Hilda Wade, a Woman with Tenacity of Purpose

With skilful haste he administered a little sal volatile and nux vomica to the swooning patient; while Hilda set about remedying the damage. “That’s better,” Sebastian said, in a mollified tone, when she had brought another basin. There was a singular note of cloaked triumph in his voice. “Now, we’ll begin again.... I was just saying, gentlemen, before this accident, that I had seen only ONE case of this peculiar form of the tendency before; and that case was the notorious”—he kept his glittering eyes fixed harder on Hilda than ever—“the notorious Dr. Yorke-Bannerman.”

I was watching Hilda, too. At the words, she trembled violently all over once more, but with an effort restrained herself. Their looks met in a searching glance. Hilda’s air was proud and fearless: in Sebastian’s, I fancied I detected, after a second, just a tinge of wavering.

“You remember Yorke-Bannerman’s case,” he went on. “He committed a murder—”

“Let ME take the basin!” I cried, for I saw Hilda’s hands giving way a second time, and I was anxious to spare her.

“No, thank you,” she answered low, but in a voice that was full of suppressed defiance. “I will wait and hear this out. I PREFER to stop here.”

As for Sebastian, he seemed now not to notice her, though I was aware all the time of a sidelong glance of his eye, parrot-wise, in her direction. “He committed a murder,” he went on, “by means of aconitine—then an almost unknown poison; and, after committing it, his heart being already weak, he was taken himself with symptoms of aneurism in a curious form, essentially similar to these; so that he died before the trial—a lucky escape for him.”

He paused rhetorically once more; then he added in the same tone: “Mental agitation and the terror of detection no doubt accelerated the fatal result in that instance. He died at once from the shock of the arrest. It was a natural conclusion. Here we may hope for a more successful issue.”

He spoke to the students, of course, but I could see for all that that he was keeping his falcon eye fixed hard on Hilda’s face. I glanced aside at her. She never flinched for a second. Neither said anything directly to the other; still, by their eyes and mouths, I knew some strange passage of arms had taken place between them. Sebastian’s tone was one of provocation, of defiance, I might almost say of challenge. Hilda’s air I took rather for the air of calm and resolute, but assured, resistance. He expected her to answer; she said nothing. Instead of that, she went on holding the basin now with fingers that WOULD not tremble. Every muscle was strained. Every tendon was strung. I could see she held herself in with a will of iron.

The rest of the episode passed off quietly. Sebastian, having delivered his bolt, began to think less of Hilda and more of the patient. He went on with his demonstration. As for Hilda, she gradually relaxed her muscles, and, with a deep-drawn breath, resumed her natural attitude. The tension was over. They had had their little skirmish, whatever it might mean, and had it out; now, they called a truce over the patient’s body.

When the case had been disposed of, and the students dismissed, I went straight into the laboratory to get a few surgical instruments I had chanced to leave there. For a minute or two, I mislaid my clinical thermometer, and began hunting for it behind a wooden partition in the corner of the room by the place for washing test-tubes. As I stooped down, turning over the various objects about the tap in my search, Sebastian’s voice came to me. He had paused outside the door, and was speaking in his calm, clear tone, very low, to Hilda. “So NOW we understand one another, Nurse Wade,” he said, with a significant sneer. “I know whom I have to deal with!”

“And I know, too,” Hilda answered, in a voice of placid confidence.

“Yet you are not afraid?”

“It is not I who have cause for fear. The accused may tremble, not the prosecutor.”

“What! You threaten?”

“No; I do not threaten. Not in words, I mean. My presence here is in itself a threat, but I make no other. You know now, unfortunately, WHY I have come. That makes my task harder. But I will NOT give it up. I will wait and conquer.”

Sebastian answered nothing. He strode into the laboratory alone, tall, grim, unbending, and let himself sink into his easy chair, looking up with a singular and somewhat sinister smile at his bottles of microbes. After a minute he stirred the fire, and bent his head forward, brooding. He held it between his hands, with his elbows on his knees, and gazed moodily straight before him into the glowing caves of white-hot coal in the fireplace. That sinister smile still played lambent around the corners of his grizzled moustaches.

I moved noiselessly towards the door, trying to pass behind him unnoticed. But, alert as ever, his quick ears detected me. With a sudden start, he raised his head and glanced round. “What! you here?” he cried, taken aback. For a second he appeared almost to lose his self-possession.

“I came for my clinical,” I answered, with an unconcerned air. “I have somehow managed to mislay it in the laboratory.”

My carefully casual tone seemed to reassure him. He peered about him with knit brows. “Cumberledge,” he asked at last, in a suspicious voice, “did you hear that woman?”

“The woman in 93? Delirious?”

“No, no. Nurse Wade?”

“Hear her?” I echoed, I must candidly admit with intent to deceive. “When she broke the basin?”

His forehead relaxed. “Oh! it is nothing,” he muttered, hastily. “A mere point of discipline. She spoke to me just now, and I thought her tone unbecoming in a subordinate.... Like Korah and his crew, she takes too much upon her.... We must get rid of her, Cumberledge; we must get rid of her. She is a dangerous woman!”

“She is the most intelligent nurse we have ever had in the place, sir,” I objected, stoutly.

He nodded his head twice. “Intelligent—je vous l’accorde; but dangerous—dangerous!”

Then he turned to his papers, sorting them out one by one with a preoccupied face and twitching fingers. I recognised that he desired to be left alone, so I quitted the laboratory.

I cannot quite say WHY, but ever since Hilda Wade first came to Nathaniel’s my enthusiasm for Sebastian had been cooling continuously. Admiring his greatness still, I had doubts as to his goodness. That day I felt I positively mistrusted him. I wondered what his passage of arms with Hilda might mean. Yet, somehow, I was shy of alluding to it before her.

One thing, however, was clear to me now—this great campaign that was being waged between the nurse and the Professor had reference to the case of Dr. Yorke-Bannerman.

For a time, nothing came of it; the routine of the hospital went on as usual. The patient with the suspected predisposition to aneurism kept fairly well for a week or two, and then took a sudden turn for the worse, presenting at times most unwonted symptoms. He died unexpectedly. Sebastian, who had watched him every hour, regarded the matter as of prime importance. “I’m glad it happened here,” he said, rubbing his hands. “A grand opportunity. I wanted to catch an instance like this before that fellow in Paris had time to anticipate me. They’re all on the lookout. Von Strahlendorff, of Vienna, has been waiting for just such a patient for years. So have I. Now fortune has favoured me. Lucky for us he died! We shall find out everything.”

We held a post-mortem, of course, the condition of the blood being what we most wished to observe; and the autopsy revealed some unexpected details. One remarkable feature consisted in a certain undescribed and impoverished state of the contained bodies which Sebastian, with his eager zeal for science, desired his students to see and identify. He said it was likely to throw much light on other ill-understood conditions of the brain and nervous system, as well as on the peculiar faint odour of the insane, now so well recognised in all large asylums. In order to compare this abnormal state with the aspect of the healthy circulating medium, he proposed to examine a little good living blood side by side with the morbid specimen under the microscope. Nurse Wade was in attendance in the laboratory, as usual. The Professor, standing by the instrument, with one hand on the brass screw, had got the diseased drop ready arranged for our inspection beforehand, and was gloating over it himself with scientific enthusiasm. “Grey corpuscles, you will observe,” he said, “almost entirely deficient. Red, poor in number, and irregular in outline. Plasma, thin. Nuclei, feeble. A state of body which tells severely against the due rebuilding of the wasted tissues. Now compare with typical normal specimen.” He removed his eye from the microscope, and wiped a glass slide with a clean cloth as he spoke. “Nurse Wade, we know of old the purity and vigour of your circulating fluid. You shall have the honour of advancing science once more. Hold up your finger.”

Hilda held up her forefinger unhesitatingly. She was used to such requests; and, indeed, Sebastian had acquired by long experience the faculty of pinching the finger-tip so hard, and pressing the point of a needle so dexterously into a minor vessel, that he could draw at once a small drop of blood without the subject even feeling it.

The Professor nipped the last joint between his finger and thumb for a moment till it was black at the end; then he turned to the saucer at his side, which Hilda herself had placed there, and chose from it, cat-like, with great deliberation and selective care, a particular needle. Hilda’s eyes followed his every movement as closely and as fearlessly as ever. Sebastian’s hand was raised, and he was just about to pierce the delicate white skin, when, with a sudden, quick scream of terror, she snatched her hand away hastily.

The Professor let the needle drop in his astonishment. “What did you do that for?” he cried, with an angry dart of the keen eyes. “This is not the first time I have drawn your blood. You KNEW I would not hurt you.”

Hilda’s face had grown strangely pale. But that was not all. I believe I was the only person present who noticed one unobtrusive piece of sleight-of-hand which she hurriedly and skilfully executed. When the needle slipped from Sebastian’s hand, she leant forward even as she screamed, and caught it, unobserved, in the folds of her apron. Then her nimble fingers closed over it as if by magic, and conveyed it with a rapid movement at once to her pocket. I do not think even Sebastian himself noticed the quick forward jerk of her eager hands, which would have done honour to a conjurer. He was too much taken aback by her unexpected behaviour to observe the needle.

Just as she caught it, Hilda answered his question in a somewhat flurried voice. “I—I was afraid,” she broke out, gasping. “One gets these little accesses of terror now and again. I—I feel rather weak. I don’t think I will volunteer to supply any more normal blood this morning.”

Sebastian’s acute eyes read her through, as so often. With a trenchant dart he glanced from her to me. I could see he began to suspect a confederacy. “That will do,” he went on, with slow deliberateness. “Better so. Nurse Wade, I don’t know what’s beginning to come over you. You are losing your nerve—which is fatal in a nurse. Only the other day you let fall and broke a basin at a most critical moment; and now, you scream aloud on a trifling apprehension.” He paused and glanced around him. “Mr. Callaghan,” he said, turning to our tall, red-haired Irish student, “YOUR blood is good normal, and YOU are not hysterical.” He selected another needle with studious care. “Give me your finger.”

As he picked out the needle, I saw Hilda lean forward again, alert and watchful, eyeing him with a piercing glance; but, after a second’s consideration, she seemed to satisfy herself, and fell back without a word. I gathered that she was ready to interfere, had occasion demanded. But occasion did not demand; and she held her peace quietly.

The rest of the examination proceeded without a hitch. For a minute or two, it is true, I fancied that Sebastian betrayed a certain suppressed agitation—a trifling lack of his accustomed perspicuity and his luminous exposition. But, after meandering for a while through a few vague sentences, he soon recovered his wonted calm; and as he went on with his demonstration, throwing himself eagerly into the case, his usual scientific enthusiasm came back to him undiminished. He waxed eloquent (after his fashion) over the “beautiful” contrast between Callaghan’s wholesome blood, “rich in the vivifying architectonic grey corpuscles which rebuild worn tissues,” and the effete, impoverished, unvitalised fluid which stagnated in the sluggish veins of the dead patient. The carriers of oxygen had neglected their proper task; the granules whose duty it was to bring elaborated food-stuffs to supply the waste of brain and nerve and muscle had forgotten their cunning. The bricklayers of the bodily fabric had gone out on strike; the weary scavengers had declined to remove the useless by-products. His vivid tongue, his picturesque fancy, ran away with him. I had never heard him talk better or more incisively before; one could feel sure, as he spoke, that the arteries of his own acute and teeming brain at that moment of exaltation were by no means deficient in those energetic and highly vital globules on whose reparative worth he so eloquently descanted. “Sure, the Professor makes annywan see right inside wan’s own vascular system,” Callaghan whispered aside to me, in unfeigned admiration.

The demonstration ended in impressive silence. As we streamed out of the laboratory, aglow with his electric fire, Sebastian held me back with a bent motion of his shrivelled forefinger. I stayed behind unwillingly. “Yes, sir?” I said, in an interrogative voice.

The Professor’s eyes were fixed intently on the ceiling. His look was one of rapt inspiration. I stood and waited. “Cumberledge,” he said at last, coming back to earth with a start, “I see it more plainly each day that goes. We must get rid of that woman.”

“Of Nurse Wade?” I asked, catching my breath.

He roped the grizzled moustache, and blinked the sunken eyes. “She has lost nerve,” he went on, “lost nerve entirely. I shall suggest that she be dismissed. Her sudden failures of stamina are most embarrassing at critical junctures.”

“Very well, sir,” I answered, swallowing a lump in my throat. To say the truth, I was beginning to be afraid on Hilda’s account. That morning’s events had thoroughly disquieted me.

He seemed relieved at my unquestioning acquiescence. “She is a dangerous edged-tool; that’s the truth of it,” he went on, still twirling his moustache with a preoccupied air, and turning over his stock of needles. “When she’s clothed and in her right mind, she is a valuable accessory—sharp and trenchant like a clean, bright lancet; but when she allows one of these causeless hysterical fits to override her tone, she plays one false at once—like a lancet that slips, or grows dull and rusty.” He polished one of the needles on a soft square of new chamois-leather while he spoke, as if to give point and illustration to his simile.

I went out from him, much perturbed. The Sebastian I had once admired and worshipped was beginning to pass from me; in his place I found a very complex and inferior creation. My idol had feet of clay. I was loth to acknowledge it.

I stalked along the corridor moodily towards my own room. As I passed Hilda Wade’s door, I saw it half ajar. She stood a little within, and beckoned me to enter.

I passed in and closed the door behind me. Hilda looked at me with trustful eyes. Resolute still, her face was yet that of a hunted creature. “Thank Heaven, I have ONE friend here, at least!” she said, slowly seating herself. “You saw me catch and conceal the needle?”

“Yes, I saw you.”

She drew it forth from her purse, carefully but loosely wrapped up in a small tag of tissue-paper. “Here it is!” she said, displaying it. “Now, I want you to test it.”

“In a culture?” I asked; for I guessed her meaning.