My witch glanced up at her hostess with a piercing dart of the keen brown eyes, held her wine-glass half raised, and then electrified me by uttering, in the same low voice, audible to me alone, but quite clearly and unhesitatingly, these astounding words:
“I think, before twelve mouths are out, Mr. Le Geyt will have murdered her!”
For a minute I could not answer, so startling was the effect of this confident prediction. One does not expect to be told such things at lunch, over the port and peaches, about one’s dearest friends, beside their own mahogany. And the assured air of unfaltering conviction with which Hilda Wade said it to a complete stranger took my breath away. Why did she think so at all? And if she thought so why choose me as the recipient of her singular confidences?
I gasped and wondered.
“What makes you fancy anything so unlikely?” I asked aside at last, behind the babel of voices. “You quite alarm me.”
She rolled a mouthful of apricot ice reflectively on her tongue, and then murmured, in a similar aside, “Don’t ask me now. Some other time will do. But I mean what I say. Believe me; I do not speak at random.”
She was quite right, of course. To continue would have been equally rude and foolish. I had perforce to bottle up my curiosity for the moment and wait till my sibyl was in the mood for interpreting.
After lunch we adjourned to the drawing-room. Almost at once, Hilda Wade flitted up with her brisk step to the corner where I was sitting. “Oh, Dr. Cumberledge,” she began, as if nothing odd had occurred before, “I was so glad to meet you and have a chance of talking to you, because I do so want to get a nurse’s place at St. Nathaniel’s.”
“A nurse’s place!” I exclaimed, a little surprised, surveying her dress of palest and softest Indian muslin; for she looked to me far too much of a butterfly for such serious work. “Do you really mean it; or are you one of the ten thousand modern young ladies who are in quest of a Mission, without understanding that Missions are unpleasant? Nursing, I can tell you, is not all crimped cap and becoming uniform.”
“I know that,” she answered, growing grave. “I ought to know it. I am a nurse already at St. George’s Hospital.”
“You are a nurse! And at St. George’s! Yet you want to change to Nathaniel’s? Why? St. George’s is in a much nicer part of London, and the patients there come on an average from a much better class than ours in Smithfield.”
“I know that too; but…Sebastian is at St. Nathaniel’s—and I want to be near Sebastian.”
“Professor Sebastian!” I cried, my face lighting up with a gleam of enthusiasm at our great teacher’s name. “Ah, if it is to be under Sebastian that you desire, I can see you mean business. I know now you are in earnest.”
“In earnest?” she echoed, that strange deeper shade coming over her face as she spoke, while her tone altered. “Yes, I think I am in earnest! It is my object in life to be near Sebastian—to watch him and observe him. I mean to succeed.… But I have given you my confidence, perhaps too hastily, and I must implore you not to mention my wish to him.”
“You may trust me implicitly,” I answered.
“Oh, yes; I saw that,” she put in, with a quick gesture. “Of course, I saw by your face you were a man of honour—a man one could trust or I would not have spoken to you. But—you promise me?”
“I promise you,” I replied, naturally flattered. She was delicately pretty, and her quaint, oracular air, so incongruous with the dainty face and the fluffy brown hair, piqued me not a little. That special mysterious commodity of charm seemed to pervade all she did and said. So I added: “And I will mention to Sebastian that you wish for a nurse’s place at Nathaniel’s. As you have had experience, and can be recommended, I suppose, by Le Geyt’s sister,” with whom she had come, “no doubt you can secure an early vacancy.”