The rest of the episode passed off quietly. Sebastian, having delivered his bolt, began to think less of Hilda and more of the patient. He went on with his demonstration. As for Hilda, she gradually relaxed her muscles, and, with a deep-drawn breath, resumed her natural attitude. The tension was over. They had had their little skirmish, whatever it might mean, and had it out; now, they called a truce over the patient’s body.
When the case had been disposed of, and the students dismissed, I went straight into the laboratory to get a few surgical instruments I had chanced to leave there. For a minute or two, I mislaid my clinical thermometer, and began hunting for it behind a wooden partition in the corner of the room by the place for washing test-tubes. As I stooped down, turning over the various objects about the tap in my search, Sebastian’s voice came to me. He had paused outside the door, and was speaking in his calm, clear tone, very low, to Hilda. “So now we understand one another, Nurse Wade,” he said, with a significant sneer. “I know whom I have to deal with!”
“And I know, too,” Hilda answered, in a voice of placid confidence.
“Yet you are not afraid?”
“It is not I who have cause for fear. The accused may tremble, not the prosecutor.”
“What! You threaten?”
“No; I do not threaten. Not in words, I mean. My presence here is in itself a threat, but I make no other. You know now, unfortunately, why I have come. That makes my task harder. But I will not give it up. I will wait and conquer.”
Sebastian answered nothing. He strode into the laboratory alone, tall, grim, unbending, and let himself sink into his easy chair, looking up with a singular and somewhat sinister smile at his bottles of microbes. After a minute he stirred the fire, and bent his head forward, brooding. He held it between his hands, with his elbows on his knees, and gazed moodily straight before him into the glowing caves of white-hot coal in the fireplace. That sinister smile still played lambent around the corners of his grizzled moustaches.
I moved noiselessly towards the door, trying to pass behind him unnoticed. But, alert as ever, his quick ears detected me. With a sudden start, he raised his head and glanced round. “What! you here?” he cried, taken aback. For a second he appeared almost to lose his self-possession.
“I came for my clinical,” I answered, with an unconcerned air. “I have somehow managed to mislay it in the laboratory.”
My carefully casual tone seemed to reassure him. He peered about him with knit brows. “Cumberledge,” he asked at last, in a suspicious voice, “did you hear that woman?”
“The woman in 93? Delirious?”
“No, no. Nurse Wade?”
“Hear her?” I echoed, I must candidly admit with intent to deceive. “When she broke the basin?”
His forehead relaxed. “Oh! it is nothing,” he muttered, hastily. “A mere point of discipline. She spoke to me just now, and I thought her tone unbecoming in a subordinate.… Like Korah and his crew, she takes too much upon her.… We must get rid of her, Cumberledge; we must get rid of her. She is a dangerous woman!”
“She is the most intelligent nurse we have ever had in the place, sir,” I objected, stoutly.
He nodded his head twice. “Intelligent—je vous l’accorde; but dangerous—dangerous!”