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Updated: May 31, 2025
Don't mind me, Scip." Scip put up his feeble hand; Zerviah took it; Scip spoke no more. The nurse held the negro's hand a long time; the lamp went out; they sat on in the dark. Through the flapping wooden shutter the stars looked in. Suddenly, Zerviah perceived that Scip's hand was quite cold. He carried him out by starlight, and buried him under the palmetto. It was hard work digging alone.
She held out her hand, lifted his, wrung it, dropped it, and softly added, "Well, never mind!" much as if he had been a child or a patient, much as he himself had said, "Never mind!" to Scip. Then Zerviah Hope broke down. "I haven't got a murderer's heart!" he cried. "It has been taken away from me. I ain't so bad now. I meant to be I wanted to do " "Hush!" she said. "You have, and you shall.
ROBERT ALLITSEN came to the old book-shop to see Zerviah Holme before returning to the mountains. He found him reading Gibbon. These two men had stood by Bernardine's grave. "I was beginning to know her," the old man said. "I have always known her," the young man said. "I cannot remember a time when she has not been part of my life." "She loved you," Zerviah said.
Dying eyes looked their last at eyes that would have died to save them; strengthening hands clasped hands that had girded them with the iron of love's tenderness, through the valley of the shadow, and up the heights of life and light. Over there, in some happy home, tremulous lips that the plague had parted met to-night in their first kiss of thanksgiving. Zerviah thought of these things.
She had no affection to bestow on any doll, nor any woolly lamb, nor apparently on any human person; unless, perhaps, there was the possibility of a friendly inclination towards Uncle Zerviah, who would not have understood the value of any deeper feeling, and did not therefore call the child cold-hearted and unresponsive, as he might well have done.
She drew her veil; there was unprofessional moisture on her long, feminine lashes. She held out her hearty hand-grasp to him, touched the tackey, and galloped away. "She is a good woman," said Zerviah, half aloud, looking down at his cold fingers. "She touched me, and she knew! Lord, I should like to have you bless her!" He looked after her.
She spent her time in dusting the books, and arranging them in some kind of order; for old Zerviah Holme had ceased to interest himself much in his belongings, and sat in the little inner room reading as usual Gibbon's "History of Rome." Customers might please themselves about coming: Zerviah Holme had never cared about amassing money, and now he cared even less than before.
She was the only person alive in the town who knew how to communicate with the outer world. She had begun to teach a little brother of hers the Morse alphabet, "That somebody may know, Bobby, if I can't come some day." She, too, knew Zerviah Hope, and looked up; but her pretty face was clouded with the awful shadow of her own responsibility.
Scip's hut stood quite by itself. No one passed by. Often no one passed for a week, or even more. Zerviah looked from the door of the hut to the little city. The red light lay between him and it, like a great pool. He felt less lonely to see the town, and the smoke now and then from chimneys. He thought how many people loved and cared for one another in the suffering place.
She hovers over the tale with a distant and beautiful influence, pervading as womanly compassion and alert as a woman's eye. 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.
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