When the days were pleasant the old man kept the little girl with him out of doors on the canal bank. She did not trouble him by running about. Her long days of confinement in the attic room had accustomed her to remain quietly in one place. She sat contentedly in the shade and watched the bugs in the grass and the birds in the tree above her. In the cool of the evening she trudged along the canal bank with Farr and the play-mamma until eyes grew heavy and little feet stumbled with weariness and it was time for bed. Rainy evenings they studied the alphabet or he read to her from picture-books in blazing colors, and after a time she remembered all the stories and made believe read them to him.
He worked in the trench and looked forward impatiently to Saturday nights when the clerk came along with the pay-envelopes; there were so many things in the stores that would delight the heart of a little girl who had never had any toys except a rag doll and a broken flower-basket. Then there were pretty dresses to buy. The taste of Zelie Dionne took charge of that shopping. When he bought the first one--one that was white and fluffy--and Rosemarie walked out with him she displayed such feminine pride in fine feathers that he looked forward to future Saturdays nights and new dresses with anticipatory gusto. If one had questioned him he could have told weeks ahead just what his plans of purchases were, for he canvassed all the possibilities with the play-mamma who knew so well how to get value for a dollar--who knew the places to buy and whose needle helped to much.
It was a wicked summer for those who were doomed to the mills and the tenement-houses. The heat puffed and throbbed over the lashing machinery. The slashers seemed to spit caloric. The spinning-frames tossed it off their spindles. The looms fairly wove it into the warp. The thick, sweet, greasy air seemed to distil cotton-oil upon the faces of the workers. The nights proved to be no better than the days. The stuffy tenements gulped in the hot air of midday and held it as a person holds his breath. All the folks came out upon the little platforms that were ranged, story after story, above each other. They gasped for air in the narrow spaces between the high buildings. The stars above those narrow spaces did not sparkle and suggest coolness; they seemed to float above the hot earth like red cinders.
Every day the undertakers' wagons came “boombling” down the narrow canyons of streets between the “Blocks,” for the people were dying. The little white hearse was a more frequent visitor than the rusty black one; the ranks of the children were paying the greatest toll to death.
“But we shall not worry about our Rosemarie,” old Etienne told Farr. “Under the shade on the green grass she shall stay where outdoors can paint her cheeks the very fine color.”
But when the old man called for her at the good woman's house one morning something else than the sun had painted the little girl's cheeks--they were flushed with fever. He told the good woman to send straight for the doctor, and went to his work much disturbed.
Later in the day the yard overseer, passing the rack, saw that the man was working with furious energy. He was even reaching out his rake to capture floating stuff before it touched the bars.
“This seems to be your busy day, Pickaroon,” suggested the overseer.
“I make believe this old rack to be a good friend of mine and that the float stuff be sickness come at him--so I work hard to keep it away.”
The overseer went along about his business, commenting mentally on a Frenchman's imagination.
When the big mill bells clanged the noon hour Etienne hurried to the good woman's house. The city physician had been there and had left medicine--two tumblers of it. He had hurried in and had hurried away and had been curt and brusk and had not told her what was the trouble, so the woman reported. But the child had been sleeping.
She was drowsy all that evening while Farr held her in his arms and Etienne sat near by with Zelie Dionne, ministering solicitously.
“Her cheeks are not so hot,” said the young man many times. He talked hopefully to reassure himself as well as the others, for he had been dreadfully frightened when he had come from his work. Fright had trodden close on the heels of much joy--for the superintendent of the Consolidated had taken him out of the hot trench that day and had appointed him boss of twoscore Italian diggers, doubling his pay.
“I have been watching you,” the superintendent told him. “You're built to boss men. What kind of a bump was it that ever slammed you down like this?”
The answer the superintendent got was a smile which put further questions out of his mind.
“No, her cheeks are not so hot,” affirmed Farr when he laid her in her bed that night. “She will come along all right.”
But at the end of a week languor still weighed on the child. There were circles under her eyes and her cheeks were wan, and she did not clap her hands with the old-time glee when he brought her new toys; the playthings lay beside her on the bed and invited her touch--staring eyes of dolls, beady eyes of toy dogs--without avail.
“It is the queer way of being sick,” lamented the old man. “The doctor mebbe not know, because he very gruff and do not say. I think I know what may cure her--it has been done many time.
“Away up in the Canada country there is the shrine of the good Sainte Anne de Beaupre. There she stand in the middle of the big church and she hold her little grandson in her arm--the little boy Jesus. So she feel very tender toward poor, sick childs. Ah, I have seen her many time--I have seen childs healed there and made so very smart--all cure. She loves little childs. _Oui_. All about her feet are short, small crutch where she has cure childs. The piece of her wrist-bone is there in the sacristy--it look like a wee scrap of some gray moss under the glass. And it cure when the good priest say the word for her. I know the way to the shrine of La Bonne Sainte Anne--I will go with the little Rosemarie and she shall sing and dance after that.”
For a moment the cynical smile of the skeptic etched itself at the corners of Farr's mouth--the flash of the nature the young man had hidden during recent weeks.
He turned to Zelie Dionne and found her regarding him with grave eyes.
“It is as M'sieu' Etienne says,” she assured the young man. “La Bonne Sainte listens very tenderly when the children come to her. She is good to all, but her spirit leans over the poor little children and comforts them.”
“You have been there?”
“Many times, sir. It is not only the sick body that the good Sainte Anne heals--she comforts anybody who is in much sorrow--she tells the right way to go. There are many roads to take in this life--and if any one goes to her with prayer and humble soul she will guide. Ah, it is true, sir.”
There was earnestness in her features and conviction in her tones and it was plain that Zelie Dionne was speaking out of the depths of her heart, and Farr remembered what old Etienne had said about the son of Farmer Leroux.
“Yes, she will lead to the right way and make all well in the end,” asserted the girl. “And, most of all, she is kind and gentle to the little children.”
Between her and the wistful old man Farr divided tolerant and kindly gaze.
“I believe in more things than I used to,” he said. “I'm willing to admit in these days that things I do not understand may have truth in them. The doctor is not making her well. But it is a long way to that shrine.”
“It is a long way, so! But I am very scare for her as she lie here all day. I will carry her very tender--on the railway car--on the big boat. The good Sainte Anne is everywhere, too. She will help.”
“If faith can move mountains it ought to heal easily one poor, little toddlekins,” muttered Farr.
A new doctor came the next day, a breezy young man, a talkative and frank young man, the assistant of the over-worked city physician, whose municipal duties had obliged him to take on helpers.
“I shall ask him, hey--about the shrine?” whispered Etienne to Farr while the doctor was examining the child.
“Yes; he'll be more patient with you than with me.”
“And do you think that pretty soon she can go on the railway if I be very careful, good docteur?” asked the old man, wistfully, apologetically.
“Go where?”
“On the pilgrimage to the shrine of the good Sainte Anne in the Canada country.”
“Don't you realize what this case is?” demanded the young physician.
“He have not say--he hurry in, he hurry out.”
“You the grandfather?”
“No!”
The doctor turned on Farr.
“Father?”
“No.”
“Then I can talk right out to you two. This is a case of typhoid that will be fatal in twenty-four hours. There's no use lying about it.”
Old Etienne's mouth and eyes seemed to sink deep into his wrinkles, as if Time had forced him suddenly to swallow an extra score of years. He looked at Farr's blank and whitening face, and as quickly looked away.
“Break it to her grandmother,” advised the doctor, nodding toward the kitchen where the good woman was at work.