GI Brides (20 page)

“The idea!” snorted Elaine. “What have you done with all that money of mine? That’s what I want to know.
Some
where you have it stored away, and now you are trying to get money out of me to run this house, and you’re not going to get it! Do you hear? You’re not going to get a cent more out of me for anything.”

Lexie drew a weary breath.

“I’m sorry, Elaine, that you have such a mistaken notion. I can’t think where you got it. But you evidently think it is true. And it isn’t! Really it isn’t. I have only a very little money that I have earned in hard work, saved to get myself a graduating dress because I didn’t think it was fair to the other girls in the class for me to go on the platform in a dark dress when they were all in white. I didn’t have a single thin dress left that wasn’t simply in rags.”

“Oh,
really
! What earthly difference would that have made? You probably would never see any of those girls again, and they would never hear of you. I declare, Lexie, you seem to have gotten very worldly. I’m sure your mother would never have approved of that. But whatever you have become, I really don’t credit that story of yours about having no money except enough to get a simple white dress. So you might as well understand it, and it is time that you came across with some of the money that belongs to me. You said you had fifty dollars that Mamma left you and that you would give it to me, but I haven’t seen it yet. Suppose you go and get it for me now. I need a new dress myself, and I want to go to a beauty parlor and have a facial and a shampoo and a permanent. I am ashamed to meet my lawyer looking like this.”

“I’m sorry, Elaine, but I’ve spent every cent of that fifty dollars on you and your children since you came, to get food for you all to eat, and I haven’t any more to spare. And now you’ll have to excuse me. I don’t want to continue this discussion. It only brings hate in our hearts, and it isn’t good for the children to hear bickering all the time. They are coming in now.”

“Oh yes, you are very clever to get up excuses to change the subject, but you’ll soon find out that it would have been much better for you if you had come through and told the truth, because if you go on like this you’ll not only lose every cent of the money yourself, but you’ll find yourself sadly in debt for interest on all that money. You see, my righteous little sister, I have definite proof now. We know pretty well just where you have parked that money, and are going to have no trouble in getting possession of it.”

“Yes?” Lexie asked, lifting her eyebrows. “Just what evidence could you possibly find of something that doesn’t exist and never has?”

“Says you! Well, my dear little sister, I have evidence in your own mother’s handwriting stating the whole thing, when and how she took possession of the money, and what she did with it. But of course you know all about that.”

“No,” said Lexie steadily, “I do not know anything about any such thing, and I don’t believe you do either. I’m sorry to speak this way to you, but I know what I am talking about, and I’m quite sure if you keep on in this way I shall have to take steps that will make you know also just what you are doing. You know I am not entirely without friends, even though I haven’t much money. If you persist in acting this way to me I shall be obliged to appeal to them to put an end to it. Certainly I’m not going to stay here and run this house for your benefit, and feed you and take care of your children when there is need, if you are going to persist in being unfriendly. I would rather go away by myself than to live in continual bickering. I’m willing to forget what you have said without formal apologies, and to try to forget what you have said about my mother, who was as kind and good to you as she was to me, her own child, if you will try to be decent to me. But to stay here and take insults like this is unbearable.”

“Oh well, if you are going to take that attitude, of course you will have to bear the consequences, but I was just trying to warn you that it is a great deal simpler to come clean and tell what you know. You will be treated with far more leniency than if you persist in lying about it and won’t tell what you know.”

“Very well,” said Lexie quietly and got up to go out of the room, but Elaine detained her.

“Wait a minute, Lexie, there is something I want to ask you. Do you remember a friend of Father’s, a Mr. Harry Perrine, a financier who made investments for Father?”

Lexie looked at her sister thoughtfully.

“Yes, I remember a man of that name who
wanted
to make investments for Father, and Father wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He said he was rotten and not fit to handle money for anybody, and Mother couldn’t bear the sight of him. He was always coming here at mealtime and hanging around to be invited to dinner, and coaxing Father to invest in this and that.”

“You’re quite mistaken, Lexie. He was a successful financier, and my father put some of my money with him at your mother’s suggestion. I have had this investigated, and he owns that Father put money with him intended for me, and after his death your mother drew it all out and invested it elsewhere. He has all the papers to prove it, and he knows just what your mother did with the money after she drew it out to use for herself.”

Lexie was very angry by this time, but she knew she must not let this be seen. Her talk with Mr. Gordon had fortified her for such a scene as this, so she closed her lips and turned toward the door again.

“Oh! You haven’t anything to say to that!” taunted the angry woman. “I thought that would finish you. There is nothing further you can say!”

“No,” said Lexie gently. “I just felt that I would rather not talk any more about this matter lest I might say something unpleasant to you, and I don’t see that would do anything but make you more angry. I think if this has to be talked about any more I will let you talk to my lawyer.”

“Your
lawyer
!” laughed Elaine. “Since when did my kid sister have a lawyer? Send him on. I’m sure I can give him a few facts that will astonish him, and he will certainly wish he hadn’t taken you on as a client.”

The sentence ended with a hateful, taunting laugh, but Lexie had gone quietly out of the room, shut the door, and did not hear the meanest part of it. She hurried upstairs to her own dark room and stood for a long time looking out into the starry night, wondering if God really cared for her and was going with her through all this.

And then she bowed her head on the window frame and prayed softly, “Dear God, help me to trust even when things are like this. Help me to remember You are here, walking with me every step of this hard way.”

T
he letter that Benedict Barron had written to Alexia Kendall reached her the morning after her fiery talk with her sister and almost precipitated another.

In fact, Lexie almost didn’t get that letter at all. Elaine had been watching for the postman as
she
expected a letter from one Harry Perrine, and she was close by the front door, ready to fly out before anybody in the house knew that he was there. But Lexie had been watching for the postman also. She had written a letter to Lawyer Gordon as she had promised she would if anything arose at home that she felt he ought to know, and she wanted to get it off in the next mail. She was worried lest she ought not to have let slip those words about her lawyer. Maybe it could do no harm, but she must keep watch on her tongue and not let an angering word break her silence.

Lexie had hurried out from the kitchen door by the side entrance with her letter as soon as she sighted the postman, and met him at the gate. So she got her letter first.

But all these days since that letter had started on its way, Ben Barron had lain on the hard little cot of the ramshackle place they called a hospital, slowly recovering from a serious wound and its resultant illness. The depressing condition had been brought about by his long exposure and the lack of food and rest, following his unremitting fighting of fire and fiends without any assurance that they would sometime reach safety.

Most of the convalescing time he had dreamed and slept by turns and in snatches. He had eaten a little of whatever they gave him apathetically, slept some more, and waked again to dreams of the past. But sometimes there came to his mind the thought of the letter he had sent out so blindly into his old world to a girl who did not know him, and whom he scarcely knew at all. He would wonder if it would ever reach her, and if it did, whether she would be minded to answer it.

Of course it had been a crazy, unconventional thing to write that letter. If he had waited until he was really well and strong he never would have written it at all. Though in these war times, plenty of girls were writing bright, cheery letters to boys they had never seen nor heard of before. They were just given an address by somebody, and asked to write to a lonesome soldier. So he hoped this little Lexie-girl would be moved to answer his letter, if it ever reached her.

He sometimes dreamed of what she might think or say or do if the letter reached her. But as the days passed by, the letter faded into the past, and new thoughts about going back to the fight again began to take form in his renewed brain as his body slowly healed. The letter took on less significance. It had been a vagary of his sick mind, out here in that fiery field, a brief respite from the heat and terror. God’s cool mountain with the dew on the grass at the roadside, and one of God’s children smiling and swinging on a little white gate—just a symbol of home it had been, but he still was glad he had written the letter, if only to get it off his mind.

Lexie, holding that letter in her hand, seeing her own name in an unfamiliar handwriting written on it, noting the strange foreign stamp with the war insignia upon it, wondered. She read her name again to make sure and slid it into her apron pocket, one hand safely guarding it as she turned to go back to the house.

Then Elaine’s sharp voice interrupted her.

“Give that letter to me!” she said, stepping out to the small front portico and holding out her hand. “How
dare
you put it into your pocket and take it in to examine!”

Lexie looked up in surprise.

“But it isn’t your letter,” she said sweetly. “It is
mine
!”

“
Your
letter! That’s a likely story. I was expecting an important business letter, and I don’t want to be delayed in reading it. I
demand
to see that letter instantly!”

Elaine was very angry, and was talking in loud, piercing tones. Lexie was aware instantly of furtively opened doors and windows from neighbors’ houses. They would be too polite to stand around and listen, but they could not fail to hear that an angry altercation was going on between the sisters, and pursed lips and shrugs would be exchanged between those women who heard. Oh, this was terrible!

“Why certainly, Elaine, look and see my name on the envelope,” she said, and held the letter up where she knew her sister could easily read her name.

Elaine leaned over the porch and looked, reached out her hand for the letter but did not quite touch it.

“Give me that letter!” demanded Elaine again. “There is some trick about this! You are as sly as can be. You’ve exchanged the envelopes or something, and you’re trying to open my letter and find out what I’m writing to my lawyer about. Give me that letter, I say!”

“Why no, I won’t give you my letter,” said Lexie. “Why should I? It’s my letter, not yours. Oh Elaine, why will you go on acting like this? You’re fairly driving me to leave. Is that what you want me to do? It would be much easier and cheaper for me to go than to stay here and submit to all this from you. It is shameful for you to act this way, and there is no point to it. What is your idea anyway?”

“Who is that letter from?” demanded Elaine. “I insist that you tell me at once. I don’t want any more underhanded business. After all your threats yesterday, are you doing some foolish thing, writing to some man and trying to get help?”

Lexie laughed.

“Why no, Elaine, I haven’t been writing to any man, and I don’t know yet who wrote me the letter. You haven’t given me a chance to go into the house and open it. It’s probably from someone I met at college.”

“It’s from a
man
!” insisted Elaine. “That’s a man’s handwriting! You went to a
women’s
college.”

“Yes, but we had men callers, several men teachers, and often met men in the town and at games and so on.”

“Now don’t try to tell me that you had some incipient lovers out in that dull college town of yours. You aren’t the kind of girl that attracts men, and never will be.”

“Oh,” laughed Lexie amusedly. “Does this look like a love letter? No, I didn’t have any lovers out there that I know of, but I did have a few friends, and this is probably from one of them, or it might be from the dean.”

“No!” said Elaine sharply. “That’s an overseas envelope. I know their look, you know.”

“Oh yes. It is overseas. But there were a number of the girls’ brothers who are overseas of course. It really isn’t important, though, I’m quite sure,” and Lexie slipped the letter into her apron pocket again, with her protecting hand over it.