Hilda Wade, a Woman with Tenacity of Purpose Part 31

"Nervous about what?"

"About disease, chiefly. She has the temperament that dreads infection--and therefore catches it."

"Why do you think so?"

"Haven't you noticed that she often doubles her thumb under her fingers--folds her fist across it--so--especially when anybody talks about anything alarming? If the conversation happens to turn on jungle fever, or any subject like that, down goes her thumb instantly, and she clasps her fist over it with a convulsive squeeze. At the same time, too, her face twitches. I know what that trick means. She's horribly afraid of tropical diseases, though she never says so."

"And you attach importance to her fear?"

"Of course. I count upon it as probably our chief means of catching and fixing her."

"As how?"

She shook her head and quizzed me. "Wait and see. You are a doctor; I, a trained nurse. Before twenty-four hours, I foresee she will ask us.

She is sure to ask us, now she has learned that you are Lady Tepping's nephew, and that I am acquainted with several of the Best People."

That evening, about ten o'clock, Sir Ivor strolled up to me in the smoking-room with affected unconcern. He laid his hand on my arm and drew me aside mysteriously. The ship's doctor was there, playing a quiet game of poker with a few of the pa.s.sengers. "I beg your pardon, Dr.

c.u.mberledge," he began, in an undertone, "could you come outside with me a minute? Lady Meadowcroft has sent me up to you with a message."

I followed him on to the open deck. "It is quite impossible, my dear sir," I said, shaking my head austerely, for I divined his errand. "I can't go and see Lady Meadowcroft. Medical etiquette, you know; the constant and salutary rule of the profession!"

"Why not?" he asked, astonished.

"The ship carries a surgeon," I replied, in my most precise tone. "He is a duly qualified gentleman, very able in his profession, and he ought to inspire your wife with confidence. I regard this vessel as Dr. Boyell's practice, and all on board it as virtually his patients."

Sir Ivor's face fell. "But Lady Meadowcroft is not at all well," he answered, looking piteous; "and--she can't endure the ship's doctor.

Such a common man, you know! His loud voice disturbs her. You MUST have noticed that my wife is a lady of exceptionally delicate nervous organisation." He hesitated, beamed on me, and played his trump card.

"She dislikes being attended by owt but a GENTLEMAN."

"If a gentleman is also a medical man," I answered, "his sense of duty towards his brother pract.i.tioners would, of course, prevent him from interfering in their proper sphere, or putting upon them the unmerited slight of letting them see him preferred before them."

"Then you positively refuse?" he asked, wistfully, drawing back. I could see he stood in a certain dread of that imperious little woman.

I conceded a point. "I will go down in twenty minutes," I admitted, looking grave,--"not just now, lest I annoy my colleague,--and I will glance at Lady Meadowcroft in an unprofessional way. If I think her case demands treatment, I will tell Dr. Boyell." And I returned to the smoking-room and took up a novel.

Twenty minutes later I knocked at the door of the lady's private cabin, with my best bedside manner in full play. As I suspected, she was nervous--nothing more--my mere smile rea.s.sured her. I observed that she held her thumb fast, doubled under in her fist, all the time I was questioning her, as Hilda had said; and I also noticed that the fingers closed about it convulsively at first, but gradually relaxed as my voice restored confidence. She thanked me profusely, and was really grateful.

On deck next day she was very communicative. They were going to make the regular tour first, she said, but were to go on to the Tibetan frontier at the end, where Sir Ivor had a contract to construct a railway, in a very wild region. Tigers? Natives? Oh, she didn't mind either of THEM; but she was told that that district--what did they call it? the Terai, or something--was terribly unwholesome. Fever was what-you-may-call-it there--yes, "endemic"--that was the word; "oh, thank you, Dr.

c.u.mberledge." She hated the very name of fever. "Now you, Miss Wade, I suppose," with an awestruck smile, "are not in the least afraid of it?"

Hilda looked up at her calmly. "Not in the least," she answered. "I have nursed hundreds of cases."

"Oh, my, how dreadful! And never caught it?"

"Never. I am not afraid, you see."

"I wish _I_ wasn't! Hundreds of cases! It makes one ill to think of it!... And all successfully?"

"Almost all of them."

"You don't tell your patients stories when they're ill about your other cases who died, do you?" Lady Meadowcroft went on, with a quick little shudder.

Hilda's face by this time was genuinely sympathetic. "Oh, never!" she answered, with truth. "That would be very bad nursing! One's object in treating a case is to make one's patient well; so one naturally avoids any sort of subject that might be distressing or alarming."

"You really mean it?" Her face was pleading.

"Why, of course. I try to make my patients my friends; I talk to them cheerfully; I amuse them and distract them; I get them away, as far as I can, from themselves and their symptoms."

"Oh, what a lovely person to have about one when one's ill!" the languid lady exclaimed, ecstatically. "I SHOULD like to send for you if I wanted nursing! But there--it's always so, of course, with a real lady; common nurses frighten one so. I wish I could always have a lady to nurse me!"

"A person who sympathises--that is the really important thing," Hilda answered, in her quiet voice. "One must find out first one's patient's temperament. YOU are nervous, I can see." She laid one hand on her new friend's arm. "You need to be kept amused and engaged when you are ill; what YOU require most is--insight--and sympathy."

The little fist doubled up again; the vacant face grew positively sweet.

"That's just it! You have hit it! How clever you are! I want all that. I suppose, Miss Wade, YOU never go out for private nursing?"

"Never," Hilda answered. "You see, Lady Meadowcroft, I don't nurse for a livelihood. I have means of my own; I took up this work as an occupation and a sphere in life. I haven't done anything yet but hospital nursing."

Lady Meadowcroft drew a slight sigh. "What a pity!" she murmured, slowly. "It does seem hard that your sympathies should all be thrown away, so to speak, on a horrid lot of wretched poor people, instead of being spent on your own equals--who would so greatly appreciate them."

"I think I can venture to say the poor appreciate them, too," Hilda answered, bridling up a little--for there was nothing she hated so much as cla.s.s-prejudices. "Besides, they need sympathy more; they have fewer comforts. I should not care to give up attending my poor people for the sake of the idle rich."

The set phraseology of the country rectory recurred to Lady Meadowcroft--"our poorer brethren," and so forth. "Oh, of course," she answered, with the mechanical acquiescence such women always give to moral plat.i.tudes. "One must do one's best for the poor, I know--for conscience' sake and all that; it's our duty, and we all try hard to do it. But they're so terribly ungrateful! Don't you think so? Do you know, Miss Wade, in my father's parish--"

Hilda cut her short with a sunny smile--half contemptuous toleration, half genuine pity. "We are all ungrateful," she said; "but the poor, I think, the least so. I'm sure the grat.i.tude I've often had from my poor women at St. Nathaniel's has made me sometimes feel really ashamed of myself. I had done so little--and they thanked me so much for it."

"Which only shows," Lady Meadowcroft broke in, "that one ought always to have a LADY to nurse one."

"Ca marche!" Hilda said to me, with a quiet smile, a few minutes after, when her ladyship had disappeared in her fluffy robe down the companion-ladder.

"Yes, ca marche," I answered. "In an hour or two you will have succeeded in landing your chaperon. And what is most amusing, landed her, too, Hilda, just by being yourself--letting her see frankly the actual truth of what you think and feel about her and about everyone!"

"I could not do otherwise," Hilda answered, growing grave. "I must be myself, or die for it. My method of angling consists in showing myself just as I am. You call me an actress, but I am not really one; I am only a woman who can use her personality for her own purposes. If I go with Lady Meadowcroft, it will be a mutual advantage. I shall really sympathise with her for I can see the poor thing is devoured with nervousness."

"But do you think you will be able to stand her?" I asked.

"Oh, dear, yes. She's not a bad little thing, au fond, when you get to know her. It is society that has spoilt her. She would have made a nice, helpful, motherly body if she'd married the curate."

As we neared Bombay, conversation grew gradually more and more Indian; it always does under similar circ.u.mstances. A sea voyage is half retrospect, half prospect; it has no personal ident.i.ty. You leave Liverpool for New York at the English standpoint, and are full of what you did in London or Manchester; half-way over, you begin to discuss American custom-houses and New York hotels; by the time you reach Sandy Hook, the talk is all of quick trains west and the shortest route from Philadelphia to New Orleans. You grow by slow stages into the new att.i.tude; at Malta you are still regretting Europe; after Aden, your mind dwells most on the hire of punkah-wallahs and the proverbial toughness of the dak-bungalow chicken.

"How's the plague at Bombay now?" an inquisitive pa.s.senger inquired of the Captain at dinner our last night out. "Getting any better?"

Lady Meadowcroft's thumb dived between her fingers again. "What! is there plague in Bombay?" she asked, innocently, in her nervous fashion.

"Plague in Bombay!" the Captain burst out, his burly voice resounding down the saloon. "Why, bless your soul, ma'am, where else would you expect it? Plague in Bombay! It's been there these five years. Better?

Not quite. Going ahead like mad. They're dying by thousands."

"A microbe, I believe, Dr. Boyell," the inquisitive pa.s.senger observed deferentially, with due respect for medical science.

"Yes," the ship's doctor answered, helping himself to an olive. "Forty million microbes to each square inch of the Bombay atmosphere."