The Goodness of St. Rocque, and Other Stories

								

The servants came to buy oysters for the larger houses, and to gossip
over the counter 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.