A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories

“I will.” He pressed his lips to the palm of her hand so she quaked suddenly. “The name of the ailment is Camillia Wilkes.”

“How strange.” She shivered, her eyes glinting lilac fires. “Am I then my own affliction? How sick I make myself! Even now, feel my heart!”

“I feel it, so.”

“My limbs, they burn with summer heat!”

“Yes. They scorch my fingers.”

“But now, the night wind, see how I shudder, cold! I die, I swear it, I die!”

“I will not let you,” he said quietly.

“Are you a doctor, then?”

“No, just your plain, your ordinary physician, like another who guessed your trouble this day. The girl who would have named it but ran off in the crowd.”

“Yes, I saw in her eyes she knew what had seized me. But, now, my teeth chatter. And no extra blanket!”

“Give room, please. There. Let me see: two arms, two legs, head and body. I’m all here!”

“What, sir!”

“To warm you from the night, of course.”

“How like a hearth! Oh, sir, sir, do I know you? Your name?”

Swiftly above her, his head shadowed hers. From it his merry clear-water eyes glowed as did his white ivory slot of a smile.

“Why, Bosco, of course,” he said.

“Is there not a saint by that name?”

“Given an hour, you will call me so, yes.”

His head bent closer. Thus sooted in shadow, she cried with joyous recognition to welcome her Dustman back.

“The world spins! I pass away! The cure, sweet Doctor, or all is lost!”

“The cure,” he said. “And the cure is this …”

Somewhere, cats sang. A shoe, shot from a window, tipped them off a fence. Then all was silence and the moon …

“Shh …”

Dawn. Tiptoeing downstairs, Mr. and Mrs. Wilkes peered into their courtyard.

“Frozen stone dead from the terrible night, I know it!”

“No, wife, look! Alive! Roses in her cheeks! No, more! Peaches, persimmons! She glows all rosy-milky! Sweet Camillia, alive and well, made whole again!”

They bent by the slumbering girl.

“She smiles, she dreams; what’s that she says?”

“The sovereign,” sighed the girl, “remedy.”

“What, what?”