The Goodness of St. Rocque | Page 7

about their employers. The little dry woman
knitted, and the big man moved lazily in and out in his red flannel shirt,
exchanged politics with the tailor next door through the window, or
lounged into Mrs. Murphy's bar and drank fiercely. Some of the
children grew up and moved away, and other little girls came to buy
candy and eat pink lagniappe fishes, and the shop still thrived.
One day Tony was ill, more than the mummied foot of gout, or the
wheeze of asthma; he must keep his bed and send for the doctor.
She clutched his arm when he came, and pulled him into the tiny room.
"Is it--is it anything much, doctor?" she gasped.
AEsculapius shook his head as wisely as the occasion would permit.
She followed him out of the room into the shop.
"Do you--will he get well, doctor?"
AEsculapius buttoned up his frock coat, smoothed his shining hat,
cleared his throat, then replied oracularly,
"Madam, he is completely burned out inside. Empty as a shell, madam,
empty as a shell. He cannot live, for he has nothing to live on."
As the cobblestones rattled under the doctor's equipage rolling leisurely
up Prytania Street, Tony's wife sat in her chair and laughed,--laughed
with a hearty joyousness that lifted the film from the dull eyes and
disclosed a sparkle beneath.
The drear days went by, and Tony lay like a veritable Samson shorn of
his strength, for his voice was sunken to a hoarse, sibilant whisper, and
his black eyes gazed fiercely from the shock of hair and beard about a
white face. Life went on pretty much as before in the shop; the children
paused to ask how Mr. Tony was, and even hushed the jingles on their
bell hoops as they passed the door. Red-headed Jimmie, Mrs. Murphy's
nephew, did the hard jobs, such as splitting wood and lifting coal from
the bin; and in the intervals between tending the fallen giant and
waiting on the customers, Tony's wife sat in her accustomed chair,
knitting fiercely, with an inscrutable smile about her purple compressed

mouth.
Then John came, introducing himself, serpent-wise, into the Eden of
her bosom.
John was Tony's brother, huge and bluff too, but fair and blond, with
the beauty of Northern Italy. With the same lack of race pride which
Tony had displayed in selecting his German spouse, John had taken
unto himself Betty, a daughter of Erin, aggressive, powerful, and
cross-eyed. He turned up now, having heard of this illness, and
assumed an air of remarkable authority at once.
A hunted look stole into the dull eyes, and after John had departed with
blustering directions as to Tony's welfare, she crept to his bedside
timidly.
"Tony," she said,--"Tony, you are very sick."
An inarticulate growl was the only response.
"Tony, you ought to see the priest; you mustn't go any longer without
taking the sacrament."
The growl deepened into words.
"Don't want any priest; you 're always after some snivelling old
woman's fuss. You and Mrs. Murphy go on with your church; it won't
make YOU any better."
She shivered under this parting shot, and crept back into the shop. Still
the priest came next day.
She followed him in to the bedside and knelt timidly.
"Tony," she whispered, "here's Father Leblanc."
Tony was too languid to curse out loud; he only expressed his hate in a
toss of the black beard and shaggy mane.
"Tony," she said nervously, "won't you do it now? It won't take long,
and it will be better for you when you go--Oh, Tony, don't--don't laugh.
Please, Tony, here's the priest."
But the Titan roared aloud: "No; get out. Think I'm a-going to give you
a chance to grab my money now? Let me die and go to hell in peace."
Father Leblanc knelt meekly and prayed, and the woman's weak
pleadings continued,--
"Tony, I've been true and good and faithful to you. Don't die and leave
me no better than before. Tony, I do want to be a good woman once, a
real-for-true married woman. Tony, here's the priest; say yes." And she
wrung her ringless hands.

"You want my money," said Tony, slowly, "and you sha'n't have it, not
a cent; John shall have it."
Father Leblanc shrank away like a fading spectre. He came next day
and next day, only to see re-enacted the same piteous scene,--the
woman pleading to be made a wife ere death hushed Tony's
blasphemies, the man chuckling in pain-racked glee at the prospect of
her bereaved misery. Not all the prayers of Father Leblanc nor the
wailings of Mrs. Murphy could alter the determination of the will
beneath the shock of hair; he gloated in his physical weakness at the
tenacious grasp on his mentality.
"Tony," she wailed on