Edith Wharton - Novel 14 Read Online Free Page B

he would pick out one of the humble cyclists’ restaurants near
the Seine ; but not he. “Madrid, is it?” he said
gaily, as the taxi turned into the Bois; and there they sat under the
illuminated trees, in the general glitter and expensiveness, with the Tziganes
playing down their talk, and all around them the painted faces that seemed to
the father so old and obvious, and to the son, no doubt, so full of novelty and
mystery.
                 The
music made conversation difficult; but Campton did not care. It was enough to
sit and watch the face in which, after each absence, he noted a new and richer
vivacity. He had often tried to make up his mind if his boy were handsome. Not
that the father’s eye influenced the painter’s; but George’s young head, with
its thick blond thatch, the complexion ruddy to the golden eyebrows, and then
abruptly white on the forehead, the short amused nose, the inquisitive eyes,
the ears lying back flat to the skull against curly edges of fair hair, defied
all rules and escaped all classifications by a mixture of romantic gaiety and
shrewd plainness like that in certain eighteenth-century portraits.
                 As
father and son faced each other over the piled-up peaches, while the last
sparkle of champagne died down in their glasses, Campton’s thoughts went back
to the day when he had first discovered his son. George was a schoolboy of
twelve, at home for the Christmas holidays. At home meant at the Brants’, since
it was always there he stayed: his father saw him only on certain days. Usually
Mariette fetched him to the studio on one afternoon in the week; but this
particular week George was ill, and it had been arranged that in case of
illness his father was to visit him at his mother’s. He had one of his frequent
bad colds, and Campton recalled him, propped up in bed in his luxurious
overheated room, a scarlet sweater over his nightshirt, a book on his thin
knees, and his ugly little fever-flushed face bent over it in profound
absorption. Till that moment George had never seemed to care for books: his
father had resigned himself to the probability of seeing him grow up into the
ordinary pleasant young fellow, with his mother’s worldly tastes. But the boy
was reading as only a bookworm reads—reading with his very finger-tips, and his
inquisitive nose, and the perpetual dart ahead of a gaze that seemed to guess
each phrase from its last work. He looked up with a smile, and said: “Oh, Dad
…” but it was clear that he regarded the visit as an interruption. Campton,
leaning over, saw that the book was a first edition of Lavengro.
                 “Where
the deuce did you get that?”
                 George
looked at him with shining eyes. “Didn’t you know? Mr. Brant has started
collecting first editions. There’s a chap who comes over from London with things for him. He lets me have them
to look at when I’m seedy. I say, isn’t this topping? Do you remember the
fight?” And, marvelling once more at the ways of Providence , Campton perceived that the millionaire’s
taste for owning books had awakened in his stepson a taste for reading them. “I
couldn’t have done that for him,” the father had reflected with secret
bitterness. It was not that a bibliophile’s library was necessary to develop a
taste for letters; but that Campton himself, being a small reader, had few
books about him, and usually borrowed those few. If George had lived with him
he might never have guessed the boy’s latent hunger, for the need of books as
part of one’s daily food would scarcely have presented itself to him.
                 From
that day he and George had understood each other. Initiation had come to them
in different ways, but their ardour for beauty had the same root. The visible world, and its transposition in terms of one art or another, were thereafter the subject of their interminable talks; and Campton, with a
passionate