CHAPTER I

STRAINED RELATIONS

Some people, you will admit, can absorb experience in gentle little homeopathic doses, while others require it to be shot into them by hypodermic injections.

Certainly my Dresden-china mother up to the time of my birth had been forced to take this bitter medicine in every form, yet she had never been known to profit by it. She would not, it is true, fly in the very face of Providence, but she _would_ nag at its coat tails.

"You might as well name this child 'Praise-the-Lord,' and be done with it!" complained the rich Christie connection (which mother had always regarded as outlaws as well as in-laws), shaking its finger across the christening font into mother's boarding-school face on the day of my baptism. "Of course all the world knows you're _glad_ she's posthumous, but--"

"But with Tom Christie only six weeks in spirit-land it isn't decent!" Cousin Pollie finished up individually.

"Besides, good families don't name their children for abstract things," Aunt Hannah put in. "It--well, it simply isn't done."

"A woman who never does anything that isn't done, never does anything worth doing," mother answered, through pretty pursed lips.

"But, since you must be freakish, why not call her Prudence, or Patience--to keep Oldburgh from wagging its tongue in two?" Aunt Louella suggested.

Oldburgh isn't the town's name, of course, but it's a descriptive alias. The place itself is, unfortunately, the worst overworked southern capital in fiction. It is one of the Old South's "types," boasting far more social leaders than sky-scrapers--and you can't suffer a blow-out on _any_ pike near the city's limits that isn't flanked by a college campus.

"Oldburgh knows how I feel," mother replied. "If this baby had been a boy I should have named him Theodore--gift of God--but since she's a girl, her name is _Grace_."

She said it smoothly, I feel sure, for her Vere de Vere repose always jutted out like an iceberg into a troubled sea when there was a family squall going on.

"_All_ right!" pronounced two aunts, simultaneously and acidly.

"All _right_!" chorused another two, but Cousin Pollie hadn't given up the ship.

"Just name a girl Faith, Hope or Natalie, if you want her to grow up freckle-faced and marry a ribbon clerk!" she threatened. "Grace is every bit as bad! It is indicative! It proclaims what you think of her--what you will expect of her--and just trust her to disappoint you!"

Which is only too true! You may be named Fannie or Bess without your family having anything up its sleeve, but it's an entirely different matter when you're named for one of the prismatic virtues. You know then that you're expected to take an A. B. degree, mate with a millionaire and bring up your children by the Montessori method.

"Bet Gwace 'ud ruther be ducked 'n cwistened, anyhow!" observed Guilford Blake, my five-year-old betrothed.--Not that we were Hindus and believed in infant marriage exactly! Not that! We were simply southerners, living in that portion of the South where the principal ambition in life is to "stay put"--where everything you get is inherited, tastes, mates and demijohns--where blood is thicker than axle-grease, and the dividing fence between your estate and the next is properly supposed to act as a seesaw basis for your amalgamated grandchildren.--Hence this early occasion for "Enter Guilford."

"My daughter is not going to disappoint me," mother declared, as she motioned for Guilford's mother to come forward and keep him from profaning the water in the font with his little celluloid duck.

"Don't be too sure," warned Cousin Pollie.

"Well, I'll--I'll risk it!" mother fired back. "And if you must know the truth, I couldn't express my feelings of gratitude--yes, I said _grat_itude--in any other name than Grace. I have had a wonderful blessing lately, and I am going to give credit where it is due! It was nothing less than an act of heavenly grace that released me!"

At this point the mercury dropped so suddenly that Cousin Pollie's breath became visible. Only six weeks before my father had died--of delirium tremens. It was a case of "the death wound on his gallant breast the last of _many_ scars," but the Christies had never given mother any sympathy on that account. He had done nothing worse, his family considered, than to get his feet tangled up in the line of least resistance. Nearly every southern man born with a silver spoon in his mouth discards it for a straw to drink mint julep with!

"Calling her the whole of the doxology isn't going to get that Christie look off her!" father's family sniffed, their triumph answering her defiant outburst. "She is the living image of Uncle Lancelot!"

You'll notice this about in-laws. If the baby is like their family their attitude is triumphant--if it's like anybody else on the face of the earth their manner is distinctly accusing.

"'Lancelot!'" mother repeated scornfully. "If they had to name him for poetry why didn't they call him Lothario and be done with it!"

The circle again stiffened, as if they had a spine in common.

"Certainly it isn't becoming in you to train this child up with a disrespectful feeling toward Uncle Lancelot," some one reprimanded quickly, "since she gives every evidence of being very much like him in appearance."

"My child like that notorious Lancelot Christie!" mother repeated, then burst into tears. "Why she's a Moore, I'll have you understand--from here--down to _here_!"

She encompassed the space between the crown of my throbbing head and the soles of my kicking feet, but neither the tears nor the measurements melted Cousin Pollie.

"A Moore! Bah! Why, you needn't expect that she'll turn out anything like you. A Lydia Languish mother always brings forth a caryatid!"

"A what?" mother demanded frenziedly, then remembering that Cousin Pollie had just returned from Europe with guide-books full of strange but not necessarily insulting words, she backed down into her former assertion. "She's a Moore! She's the image of my revered father."

"There's something in that, Pollie," admitted Aunt Louella, who was the weak-kneed one of the sisters. "Look at the poetic little brow and expression of spiritual intelligence!"

"But what a combination!" Aunt Hannah pointed out. "As sure as you're a living woman this mouth and chin are like Uncle Lancelot!--Think of it--Jacob Moore and Lancelot Christie living together in the same skin!"

"Why, they'll tear the child limb from limb!"

This piece of sarcasm came from old great-great-aunt, Patricia Christie, who never took sides with anybody in family disputes, because she hated them one and all alike. She rose from her chair now and hobbled on her stick into the midst of the battle-field.

"Let me see! Let me see!"

"She's remarkably like Uncle Lancelot, aunty," Cousin Pollie declared with a superior air of finality.

"She's a thousand times more like my father than I, myself, am," poor little mother avowed stanchly.

"Then, all I've got to say is that it's a devilish bad combination!" Aunt Patricia threw out, making faces at them impartially.

And to pursue the matter further, I may state that it was! All my life I have been divided between those ancient enemies--cut in two by a Solomon's sword, as it were, because no decision could be made as to which one really owned me.

You believe in a "dual personality"? Well, they're mine! They quarrel within me! They dispute! They pull and wrangle and seesaw in as many different directions as a party of Cook tourists in Cairo--coming into the council-chamber of my conscience to decide everything I do, from the selection of a black-dotted veil to the emancipation of the sex--while I sit by as helpless as a bound-and-gagged spiritual medium.

"They're not going to affect her future," mother said, but a little gasp of fear showed that if she'd been a Roman Catholic she would be crossing herself.

"Of course not!" Aunt Patricia answered. "It's all written down, anyhow, in her little hand. Let me see the lines of her palm!"

"Her feet's a heap cuter!" Guilford advised, but the old lady untwisted my tight little fist.

"Ah! This tells the story!"

"What?" mother asked, peering over eagerly.

"Nothing--nothing, except that the youngster's a Christie, sure enough! All heart and no head."

Mother started to cry again, but Aunt Patricia stopped her.

"For the lord's sake hush--here comes the minister! Anyhow, if the child grows up beautiful she may survive it--but heaven help the woman who has a big heart and a big nose at the same time."

Then, with this christening and bit of genealogical gossip by way of introduction, the next mile-stone in my career came one day when the twentieth century was in its wee small figures.

"I hate Grandfather Moore and Uncle Lancelot Christie, both!" I confided to Aunt Patricia upon that occasion, having been sent to her room to make her a duty visit, as I was home for the holidays--a slim-legged sorority "pledge"--and had learned that talking about the Past, either for or against, was the only way to gain her attention. "I hate them both, I say! I wish you could be vaccinated against your ancestors. Are they in you to stay?"

I put the question pertly, for she was not the kind to endure timidity nor hushed reverence from her family connections. She was a woman of great spirit herself, and she called forth spirit in other people. A visit with her was more like a bomb than a benediction.

"Hate your ancestors?"

At this time she was perching, hawk-eyed and claw-fingered, upon the edge of the grave, but she always liked and remembered me because I happened to be the only member of the family who didn't keep a black bonnet in readiness upon the wardrobe shelf.

"I hate that grandfather and Uncle Lancelot affair! Don't you think it's a pity I couldn't have had a little say-so in that business?"

"Yes--no--I don't know--ouch, my knee!" she snapped. "What a chatterbox you are, Grace! I've got rheumatism!"

"But I've got 'hereditary tendencies,'" I persisted, "and chloroform liniment won't do any good with my ailment. I wish I need never hear my family history mentioned again."

"Then, you shouldn't have chosen so notable a lineage," she exclaimed viciously. "Your Grandfather Moore, as you know, was a famous divine--"

"I know--and Uncle Lancelot Christie was an equally famous infernal," I said, for the sake of varying the story a little. I was so tired of it.

She stared, arrested in her recital.

"What?"

"Well, if you call a minister a divine, why shouldn't you call a gambler an infernal?"

"Just after the Civil War," she kept on, with the briefest pause left to show that she ignored my interruption, "your grandfather did all in his power--although he was no kin to me, I give him credit for that--he did all in his power to re-establish peace between the states by preaching and praying across the border."

"And Uncle Lancelot accomplished the feat in half the time by flirting and marrying," I reminded her.

She turned her face away, to hide a smile I knew, for she always concealed what was pleasant and displayed grimaces.

"Well, I must admit that when Lancelot brought home his third Ohio heiress--"

"The other two heiresses having died of neglect," I put in to show my learning.

"--many southern aristocrats felt that if the Mason and Dixon line had not been wiped away it had at least been broken up into dots and dashes--like a telegraph code."

I smiled conspicuously at her wit, then went back to my former stand. I was determined to be firm about it.

"I don't care--I hate them both! Nagging old crisscross creatures!"

She looked at me blankly for a moment, then:

"Grace, you amaze me!" she said.

But she mimicked mother's voice--mother's hurt, helpless, moral-suasion voice--as she said it, and we both burst out laughing.

"But, honest Injun, aunty, if a person's got to carry around a heritage, why aren't you allowed to choose which one you prefer?" I asked; then, a sudden memory coming to me, I leaped to my feet and sprang across the room, my gym. shoes sounding in hospital thuds against the floor. I drew up to where three portraits hung on the opposite wall. They represented an admiral, an ambassador and an artist.

"Why can't you adopt an ancestor, as you can a child?" I asked again, turning back to her.

"Adopt an ancestor?"

Her voice was trembling with excitement, which was not brought about by the annoyance of my chatter, and as I saw that she was nodding her head vigorously, I calmed down at once and regretted my precipitate action, for the doctor had said that any unusual exertion or change of routine would end her.

"I only meant that I'd prefer these to grandfather and Uncle Lancelot," I explained soothingly, but her anxiety only increased.

"Which one?" she demanded in a squeaky voice which fairly bubbled with a "bully-for-you" sound. "_Which one_, Grace?"

"Him," I answered.

"They're all hims!" she screamed impatiently.

"I mean the artist."

At this she tried to struggle to her feet, then settled back in exhaustion and drew a deep breath.

"Come here! Come here quick!" she panted weakly.

"Yes, 'um."

She wiped away a tear, in great shame, for she was not a weeping woman.

"Thank God!" she said angrily. "Thank God! That awful problem is settled at last! I knew I couldn't have a moment's peace a-dying until I had decided."

"Decided what?" I gasped in dismay, for I was afraid from the look in her eyes that she was "seeing things." "Shall I call mother, or--some one?"

"Don't you dare!" she challenged. "Don't you leave this room, miss. It's _you_ that I have business with!"

"But I haven't done a thing!" I plead, as weak all of a sudden as she was.

"It's not what you've done, but what you _are_," she exclaimed. "You're the only member of this family that has an idea which isn't framed and hung up! Now, listen! I'm going to leave you something--something very precious. Do you know about that artist over there--James Mackenzie Christie--our really famous ancestor--_my_ great-uncle, who has been dead these sixty years, but will always be immortal? Do you know about him?"

"Yes--I know!"

"Well, I'm going to leave--those letters--those terrible love-letters to _you_!"

I drew back, as if she'd pointed a pistol straight at me.

"But they're the skeleton in the closet," I repeated, having heard it expressed that way all my life.

She was angry for a moment, then she began laughing reminiscently and rocking herself backward and forward slowly in her chair. Her face was as detached and crazy as Ophelia's over her botany lesson, when she gets on your nerves with her: "There is pansies, that's for thoughts," and so forth.

"Yes, he left a skeleton--what was considered a skeleton in those days--Uncle James--our family's great man--but such a skeleton! People now would understand how wonderful it is--with its carved ivory bones--and golden joints and ruby eyes! _You little fool!_"

"Why, I'm proud!" I denied, backing back, all a-tremble. "I'll love those letters, Aunt Patricia."

"You'd better!"

"I'll be sure to," I reiterated, but her face suddenly softened, and she caught up my hand in her yellow claw. She studied the palm for a moment.

"You'll understand them," she sighed. "Poor little, heart-strong Christie!"

And, whether her words were prophetic or delirious, she had told the truth. I have understood them.

She gave them over into my keeping that day; and the next morning we found her settled back among her pillows, imagining that all her brothers and sisters were flying above the mantlepiece and that the Chinese vase was in danger. Another day passed, and on Sunday afternoon all the wardrobe shelves yielded up their black bonnets.

I was not distressed, but I was lonely, with an ultra-Sabbathical repression over my spirits.

"I believe I'll amuse myself by reading over those old letters," I suggested to mother, as time dragged wearily before the crowd began to gather. But she uttered a shriek, with an ultra-Sabbathical repression over its tone.

"Grace, you amaze me!" she said.

"She's really a most American child!" Cousin Pollie pronounced severely, having just finished doing the British Isles.

After this it seemed that years and years and years of the twentieth century passed--all in a heap. I awoke one morning to find myself set in my ways. Most women, in the formation of their happiness, are willing to let nature take its course, then there are others who are not content with this, but demand a postgraduate course. I, unfortunately, belonged to this latter class. Growing up I was fairly normal, not idle enough at school to forecast a brilliant career in any of the arts, nor studious enough to deserve a prediction of mediocre plodding the rest of my life; but after school came the deluge. I was restless, shabby and _single_--no one of which mother could endure in her daughter.

So I was a disappointment to her, while the rest of the tribe gloated. The name, Grace, with all appurtenances and emoluments accruing thereto, availed nothing. I was a failure.

"My pet abomination begins with C," I chattered savagely to myself one afternoon in June, a suitable number of years after the above-mentioned christening, as I made my way to my own private desk in the office of _The Oldburgh Herald_, pondering family affairs in my heart as I went. "Of course this is at the bottom of the whole agony! They just can't bear to see me turn out to be a newspaper reporter instead of Mrs. Guilford Blake. And I hate everything that they love best--cities, clothes, clubs, culture, civilities, conventions, chiffons!"

I was thinking of Cousin Pollie's comment when she first saw a feature story in the _Herald_ signed with my name.

"Is the girl named Grace or Disgrace?" she had asked. "Not since America was a wilderness has the name of any Christie woman appeared outside the head-lines of the society column!"

"The whole connection has raised its eyebrows," I laughed, when I met the owner and publisher of the paper down in his private office the next day. He was an old friend of the family, having fought beside my revered grandfather, and he had taken me into the family circle of the _Herald_ more out of sympathy than need.

"That's all right! It's better to raise an eyebrow than to raise hell!" he laughed back.

But on the June afternoon I have in mind, when I hurried up-town thinking over my pet abominations beginning with C, I was still a fairly civilized being. I lived at home with mother in the old house, for one thing, instead of in an independent apartment, after the fashion of emancipated women--and I still wore Guilford Blake's heirloom scarab ring.

"Aren't your nerves a little on edge just now, Grace, from the scene this morning?" something kept whispering in my ears in an effort to tame my savagery. It was the soft virtuous personality of my inner consciousness, which, according to science, was Grandfather Moore. "You'll be all right, my dear, as soon as you make up your mind to do the square thing about this matter which is agitating you. And of course you are going to do the square thing. Money isn't all there is."

"Now, that's all rot, parson!" Uncle Lancelot, in the other hemisphere of my brain, denied stoutly. "Don't listen to him, Grace! You can't go on living this crocheted life, and money will bring freedom."

"He's a sophist, Grace," came convincingly across the wires.

"He's a purist, Grace," flashed back.

"Hush! Hush! What do two old Kilkenny cats of ancestors know about my problems?" I cried fiercely. Then, partly to drown out their clamor, I kept on: "My pet abominations in several syllables are--checkered career--contiguous choice--just because his mother and mine lived next door when they were girls--circumscribed capabilities--"

"And the desire of your heart begins with H," Uncle Lancelot said triumphantly. "You want Happy Humanness--different brand and harder to get than Human Happiness--you want a House that is a Home, and above all else you want a Husband with a sense of Humor!"

"But how could this letter affect all this?" I asked myself, stopping at the foot of the steps to take a message in rich vellum stationery from my bag. "How can so much be contained in one little envelope?"

After all, this was what it said:

"My dear Miss Christie:

"While in Oldburgh recently on a visit to Mr. Clarence Wiley"--he was the author of blood-and-thunder detective stories who lived on Waverley Pike and raised pansies between times--"I learned that you are in possession of the love-letters written by the famous Lady Frances Webb to your illustrious ancestor, James Mackenzie Christie. Mr. Wiley himself was my informer, and being a friend of your family was naturally able to give me much interesting information about the remaining evidences of this widely-discussed affair.

"No doubt the idea has occurred to you that the love-letters of a celebrated English novelist to the first American artist of his time would make valuable reading matter for the public; and the suggestion of these letters being done into a book has made such charming appeal to my mind that I resolved to put the matter before you without delay.

"To be perfectly plain and direct, this inheritance of yours can be made into a small fortune for you, since the material, properly handled, would make one of the best-selling books of the decade.

"If you are interested I shall be glad to hear from you, and we can then take up at once the business details of the transaction. Mr. Wiley spoke in such high praise of the literary value of the letters that my enthusiasm has been keenly aroused.

"With all good wishes, I am, "Very sincerely yours,

"Julien J. Dutweiler."

There was an embossed superscription on the envelope's flap which read: "Coburn-Colt Company, Publishers, Philadelphia." They were America's best-known promoters--the kind who could take six inches of advertising and a red-and-gold binding and make a mountain out of a mole-hill.

"'Small fortune!'" I repeated. "Surely a great temptation _does_ descend during a hungry spell--in real life, as well as in human documents."