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!’
Then he turned to his papers, sorting them out one by one with a preoccupied face and twitching fingers. I recognised that he desired to be left alone, so I quitted the laboratory.
I cannot quite say why, but ever since Hilda Wade first came to Nathaniel’s my enthusiasm for Sebastian had been cooling continuously. Admiring his greatness still, I had doubts as to his goodness. That day I felt I positively mistrusted him. I wondered what his passage of arms with Hilda might mean. Yet, somehow, I was shy of alluding to it before her.
One thing, however, was clear to me now – this great campaign that was being waged between the nurse and the Professor had reference to the case of Dr Yorke-Bannerman.
For a time, nothing came of it; the routine of the hospital went on as usual. The patient with the suspected predisposition to aneurism kept fairly well for a week or two, and then took a sudden turn for the worse, presenting at times most unwonted symptoms. He died unexpectedly. Sebastian, who had watched him every hour, regarded the matter as of prime importance. ‘I’m glad it happened here,’ he said, rubbing his hands. ‘A grand opportunity. I wanted to catch an instance like this before that fellow in Paris had time to anticipate me. They’re all on the lookout. Von Strahlendorff, of Vienna, has been waiting for just such a patient for years. So have I. Now fortune has favoured me. Lucky for us he died! We shall find out everything.’
We held a post-mortem, of course, the condition of the blood being what we most wished to observe; and the autopsy revealed some unexpected details. One remarkable feature consisted in a certain undescribed and impoverished state of the contained bodies which Sebastian, with his eager zeal for science, desired his students to see and identify. He said it was likely to throw much light on other ill-understood conditions of the brain and nervous system, as well as on the peculiar faint odour of the insane, now so well recognised in all large asylums. In order to compare this abnormal state with the aspect of the healthy circulating medium, he proposed to examine a little good living blood side by side with the morbid specimen under the microscope. Nurse Wade was in attendance in the laboratory, as usual. The Professor, standing by the instrument, with one hand on the brass screw, had got the diseased drop ready arranged for our inspection beforehand, and was gloating over it himself with scientific enthusiasm. ‘Grey corpuscles, you will observe,’ he said, ‘almost entirely deficient. Red, poor in
