glass windows, though all we can see out of 'em is the smoke and the old Johnson house, which is a counter-jumper's boardinghouse now, while you've got a view, and you cut it all up into little panes. Well, you're pretty refreshingly out of the smoke up here."
"Yes, for a while," Lucy laughed. "Until it comes and we have to move out farther."
"No, you'll stay here," he assured her. "It will be somebody else who'll move out farther."
He continued to talk of the house after Eugene arrived, and gave them no account of his journey until they had retired from the dinner table to Eugene's library, a gray and shadowy room, where their coffee was brought. Then, equipped with a cigar, which seemed to occupy his attention, Amberson spoke in a casual tone of his sister and her son.
"I found Isabel as well as usual," he said, "only I'm afraid 'as usual' isn't particularly well. Sydney and Amelia had been up to Paris in the spring, but she hadn't seen them. Somebody told her they were there, it seems. They'd left Florence and were living in Rome; Amelia's become a Catholic and is said to give great sums to charity and to go about with the gentry in consequence, but Sydney's ailing and lives in a wheel-chair most of the time. It struck me Isabel ought to be doing the same thing."
He paused, bestowing minute care upon the removal of the little band from his cigar; and as he seemed to have concluded his narrative, Eugene spoke out of the shadow beyond a heavily shaded lamp: "What do you mean by that?" he asked quietly.
"Oh, she's cheerful enough," said Amberson, still not looking at either his young hostess or her father. "At least," he added, "she manages to seem so. I'm afraid she hasn't been really well for several years. She isn't stout you know--she hasn't changed in looks much--and she seems rather alarmingly short of breath for a slender person. Father's been that way for years, of course; but never nearly so much as Isabel is now. Of course she makes nothing of it, but it seemed rather serious to me when I noticed she had to stop and rest twice to get up the one short flight of stairs in their two-floor apartment. I told her I thought she ought to make George let her come home."
"'Let her?'" Eugene repeated, in a low voice. "Does she want to?"
"She doesn't urge it. George seems to like the life there--in his grand, gloomy, and peculiar way; and of course she'll never change about being proud of him and all that--he's quite a swell. But in spite of anything she said, rather than because, I know she does indeed want to come. She'd like to be with father, of course; and I think she's--well, she intimated one day that she feared it might even happen that she wouldn't get to see him again. At the time I thought she referred to his age and feebleness, but on the boat, coming home, I remembered the little look of wistfulness, yet of resignation, with which she said it, and it struck me all at once that I'd been mistaken: I saw she was really thinking of her own state of health."
"I see," Eugene said, his voice even lower than it had been before. "And you say he won't 'let' her come home?"
Amberson laughed, but still continued to be interested in his cigar. "Oh, I don't think he uses force! He's very gentle with her. I doubt if the subject is mentioned between them, and yet--and yet, knowing my interesting nephew as you do, wouldn't you think that was about the way to put it?"
"Knowing him as I do--yes," said Eugene slowly, "Yes, I should think that was about the way to put it."
A murmur out of the shadows beyond him--a faint sound, musical and feminine, yet expressive of a notable intensity--seemed to indicate that Lucy was of the same opinion.
"LET her" was correct; but the time came--and it came in the spring of the next year--when it was no longer a question of George's letting his mother come home. He had to bring her, and to bring her quickly if she was to see her father again; and Amberson had been right: her danger of never seeing him again lay not in the Major's feebleness of heart but in her own. As it was, George telegraphed his uncle to have a wheeled chair at the station, for the journey had been disastrous, and to this hybrid vehicle, placed close to the car platform, her son carried her in his arms when she arrived. She was unable to speak, but patted her brother's and Franny's hands and looked "very sweet," Fanny found the desperate courage to tell her. She was lifted from the chair into a carriage, and seemed a little stronger as they drove home; for once she took her hand from George's, and waved it feebly toward the carriage window.
"Changed," she whispered. "So changed."
"You mean the town," Amberson said. "You mean the old place is changed, don't you, dear?"
She smiled and moved her lips: "Yes."
"It'll change to a happier place, old dear," he said, "now that you're back in it, and going to get well again."
But she only looked at him wistfully, her eyes a little frightened.
When the carriage stopped, her son carried her into the house, and up the stairs to her own room. where a nurse was waiting; and he came out a moment later, as the doctor went in. At the end of the hall a stricken group was clustered: Amberson, and Fanny, and the Major. George, deathly pale and speechless, took his grandfather's hand, but the old gentleman did not seem to notice his action.
"When are they going to let me see my daughter?" he asked querulously. "They told me to keep out of the way while they carried her in, because it might upset her. I wish they'd let me go in and speak to my daughter. I think she wants to see me."
He was right--presently the doctor came out and beckoned to him; and the Major shuffled forward, leaning on a shaking cane; his figure, after all its years of proud soldierliness, had grown stooping at last, and his untrimmed white hair straggled over the back of his collar. He looked old--old and divested of the world--as he crept toward his daughter's room. Her voice was stronger, for the waiting group heard a low cry of tenderness and welcome as the old man reached the open doorway. Then the door was closed.
Fanny touched her nephew's arm. "George, you must need something to eat--I know she'd want you to. I've had things ready; I knew she'd want me to. You'd better go down to the dining room; there's plenty on the table, waiting for you. She'd want you to eat something."
He turned a ghastly face to her, it was so panic-stricken. "I don't want anything to eat!" he said savagely. And he began to pace the floor, taking care not to go near Isabel's door, and that his footsteps were muffled by the long, thick hall rug. After a while he went to where Amberson, with folded arms and bowed head, had seated himself near the front window. "Uncle George," he said hoarsely. "I didn't--"
"Well?"
"Oh, my God, I didn't think this thing the matter with her could ever be serious! I--" He gasped. "When that doctor I had meet us at the boat--" He could not go on.
Amberson only nodded his head, and did not otherwise change his attitude.
. . . Isabel lived through the night. At eleven o'clock Fanny came timidly to George in his room. "Eugene is here," she whispered. "He's downstairs. He wants--" She gulped. "He wants to know if he can't see her. I didn't know what to say. I said I'd see. I didn't know--the doctor said--"
"The doctor said we 'must keep her peaceful,'" George said sharply. "Do you think that man's coming would be very soothing? My God! if it hadn't been for him this mightn't have happened: we could have gone on living here quietly, and--why, it would be like taking a stranger into her room! She hasn't even spoken of him more than twice in all the time we've been away. Doesn't he know how sick she is? You tell him the doctor said she had to be quiet and peaceful. That's what he did say, isn't it?"
Fanny acquiesced tearfully. "I'll tell him. I'll tell him the doctor said she was to be kept very quiet. I--I didn't know--" And she pottered out.
An hour later the nurse appeared in George's doorway; she came noiselessly, and his back was toward her; but he jumped as if he had been shot, and his jaw fell, he so feared what she was going to say.
"She wants to see you."
The terrified mouth shut with a click; and he nodded and followed her; but she remained outside his mother's room while he went in.
Isabel's eyes were closed, and she did not open them or move her head, but she smiled and edged her hand toward him as he sat on a stool beside the bed. He took that slender, cold hand, and put it to his cheek.
"Darling, did you--get something to eat?" She could only whisper, slowly and with difficulty. It was as if Isabel herself were far away, and only able to signal what she wanted to say.
"Yes, mother."
"All you--needed?"
