“Sometimes cruel, sometimes cunning, sometimes sensuous; but nine times out of ten best masked by moustaches.”
“You have a bad opinion of our sex!” 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.”