Wild Wings | Page 9

"I repeat, your father was a very lucky man--a damnably lucky one."
And with that they shook hands and parted.
It was many months before Tony was to see Max Hempel again and many waters were to run under the bridge before the meeting came to pass.
Outside in the car, Ted, Dick and the twins waited the arrival of the heroine of the evening. The three latter greeted her with a burst of prideful congratulation; the former, being merely a brother, was distinctly cross at having been kept waiting so long and did not hesitate to express his sentiments fully out loud. But Doctor Holiday cut short his nephew's somewhat ungracious speech by a quiet reminder that the car was here primarily for Tony's use, and the boy subsided, having no more to say until, having deposited the occupants of the car at their various destinations, he announced to his uncle with elaborate carelessness that he would take the car around to the garage.
But he did not turn in at the side street where the garage was. Instead he shot out Elm Street, "hitting her up" at forty. There had been a reason for his impatience. Ted Holiday had important private business to transact ere cock crow.
Tony lay awake a long time that night, dreaming dreams that carried her far and far into the future, until Rosalind's happy triumph of the evening almost faded away in the glory of the yet-to-be. It was characteristic of the girl's stage of development that in all her dreams, no lovers, much less a possible husband, ever once entered. Tony Holiday was in love with life and life alone that wonderful June night. As Hempel had shrewdly perceived she was conscious of having wings and desirous of flying far and free with them ere she came to pause.
She did remember, in passing however, how she had caught Dick's eyes once as he sat in the box near the stage, and how his rapt gaze had thrilled her to intenser playing of her part. And she remembered how dear he was afterward in the car when he held her roses and told her softly what a wonderful, wonderful Rosalind she was. But, on the whole, Dick, like most of the rest of the people with whom she had held converse since the curtain went down upon Arden, seemed unimportant and indistinct, like courtiers and foresters, not specifically named among the _dramatis personae_, just put in to fill out and make a more effective stage setting.
Dick, too, in his room on Greene Street, was wakeful. He sat by the window far into the night. His heart was heavy within him. The gulf between him and Tony had suddenly widened immeasureably. She was a real actress. He hadn't needed a great manager's verdict to teach him that. He had seen it with his own eyes, heard it with his own ears, felt it with his own heart. He had worshiped and adored and been made unutterably sad and lonely by her dazzling success, glad as he was that it had come to her. Tony would go on in her shining path. He would always lag behind in the shadows. They would never come together as long as they both lived. She had started too far ahead. He could never overtake her.
If only there were some way of finding out who he was, get some clue as to his parentage. He only knew that the man they called Jim, who had kicked and beaten and sworn at him with foul oaths until he could bear it no longer, was no kin of his, though the other had claimed the authority to abuse him as he abused his horses and dogs when drink and ugliness were upon him. If only he could find Jim again after all these years, perhaps he could manage to get the truth out of him, find out what the man knew of himself, and how he had come to be in a circus troupe. Yet after all, perhaps it was better not to know. The facts might separate him from Tony even more than he was separated by his ignorance of them. As it was, he started even, with neither honor nor shame bequeathed him from the past. What he was, he was in himself. And if by any miracle of fortune Tony ever did come to care for him it would be just himself, plain Dick, that she would love. He knew that.
The thought was vaguely comforting and he, too, fell adreaming. Most of us foiled humans learn to play the game of make-believe and to find such consolation as we may therein. Often and often in his lonely hours Dick Carson had summoned Tony Holiday to his side, a Tony as bright and beautiful