The Magnificent Ambersons - Booth Tarkington (top novels of all time TXT) 📗

and she let it go on, and fostered it till it absolutely ruled her. I never saw a plainer case of a person’s fault making them pay for having it! She goes about, overseeing the packing and praising George and pretending to be perfectly cheerful about what he’s making her do and about the dreadful things he’s done. She pretends he did such a fine thing⁠—so manly and protective⁠—going to Mrs. Johnson. And so heroic⁠—doing what his ‘principles’ made him⁠—even though he knew what it would cost him with you! And all the while it’s almost killing her⁠—what he said to your father! She’s always been lofty enough, so to speak, and had the greatest idea of the Ambersons being superior to the rest of the world, and all that, but rudeness, or anything like a ‘scene,’ or any bad manners⁠—they always just made her sick! But she could never see what George’s manners were⁠—oh, it’s been a terrible adulation!⁠ ⁠… It’s going to be a task for me, living in that big house, all alone: you must come and see me⁠—I mean after they’ve gone, of course. I’ll go crazy if I don’t see something of people. I’m sure you’ll come as often as you can. I know you too well to think you’ll be sensitive about coming there, or being reminded of George. Thank heaven you’re too well-balanced,” Miss Fanny concluded, with a profound fervour, “you’re too well-balanced to let anything affect you deeply about that⁠—that monkey!”

The four photographs and the painted Florentine box went to their cremation within the same hour that Miss Fanny spoke; and a little later Lucy called her father in, as he passed her door, and pointed to the blackened area on the underside of the mantelpiece, and to the burnt heap upon the coal, where some metallic shapes still retained outline. She flung her arms about his neck in passionate sympathy, telling him that she knew what had happened to him; and presently he began to comfort her and managed an embarrassed laugh.

“Well, well⁠—” he said. “I was too old for such foolishness to be getting into my head, anyhow.”

“No, no!” she sobbed. “And if you knew how I despise myself for⁠—forever having thought one instant about⁠—oh, Miss Fanny called him the right name: that monkey! He is!”

“There, I think I agree with you,” Eugene said grimly, and in his eyes there was a steady light of anger that was to last. “Yes, I think I agree with you about that!”

“There’s only one thing to do with such a person,” she said vehemently. “That’s to put him out of our thoughts forever⁠—forever!”

And yet, the next day, at six o’clock, which was the hour, Fanny had told her, when George and his mother were to leave upon their long journey, Lucy touched that scorched place on her mantel with her hand just as the little clock above it struck. Then, after this odd, unconscious gesture, she went to a window and stood between the curtains, looking out into the cold November dusk; and in spite of every reasoning and reasonable power within her, a pain of loneliness struck through her heart. The dim street below her window, the dark houses across the way, the vague air itself⁠—all looked empty, and cold and (most of all) uninteresting. Something more sombre than November dusk took the colour from them and gave them that air of desertion.

The light of her fire, flickering up behind her showed suddenly a flying group of tiny snowflakes nearing the windowpane; and for an instant she felt the sensation of being dragged through a snows drift under a broken cutter, with a boy’s arms about her⁠—an arrogant, handsome, too-conquering boy, who nevertheless did his best to get hurt himself, keeping her from any possible harm.

She shook the picture out of her eyes indignantly, then came and sat before her fire, and looked long and long at the blackened mantelpiece. She did not have the mantelpiece repainted⁠—and, since she did not, might as well have kept his photographs. One forgets what made the scar upon his hand but not what made the scar upon his wall.

She played no marche funèbre upon her piano, even though Chopin’s romantic lamentation was then at the top of nine-tenths of the music-racks in the country, American youth having recently discovered the distinguished congeniality between itself and this deathless bit of deathly gloom. She did not even play “Robin Adair”; she played “Bedelia” and all the new cakewalks, for she was her father’s housekeeper, and rightly looked upon the office as being the same as that of his heart-keeper. Therefore it was her affair to keep both house and heart in what state of cheerfulness might be contrived. She made him “go out” more than ever; made him take her to all the gayeties of that winter, declining to go herself unless he took her, and, though Eugene danced no more, and quoted Shakespeare to prove all lightfoot caperings beneath the dignity of his age, she broke his resolution for him at the New Year’s Eve “Assembly” and half coaxed, half dragged him forth upon the floor, and made him dance the New Year in with her.

… New faces appeared at the dances of the winter; new faces had been appearing everywhere, for that matter, and familiar ones were disappearing, merged in the increasing crowd, or gone forever and missed a little and not long; for the town was growing and changing as it never had grown and changed before.

It was heaving up in the middle incredibly; it was spreading incredibly; and as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself and darkened its sky. Its boundary was mere shapelessness on the run; a raw, new house would appear on a country road; four or five others would presently be built at intervals between it and the outskirts of the town; the country road would turn into an asphalt street with a brick-faced drugstore and a frame grocery