‘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.’
As he uttered the words, Hilda Wade’s hands trembled more than ever, and with a little scream she let the basin fall, breaking it into fragments.
Sebastian’s keen eyes had transfixed her in a second. ‘How did you manage to do that?’ he asked, with quiet sarcasm, but in a tone full of meaning.
‘The basin was heavy,’ Hilda faltered. ‘My hands were trembling – and it somehow slipped through them. I am not… quite myself… not quite well this afternoon. I ought not to have attempted it.’
The Professor’s deep-set eyes peered out like gleaming lights from beneath their overhanging brows. ‘No; you ought not to have attempted it,’ he answered, withering her with a glance. ‘You might have let the thing fall on the patient and killed him. As it is, can’t you see you have agitated him with the flurry? Don’t stand there holding your breath, woman: repair your mischief. Get a cloth and wipe it up, and give me the bottle.’
With skilful haste he administered a little sal volatile and nux vomica to the swooning patient; while Hilda set about remedying the damage. ‘That’s better,’ Sebastian said, in a mollified tone, when she had brought another basin. There was a singular note of cloaked triumph in his voice. ‘Now, we’ll begin again… I was just saying, gentlemen, before this accident, that I had seen only one case of this peculiar form of the tendency before; and that case was the notorious’ – he kept his glittering eyes fixed harder on Hilda than ever – ‘the notorious Dr Yorke-Bannerman.’
I was watching Hilda, too. At the words, she trembled violently all over once more, but with an effort restrained herself. Their looks met in a searching glance. Hilda’s air was proud and fearless: in Sebastian’s, I fancied I detected, after a second, just a tinge of wavering.
‘You remember Yorke-Bannerman’s case,’ he went on. ‘He committed a murder –’
‘Let me take the basin!’ I cried, for I saw Hilda’s hands giving way a second time, and I was anxious to spare her.
‘No, thank you,’ she answered low, but in a voice that was full of suppressed defiance. ‘I will wait and hear this out. I prefer to stop here.’
As for Sebastian, he seemed now not to notice her, though I was aware all the time of a sidelong glance of his eye, parrot-wise, in her direction. ‘He committed a murder,’ he went on, ‘by means of aconitine – then an almost unknown poison; and, after committing it, his heart being already weak, he was taken himself with symptoms of aneurism in a curious form, essentially similar to these; so that he died before the trial – a lucky escape for him.’
He paused rhetorically once more; then he added in the same tone: ‘Mental agitation and the terror of detection no doubt accelerated the fatal result in that instance. He died at once from the shock of the arrest. It was a natural conclusion. Here we may hope for a more successful issue.’
He spoke to the students, of course, but I could see for all that that he was keeping his falcon eye fixed hard on Hilda’s face. I glanced aside at her. She never flinched for a second. Neither said anything directly to the other; still, by their eyes and mouths, I knew some strange passage of arms had taken place between them. Sebastian’s tone was one of provocation, of defiance, I might almost say of challenge. Hilda’s air I took rather for the air of calm and resolute, but assured, resistance. He expected her to answer; she said nothing. Instead of that, she went on holding the basin now with fingers that would not tremble. Every muscle was strained. Every tendon was strung. I could see she held herself in with a will of iron.
The
