On the third day she gave up thinking about the cares of the house and began to bemoan herself.
“Oh my God!” she wailed. “I have pains all over my body, and my head is burning. I think that I am going to die.”
Her husband tried to cheer her with his clumsy pleasantries. “You are going to die when the good God wills it, and according to my way of thinking that will not be for a while yet. What would He be doing with you? Heaven is all cluttered with old women, and down here we have only the one, and she is able to make herself a bit useful, every now and then …” But he was beginning to feel anxious, and took counsel with his daughter.
“I could put the horse in and go as far as La Pipe,” he suggested. “It may be that they have some medicine for this sickness at the store; or I might talk things over with the cure, and he would tell me what to do.”
Before they had made up their minds night had fallen, and Tit’Bé, who had been at Eutrope Gagnon’s helping him to saw his firewood, came back bringing Eutrope along with him.
“Eutrope has a remedy,” said he. They all gathered round Eutrope, who took a little tin box from his pocket and opened it deliberately.
“This is what I have,” he announced rather dubiously. “They are little pills. When my brother was bad with his kidneys three years ago he saw an advertisement in a paper about these pills, and it said they were the proper thing, so he sent the money for a box, and he declares it is a good medicine. Of course his trouble did not leave him at once, but he says that this did him good. It comes from the States …”
Without word said they looked at the little gray pills rolling about on the bottom of the box … A remedy compounded by some man in a distant land famed for his wisdom … And they felt the awe of the savage for his broth of herbs simmered on a night of the full moon beneath the medicineman’s incantations.
Maria asked doubtfully: “Is it certain that her trouble has only to do with the kidneys?”
“I thought it was just that, from what Tit’Bé told me.”
A motion of Chapdelaine’s hand eked out his words.—“She strained herself lifting a bag of flour, as she says; and now she has pains everywhere. How can we tell …”
“The newspaper that spoke of this medicine,” Eutrope Gagnon went on, “put it that whenever a person falls sick and is in pain it is always the kidneys; and for trouble in the kidneys these pills here are first-rate. That is what the paper said, and my brother as well.”
“Even if they are not for this very sickness,” said Tit’Bé deferentially, “they are a remedy all the same.”
“She suffers, that is one thing certain; we cannot let her go on like this.”
They drew near the bed where the sick woman was moaning and breathing heavily, attempting from time to time to make slight movements which were followed by sharper outcries.
“Eutrope has brought you a curé, Laura.”
“I have no faith in your cures,” she groaned out. But yet she was ready to look at the little gray pills ever running round in the tin box as if they were alive.
“My brother took some of these three years ago when he had the kidney trouble so badly that he was hardly able to work at all, and he says that they cured him. It is a fine remedy, Madame Chapdelaine, there is not a question of it!” His former doubts had vanished in speech and he felt wholly confident. “This is going to cure you, Madame Chapdelaine, as surely as the good God is above us. It is a medicine of the very first class; my brother had it sent expressly from the States. You may be sure that you would never find a medicine like this in the store at La Pipe.”
“It cannot make her worse?” Maria asked, some doubt lingering. “It is not a poison, or anything of that sort?”
With one voice, in an indignant tone, the three men protested: “Do harm? Tiny pills no bigger than that!”
“My brother took nearly a box of them, and according to his account it was only good they did him.”
When Eutrope departed he left the box of pills; the sick woman had not yet agreed to try them, but her objections grew weaker with their urging. In the middle of the night she took a couple, and two more in the morning, and as the hours passed they all waited in confidence for the virtue of the medicine to declare itself. But toward midday they had to bow to the facts: she was no easier and did not cease her moaning. By evening the box was empty, and at the falling of the night her groans were filling the household with anguished distress, all the keener as they had no medicine now in which to place their trust.
Maria was up several times in the night, aroused by her mother’s more piercing cries; she always found her lying motionless on her side, and this position seemed to increase the suffering and the stiffness, so that her groans were pitiful to hear.
“What ails you, mother? Are you not feeling any better?”
“Ah God, how I suffer! How I do suffer! I cannot stir myself, not the least bit, and even so the pain is as bad as ever. Give me some cold water, Maria; I have the most terrible thirst.”
Several times Maria gave her mother water, but at last she became afraid. “Maybe it is not good for you to drink so much. Try to bear the thirst for a little.”
“But I cannot bear it, I tell you—the thirst and the pain all through my body, and my
