Just as she caught it, Hilda answered his question in a somewhat flurried voice. “I—I was afraid,” she broke out, gasping. “One gets these little accesses of terror now and again. I—I feel rather weak. I don’t think I will volunteer to supply any more normal blood this morning.”
Sebastian’s acute eyes read her through, as so often. With a trenchant dart he glanced from her to me. I could see he began to suspect a confederacy. “That will do,” he went on, with slow deliberateness. “Better so. Nurse Wade, I don’t know what’s beginning to come over you. You are losing your nerve—which is fatal in a nurse. Only the other day you let fall and broke a basin at a most critical moment; and now, you scream aloud on a trifling apprehension.” He paused and glanced around him. “Mr. Callaghan,” he said, turning to our tall, red-haired Irish student, “your blood is good normal, and you are not hysterical.” He selected another needle with studious care. “Give me your finger.”
As he picked out the needle, I saw Hilda lean forward again, alert and watchful, eyeing him with a piercing glance; but, after a second’s consideration, she seemed to satisfy herself, and fell back without a word. I gathered that she was ready to interfere, had occasion demanded. But occasion did not demand; and she held her peace quietly.
The rest of the examination proceeded without a hitch. For a minute or two, it is true, I fancied that Sebastian betrayed a certain suppressed agitation—a trifling lack of his accustomed perspicuity and his luminous exposition. But, after meandering for a while through a few vague sentences, he soon recovered his wonted calm; and as he went on with his demonstration, throwing himself eagerly into the case, his usual scientific enthusiasm came back to him undiminished. He waxed eloquent (after his fashion) over the “beautiful” contrast between Callaghan’s wholesome blood, “rich in the vivifying architectonic grey corpuscles which rebuild worn tissues,” and the effete, impoverished, unvitalised fluid which stagnated in the sluggish veins of the dead patient. The carriers of oxygen had neglected their proper task; the granules whose duty it was to bring elaborated food-stuffs to supply the waste of brain and nerve and muscle had forgotten their cunning. The bricklayers of the bodily fabric had gone out on strike; the weary scavengers had declined to remove the useless by-products. His vivid tongue, his picturesque fancy, ran away with him. I had never heard him talk better or more incisively before; one could feel sure, as he spoke, that the arteries of his own acute and teeming brain at that moment of exaltation were by no means deficient in those energetic and highly vital globules on whose reparative worth he so eloquently descanted. “Sure, the Professor makes annywan see right inside wan’s own vascular system,” Callaghan whispered aside to me, in unfeigned admiration.
The demonstration ended in impressive silence. As we streamed out of the laboratory, aglow with his electric fire, Sebastian held me back with a bent motion of his shrivelled forefinger. I stayed behind unwillingly. “Yes, sir?” I said, in an interrogative voice.
The Professor’s eyes were fixed intently on the ceiling. His look was one of rapt inspiration. I stood and waited. “Cumberledge,” he said at last, coming back to earth with a start, “I see it more plainly each day that goes. We must get rid of that woman.”
“Of Nurse Wade?” I asked, catching my breath.
He roped the grizzled moustache, and blinked the sunken eyes. “She has lost nerve,” he went on, “lost nerve entirely. I shall suggest that she be dismissed. Her sudden failures of stamina are most embarrassing at critical junctures.”
“Very well, sir,” I answered, swallowing a lump in my throat. To say the truth, I was beginning to be afraid on Hilda’s account. That morning’s events had thoroughly disquieted me.