Chapter IV: Grantley Montague’s Story

ALECK AND THEA.

HOTEL CHAPMAN, FLORENCE, April —, 18—.

Nearly everybody keeps a diary at some time in his life, I think. Aunt Brier does, I know, and Thea, and Aleck,—confound him, with his Hepburn lines and missing links!—and so I may as well be in fashion and commence one, even if I tear it up, as I probably shall. Well, here we are in Florence, and likely to be until Thea is able to travel. Why did she go tearing around Rome night and day in all sorts of weather, spooning it in the Coliseum by moonlight and declaring she was _oh, so hot_, when my teeth were chattering with cold, and I could see nothing in the beauty she raved about but some old broken walls and arches, with shadows here and there, which did not look half as pretty as the shadows in the park at home? Europe hasn’t panned out exactly as I thought it would, and I am getting confoundedly bored. Thea is nice, of course,—too nice, in fact,—but a fellow does not want to be compelled to marry a girl any way. He’d rather have some choice in the matter, which I haven’t had; but I like Thea immensely, and we are engaged.

There, I’ve blurted it out, and it looks first-rate on paper, too. Yes, we are engaged, and this is how it happened. Ever since I was knee-high Aunt Keziah has dinged it into me that I must marry Thea, or her heart would be broken, and the Mortons beggared. I wish old Amos Hepburn’s hand had been paralyzed before he added to that long lease a condition which has brought grief to my Uncle Douglas and cousin Gerold, who married an actress, or a cook, or something, because he loved her more than he did money. By George, I respect him for his independence, and wish I were more like him, and not a lazy, good-for-nothing fellow who does not know how to do a single useful thing or to earn a dollar.

Well, the time is drawing near for that lease to expire, and unless a direct heir of Joseph Morton, my great-grandfather, marries a direct heir of Amos Hepburn, the entire Morton estate will revert to the Hepburn heir. Now, I am a direct heir of Joseph Morton, and Thea is old Hepburn’s direct heir, which means, according to the way it was explained in the lease, that she is the eldest child, whether son or daughter, of the eldest child, and so on back to the beginning, when there were three daughters of old Amos. Thea comes from the second of these daughters, for where the first one is the Lord only knows. Aleck Grady descends from old Amos’s third daughter, and has no chance while Thea lives. Nor does he pretend to want any, as he has money enough of his own. He joined our party uninvited in Egypt, and has bored us to death with his family tree, and the missing link, which link means the eldest daughter of old Hepburn, of whom nothing is known after a certain date. And it is she and her descendants, if there are any, he is trying to hunt up. He is a shrewd fellow, and a kind of quack lawyer, too, and once told me that he did not think the long lease would hold water a minute in the United States, and asked if Aunt Keziah had consulted a first-class lawyer, and when I told him that she had not,—that it had been a rule in our family not to talk about the lease to any one until compelled to do so, and that even if she knew the document was invalid she would consider herself bound in honor to respect it as her father had done before her and enjoined her to do,—he shrugged his shoulders and said, “_Chacun à son goût_; but I should dispute that lease inch by inch, and beat the Hepburns too.”

“Why, then,” I asked, “are you so anxious to find the _missing link_, as you call it? I always supposed that for some reason you wanted to throw Thea out of the property.”

With that insinuating smile of his which Thea thinks so winning and I think so disgusting, he replied, “My dear fellow, how you mistake me! I don’t care a picayune who gets the Morton money, if you are fools enough to give it up. But I do care for my ancestors; in fact, I have a real affection for my great-aunt Octavia, and am most anxious to know what became of her and her progeny. I have her as far as New York, where all trace of her is lost. Would you like to see the family tree?”

As I had seen it half a dozen times and knew exactly where Octavia failed to connect, I declined, and then the conversation turned upon Thea, who, Aleck said, was a very nice girl, but a little too fast, and had about her too much gush and too much powder to suit him. It was strange why girls would gush and giggle and plaster their faces with cosmetics and blacken their eyebrows until they looked like women of the town, he said, appealing to me for confirmation of his opinion. I had more than half suspected him of designs on Thea, and I flamed up at once in her defense, telling him she neither gushed, nor powdered, nor blackened,—three lies, as I knew,—but I was angry, and when, with that imperturbable good humor which never fails him, he continued: “Don’t get so mad, I beg. I am older than you, and know human nature better than you do, and I know you pretty well. Why, I’ve made you quite a study. Thea, in spite of her powder and gush, is a splendid girl, and will make a good wife to the man she loves and who loves her, but she is not your ideal, and pardon me for suggesting that I don’t believe that you would marry her if it were not for that clause about the eldest heir, which I don’t think is worth the paper it is written on,”—I could have knocked him down, he was so cool and patronizing, and was also telling me a good deal of truth. But I would not admit it, and insisted that I would marry Thea if there had never been any Hepburn line and she had not a dollar in the world.

“Why don’t you propose, then, and done with it? She is dying to have you,” he said, and I declared I would, and that night I asked her to be my wife, and I have not regretted it either, although I know she is not my ideal.

But who is my ideal, and where is she, if I have one? I am sure I don’t know, unless it is the owner of a face which I have seen but twice, but which comes back to me over and over again, and which I would not forget if I could, and could not if I would. The first time I saw it was at a concert in Boston, not long before I left college. I was in the dress-circle, and diagonally to my right was an immense bonnet or hat which hid half the audience from me. Late in the evening it moved, and I saw beyond it a face which has haunted me ever since. It was that of a young and beautiful girl, who I instinctively felt belonged to a type entirely different from the class of girls whom I had known while at Harvard, and who, without being exactly fast in the worst acceptation of the term, had come so near the boundary-line between propriety and impropriety that it was difficult to tell on which side they stood. But this girl was different, with her deep-blue eyes and her wavy hair which I was sure had never come in contact with the hot curling-tongs, as Thea’s does, while her complexion, which reminded me of the roses and lilies in Aunt Keziah’s garden, owed none of its brilliancy to cosmetics, as Aleck says most complexions do. She was real, and inexpressibly lovely, especially when she smiled, as she sometimes did upon the lady who sat beside her, and who might have been her mother, or her chaperone, or some elderly relative. When the concert was over I hurried out, hoping to get near her, but she was lost in the crowd, and I only saw her once again, three weeks later, in an open street-car going in the opposite direction from the one in which I was seated. In her hand she held a paper parcel, which made me think she might possibly be a seamstress or a saleslady, and I spent a great deal of time haunting the establishments in Boston which employed girls as clerks, but I never found her, nor heard of her. She certainly was not at Moisiere’s and I don’t think she was at Wellesley, as I am sure I should have heard of her through Fred, who had a sister there. Once I thought I would tell him about her, but was kept from doing so by a wish to discover her myself, and when discovered to keep her to myself. But I have never seen her since the day she went riding so serenely past me, unconscious of the admiration and strange emotions she was exciting in me. Who was she, I wonder; and shall I ever see her again? It is not likely; and if I do, what can it matter to me, now that I am engaged to Thea?

In her letter of congratulation Aunt Keziah, who was wild with delight, wrote to me that nothing could make her so happy as my marriage with Thea, and that she knew I would keep my promise, no matter whom I might meet, for no one of Morton blood ever proved untrue to the woman he loved. Of course I shall prove true; and who is there to meet, unless it is my Lost Star, as I call her, for whom I believe I am as persistently searching as Aleck is for the missing link, for I never see a group of young American girls that I do not manage to get near enough to see if she is among them, and I never see a head of chestnut-brown hair set on shoulders just as hers was that I don’t follow it until I see the face, which as yet has not been hers. And in this I am not disloyal to Thea, whom I love better than any girl I have ever known, and whom I will make happy, if possible. She has been ill now nearly four weeks, but in a few days we hope to move on to Paris, where we shall stay until June, then go to Switzerland, and some time in the autumn sail for home, and the aunts who have vied with each other in spoiling me and are the dearest aunts in the world, although so unlike each other,—Aunt Keziah, with her iron will but really kind heart, Aunt Dizzy, with her invalid airs and pretty youthful ways which suit her so well in spite of her years, and Aunt Brier, whose name is a misnomer, she is so soft and gentle, with nothing scratchy about her, and who has such a sad, sweet face, with a look in her brown eyes as if she were always waiting or listening for something. I believe she has a history, and that it is in some way connected with that queer chap, Bey Atkins they called him, whose dress was half Oriental and half European, and whom I met at Shepheard’s in Cairo. I first saw him the night after our return from the trip up the Nile. He registered just after I had written the names of our party, at which he looked a long time, and then fairly shadowed me until he had a chance to speak to me alone. It was after dinner, and we were sitting near each other in front of the hotel, when he began to talk to me, and in an inconceivably short space of time had learned who I was, and where I lived, and about my aunts, in whom he seemed so greatly interested, especially Aunt Brier, that I finally asked if he had ever been to Morton Park.

“Yes,” he answered, knocking the ashes from his cigar and leaning back in the bamboo chair in the graceful, lounging way he has,—“yes, years ago I was in Versailles and visited at Morton Park. Your aunt Beriah and I were great friends. Tell her when you go home that you saw Tom Atkins in Cairo, and that he has become a kind of wandering Ishmael and wears a red fez and white flannel suit. Tell her, too—” but here he stopped suddenly, and, rising, went into the street, where his dragoman was holding the white donkey he always rode, sometimes alone and sometimes with a little girl beside him, who called him father.

Of course, then, he is married, and his wife must be an Arab, for the child was certainly of that race, with her great dark eyes and her tawny hair all in a tangle. I meant to ask him about her, but when next day I inquired for him, I was told that he had gone to his home near Alexandria, where, I dare say, there is a host of little Arabs, and a woman with a veil stretched across her nose, whom he calls his wife.

Alas for Aunt Brier if my conjecture is right!