



Produced by Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)







Transcriber's Note:

  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.




     AMAZING GRACE

  [Illustration: I took up the first one]




     AMAZING GRACE

     _Who Proves That Virtue Has Its Silver Lining_

     By
     KATE TRIMBLE SHARBER
     _Author of_
     THE ANNALS OF ANN, AT THE AGE OF EVE, ETC.

     ILLUSTRATED BY
     R. M. CROSBY

     INDIANAPOLIS
     THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
     PUBLISHERS




     COPYRIGHT 1914
     THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

     PRESS OF
     BRAUNWORTH & CO.
     BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
     BROOKLYN, N. Y.




     TO
     LAURA NORVELL ELLIOTT
     WHO HAS THE OLD LETTERS--




CONTENTS


     CHAPTER                             PAGE

     I STRAINED RELATIONS                  1

     II A GLIMPSE OF PROMISED LAND        26

     III NIP AND TUCK                     40

     IV THE QUALITY OF MERCY              59

     V ET TU, BRUTE!                      82

     VI FLAG DAY                          99

     VII STRAWS POINT                    115

     VIII LONGEST WAY HOME               128

     IX MAITLAND TAIT                    141

     X IN THE FIRELIGHT                  157

     XI TWO MEN AND A MAID               168

     XII AN ASSIGNMENT                   186

     XIII JILTED!                        211

     XIV THE SKIES FALL                  230

     XV THE JOURNEY                      244

     XVI LONDON                          278

     XVII HOUSE OF A HUNDRED DREAMS      312




AMAZING GRACE




AMAZING GRACE




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!"

