Hilda Wade, a Woman with Tenacity of Purpose. Allen Grant
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humanitarian expectations. One day, while the investigation 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 through the operation. The work of removing the growth was long and ghastly, even for us who were well seasoned to such sights; but at the end Nielsen expressed himself as perfectly satisfied. “A very neat piece of work!” Sebastian exclaimed, looking on. “I congratulate you, Nielsen. I never saw anything done cleaner or better.”
“A successful operation, certainly!” the great surgeon admitted, with just pride in the Master’s commendation.
“AND the patient?” Hilda asked, wavering.
“Oh, the patient? The patient will die,” Nielsen replied, in an unconcerned voice, wiping his spotless instruments.
“That is not MY idea of the medical art,” I cried, shocked at his callousness. “An operation is only successful if—”
He regarded me with lofty scorn. “A certain percentage of losses,” he interrupted, calmly, “is inevitable, of course, in all surgical operations. We are obliged to average it. How could I preserve my precision and accuracy of hand if I were always bothered by sentimental considerations of the patient’s safety?”
Hilda Wade looked up at me with a sympathetic glance. “We will pull her through yet,” she murmured, in her soft voice, “if care and skill can do it,—MY care and YOUR skill. This is now OUR patient, Dr. Cumberledge.”
It needed care and skill. We watched her for hours, and she showed no sign or gleam of recovery. Her sleep was deeper than either Sebastian’s or Hilda’s had been. She had taken a big dose, so as to secure immobility. The question now was, would she recover at all from it? Hour after hour we waited and watched; and not a sign of movement! Only the same deep, slow, hampered breathing, the same feeble, jerky pulse, the same deathly pallor on the dark cheeks, the same corpse-like rigidity of limb and muscle.
At last our patient stirred faintly, as in a dream; her breath faltered. We bent over her. Was it death, or was she beginning to recover?
Very slowly, a faint trace of colour came back to her cheeks. Her heavy eyes half opened. They stared first with a white stare. Her arms dropped by her side. Her mouth relaxed its ghastly smile.... We held our breath.... She was coming to again!
But her coming to was slow—very, very slow. Her pulse was still weak. Her heart pumped feebly. We feared she might sink from inanition at any moment. Hilda Wade knelt on the floor by the girl’s side and held a spoonful of beef essence coaxingly to her lips. Number Fourteen gasped, drew a long, slow breath, then gulped and swallowed it. After that she lay back with her mouth open, looking like a corpse. Hilda pressed another spoonful of the soft jelly upon her; but the girl waved it away with one trembling hand. “Let me die,” she cried. “Let me die! I feel dead already.”
Hilda held her face close. “Isabel,” she whispered—and I recognised in her tone the vast moral difference between “Isabel” and “Number Fourteen,”—“Is-a-bel, you must take it. For Arthur’s sake, I say, you MUST take it.”
The girl’s hand quivered as it lay on the white coverlet. “For Arthur’s sake!” she murmured, lifting her eyelids dreamily. “For Arthur’s sake! Yes, nurse, dear!”
“Call me Hilda, please! Hilda!”
The girl’s face lighted up again. “Yes, Hilda, dear,” she answered, in an unearthly voice, like one raised from the dead. “I will call you what you will. Angel of light, you have been so good to me.”
She opened her lips with an effort and slowly swallowed another spoonful. Then she fell back, exhausted. But her pulse improved within twenty minutes. I mentioned the matter, with enthusiasm, to Sebastian later. “It is very nice in its way,”