"Yes, mother."
She did not speak again for a time; then, "Are you sure you didn't--didn't catch cold--coming home?"
"I'm all right, mother."
"That's good. It's sweet--it's sweet--"
"What is, mother darling?"
"To feel--my hand on your cheek. I--I can feel it."
But this frightened him horribly--that she seemed so glad she could feel it, like a child proud of some miraculous seeming thing accomplished. It frightened him so that he could not speak, and he feared that she would know how he trembled; but she was unaware, and again was silent. Finally she spoke
again:
"I wonder if--if Eugene and Lucy know that we've come--home."
"I'm sure they do."
"Has he--asked about me?"
"Yes, he was here."
"Has he--gone?"
"Yes, mother."
She sighed faintly. "I'd like--"
"What, mother?"
"I'd like to have--seen him." It was just audible, this little regretful murmur. Several minutes passed before there was another. "Just--just once," she whispered, and then was still.
She seemed to have fallen asleep, and George moved to go, but a faint pressure upon his fingers detained him, and he remained, with her hand still pressed against his cheek. After a while he made sure she was asleep, and moved again, to let the nurse come in, and this time there was no pressure of the fingers to keep him. She was not asleep, but, thinking that if he went he might get some rest, and be better prepared for what she knew was coming, she commanded those longing fingers of hers--and let him go.
He found the doctor standing with the nurse in the hall; and, telling them that his mother was drowsing now, George went back to his own room, where he was startled to find his grandfather lying on the bed, and his uncle leaning against the wall. They had gone home two hours before, and he did not know they had returned.
"The doctor thought we'd better come over," Amberson said, then was silent, and George, shaking violently, sat down on the edge of the bed. His shaking continued, and from time to time he wiped heavy sweat from his forehead.
The hours passed, and sometimes the old man upon the bed would snore a little, stop suddenly, and move as if to rise, but George Amberson would set a hand upon his shoulder, and murmur a reassuring word or two. Now and then, either uncle or nephew would tiptoe into the hall and look toward Isabel's room, then come tiptoeing back, the other watching him haggardly.
Once George gasped defiantly: "That doctor in New York said she might get better! Don't you know he did? Don't you know he said she might?"
Amberson made no answer.
Dawn had been murking through the smoky windows, growing stronger for half an hour, when both men started violently at a sound in the hall; and the Major sat up on the bed, unchecked. It was the voice of the nurse speaking to Fanny Minafer, and the next moment, Fanny appeared in the doorway, making contorted efforts to speak.
Amberson said weakly: "Does she want us--to come in?"
But Fanny found her voice, and uttered a long, loud cry. She threw her arms about George, and sobbed in an agony of loss and compassion:
"She loved you!" she wailed. "She loved you! She loved you! Oh, how she did love you!"
Isabel had just left them.
MAJOR AMBERSON remained dry-eyed through the time that followed: he knew that this cseparation from his daughter would be short; that the separation which had preceded it was the long one. He worked at his ledgers no more under his old gas drop-light, but would sit all evening staring into the fire, in his bedroom, and not speaking unless someone asked him a question. He seemed almost unaware of what went on around him, and those who were with him thought him dazed by Isabel's death, guessing that he was lost in reminiscences and vague dreams. "Probably his mind is full of pictures of his youth, or the Civil War, and the days when he and mother were young married people and all of us children were jolly little things--and the city was a small town with one cobbled street and the others just dirt roads with board sidewalks." This was George Amberson's conjecture, and the others agreed; but they were mistaken. The Major was engaged in the profoundest thinking of his life. No business plans which had ever absorbed him could compare in momentousness with the plans that absorbed him now, for he had to plan how to enter the unknown country where he was not even sure of being recognized as an Amberson--not sure of anything, except that Isabel would help him if she could. His absorption produced the outward effect of reverie, but of course it was not. The Major was occupied with the first really important matter that had taken his attention since he came home invalided, after the Gettysburg campaign, and went into business; and he realized that everything which had worried him or delighted him during this lifetime between then and to-day--all his buying and building and trading and banking--that it all was trifling and waste beside what concerned him now.
He seldom went out of his room, and often left untouched the meals they brought to him there; and this neglect caused them to shake their heads mournfully, again mistaking for dazedness the profound concentration of his mind. Meanwhile, the life of the little bereft group still forlornly centring upon him began to pick up again, as life will, and to emerge from its own period of dazedness. It was not Isabel's father but her son who was really dazed.
A month after her death he walked abruptly into Fanny's room, one night, and found her at her desk, eagerly adding columns of figures with which she had covered several sheets of paper. This mathematical computation was concerned with her future income to be produced by the electric headlight, now just placed on the general market; but Fanny was ashamed to be discovered doing anything except mourning, and hastily pushed the sheets aside, even as she looked over her shoulder to greet her hollow-eyed visitor.
"George! You startled me."
"I beg your pardon for not knocking," he said huskily. "I didn't think."
She turned in her chair and looked at him solicitously. "Sit down, George, won't you?"
"No. I just wanted--"
"I could hear you walking up and down in your room," said Fanny. "You were doing it ever since dinner, and it seems to me you're at it almost every evening. I don't believe it's good for you--and I know it would worry your mother terribly if she--" Fanny hesitated.
"See here," George said, breathing fast, "I want to tell you once more that what I did was right. How could I have done anything else but what I did do?"
"About what, George?"
"About everything!" he exclaimed; and he became vehement. "I did the right thing, I tell you! In heaven's name, I'd like to know what else there was for anybody in my position to do! It would have been a dreadful thing for me to just let matters go on and not interfere--it would have been terrible! What else on earth was there for me to do? I had to stop that talk, didn't I? Could a son do less than I did? Didn't it cost me something to do it? Lucy and I'd had a quarrel, but that would have come round in time--and it meant the end forever when I turned her father back from our door. I knew what it meant, yet I went ahead and did it because I knew it had to be done if the talk was to be stopped. I took mother away for the same reason. I knew that would help to stop it. And she was happy over there--she was perfectly happy. I tell you, I think she had a happy life, and that's my only consolation. She didn't live to be old; she was still beautiful and young looking, and I feel she'd rather have gone before she got old. She'd had a good husband, and all the comfort and luxury that anybody could have--and how could it be called anything but a happy life? She was always cheerful, and when I think of her I can always see her laughing--I can always hear that pretty laugh of hers. When I can keep my mind off of the trip home, and that last night, I always think of her gay and laughing. So how on earth could she have had anything but a happy life? People that aren't happy don't look cheerful all the time, do they? They look unhappy if they are unhappy; that's how they look! See here"--he faced her challengingly--"do you deny that I did the right thing?"
"Oh, I don't pretend to judge," Fanny said soothingly, for his voice and gesture both partook of wildness. "I know you think you did, George."
"'Think I did!'" he echoed violently. "My God in heaven!" And he began to walk up and down the floor. "What else was there to do? What choice did I have? Was there any other way of stopping the talk?" He stopped, close in front of her, gesticulating, his voice harsh and loud: "Don't you hear me? I'm asking you: Was there any other way on earth of protecting her from the talk?"
Miss Fanny looked away. "It died down before long, I think," she said nervously.
"That shows I was right, doesn't it?" he cried. "If I hadn't acted as I did, that slanderous old Johnson woman would have kept on with her slanders--she'd still be--
"No," Fanny interrupted. "She's dead. She dropped dead with apoplexy one day about six weeks after you left. I didn't mention it in my letters because I didn't want--I thought--
"Well, the other people would have kept on, then. They'd have--"
"I don't know," said Fanny, still averting her troubled eyes. "Things are so changed here, George. The other people you speak of--one hardly knows what's become of them. Of course not a great many were doing the talking, and they--well, some of them are dead, and some might as well be--you never see them any more--and the rest, whoever they were, are probably so mixed in with the crowds of new people that seem never even to have heard of us--and I'm sure we certainly never heard of them--and people seem to forget things so soon--they seem to forget anything. You can't imagine how things have changed here!"
