Read Ebook: Invincible Minnie by Holding Elisabeth Sanxay

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Ebook has 1779 lines and 68957 words, and 36 pages

your--our trade. Really, Grandma, you ought to talk things over with Frankie and me."

The old lady was almost unable to speak.

"We only want to help," said Minnie, ingeniously including her sister.

"I've got on pretty well for seventy-five years without your assistance," said the old lady.

"Really, Grandma, I do think it would be better," Frankie interposed, "Minnie's a wonderful manager, and I'm sure she could help you ever so much."

"Two children! It's outrageous! I've managed...."

"Grandma," Minnie interrupted solemnly, "Mr. Simms spoke to me."

This was a telling blow; the old lady winced under it.

Frances was distressed by the idea of debts.

"Oh, dear!" she cried, "That's too bad! Do let's talk it over, Grandma dear, and see what can be done."

But Minnie met with an obstinacy inflexible as her own. Not one detail could they extract from the old lady. She took refuge in bitter reproach.

"I've worked for you both, day in and day out, for more than two years," she said, "and whatever money I've spent was my own. I'm not accountable to anyone for it." And she called them undutiful, ungrateful, unkind.

"Very well, then," said Minnie at last, "if you're going to take it that way ... if you refuse to--to co-operate, Grandma, then I'll have to accept an offer I had of a position in an office."

"What office?" Frankie asked, with interest.

"Mr. Petersen's. He says I can have your place. I'll go down to the village to-morrow and find a girl to stay with Grandma while I'm away."

Now, both Frances and Minnie knew that, on account of her liability to those mysterious "attacks," it wouldn't do to leave the old lady alone, and they wouldn't have done so under any circumstances, but she, poor old soul, terrified before their confident youth, not knowing what resources they had, felt them to be capable of everything. She pictured herself, solitary again, ill perhaps, with a strange servant prowling about, prying into everything, pilfering, undoubtedly setting the house on fire....

It was a most painful scene; she broke down, cried, surrendered. Minnie, although with tears in her eyes, saw her opportunity and pressed her point.

"Grandma dear," she said, "tell us just what you have, and we'll arrange some way to manage."

The old lady confessed resentfully to a sole income of twenty-five dollars a month. They were incredulous.

"But in that case," said Frances, "you must.... Why, there must be...."

"About how much do you suppose--we--owe?" asked Minnie.

This question the old lady couldn't answer, because she actually did not know. She had never attempted to calculate; it was a topic she did not care to think about. She mentioned a number of tradespeople who had been "very nice"; in fact, she deluded herself into the belief they enjoyed serving a Defoe. They were, she assured the girls, perfectly willing to wait. Wait for Heaven knows what!

"Mr. Petersen, too, I suppose," Minnie asked with a frown, "I suppose we owe him money?"

"Dear me, child, he's only too pleased to have someone living here. He told me so himself. He couldn't rent this place to anyone else; he'd simply have to pay a caretaker."

"Why did he buy it then?" enquired Frankie.

The subject was not pursued, however, for Minnie had got up, a little pale as her great minute approached.

"Now then, Grandma and Frankie," she said, "here's my plan. I want to take charge of the housekeeping and--and the money.... I'll keep things going and try to pay off the debts."

"I've found a boarder," she said.

"A boarder!" they both cried, simultaneously.

"A literary gentleman," she explained, "from New York. He'll only pay eight dollars a week, but he's a start, anyway."

"But, my dear," Frances objected, "where could you put him?"

They argued, wrangled, remonstrated. It was of vital importance to them both. To the old lady a boarder meant incalculable loss of dignity, it meant degradation. She defended her position vehemently, fought to the last ditch for her honour.

But Minnie won. Her grandmother's resistance crumpled at last before her iron determination. She went up to bed that night in a sort of ecstasy of triumph, drunk with her first victory. Her career had begun. The tiger had tasted blood.

She met with some slight opposition from Frances, loyally concealed until they were alone, but this she easily ended by a great deal of talk about the necessity of earning a living.

That's what she called it; never facing the truth. If someone else had confronted her with it, she very likely wouldn't have recognised it. Even in her own soul she called it a chance to "earn a living," when it was really nothing but a ferocious determination to seek another man before accepting Mr. Petersen. She was resolved upon getting married. Mr. Petersen she would take if no one else presented, but not without a struggle, a gallant struggle to find a better. No one, nothing should balk her of this literary man from New York.

It was another little triumph, too, to be the object of such deep interest to her sister. They sat in the gloomy, cold bedroom, Frances on the bed with a blanket round her shoulders, while Minnie, erect on a broken little chair near the lamp, combed her heavy black hair with conscientious vigour.

"How on earth did you ever find him?" Frances asked.

"I saw his advertisement in a New York paper; he wanted country board some place where he could be quiet, for his writing. So I answered it."

Frances expressed admiration for her enterprise.

"It was wonderful for you to think of such a thing," she said, "But, Minnie, what an awful lot of work and bother for you!"

They sat up late, discussing the arrangement of the boarder's room and everything connected with him. They forgot nothing, overlooked nothing, except the effect of all this upon their grandmother.

She lay awake in her room, vaguely bitter, very unhappy. She had died and been buried that evening. She was supplanted. She was no longer to be the guardian of Frankie and Minnie; in the future they were to take care of her. As far as they were concerned, she was unnecessary; she was--one might say--no longer anything but an urn of sacred ashes, to be reverenced as the receptacle of what had once been an important human being.

They heard her coughing feebly.

Frances spent all the next day, which was Sunday, in helping Minnie give the boarder's room a "good cleaning." They cherished a tradition that they detested such work, that it disgusted and exhausted them, but one had only to hear their voices to know that the vigorous work delighted them and that they were tremendously happy in doing it. Frankie was on her knees scrubbing the floor, while Minnie cleaned the windows. They talked incessantly; when it became necessary for Minnie to clean the outsides of the panes, Frankie always had to stop work and stand beside her, so that she could still hear.

As a sort of silent protest, their grandmother had dressed herself in her best dress and was sitting in the parlour, reading a book of sermons. The girls insisted that they were too busy to go to church.

"I'll drive you, if you want," Minnie told her, grudgingly, "but I can't spare the time to stay through the service."

They sat down to supper, weary but profoundly satisfied.

Minnie shook her head gravely.

"Not likely," she said, "at eight dollars a week."

"It isn't money that gives people distinction," Frances protested.

"Generally it is," said Minnie.

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