The doctor grunted among his hollyhocks. “Yes, this Love. I have seen many manifestations; many symptoms of it. The heroic symptom has never shown itself so plainly as in the case of our Blanchisseuse Dorée. Name of a name! If I were you, my dear, I should never be surprised to see a hale young angel or two helping her with the wringing, and half the powers of heaven on guard among her apple trees.”
“And there is no hope for her release?”
“Speaking as a doctor, no. As a man”—the doctor was small, and of a wicked, selfish humour—“as a man, I am so greatly tempted to tell the pig to drink his liniments someday—”
Père Barthélemy laughed. “He is of my flock, and I say that a long purgatory is his only chance. Well, well! What would she say if she heard us?”
“Those sort of creatures always live long. Perhaps you can tell me why. These slugs are manifold as my good intentions, and will have a like fate. Remember our Blanchisseuse in your prayers.”
But for once, the doctor was wrong. La Blanchisseuse’s husband died, quite suddenly, and she was a widow. Upon Père Barthélemy came the weight of her wild grief.
“O, mon père, he is gone, he is gone! Dead before me, and he so much younger! You should have seen him when he came courting me. Such a fine lad, and even then I was plain and hard-favoured. I cannot believe it. O Mother of Sorrows, give him back to me! I was weak, I was wicked. When he called me, sometimes I came slowly. My legs were stiff with rheumatism, but I should have hastened. And often I fell asleep when I was rubbing him. O, my father, how shall I live without him?”
“She will not live,” said the curé. But the doctor said: “Wait. That grief must find healing.”
The Golden Washerwoman awoke, at last, to a sense of other things than her loneliness. She need be the Golden Washerwoman no more. There was the insurance to meet the dues for which she had striven for years, urged and helped by Père Barthélemy. La Blanchisseuse Dorée was rich, mon Dieu, as rich as any lonely woman need be. My faith, she had money in the bank. Regardez la!
“I will buy mourning,” she said, “such mourning as will become my age.”