Hilda Wade, a Woman with Tenacity of Purpose

Very slowly, a faint trace of colour came back to her cheeks. Her heavy eyes half opened. They stared first with a white stare. Her arms dropped by her side. Her mouth relaxed its ghastly smile.... We held our breath.... She was coming to again!

But her coming to was slow—very, very slow. Her pulse was still weak. Her heart pumped feebly. We feared she might sink from inanition at any moment. Hilda Wade knelt on the floor by the girl’s side and held a spoonful of beef essence coaxingly to her lips. Number Fourteen gasped, drew a long, slow breath, then gulped and swallowed it. After that she lay back with her mouth open, looking like a corpse. Hilda pressed another spoonful of the soft jelly upon her; but the girl waved it away with one trembling hand. “Let me die,” she cried. “Let me die! I feel dead already.”

Hilda held her face close. “Isabel,” she whispered—and I recognised in her tone the vast moral difference between “Isabel” and “Number Fourteen,”—“Is-a-bel, you must take it. For Arthur’s sake, I say, you MUST take it.”

The girl’s hand quivered as it lay on the white coverlet. “For Arthur’s sake!” she murmured, lifting her eyelids dreamily. “For Arthur’s sake! Yes, nurse, dear!”

“Call me Hilda, please! Hilda!”

The girl’s face lighted up again. “Yes, Hilda, dear,” she answered, in an unearthly voice, like one raised from the dead. “I will call you what you will. Angel of light, you have been so good to me.”

She opened her lips with an effort and slowly swallowed another spoonful. Then she fell back, exhausted. But her pulse improved within twenty minutes. I mentioned the matter, with enthusiasm, to Sebastian later. “It is very nice in its way,” he answered; “but… it is not nursing.”

I thought to myself that that was just what it WAS; but I did not say so. Sebastian was a man who thought meanly of women. “A doctor, like a priest,” he used to declare, “should keep himself unmarried. His bride is medicine.” And he disliked to see what he called PHILANDERING going on in his hospital. It may have been on that account that I avoided speaking much of Hilda Wade thenceforth before him.

He looked in casually next day to see the patient. “She will die,” he said, with perfect assurance, as we passed down the ward together. “Operation has taken too much out of her.”

“Still, she has great recuperative powers,” Hilda answered. “They all have in her family, Professor. You may, perhaps, remember Joseph Huntley, who occupied Number Sixty-seven in the Accident Ward, some nine months since—compound fracture of the arm—a dark, nervous engineer’s assistant—very hard to restrain—well, HE was her brother; he caught typhoid fever in the hospital, and you commented at the time on his strange vitality. Then there was her cousin, again, Ellen Stubbs. We had HER for stubborn chronic laryngitis—a very bad case—anyone else would have died—yielded at once to your treatment; and made, I recollect, a splendid convalescence.”

“What a memory you have!” Sebastian cried, admiring against his will. “It is simply marvellous! I never saw anyone like you in my life… except once. HE was a man, a doctor, a colleague of mine—dead long ago.... Why—” he mused, and gazed hard at her. Hilda shrank before his gaze. “This is curious,” he went on slowly, at last; “very curious. You—why, you resemble him!”

“Do I?” Hilda replied, with forced calm, raising her eyes to his. Their glances met. That moment, I saw each had recognised something; and from that day forth I was instinctively aware that a duel was being waged between Sebastian and Hilda,—a duel between the two ablest and most singular personalities I had ever met; a duel of life and death—though I did not fully understand its purport till much, much later.

Every day after that, the poor, wasted girl in Number Fourteen grew feebler and fainter. Her temperature rose; her heart throbbed weakly. She seemed to be fading away. Sebastian shook his head. “Lethodyne is a failure,” he said, with a mournful regret. “One cannot trust it. The case might have recovered from the operation, or recovered from the drug; but she could not recover from both together. Yet the operation would have been impossible without the drug, and the drug is useless except for the operation.”

It was a great disappointment to him. He hid himself in his room, as was his wont when disappointed, and went on with his old work at his beloved microbes.

“I have one hope still,” Hilda murmured to me by the bedside, when our patient was at her worst. “If one contingency occurs, I believe we may save her.”

“What is that?” I asked.

She shook her head waywardly. “You must wait and see,” she answered. “If it comes off, I will tell you. If not, let it swell the limbo of lost inspirations.”

Next morning early, however, she came up to me with a radiant face, holding a newspaper in her hand. “Well, it HAS happened!” she cried, rejoicing. “We shall save poor Isabel Number Fourteen, I mean; our way is clear, Dr. Cumberledge.”

I followed her blindly to the bedside, little guessing what she could mean. She knelt down at the head of the cot. The girl’s eyes were closed. I touched her cheek; she was in a high fever. “Temperature?” I asked.

“A hundred and three.”

I shook my head. Every symptom of fatal relapse. I could not imagine what card Hilda held in reserve. But I stood there, waiting.

She whispered in the girl’s ear: “Arthur’s ship is sighted off the Lizard.”

The patient opened her eyes slowly, and rolled them for a moment as if she did not understand.

“Too late!” I cried. “Too late! She is delirious—insensible!”

Hilda repeated the words slowly, but very distinctly. “Do you hear, dear? Arthur’s ship… it is sighted.... Arthur’s ship… at the Lizard.”

The girl’s lips moved. “Arthur! Arthur!… Arthur’s ship!” A deep sigh. She clenched her hands. “He is coming?” Hilda nodded and smiled, holding her breath with suspense.

“Up the Channel now. He will be at Southampton tonight. Arthur… at Southampton. It is here, in the papers; I have telegraphed to him to hurry on at once to see you.”

She struggled up for a second. A smile flitted across the worn face. Then she fell back wearily.

I thought all was over. Her eyes stared white. But ten minutes later she opened her lids again. “Arthur is coming,” she murmured. “Arthur… coming.”

“Yes, dear. Now sleep. He is coming.”

All through that day and the next night she was restless and agitated; but still her pulse improved a little. Next morning she was again a trifle better. Temperature falling—a hundred and one, point three. At ten o’clock Hilda came in to her, radiant.

“Well, Isabel, dear,” she cried, bending down and touching her cheek (kissing is forbidden by the rules of the house), “Arthur has come. He is here… down below… I have seen him.”

“Seen him!” the girl gasped.

“Yes, seen him. Talked with him. Such a nice, manly fellow; and such an honest, good face! He is longing for you to get well. He says he has come home this time to marry you.”

The wan lips quivered. “He will NEVER marry me!”

“Yes, yes, he WILL—if you will take this jelly. Look here—he wrote these words to you before my very eyes: ‘Dear love to my Isa!’… If you are good, and will sleep, he may see you—to-morrow.”

The girl opened her lips and ate the jelly greedily. She ate as much as she was desired. In three minutes more her head had fallen like a child’s upon her pillow and she was sleeping peacefully.

I went up to Sebastian’s room, quite excited with the news. He was busy among his bacilli. They were his hobby, his pets. “Well, what do you think, Professor?” I cried. “That patient of Nurse Wade’s—”

He gazed up at me abstractedly, his brow contracting. “Yes, yes; I know,” he interrupted. “The girl in Fourteen. I have discounted her case long ago. She has ceased to interest me.... Dead, of course! Nothing else was possible.”

I laughed a quick little laugh of triumph. “No, sir; NOT dead. Recovering! She has fallen just now into a normal sleep; her breathing is natural.”

He wheeled his revolving chair away from the germs and fixed me with his keen eyes. “Recovering?” he echoed. “Impossible! Rallying, you mean. A mere flicker. I know my trade. She MUST die this evening.”

“Forgive my persistence,” I replied; “but—her temperature has gone down to ninety-nine and a trifle.”

He pushed away the bacilli in the nearest watch-glass quite angrily. “To ninety-nine!” he exclaimed, knitting his brows. “Cumberledge, this is disgraceful! A most disappointing case! A most provoking patient!”

“But surely, sir—” I cried.

“Don’t talk to ME, boy! Don’t attempt to apologise for her. Such conduct is unpardonable. She OUGHT to have died. It was her clear duty. I SAID she would die, and she should have known better than to fly in the face of the faculty. Her recovery is an insult to medical science. What is the staff about? Nurse Wade should have prevented it.”

“Still, sir,” I exclaimed, trying to touch him on a tender spot, “the anaesthetic, you know! Such a triumph for lethodyne! This case shows clearly that on certain constitutions it may be used with advantage under certain conditions.”

He snapped his fingers. “Lethodyne! pooh! I have lost interest in it. Impracticable! It is not fitted for the human species.”

“Why so? Number Fourteen proves—”

He interrupted me with an impatient wave of his hand; then he rose and paced up and down the room testily. After a pause, he spoke again. “The weak point of lethodyne is this: nobody can be trusted to say WHEN it may be used—except Nurse Wade,—which is NOT science.”

For the first time in my life, I had a glimmering idea that I distrusted Sebastian. Hilda Wade was right—the man was cruel. But I had never observed his cruelty before—because his devotion to science had blinded me to it.