Hilda Wade | Page 7

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."
Sebastian loved such cases. They formed his ideal. He did not greatly
admire the artificial prolongation of diseased and unwholesome lives,
which could never be of much use to their owners or anyone else; but
when a chance occurred for restoring to perfect health a valuable
existence which might otherwise, be extinguished before its time, he
positively revelled in his beneficent calling. "What nobler object can a
man propose to himself," he used to say, "than to raise good men and
true from the dead, as it were, and return them whole and sound to the
family that depends upon them? Why, I had fifty times rather cure an
honest coal-heaver of a wound in his leg than give ten years more lease
of life to a gouty lord, diseased from top to toe, who expects to find a
month of Carlsbad or Homburg once every year make up for eleven
months of over- eating, over-drinking, vulgar debauchery, and
under-thinking." He had no sympathy with men who lived the lives of
swine: his heart was with the workers.
Of course, Hilda Wade soon suggested that, as an operation was
absolutely necessary, Number Fourteen would be a splendid subject on
whom to test once more the effects of lethodyne. Sebastian, with his
head on one side, surveying the patient, promptly coincided. "Nervous
diathesis," he observed. "Very vivid fancy. Twitches her hands the right
way. Quick pulse, rapid perceptions, no meaningless unrest, but deep
vitality. I don't doubt she'll stand it."

We explained to Number Fourteen the gravity of the case, and also the
tentative character of the operation under lethodyne. At first, she shrank
from taking it. "No, no!" she said; "let me die quietly." But Hilda, like
the Angel of Mercy that she was, whispered in the girl's ear: "IF it
succeeds, you will get quite well, and--you can marry Arthur."
The patient's dark face flushed crimson.
"Ah! Arthur," she cried. "Dear Arthur! I can bear anything you choose
to do to me--for Arthur!"
"How soon you find these things out!" I cried to Hilda, a few minutes
later. "A mere man would never have thought of that. And who is
Arthur?"
"A sailor--on a ship that trades with the South Seas. I hope he is worthy
of her. Fretting over Arthur's absence has aggravated the case. He is
homeward-bound now. She is worrying herself to death for fear she
should not live to say good-bye to him."
"She WILL live to marry him," I answered, with confidence like her
own, "if YOU say she can stand it."
"The lethodyne--oh, yes; THAT'S all right. But the operation itself is so
extremely dangerous; though Dr. Sebastian says he has called in the
best surgeon in London for all such cases. They are rare, he tells
me--and Nielsen has performed on six, three of them successfully."
We gave the girl the drug. She took it, trembling, and went off at once,
holding Hilda's hand, with a pale smile on her face, which persisted
there somewhat weirdly all