Amazing Grace.

by Kate Trimble Sharber.

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-sc.r.a.pers--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 G.o.d--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!" p.r.o.nounced 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 princ.i.p.al 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 grat.i.tude--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 att.i.tude 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 encompa.s.sed the s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sertion. "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 emanc.i.p.ation of the s.e.x--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."