pg8867 [50]
"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