Neither Mabel nor I could hazard a guess with regard to the missing link or the Hepburn line, and I soon forgot them entirely in the excitement of preparing for my graduation, which was not very far away. I had hoped that one of my aunts at least would be present, and had written to that effect to Aunt Keziah, telling her how lonely it would be for me with no relative present, and how earnestly I wished that either she or Aunt Desire or Aunt Beriah would come. I even went so far as to thank her for all she had done for me and to tell her how sorry I was for the saucy letter I wrote to her six years ago. I had often wanted to do this, but had never quite made up my mind to it until now, when I hoped it might bring me a favorable response. But I was mistaken.
It was not possible for herself or either of her sisters to come so far, she wrote. She appreciated my wish to have her there, she said, and did not esteem me less for it. But it could not be. She enclosed money for my graduating dress, and also for my traveling expenses, for after a brief rest in Meadowbrook I was going to Morton Park, in charge of a merchant from Frankfort, who would be in New York in July and would meet me in Albany. And so, with no relative present to encourage me or be proud of me, I received my diploma and more flowers than I knew what to do with, and compliments enough to turn my head, and then, amid tears and kisses and good wishes, bade farewell to my girl friends and teachers, one of whom said to me at parting: “If all our pupils were like you, Wellesley would be a Paradise.”
A model in every respect they called me, and it was with quite a high opinion of myself that I went to Meadowbrook, where I spent a week, and then, bidding a tearful good-bye to the friends who had been so kind to me, I joined Mr. Jones at Albany, and was soon on my way to Kentucky.
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?”