THE EPISODE OF THE PATIENT WHO DISAPPOINTED HER DOCTOR
Hilda Wade's gift was so unique, so extraordinary, that I must
illustrate it, I think, before I attempt to describe it. But first let
me say a word of explanation about the Master.
I have never met anyone who impressed me so much with a sense of
GREATNESS as Professor Sebastian. And this was not due to his scientific
eminence alone: the man's strength and keenness struck me quite as
forcibly as his vast attainments. When he first came to St. Nathaniel's
Hospital, an eager, fiery-eyed physiologist, well past the prime of
life, and began to preach with all the electric force of his vivid
personality that the one thing on earth worth a young man's doing was
to work in his laboratory, attend his lectures, study disease, and be
a scientific doctor, dozens of us were infected by his contagious
enthusiasm. He proclaimed the gospel of germs; and the germ of his own
zeal flew abroad in the hospital: it ran through the wards as if it were
typhoid fever. Within a few months, half the students were converted
from lukewarm observers of medical routine into flaming apostles of the
new methods.
The greatest authority in Europe on comparative anatomy, now that Huxley
was taken from us, he had devoted his later days to the pursuit of
medicine proper, to which he brought a mind stored with luminous
analogies from the lower animals. His very appearance held one. Tall,
thin, erect, with an ascetic profile not unlike Cardinal Manning's, he
represented that abstract form of asceticism which consists in absolute
self-sacrifice to a mental ideas, not that which consists in religious
abnegation. Three years of travel in Africa had tanned his skin for
life. His long white hair, straight and silvery as it fell, just curled
in one wave-like inward sweep where it turned and rested on the stooping
shoulders. His pale face was clean-shaven, save for a thin and wiry
grizzled moustache, which cast into stronger relief the deep-set,
hawk-like eyes and the acute, intense, intellectual features. In some
respects, his countenance reminded me often of Dr. Martineau's: in
others it recalled the knife-like edge, unturnable, of his great
predecessor, Professor Owen. Wherever he went, men turned to stare at
him. In Paris, they took him for the head of the English Socialists; in
Russia, they declared he was a Nihilist emissary. And they were not
far wrong--in essence; for Sebastian's stern, sharp face was above all
things the face of a man absorbed and engrossed by one overpowering
pursuit in life--the sacred thirst of knowledge, which had swallowed up
his entire nature.
He WAS what he looked--the most single-minded person I have ever come
across. And when I say single-minded, I mean just that, and no more. He
had an End to attain--the advancement of science, and he went straight
towards the End, looking neither to the right nor to the left for
anyone. An American millionaire once remarked to him of some ingenious
appliance he was describing: "Why, if you were to perfect that
apparatus, Professor, and take out a patent for it, I reckon you'd make
as much money as I have made." Sebastian withered him with a glance. "I
have no time to waste," he replied, "on making money!"
So, when Hilda Wade told me, on the first day I met her, that she wished
to become a nurse at Nathaniel's, "to be near Sebastian," I was not at
all astonished. I took her at her word. Everybody who meant business in
any branch of the medical art, however humble, desired to be close to
our rare teacher--to drink in his large thought, to profit by his clear
insight, his wide experience. The man of Nathaniel's was revolutionising
practice; and those who wished to feel themselves abreast of the modern
movement were naturally anxious to cast in their lot with him. I did not
wonder, therefore, that Hilda Wade, who herself possessed in so large a
measure the deepest feminine gift--intuition--should seek a place
under the famous professor who represented the other side of the same
endowment in its masculine embodiment--instinct of diagnosis.
Hilda Wade herself I will not formally introduce to you: you will learn
to know her as I proceed with my story.
I was Sebastian's assistant, and my recommendation soon procured Hilda
Wade the post she so strangely coveted. Before she had been long at
Nathaniel's, however, it began to dawn upon me that her reasons for
desiring to attend upon our revered Master were not wholly and solely
scientific. Sebastian, it is true, recognised her value as a nurse from
the first; he not only allowed that she was a good assistant, but he
also admitted that her subtle knowledge of temperament sometimes enabled
her closely to approach his own reasoned scientific analysis of a case
and its probable development. "Most women," he said to me once, "are
quick at reading THE PASSING EMOTION. They can judge with astounding
correctness from a shadow on one's face, a catch in one's breath, a
movement of one's hands, how their words or deeds are affecting us. We
cannot conceal our feelings from them. But underlying character they
do not judge so well as fleeting expression. Not what Mrs. Jones IS in
herself, but what Mrs. Jones is now thinking and feeling--there lies
their great success as psychologists. Most men, on the contrary, guide
their life by definite FACTS--by signs, by symptoms, by observed data.
Medicine itself is built upon a collection of such reasoned facts.
But this woman, Nurse Wade, to a certain extent, stands intermediate
mentally between the two sexes. She recognises TEMPERAMENT--the fixed
form of character, and what it is likely to do--in a degree which I have
never seen equalled elsewhere. To that extent, and within proper limits
of supervision, I acknowledge her faculty as a valuable adjunct to a
scientific practitioner."
Still, though Sebastian started with a predisposition in favour of
Hilda Wade--a pretty girl appeals to most of us--I could see from the
beginning that Hilda Wade was by no means enthusiastic for Sebastian,
like the rest of the hospital:
"He is extraordinarily able," she would say, when I gushed to her about
our Master; but that was the most I could ever extort from her in the
way of praise. Though she admitted intellectually Sebastian's gigantic
mind, she would never commit herself to anything that sounded like
personal admiration. To call him "the prince of physiologists" did
not satisfy me on that head. I wanted her to exclaim, "I adore him! I
worship him! He is glorious, wonderful!"
I was also aware from an early date that, in an unobtrusive way, Hilda
Wade was watching Sebastian, watching him quietly, with those wistful,
earnest eyes, as a cat watches a mouse-hole; watching him with mute
inquiry, as if she expected each moment to see him do something
different from what the rest of us expected of him. Slowly I gathered
that Hilda Wade, in the most literal sense, had come to Nathaniel's, as
she herself expressed it, "to be near Sebastian."
Gentle and lovable as she was in every other aspect, towards Sebastian
she seemed like a lynx-eyed detective. She had some object in view,
I thought, almost as abstract as his own--some object to which, as I
judged, she was devoting her life quite as single-mindedly as Sebastian
himself had devoted his to the advancement of science.
"Why did she become a nurse at all?" I asked once of her friend, Mrs.
Mallet. "She has plenty of money, and seems well enough off to live
without working."
"Oh, dear, yes," Mrs. Mallet answered. "She is independent, quite; has
a tidy little income of her own--six or seven hundred a year--and she
could choose her own society. But she went in for this mission fad
early; she didn't intend to marry, she said; so she would like to have
some work to do in life. Girls suffer like that, nowadays. In her case,
the malady took the form of nursing."
"As a rule," I ventured to interpose, "when a pretty girl says she
doesn't intend to marry, her remark is premature. It only means--"
"Oh, yes, I know. Every girl says it; 'tis a stock property in the
popular masque of Maiden Modesty. But with Hilda it is different. And
the difference is--that Hilda means it!"
"You are right," I answered. "I believe she means it. Yet I know one man
at least--" for I admired her immensely.
Mrs. Mallet shook her head and smiled. "It is no use, Dr. Cumberledge,"
she answered. "Hilda will never marry. Never, that is to say, till she
has attained some mysterious object she seems to have in view, about
which she never speaks to anyone--not even to me. But I have somehow
guessed it!"
"And it is?"
"Oh, I have not guessed what it IS: I am no Oedipus. I have merely
guessed that it exists. But whatever it may be, Hilda's life is bounded
by it. She became a nurse to carry it out, I feel confident. From
the very beginning, I gather, a part of her scheme was to go to St.
Nathaniel's. She was always bothering us to give her introductions
to Dr. Sebastian; and when she met you at my brother Hugo's, it was a
preconcerted arrangement; she asked to sit next you, and meant to induce
you to use your influence on her behalf with the Professor. She was
dying to get there."
"It is very odd," I mused. "But there!--women are inexplicable!"
"And Hilda is in that matter the very quintessence of woman. Even I, who
have known her for years, don't pretend to understand her."
A few months later, Sebastian began his great researches on his new
anaesthetic. It was a wonderful set of researches. It promised so well.
All Nat's (as we familiarly and affectionately styled St. Nathaniel's)
was in a fever of excitement over the drug for a twelvemonth.
The Professor obtained his first hint of the new body by a mere
accident. His friend, the Deputy Prosector of the Zoological Society,
had mixed a draught for a sick raccoon at the Gardens, and, by some
mistake in a bottle, had mixed it wrongly. (I purposely refrain from
mentioning the ingredients, as they are drugs which can be easily
obtained in isolation at any chemist's, though when compounded they form
one of the most dangerous and difficult to detect of organic poisons.
I do not desire to play into the hands of would-be criminals.) The
compound on which the Deputy Prosector had thus accidentally lighted
sent the raccoon to sleep in the most extraordinary manner. Indeed, the
raccoon slept for thirty-six hours on end, all attempts to awake him, by
pulling his tail or tweaking his hair being quite unavailing. This was
a novelty in narcotics; so Sebastian was asked to come and look at the
slumbering brute. He suggested the attempt to perform an operation on
the somnolent raccoon by removing, under the influence of the drug, an
internal growth, which was considered the probable cause of his illness.
A surgeon was called in, the growth was found and removed, and the
raccoon, to everybody's surprise, continued to slumber peacefully on his
straw for five hours afterwards. At the end of that time he awoke, and
stretched himself as if nothing had happened; and though he was, of
course, very weak from loss of blood, he immediately displayed a
most royal hunger. He ate up all the maize that was offered him
for breakfast, and proceeded to manifest a desire for more by most
unequivocal symptoms.
Sebastian was overjoyed. He now felt sure he had discovered a drug
which would supersede chloroform--a drug more lasting in its immediate
effects, and yet far less harmful in its ultimate results on the balance
of the system. A name being wanted for it, he christened it "lethodyne."
It was the best pain-luller yet invented.
For the next few weeks, at Nat's, we heard of nothing but lethodyne.
Patients recovered and patients died; but their deaths or recoveries
were as dross to lethodyne, an anaesthetic that might revolutionise
surgery, and even medicine! A royal road through disease, with no
trouble to the doctor and no pain to the patient! Lethodyne held the
field. We were all of us, for the moment, intoxicated with lethodyne.
Sebastian's observations on the new agent occupied several months.
He had begun with the raccoon; he went on, of course, with those poor
scapegoats of physiology, domestic rabbits. Not that in this particular
case any painful experiments were in contemplation. The Professor
tried the drug on a dozen or more quite healthy young animals--with the
strange result that they dozed off quietly, and never woke up again.
This nonplussed Sebastian. He experimented once more on another raccoon,
with a smaller dose; the raccoon fell asleep, and slept like a top for
fifteen hours, at the end of which time he woke up as if nothing out of
the common had happened. Sebastian fell back upon rabbits again, with
smaller and smaller doses. It was no good; the rabbits all died with
great unanimity, until the dose was so diminished that it did not send
them off to sleep at all. There was no middle course, apparently, to
the rabbit kind, lethodyne was either fatal or else inoperative. So it
proved to sheep. The new drug killed, or did nothing.
I will not trouble you with all the details of Sebastian's further
researches; the curious will find them discussed at length in Volume
237 of the Philosophical Transactions. (See also Comptes Rendus de
l'Academie de Medecine: tome 49, pp. 72 and sequel.) I will restrict
myself here to that part of the inquiry which immediately refers to
Hilda Wade's history.
"If I were you," she said to the Professor one morning, when he was most
astonished at his contradictory results, "I would test it on a hawk.
If I dare venture on a suggestion, I believe you will find that hawks
recover."
"The deuce they do!" Sebastian cried. However, he had such confidence
in Nurse Wade's judgment that he bought a couple of hawks and tried
the treatment on them. Both birds took considerable doses, and, after a
period of insensibility extending to several hours, woke up in the end
quite bright and lively.
"I see your principle," the Professor broke out. "It depends upon
diet. Carnivores and birds of prey can take lethodyne with impunity;
herbivores and fruit-eaters cannot recover, and die of it. Man,
therefore, being partly carnivorous, will doubtless be able more or less
to stand it."
Hilda Wade smiled her sphinx-like smile. "Not quite that, I fancy," she
answered. "It will kill cats, I feel sure; at least, most domesticated
ones. But it will NOT kill weasels. Yet both are carnivores."
"That young woman knows too much!" Sebastian muttered to me, looking
after her as she glided noiselessly with her gentle tread down the long
white corridor. "We shall have to suppress her, Cumberledge.... But I'll
wager my life she's right, for all that. I wonder, now, how the dickens
she guessed it!"
"Intuition," I answered.
He pouted his under lip above the upper one, with a dubious
acquiescence. "Inference, I call it," he retorted. "All woman's
so-called intuition is, in fact, just rapid and half-unconscious
inference."
He was so full of the subject, however, and so utterly carried away by
his scientific ardour, that I regret to say he gave a strong dose of
lethodyne at once to each of the matron's petted and pampered Persian
cats, which lounged about her room and were the delight of the
convalescents. They were two peculiarly lazy sultanas of cats--mere
jewels of the harem--Oriental beauties that loved to bask in the sun
or curl themselves up on the rug before the fire and dawdle away their
lives in congenial idleness. Strange to say, Hilda's prophecy came true.
Zuleika settled herself down comfortably in the Professor's easy chair
and fell into a sound sleep from which there was no awaking; while
Roxana met fate on the tiger-skin she loved, coiled up in a circle,
and passed from this life of dreams, without knowing it, into one
where dreaming is not. Sebastian noted the facts with a quiet gleam of
satisfaction in his watchful eye, and explained afterwards, with curt
glibness to the angry matron, that her favourites had been "canonised
in the roll of science, as painless martyrs to the advancement of
physiology."
The weasels, on the other hand, with an equal dose, woke up after six
hours as lively as crickets. It was clear that carnivorous tastes were
not the whole solution, for Roxana was famed as a notable mouser.
"Your principle?" Sebastian asked our sibyl, in his brief, quick way.
Hilda's cheek wore a glow of pardonable triumph. The great teacher had
deigned to ask her assistance. "I judged by the analogy of Indian hemp,"
she answered. "This is clearly a similar, but much stronger, narcotic.
Now, whenever I have given Indian hemp by your direction to people of
sluggish, or even of merely bustling temperament, I have noticed that
small doses produce serious effects, and that the after-results are
most undesirable. But when you have prescribed the hemp for nervous,
overstrung, imaginative people, I have observed that they can stand
large amounts of the tincture without evil results, and that the
after-effects pass off rapidly. I who am mercurial in temperament, for
example, can take any amount of Indian hemp without being made ill by
it; while ten drops will send some slow and torpid rustics mad drunk
with excitement--drive them into homicidal mania."
Sebastian nodded his head. He needed no more explanation. "You have hit
it," he said. "I see it at a glance. The old antithesis! All men and all
animals fall, roughly speaking, into two great divisions of type: the
impassioned and the unimpassioned; the vivid and the phlegmatic. I catch
your drift now. Lethodyne is poison to phlegmatic patients, who have not
active power enough to wake up from it unhurt; it is relatively harmless
to the vivid and impassioned, who can be put asleep by it, indeed, for a
few hours more or less, but are alive enough to live on through the coma
and reassert their vitality after it."
I recognised as he spoke that this explanation was correct. The dull
rabbits, the sleepy Persian cats, and the silly sheep had died outright
of lethodyne; the cunning, inquisitive raccoon, the quick hawk, and
the active, intense-natured weasels, all most eager, wary, and alert
animals, full of keenness and passion, had recovered quickly.
"Dare we try it on a human subject?" I asked, tentatively.
Hilda Wade answered at once, with that unerring rapidity of hers: "Yes,
certainly; on a few--the right persons. _I_, for one, am not afraid to
try it."
"You?" I cried, feeling suddenly aware how much I thought of her. "Oh,
not YOU, please, Nurse Wade. Some other life, less valuable!"
Sebastian stared at me coldly. "Nurse Wade volunteers," he said. "It is
in the cause of science. Who dares dissuade her? That tooth of yours?
Ah, yes. Quite sufficient excuse. You wanted it out, Nurse Wade.
Wells-Dinton shall operate."
Without a moment's hesitation, Hilda Wade sat down in an easy chair and
took a measured dose of the new anaesthetic, proportioned to the average
difference in weight between raccoons and humanity. My face displayed my
anxiety, I suppose, for she turned to me, smiling with quiet confidence.
"I know my own constitution," she said, with a reassuring glance that
went straight to my heart. "I do not in the least fear."
As for Sebastian, he administered the drug to her as unconcernedly as
if she were a rabbit. Sebastian's scientific coolness and calmness have
long been the admiration of younger practitioners.
Wells-Dinton gave one wrench. The tooth came out as though the patient
were a block of marble. There was not a cry or a movement, such as
one notes when nitrous oxide is administered. Hilda Wade was to all
appearance a mass of lifeless flesh. We stood round and watched. I
was trembling with terror. Even on Sebastian's pale face, usually so
unmoved, save by the watchful eagerness of scientific curiosity, I saw
signs of anxiety.
After four hours of profound slumber--breath hovering, as it seemed,
between life and death--she began to come to again. In half an hour more
she was wide awake; she opened her eyes and asked for a glass of hock,
with beef essence or oysters.
That evening, by six o'clock, she was quite well and able to go about
her duties as usual.
"Sebastian is a wonderful man," I said to her, as I entered her ward on
my rounds at night. "His coolness astonishes me. Do you know, he watched
you all the time you were lying asleep there as if nothing were the
matter."
"Coolness?" she inquired, in a quiet voice. "Or cruelty?"
"Cruelty?" I echoed, aghast. "Sebastian cruel! Oh, Nurse Wade, what an
idea! Why, he has spent his whole life in striving against all odds to
alleviate pain. He is the apostle of philanthropy!"
"Of philanthropy, or of science? To alleviate pain, or to learn the
whole truth about the human body?"
"Come, come, now," I cried. "You analyse too far. I will not let even
YOU put me out of conceit with Sebastian." (Her face flushed at
that "even you"; I almost fancied she began to like me.) "He is the
enthusiasm of my life; just consider how much he has done for humanity!"
She looked me through searchingly. "I will not destroy your illusion,"
she answered, after a pause. "It is a noble and generous one. But is it
not largely based on an ascetic face, long white hair, and a moustache
that hides the cruel corners of the mouth? For the corners ARE cruel.
Some day, I will show you them. Cut off the long hair, shave the
grizzled moustache--and what then will remain?" She drew a profile
hastily. "Just that," and she showed it me. 'Twas a face like
Robespierre's, grown harder and older and lined with observation. I
recognised that it was in fact the essence of Sebastian.
Next day, as it turned out, the Professor himself insisted upon testing
lethodyne in his own person. All Nat's strove to dissuade him. "Your
life is so precious, sir--the advancement of science!" But the Professor
was adamantine.
"Science can only be advanced if men of science will take their lives in
their hands," he answered, sternly. "Besides, Nurse Wade has tried. Am
I to lag behind a woman in my devotion to the cause of physiological
knowledge?"
"Let him try," Hilda Wade murmured to me. "He is quite right. It will
not hurt him. I have told him already he has just the proper temperament
to stand the drug. Such people are rare: HE is one of them."
We administered the dose, trembling. Sebastian took it like a man, and
dropped off instantly, for lethodyne is at least as instantaneous in its
operation as nitrous oxide.
He lay long asleep. Hilda and I watched him.
After he had lain for some minutes senseless, like a log, on the couch
where we had placed him, Hilda stooped over him quietly and lifted up
the ends of the grizzled moustache. Then she pointed one accusing
finger at his lips. "I told you so," she murmured, with a note of
demonstration.
"There is certainly something rather stern, or even ruthless, about
the set of the face and the firm ending of the lips," I admitted,
reluctantly.
"That is why God gave men moustaches," she mused, in a low voice; "to
hide the cruel corners of their mouths."
"Not ALWAYS cruel," I cried.
"Sometimes cruel, sometimes cunning, sometimes sensuous; but nine times
out of ten best masked by moustaches."
"You have a bad opinion of our s*x!" I exclaimed.
"Providence knew best," she answered. "IT gave you moustaches. That was
in order that we women might be spared from always seeing you as you
are. Besides, I said 'Nine times out of ten.' There are exceptions--SUCH
exceptions!"
On second thought, I did not feel sure that I could quarrel with her
estimate.
The experiment was that time once more successful. Sebastian woke up
from the comatose state after eight hours, not quite as fresh as Hilda
Wade, perhaps, but still tolerably alive; less alert, however, and
complaining of dull headache. He was not hungry. Hilda Wade shook her
head at that. "It will be of use only in a very few cases," she said to
me, regretfully; "and those few will need to be carefully picked by
an acute observer. I see resistance to the coma is, even more than
I thought, a matter of temperament. Why, so impassioned a man as
the Professor himself cannot entirely recover. With more sluggish
temperaments, we shall have deeper difficulty."
"Would you call him impassioned?" I asked. "Most people think him so
cold and stern."
She shook her head. "He is a snow-capped volcano!" she answered. "The
fires of his life burn bright below. The exterior alone is cold and
placid."
However, starting from that time, Sebastian began a course of
experiments on patients, giving infinitesimal doses at first, and
venturing slowly on somewhat larger quantities. But only in his own case
and Hilda's could the result be called quite satisfactory. One dull
and heavy, drink-sodden navvy, to whom he administered no more than
one-tenth of a grain, was drowsy for a week, and listless long after;
while a fat washerwoman from West Ham, who took only two-tenths, fell so
fast asleep, and snored so stertorously, that we feared she was going
to doze off into eternity, after the fashion of the rabbits. Mothers of
large families, we noted, stood the drug very ill; on pale young girls
of the consumptive tendency its effect was not marked; but only
a patient here and there, of exceptionally imaginative and vivid
temperament, seemed able to endure it. Sebastian was discouraged. He
saw the anaesthetic was not destined to fulfil his first enthusiastic
humanitarian expectations. One day, while the investigation was just at
this stage, a case was admitted into the observation-cots in which Hilda
Wade took a particular interest. The patient was a young girl
named Isabel Huntley--tall, dark, and slender, a markedly quick
and imaginative type, with large black eyes which clearly bespoke a
passionate nature. Though distinctly hysterical, she was pretty and
pleasing. Her rich dark hair was as copious as it was beautiful. She
held herself erect and had a finely poised head. From the first moment
she arrived, I could see nurse Wade was strongly drawn towards her.
Their souls sympathised. Number Fourteen--that is our impersonal way of
describing CASES--was constantly on Hilda's lips. "I like the girl," she
said once. "She is a lady in fibre."
"And a tobacco-trimmer by trade," Sebastian added, sarcastically.
As usual, Hilda's was the truer description. It went deeper.
Number Fourteen's ailment was a rare and peculiar one, into which I need
not enter here with professional precision. (I have described the case
fully for my brother practitioners in my paper in the fourth volume
of Sebastian's Medical Miscellanies.) It will be enough for my present
purpose to say, in brief, that the lesion consisted of an internal
growth which is always dangerous and most often fatal, but which
nevertheless is of such a character that, if it be once happily
eradicated by supremely good surgery, it never tends to recur, and
leaves the patient as strong and well as ever. Sebastian was, of course,
delighted with the splendid opportunity thus afforded him. "It is a
beautiful case!" he cried, with professional enthusiasm. "Beautiful!
Beautiful! I never saw one so deadly or so malignant before. We are
indeed in luck's way. Only a miracle can save her life. Cumberledge, we
must proceed to perform the miracle."
Sebastian loved such cases. They formed his ideal. He did not greatly
admire the artificial prolongation of diseased and unwholesome lives,
which could never be of much use to their owners or anyone else; but
when a chance occurred for restoring to perfect health a valuable
existence which might otherwise, be extinguished before its time, he
positively revelled in his beneficent calling. "What nobler object can
a man propose to himself," he used to say, "than to raise good men and
true from the dead, as it were, and return them whole and sound to the
family that depends upon them? Why, I had fifty times rather cure an
honest coal-heaver of a wound in his leg than give ten years more lease
of life to a gouty lord, diseased from top to toe, who expects to find
a month of Carlsbad or Homburg once every year make up for eleven months
of over-eating, over-drinking, vulgar debauchery, and under-thinking."
He had no sympathy with men who lived the lives of swine: his heart was
with the workers.
Of course, Hilda Wade soon suggested that, as an operation was
absolutely necessary, Number Fourteen would be a splendid subject on
whom to test once more the effects of lethodyne. Sebastian, with his
head on one side, surveying the patient, promptly coincided. "Nervous
diathesis," he observed. "Very vivid fancy. Twitches her hands the right
way. Quick pulse, rapid perceptions, no meaningless unrest, but deep
vitality. I don't doubt she'll stand it."
We explained to Number Fourteen the gravity of the case, and also the
tentative character of the operation under lethodyne. At first, she
shrank from taking it. "No, no!" she said; "let me die quietly." But
Hilda, like the Angel of Mercy that she was, whispered in the girl's
ear: "IF it succeeds, you will get quite well, and--you can marry
Arthur."
The patient's dark face flushed crimson.
"Ah! Arthur," she cried. "Dear Arthur! I can bear anything you choose to
do to me--for Arthur!"
"How soon you find these things out!" I cried to Hilda, a few minutes
later. "A mere man would never have thought of that. And who is Arthur?"
"A sailor--on a ship that trades with the South Seas. I hope he is
worthy of her. Fretting over Arthur's absence has aggravated the case.
He is homeward-bound now. She is worrying herself to death for fear she
should not live to say good-bye to him."
"She WILL live to marry him," I answered, with confidence like her own,
"if YOU say she can stand it."
"The lethodyne--oh, yes; THAT'S all right. But the operation itself is
so extremely dangerous; though Dr. Sebastian says he has called in
the best surgeon in London for all such cases. They are rare, he tells
me--and Nielsen has performed on six, three of them successfully."
We gave the girl the drug. She took it, trembling, and went off at once,
holding Hilda's hand, with a pale smile on her face, which persisted
there somewhat weirdly all through the operation. The work of removing
the growth was long and ghastly, even for us who were well seasoned
to such sights; but at the end Nielsen expressed himself as perfectly
satisfied. "A very neat piece of work!" Sebastian exclaimed, looking
on. "I congratulate you, Nielsen. I never saw anything done cleaner or
better."
"A successful operation, certainly!" the great surgeon admitted, with
just pride in the Master's commendation.
"AND the patient?" Hilda asked, wavering.
"Oh, the patient? The patient will die," Nielsen replied, in an
unconcerned voice, wiping his spotless instruments.
"That is not MY idea of the medical art," I cried, shocked at his
callousness. "An operation is only successful if--"
He regarded me with lofty scorn. "A certain percentage of losses,"
he interrupted, calmly, "is inevitable, of course, in all surgical
operations. We are obliged to average it. How could I preserve my
precision and accuracy of hand if I were always bothered by sentimental
considerations of the patient's safety?"
Hilda Wade looked up at me with a sympathetic glance. "We will pull her
through yet," she murmured, in her soft voice, "if care and skill can do
it,--MY care and YOUR skill. This is now OUR patient, Dr. Cumberledge."
It needed care and skill. We watched her for hours, and she showed no
sign or gleam of recovery. Her sleep was deeper than either Sebastian's
or Hilda's had been. She had taken a big dose, so as to secure
immobility. The question now was, would she recover at all from it? Hour
after hour we waited and watched; and not a sign of movement! Only the
same deep, slow, hampered breathing, the same feeble, jerky pulse, the
same deathly pallor on the dark cheeks, the same corpse-like rigidity of
limb and muscle.
At last our patient stirred faintly, as in a dream; her breath faltered.
We bent over her. Was it death, or was she beginning to recover?
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.