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Updated: May 31, 2025
Zerviah Hope returned to his work, shrinking under the foreknowledge of his fate. He felt as if he knew what kind of people would remind him that they had become acquainted with his history, and what ways they would select to do it. He was not taken by surprise when men who had lifted their hats to the popular nurse last week, passed him on the street to-day with a cold nod or curious stare.
"I never done mean to hurt you!" cried Scip, following him into the road. "Jupiter the durn, he said he'd never tell. I never told nobody else." "You have told the whole town," said Zerviah Hope, patiently. "I'm sorry, but never mind." He stood for a moment looking across the stark palmetto, over the dusty stretch of road, across the glare, to the town. His eyes blinded and filled.
They felt that she was no longer analysing them, weighing them in her intellectual balance, and finding them wanting; so they were free with her now, and revealed to her qualities at which she had never guessed before. As the days went on, Zerviah began to notice that things were somehow different. He found some flowers near his table.
His father, his mother and four brothers had died of the plague since June. He started when he saw Hope, and his habitual look of fear deepened to a craven terror; he would rather have had the yellow fever than to have seen the Northern nurse just then. But Zerviah sat down by him on the hot sand, beside a rather ghastly palmetto that grew there, and spoke to him very gently.
One said: "I am sorry to hear you are not the man we thought you," and died in his arms that night. Zerviah remembered that these things must be. He reasoned with himself. He went into his attic, and prayed it all over. He said: "Lord, I can't expect to be treated as if I'd never been in prison. I'm sorry I mind it so. Perhaps I'd ought not to. I'll try not to care too much."
I presume I shall need nurses before morning. I'll have your address." She took from her gray sacque pocket a physician's note-book, and stood, pencil in hand. "My name," he said, "is Hope Zerviah Hope." She wrote without comment, walking as she wrote; he made no other attempt to converse with her. The two physicians followed, exchanging now and then a subdued word.
In point of fact, even in that death-stricken town, to be alive was to be as able to gossip as well people, and rumor, wearied of the monotonous fever symptom, found a diverting zest in this shattered reputation. Zerviah Hope was very much talked about in Calhoun; so much, that the Relief Committee heard, questioned, and experienced official anxiety. It seemed a mistake to lose so valuable a man.
Marian Dare came South to do a brave work, and I have no doubt she did it bravely, as a woman should. She came in pursuit of science, and I have no doubt she found it, as a woman will. Our chief interest in her at this time lies in the fact that certain missing fragments in the history of the person known as Zerviah Hope we owe to her.
It was the morning after his last pay-day Sunday morning, the first in October; a dry, deadly, glittering day. Zerviah had been to his attic to rest and bathe; he had been there some hours since sunrise, in the old place by the window, and watched the red sun kindle, and watched the dead-carts slink away into the color, and kneeled and prayed for frost.
Not a pleasing nor a good face; yet intensely pathetic because of its undisguised harassment. Zerviah looked at it for a moment. "She has never been much to either of us," he said to himself. "And yet, when Malvina was alive, I used to think that she was hard on Bernardine. I believe I said so once or twice. But Malvina had her own way of looking at things. Well, that is over now."
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