“Then you give me hope?” his sunken eye turned up.
“Hope is proportioned to confidence. How much confidence you give me, so much hope do I give you. For this,” lifting the box, “if all depended upon this, I should rest. It is nature’s own.”
“Nature!”
“Why do you start?”
“I know not,” with a sort of shudder, “but I have heard of a book entitled ‘Nature in Disease.’”
“A title I cannot approve; it is suspiciously scientific. ‘Nature in Disease?’ As if nature, divine nature, were aught but health; as if through nature disease is decreed! But did I not before hint of the tendency of science, that forbidden tree? Sir, if despondency is yours from recalling that title, dismiss it. Trust me, nature is health; for health is good, and nature cannot work ill. As little can she work error. Get nature, and you get well. Now, I repeat, this medicine is nature’s own.”
Again the sick man could not, according to his light, conscientiously disprove what was said. Neither, as before, did he seem over-anxious to do so; the less, as in his sensitiveness it seemed to him, that hardly could he offer so to do without something like the appearance of a kind of implied irreligion; nor in his heart was he ungrateful, that since a spirit opposite to that pervaded all the herb-doctor’s hopeful words, therefore, for hopefulness, he (the sick man) had not alone medical warrant, but also doctrinal.
“Then you do really think,” hectically, “that if I take this medicine,” mechanically reaching out for it, “I shall regain my health?”
“I will not encourage false hopes,” relinquishing to him the box, “I will be frank with you. Though frankness is not always the weakness of the mineral practitioner, yet the herb doctor must be frank, or nothing. Now then, sir, in your case, a radical cure—such a cure, understand, as should make you robust—such a cure, sir, I do not and cannot promise.”
“Oh, you need not! only restore me the power of being something else to others than a burdensome care, and to myself a droning grief. Only cure me of this misery of weakness; only make me so that I can walk about in the sun and not draw the flies to me, as lured by the coming of decay. Only do that—but that.”