The Goodness of St. Rocque, and Other Stories

								

carefully wrapped in crispest brown paper, and a half dozen or more of
pink candy fish for lagniappe, and the little Jew girl sped away in
blissful contentment.  Tony's wife resumed her knitting with a stifled
sigh until the next customer should come.
A low growl caused her to look up apprehensively.  Tony himself stood
beetle-browed and huge in the small doorway.
"Get up from there," he muttered, "and open two dozen oysters right
away; the Eliots want 'em."  His English was unaccented.  It was long
since he had seen Italy.
She moved meekly behind the counter, and began work on the thick
shells.  Tony stretched his long neck up the street.
"Mr. Tony, mama wants some charcoal."  The very small voice at his feet
must have pleased him, for his black brows relaxed into a smile, and he
poked the little one's chin with a hard, dirty finger, as he emptied
the ridiculously small bucket of charcoal into the child's bucket, and
gave a banana for lagniappe.
The crackling of shells went on behind, and a stifled sob arose as a
bit of sharp edge cut into the thin, worn fingers that clasped the
knife.
"Hurry up there, will you?" growled the black brows; "the Eliots are
sending for the oysters."
She deftly strained and counted them, and, after wiping her fingers,
resumed her seat, and took up the endless crochet work, with her usual
stifled sigh.
Tony and his wife had always been in this same little queer old shop on
Prytania Street, at least to the memory of the oldest inhabitant in the
neighbourhood.  When or how they came, or how they stayed, no one knew;
it was enough that they were there, like a sort of ancestral fixture to
the street.  The neighbourhood was fine enough to look down upon these
two tumble-down shops at the corner, kept by Tony and Mrs. Murphy, the
grocer.  It was a semi-fashionable locality, far up-town, away from the
old-time French quarter.  It was the sort of neighbourhood where
millionaires live before their fortunes are made and fashionable,
high-priced private schools flourish, where the small cottages are
occupied by aspiring school-teachers and choir-singers.  Such was this
locality, and you must admit that it was indeed a condescension to
tolerate Tony and Mrs. Murphy.
He was a great, black-bearded, hoarse-voiced, six-foot specimen of
Italian humanity, who looked in his little shop and on the prosaic
pavement of Prytania Street somewhat as Hercules might seem in a modern
drawing-room.  You instinctively thought of wild mountain-passes, and
the gleaming dirks of bandit contadini in looking at him.  What his
last name was, no one knew.  Someone had maintained once that he had
been christened Antonio Malatesta, but that was unauthentic, and as
little to be believed as that other wild theory that her name was Mary.
She was meek, pale, little, ugly, and German.  Altogether part of his
arms and legs would have very decently made another larger than she.