RONALD obeyed his father’s injunction not to come to luncheon on the day
of the Bankshires’ dinner; but in the middle of the following week Mr.
Grew was surprised by a telegram from his son.
“Want to see you important matter. Expect me to-morrow afternoon.”
Mr. Grew received the telegram after breakfast. To peruse it he had
lifted his eye from a paragraph of the morning paper describing a
fancy-dress dinner which had taken place the night before at the
Hamilton Gliddens’ for the house-warming of their new Fifth Avenue
palace.
“Among the couples who afterward danced in the Poets’ Quadrille were
Miss Daisy Bankshire, looking more than usually lovely as Laura, and Mr.
Ronald Grew as the young Petrarch.”
Petrarch and Laura! Well--if _anything_ meant anything, Mr. Grew
supposed he knew what that meant. For weeks past he had noticed how
constantly the names of the young people appeared together in the
society notes he so insatiably devoured. Even the soulless reporter was
getting into the habit of coupling them in his lists. And this Laura and
Petrarch business was almost an announcement...
Mr. Grew dropped the telegram, wiped his eye-glasses, and re-read the
paragraph. “Miss Daisy Bankshire ... more than usually lovely...” Yes;
she _was_ lovely. He had often seen her photograph in the papers--seen
her represented in every conceivable attitude of the mundane game:
fondling her prize bull-dog, taking a fence on her thoroughbred, dancing
a _gavotte_, all patches and plumes, or fingering a guitar, all tulle
and lilies; and once he had caught a glimpse of her at the theatre.
Hearing that Ronald was going to a fashionable first-night with the
Bankshires, Mr. Grew had for once overcome his repugnance to following
his son’s movements, and had secured for himself, under the shadow of
the balcony, a stall whence he could observe the Bankshire box without
fear of detection. Ronald had never known of his father’s presence at
the play; and for three blessed hours Mr. Grew had watched his boy’s
handsome dark head bent above the dense fair hair and white averted
shoulder that were all he could catch of Miss Bankshire’s beauties.
He recalled the vision now; and with it came, as usual, its ghostly
double: the vision of his young self bending above such a white shoulder
and such shining hair. Needless to say that the real Mason Grew had
never found himself in so enviable a situation. The late Mrs. Grew had
no more resembled Miss Daisy Bankshire than he had looked like the happy
victorious Ronald. And the mystery was that from their dull faces,
their dull endearments, the miracle of Ronald should have sprung. It was
almost--fantastically--as if the boy had been a changeling, child of a
Latmian night, whom the divine companion of Mr. Grew’s early reveries
had secretly laid in the cradle of the Wingfield bedroom while Mr. And
Mrs. Grew slept the deep sleep of conjugal indifference.
The young Mason Grew had not at first accepted this astral episode as
the complete cancelling of his claims on romance. He too had grasped at
the high-hung glory; and, with his fatal tendency to reach too far when
he reached at all, had singled out the prettiest girl in Wingfield.
When he recalled his stammered confession of love his face still tingled
under her cool bright stare. The wonder of his audacity had struck her
dumb; and when she recovered her voice it was to fling a taunt at him.
“Don’t be too discouraged, you know--have you ever thought of trying
Addie Wicks?”
All Wingfield would have understood the gibe: Addie Wicks was the
dullest girl in town. And a year later he had married Addie Wicks...
He looked up from the perusal of Ronald’s telegram with this memory in
his mind. Now at last his dream was coming true! His boy would taste
of the joys that had mocked his thwarted youth and his dull gray
middle-age. And it was fitting that they should be realized in Ronald’s
destiny. Ronald was made to take happiness boldly by the hand and lead
it home like a bridegroom. He had the carriage, the confidence, the high
faith in his fortune, that compel the wilful stars. And, thanks to
the Buckle, he would have the exceptional setting, the background of
material elegance, that became his conquering person. Since Mr. Grew
had retired from business his investments had prospered, and he had been
saving up his income for just such a contingency. His own wants were
few: he had transferred the Wingfield furniture to Brooklyn, and his
sitting-room was a replica of that in which the long years of his
married life had been spent. Even the florid carpet on which Ronald’s
tottering footsteps had been taken was carefully matched when it
became too threadbare. And on the marble centre-table, with its
chenille-fringed cover and bunch of dyed pampas grass, lay the
illustrated Longfellow and the copy of Ingersoll’s lectures which
represented literature to Mr. Grew when he had led home his bride. In
the light of Ronald’s romance, Mr. Grew found himself re-living, with
a strange tremor of mingled pain and tenderness, all the poor prosaic
incidents of his own personal history. Curiously enough, with this new
splendor on them they began to emit a small faint ray of their own. His
wife’s armchair, in its usual place by the fire, recalled her placid
unperceiving presence, seated opposite to him during the long drowsy
years; and he felt her kindness, her equanimity, where formerly he had
only ached at her obtuseness. And from the chair he glanced up at the
large discolored photograph on the wall above, with a brittle brown
wreath suspended on a corner of the frame. The photograph represented
a young man with a poetic necktie and untrammelled hair, leaning
negligently against a Gothic chair-back, a roll of music in his hand;
and beneath was scrawled a bar of Chopin, with the words: “_ Adieu,
Adele_.”
The portrait was that of the great pianist, Fortune Dolbrowski; and its
presence on the wall of Mr. Grew’s sitting-room commemorated the only
exquisite hour of his life save that of Ronald’s birth. It was some time
before the latter memorable event, a few months only after Mr. Grew’s
marriage, that he had taken his wife to New York to hear the great
Dolbrowski. Their evening had been magically beautiful, and even Addie,
roused from her habitual inexpressiveness, had quivered into a momentary
semblance of life. “I never--I never--” she gasped out helplessly when
they had regained their hotel bedroom, and sat staring back entranced
at the evening’s evocations. Her large immovable face was pink and
tremulous, and she sat with her hands on her knees, forgetting to roll
up her bonnet-strings and prepare her curl-papers.
“I’d like to _write_ him just how I felt--I wisht I knew how!” she burst
out suddenly in a final effervescence of emotion.
Her husband lifted his head and looked at her.
“Would you? I feel that way too,” he said with a sheepish laugh. And
they continued to stare at each other shyly through a transfiguring mist
of sound.
Mr. Grew recalled the scene as he gazed up at the pianist’s faded
photograph. “Well, I owe her that anyhow--poor Addie!” he said, with a
smile at the inconsequences of fate. With Ronald’s telegram in his hand
he was in a mood to count his mercies.