[106] P. 247.
[107] P. 253.
THE DEVIL’S CHRISTMAS GIFT.
Let fastidious and fashionable people say what they will about shanties, there was something in Mike Roony’s humble dwelling that was really attractive. Perched on the top of a broad and lofty rock near the corner of Broadway and Forty-ninth Street, it commanded a magnificent view of the Hudson River and the Sound; and as the only way to reach it was by a flight of steps which Mike had cut in the rock, ’twas known among the neighbors by the name of Gibraltar. Some said Roony was a squatter; that he paid neither tax nor rent for the small piece of Manhattan Island which he occupied. Well, be this as it may, one thing is certain—he always declared his readiness to move when they blasted him out. Nothing grew upon this homestead—not a bush, not a weed, not a blade of grass; it was a little desert, roamed over by a goat, and swept clean by the winds, which made it their romping-ground from every quarter of the compass.
But Mike had a wife who loved flowers, and in the window fronting south stood a flower-pot wherein there bloomed a sweet red rose. Helen—for this was her name—had the true instincts of a lady, albeit her garment was not of silk and she sometimes went barefoot. She kept herself scrupulously neat—for water does not cost anything—and was fairer to behold than the flower she cherished. Born in America, of Irish parents, hers was one of those ideal faces which we not seldom meet with among American
women. A freckle or two only helped to set off the perfect whiteness of her skin; her eyes had taken their hue from the blue sky of her native land, and like the raven’s wing was the color of her hair.
But although Helen knew that she was beautiful, and there was a small mirror in the shanty, she did not waste any time before it, unless, perhaps, of a Sunday morning ere going to High Mass. A true helpmate was this wife in every sense of the word. She arose betimes, no matter how cold the weather might be, to prepare her husband’s breakfast, and, if a button was missing off his coat, always found time to sew it on before he went to his work. The floor of the shanty was daily sprinkled with fresh sand; the pictures on the wall—one of the Blessed Virgin at the foot of the cross, the other of St. Joseph—were never hung awry; you saw no broken panes in the windows; and the faces of her two little children, Michael and Helen, were kept as bright and clean as her own. She never quitted home during her husband’s absence to gossip and talk scandal with other women; and, monotonous as her life may seem, ’twas a happy one. Mike, too, was happy, and no mariner homeward bound ever watched for the beacon-light on his native coast more impatiently than he watched for the light which Helen used to place in the window, whence he might see it from afar as he trudged back from his day’s work.
And no matter how hard it might be raining, or snowing, or freezing, at the first glimpse of its welcome rays Mike always burst out into a merry song. In the evening she would read him to sleep with some story from the Catholic Review; then, when his head began to nod, she gently drew the pipe out of his mouth and whispered: “Love, ’tis bed-time.”