I recognised at once the truth of her diagnosis. “Nurse Wade,” I cried, “you are a wonderful woman! I believe you are right; but—how did you come to think of it?”
A cloud passed over her brow. “I have reason to know it,” she answered, slowly. Then her voice changed. “Take another muffin.”
I helped myself and paused. I laid down my cup, and gazed at her. What a beautiful, tender, sympathetic face! And yet, how able! She stirred the fire uneasily. I looked and hesitated. I had often wondered why I never dared ask Hilda Wade one question that was nearest my heart. I think it must have been because I respected her so profoundly. The deeper your admiration and respect for a woman, the harder you find it in the end to ask her. At last I almost made up my mind. “I cannot think,” I began, “what can have induced a girl like you, with means and friends, with brains and”—I drew back, then I plumped it out—“beauty, to take to such a life as this—a life which seems, in many ways, so unworthy of you!”
She stirred the fire more pensively than ever, and rearranged the muffin-dish on the little wrought-iron stand in font of the grate. “And yet,” she murmured, looking down, “what life can be better than the service of one’s kind? You think it a great life for Sebastian!”
“Sebastian! He is a man. That is different; quite different. But a woman! Especially you, dear lady, for whom one feels that nothing is quite high enough, quite pure enough, quite good enough. I cannot imagine how—”
She checked me with one wave of her gracious hand. Her movements were always slow and dignified. “I have a Plan in my life,” she answered earnestly, her eyes meeting mine with a sincere, frank gaze; “a Plan to which I have resolved to sacrifice everything. It absorbs my being. Till that Plan is fulfilled—” I saw the tears were gathering fast on her lashes. She suppressed them with an effort. “Say no more,” she added, faltering. “Infirm of purpose! I will not listen.”
I leant forward eagerly, pressing my advantage. The air was electric. Waves of emotion passed to and fro. “But surely,” I cried, “you do not mean to say—”
She waved me aside once more. “I will not put my hand to the plough, and then look back,” she answered, firmly. “Dr. Cumberledge, spare me. I came to Nathaniel’s for a purpose. I told you at the time what that purpose was—in part: to be near Sebastian. I want to be near him…for an object I have at heart. Do not ask me to reveal it; do not ask me to forego it. I am a woman, therefore weak. But I need your aid. Help me, instead of hindering me.”
“Hilda,” I cried, leaning forward, with quiverings of my heart, “I will help you in whatever way you will allow me. But let me at any rate help you with the feeling that I am helping one who means in time—”
At that moment, as unkindly fate would have it, the door opened, and Sebastian entered.
“Nurse Wade,” he began, in his iron voice, glancing about him with stern eyes, “where are those needles I ordered for that operation? We must be ready in time before Nielsen comes.… Cumberledge, I shall want you.”
The golden opportunity had come and gone. It was long before I found a similar occasion for speaking to Hilda.
Every day after that the feeling deepened upon me that Hilda was there to watch Sebastian. Why, I did not know; but it was growing certain that a life-long duel was in progress between these two—a duel of some strange and mysterious import.
The first approach to a solution of the problem which I obtained came a week or two later. Sebastian was engaged in observing a case where certain unusual symptoms had suddenly supervened. It was a case of some obscure affection of the heart. I will not trouble you here with the particular details. We all suspected a tendency to aneurism. Hilda Wade was in attendance, as she always was on Sebastian’s observation cases. We crowded round, watching. The Professor himself leaned over the cot with some medicine for external application in a basin. He gave it to Hilda to hold. I noticed that as she held it her fingers trembled, and that her eyes were fixed harder than ever upon Sebastian. He turned round to his students. “Now this,” he began, in a very unconcerned voice, as if the patient were a toad, “is a most unwonted turn for the disease to take. It occurs very seldom. In point of fact, I have only observed the symptom once before; and then it was fatal. The patient in that instance”—he paused dramatically—“was the notorious poisoner, Dr. Yorke-Bannerman.”