Tales of Men and Ghosts

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.