Grant Allen - Hilda Wade, a Woman with Tenacity of Purpose

“I promise you,” I replied, naturally flattered. She was delicately pretty, and her quaint, oracular air, so incongruous with the dainty face and the fluffy brown hair, piqued me not a little. That special mysterious commodity of CHARM seemed to pervade all she did and said. So I added: “And I will mention to Sebastian that you wish for a nurse’s place at Nathaniel’s. As you have had experience, and can be recommended, I suppose, by Le Geyt’s sister,” with whom she had come, “no doubt you can secure an early vacancy.”

“Thanks so much,” she answered, with that delicious smile. It had an infantile simplicity about it which contrasted most piquantly with her prophetic manner.

“Only,” I went on, assuming a confidential tone, “you really MUST tell me why you said that just now about Hugo Le Geyt. Recollect, your Delphian utterances have gravely astonished and disquieted me. Hugo is one of my oldest and dearest friends; and I want to know why you have formed this sudden bad opinion of him.”

“Not of HIM, but of HER,” she answered, to my surprise, taking a small Norwegian dagger from the what-not and playing with it to distract attention.

“Come, come, now,” I cried, drawing back. “You are trying to mystify me. This is deliberate seer-mongery. You are presuming on your powers. But I am not the sort of man to be caught by horoscopes. I decline to believe it.”

She turned on me with a meaning glance. Those truthful eyes fixed me. “I am going from here straight to my hospital,” she murmured, with a quiet air of knowledge—talking, I mean to say, like one who really knows. “This room is not the place to discuss this matter, is it? If you will walk back to St. George’s with me, I think I can make you see and feel that I am speaking, not at haphazard, but from observation and experience.”

Her confidence roused my most vivid curiosity. When she left I left with her. The Le Geyts lived in one of those new streets of large houses on Campden Hill, so that our way eastward lay naturally through Kensington Gardens.

It was a sunny June day, when light pierced even through the smoke of London, and the shrubberies breathed the breath of white lilacs. “Now, what did you mean by that enigmatical saying?” I asked my new Cassandra, as we strolled down the scent-laden path. “Woman’s intuition is all very well in its way; but a mere man may be excused if he asks for evidence.”

She stopped short as I spoke, and gazed full into my eyes. Her hand fingered her parasol handle. “I meant what I said,” she answered, with emphasis. “Within one year, Mr. Le Geyt will have murdered his wife. You may take my word, for it.”

“Le Geyt!” I cried. “Never! I know the man so well! A big, good-natured, kindly schoolboy! He is the gentlest and best of mortals. Le Geyt a murderer! Im—possible!”

Her eyes were far away. “Has it never occurred to you,” she asked, slowly, with her pythoness air, “that there are murders and murders?—murders which depend in the main upon the murderer… and also murders which depend in the main upon the victim?”

“The victim? What do you mean?”

“Well, there are brutal men who commit murder out of sheer brutality—the ruffians of the slums; and there are sordid men who commit murder for sordid money—the insurers who want to forestall their policies, the poisoners who want to inherit property; but have you ever realised that there are also murderers who become so by accident, through their victims’ idiosyncrasy? I thought all the time while I was watching Mrs. Le Geyt, ‘That woman is of the sort predestined to be murdered.’… And when you asked me, I told you so. I may have been imprudent; still, I saw it, and I said it.”

“But this is second sight!” I cried, drawing away. “Do you pretend to prevision?”

“No, not second sight; nothing uncanny, nothing supernatural. But prevision, yes; prevision based, not on omens or auguries, but on solid fact—on what I have seen and noticed.”

“Explain yourself, oh, prophetess!”

She let the point of her parasol make a curved trail on the gravel, and followed its serpentine wavings with her eyes. “You know our house surgeon?” she asked at last, looking up of a sudden.

“What, Travers? Oh, intimately.”

“Then come to my ward and see. After you have seen, you will perhaps believe me.”

Nothing that I could say would get any further explanation out of her just then. “You would laugh at me if I told you,” she persisted; “you won’t laugh when you have seen it.”

We walked on in silence as far as Hyde Park Corner. There my Sphinx tripped lightly up the steps of St. George’s Hospital. “Get Mr. Travers’s leave,” she said, with a nod, and a bright smile, “to visit Nurse Wade’s ward. Then come up to me there in five minutes.”

I explained to my friend the house surgeon that I wished to see certain cases in the accident ward of which I had heard; he smiled a restrained smile—“Nurse Wade, no doubt!” but, of course, gave me permission to go up and look at them. “Stop a minute,” he added, “and I’ll come with you.” When we got there, my witch had already changed her dress, and was waiting for us demurely in the neat dove-coloured gown and smooth white apron of the hospital nurses. She looked even prettier and more meaningful so than in her ethereal outside summer-cloud muslin.

“Come over to this bed,” she said at once to Travers and myself, without the least air of mystery. “I will show you what I mean by it.”

“Nurse Wade has remarkable insight,” Travers whispered to me as we went.

“I can believe it,” I answered.

“Look at this woman,” she went on, aside, in a low voice—“no, NOT the first bed; the one beyond it; Number 60. I don’t want the patient to know you are watching her. Do you observe anything odd about her appearance?”

“She is somewhat the same type,” I began, “as Mrs.—”

Before I could get out the words “Le Geyt,” her warning eye and puckering forehead had stopped me. “As the lady we were discussing,” she interposed, with a quiet wave of one hand. “Yes, in some points very much so. You notice in particular her scanty hair—so thin and poor—though she is young and good-looking?”

“It is certainly rather a feeble crop for a woman of her age,” I admitted. “And pale at that, and washy.”

“Precisely. It’s done up behind about as big as a nutmeg.... Now, observe the contour of her back as she sits up there; it is curiously curved, isn’t it?”

“Very,” I replied. “Not exactly a stoop, nor yet quite a hunch, but certainly an odd spinal configuration.”

“Like our friend’s, once more?”

“Like our friend’s, exactly!”

Hilda Wade looked away, lest she should attract the patient’s attention. “Well, that woman was brought in here, half-dead, assaulted by her husband,” she went on, with a note of unobtrusive demonstration.

“We get a great many such cases,” Travers put in, with true medical unconcern, “very interesting cases; and Nurse Wade has pointed out to me the singular fact that in almost all instances the patients resemble one another physically.”

“Incredible!” I cried. “I can understand that there might well be a type of men who assault their wives, but not, surely, a type of women who get assaulted.”

“That is because you know less about it than Nurse Wade,” Travers answered, with an annoying smile of superior knowledge.

Our instructress moved on to another bed, laying one gentle hand as she passed on a patient’s forehead. The patient glanced gratitude. “That one again,” she said once more, half indicating a cot at a little distance: “Number 74. She has much the same thin hair—sparse, weak, and colourless. She has much the same curved back, and much the same aggressive, self-assertive features. Looks capable, doesn’t she? A born housewife!… Well, she, too, was knocked down and kicked half-dead the other night by her husband.”