To Doctor Frank, who had happened in, she said:
“He will do the work of ten.”
“His strength was as the strength of ten,
Because his heart was pure,”
quoted the young man, laughing lightly. “I don’t know that I should have thought it, in this case. You’ve taken a fancy to the fellow.”
“I always respect an unmixed motive when I see it,” she replied, shortly. “But I’ve been in practice too long to take sudden fancies. There is no profession like ours, Doctor, for putting the sympathies under double picket guard.”
She stiffened a little in her manner. She did not like to be thought an over-enthusiastic woman—womanish, unused to the world.
The weather, soon after the arrival of the Mercy, took a terrible mood, and a prolonged drought settled upon Calhoun. The days dawned lurid and long. The nights fell dewless and deadly. Fatal and beautiful colors lurked in the swamps, and in the sifting dust, fine and hard, blown by siroccos across the glare of noon, like sands on the shores of the Lake of Fire. The pestilence walked in darkness, and the destruction wasted at midday. Men died, in that little town of a few thousand souls, at the rate of a score a day—black and white, poor and rich, clean and foul, saint and sinner. The quarantine laws tightened. Vessels fled by the harbor mouth under full sail, and melted like helpless compassion upon the fiery horizon. Trains upon the Shore Line shot through and thundered past the station; they crowded on steam; the fireman and his stoker averted their faces as they whirled by. The world turned her back upon Calhoun, and the dying town was shut in with her dead. Only, at long intervals, the Mercy, casting anchor far down the channel, sent up by Scip, the weak, black boatman, the signs of human fellowship—food, physician, purse, medicine—that spoke from the heart of the North to the heart of the South, and upheld her in those well-remembered days.
Zerviah Hope, volunteer nurse, became quickly enough a marked man in Calhoun. He more than verified Doctor Dare’s prognosis. Where the deadliest work was to be done, this man, it was observed, asked to be sent. Where no one else would go, he went. What no one else would do, he did. He sought the neglected, and the negroes. He braved the unclean, and the unburied. With the readiness of all incisive character acting on emergencies, he stamped himself upon the place and time. He went to his task as the soldier goes to the front under raking fire, with gleaming eyes and iron muscles. The fever of the fight was on him. He seemed to wrestle with disease for his patients, and to trample death beneath his feet. He glowed over his cures with a positive physical dilation, and writhed over his dead as if he had killed them. He seemed built of endurance more than mortal. It was not known when he slept, scarcely if he ate. His weariness sat upon him like a halo. He grew thin, refined, radiant. In short, he presented an example of that rare spectacle which never fails to command spectators—a common man possessed by an uncommon enthusiasm.
What passed with him at this time in that undiscovered sea which we call a man’s inner life, it would not be easy to assert. So far as we can judge, all the currents of his nature had swelled into the great, pulsing tide of self-surrender, which swept him along. Weakness, wrong, memory, regret, fear, grief, pleasure, hope,—all the little channels of personal life,—ran dry. He was that most blessed of human creatures, a man without a past and without a future, and living in a present nobler than the one could have been or the other could become. He continued to be a silent man, speaking little, excepting to his patients, and now and then, very gently, to the lady, Dr. Dare. He was always pliable to the influence of a woman’s voice or to womanly manner. He had, in the presence of women, the quick responsiveness and sudden change of color and sensitiveness of intonation which bespeak the man whose highest graces and lowest faults are likely to be owing to feminine power.