I have nothing further to say about the story before I tell it, except that it is true.
That night, after the physicians had gone about their business, Zerviah Hope wandered, a little forlornly, through the wretched town. Scip, the negro boatman, found him a corner to spend the night. It was a passable place, but Hope could not sleep; he had already seen too much. His soul was parched with the thirst of sympathy. He walked his hot attic till the dawn came. As it grew brighter he grew calmer; and, when the unkindly sun burst burning upon the land, he knelt by his window and looked over the doomed town, and watched the dead-carts slinking away toward the everglades in the splendid color of the sky and air, and thought his own thoughts in his own way about this which he had come to do. We should not suppose that they were remarkable thoughts; he had not the look of a remarkable man. Yet, as he knelt there,—a sleepless, haggard figure blotted against the sunrise, with folded hands and moving lips,—an artist, with a high type of imagination and capable of spiritual discernment, would have found in him a design for a lofty subject, to which perhaps he would have given the name of “Consecration” rather than of “Renunciation,” or of “Exultance” rather than of “Dread.”
A common observer would have simply said: “I should not have taken him for a praying man.”
He was still upon his knees when Dr. Dare’s order came, “Nurse wanted for a bad case!” and he went from his prayer to his first patient. The day was already deep, and a reflection, not of the sunrise, moved with him as light moves.
Doctor Dare, in her gray dress, herself a little pale, met him with keen eyes. She said:
“It is a very bad case. An old man—much neglected. No one will go. Are you willing?”
The nurse answered:
“I am glad.”
She watched him as he walked away—a plain, clean, common man, with unheroic carriage. The physician’s fine eyes fired.