Hilda Wade, a Woman with Tenacity of Purpose

She stuck a steel safety-pin with deft fingers into the roll of lint. “When I have finished my day’s work,” she answered slowly, still continuing the bandage, “I may perhaps find time to tell you.”

CHAPTER IV

THE EPISODE OF THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT COMMIT SUICIDE

After my poor friend Le Geyt had murdered his wife, in a sudden access of uncontrollable anger, under the deepest provocation, the police naturally began to inquire for him. It is a way they have; the police are no respecters of persons; neither do they pry into the question of motives. They are but poor casuists. A murder is for them a murder, and a murderer a murderer; it is not their habit to divide and distinguish between case and case with Hilda Wade’s analytical accuracy.

As soon as my duties at St. Nathaniel’s permitted me, on the evening of the discovery, I rushed round to Mrs. Mallet’s, Le Geyt’s sister. I had been detained at the hospital for some hours, however, watching a critical case; and by the time I reached Great Stanhope Street I found Hilda Wade, in her nurse’s dress, there before me. Sebastian, it seemed, had given her leave out for the evening. She was a supernumerary nurse, attached to his own observation-cots as special attendant for scientific purposes, and she could generally get an hour or so whenever she required it.

Mrs. Mallet had been in the breakfast-room with Hilda before I arrived; but as I reached the house she rushed upstairs to wash her red eyes and compose herself a little before the strain of meeting me; so I had the opportunity for a few words alone first with my prophetic companion.

“You said just now at Nathaniel’s,” I burst out, “that Le Geyt would not be hanged: he would commit suicide. What did you mean by that? What reason had you for thinking so?”

Hilda sank into a chair by the open window, pulled a flower abstractedly from the vase at her side, and began picking it to pieces, floret after floret, with twitching fingers. She was deeply moved. “Well, consider his family history,” she burst out at last, looking up at me with her large brown eyes as she reached the last petal. “Heredity counts.... And after such a disaster!”

She said “disaster,” not “crime”; I noted mentally the reservation implied in the word.

“Heredity counts,” I answered. “Oh, yes. It counts much. But what about Le Geyt’s family history?” I could not recall any instance of suicide among his forbears.

“Well—his mother’s father was General Faskally, you know,” she replied, after a pause, in her strange, oblique manner. “Mr. Le Geyt is General Faskally’s eldest grandson.”

“Exactly,” I broke in, with a man’s desire for solid fact in place of vague intuition. “But I fail to see quite what that has to do with it.”

“The General was killed in India during the Mutiny.”

“I remember, of course—killed, bravely fighting.”

“Yes; but it was on a forlorn hope, for which he volunteered, and in the course of which he is said to have walked straight into an almost obvious ambuscade of the enemy’s.”

“Now, my dear Miss Wade”—I always dropped the title of “Nurse,” by request, when once we were well clear of Nathaniel’s,—“I have every confidence, you are aware, in your memory and your insight; but I do confess I fail to see what bearing this incident can have on poor Hugo’s chances of being hanged or committing suicide.”

She picked a second flower, and once more pulled out petal after petal. As she reached the last again, she answered, slowly: “You must have forgotten the circumstances. It was no mere accident. General Faskally had made a serious strategical blunder at Jhansi. He had sacrificed the lives of his subordinates needlessly. He could not bear to face the survivors. In the course of the retreat, he volunteered to go on this forlorn hope, which might equally well have been led by an officer of lower rank; and he was permitted to do so by Sir Colin in command, as a means of retrieving his lost military character. He carried his point, but he carried it recklessly, taking care to be shot through the heart himself in the first onslaught. That was virtual suicide—honourable suicide to avoid disgrace, at a moment of supreme remorse and horror.”

“You are right,” I admitted, after a minute’s consideration. “I see it now—though I should never have thought of it.”

“That is the use of being a woman,” she answered.

I waited a second once more, and mused. “Still, that is only one doubtful case,” I objected.

“There was another, you must remember: his uncle Alfred.”

“Alfred Le Geyt?”

“No; HE died in his bed, quietly. Alfred Faskally.”

“What a memory you have!” I cried, astonished. “Why, that was before our time—in the days of the Chartist riots!”

She smiled a certain curious sibylline smile of hers. Her earnest face looked prettier than ever. “I told you I could remember many things that happened before I was born,” she answered. “THIS is one of them.”

“You remember it directly?”

“How impossible! Have I not often explained to you that I am no diviner? I read no book of fate; I call no spirits from the vasty deep. I simply remember with exceptional clearness what I read and hear. And I have many times heard the story about Alfred Faskally.”

“So have I—but I forget it.”

“Unfortunately, I CAN’T forget. That is a sort of disease with me.... He was a special constable in the Chartist riots; and being a very strong and powerful man, like his nephew Hugo, he used his truncheon—his special constable’s baton, or whatever you call it—with excessive force upon a starveling London tailor in the mob near Charing Cross. The man was hit on the forehead—badly hit, so that he died almost immediately of concussion of the brain. A woman rushed out of the crowd at once, seized the dying man, laid his head on her lap, and shrieked out in a wildly despairing voice that he was her husband, and the father of thirteen children. Alfred Faskally, who never meant to kill the man, or even to hurt him, but who was laying about him roundly, without realising the terrific force of his blows, was so horrified at what he had done when he heard the woman’s cry, that he rushed off straight to Waterloo Bridge in an agony of remorse and—flung himself over. He was drowned instantly.”

“I recall the story now,” I answered; “but, do you know, as it was told me, I think they said the mob THREW Faskally over in their desire for vengeance.”

“That is the official account, as told by the Le Geyts and the Faskallys; they like to have it believed their kinsman was murdered, not that he committed suicide. But my grandfather”—I started; during the twelve months that I had been brought into daily relations with Hilda Wade, that was the first time I had heard her mention any member of her own family, except once her mother—“my grandfather, who knew him well, and who was present in the crowd at the time, assured me many times that Alfred Faskally really jumped over of his own accord, NOT pursued by the mob, and that his last horrified words as he leaped were, ‘I never meant it! I never meant it!’ However, the family have always had luck in their suicides. The jury believed the throwing-over story, and found a verdict of ‘wilful murder’ against some person or persons unknown.”

“Luck in their suicides! What a curious phrase! And you say, ALWAYS. Were there other cases, then?”

“Constructively, yes; one of the Le Geyts, you must recollect, went down with his ship (just like his uncle, the General, in India) when he might have quitted her. It is believed he had given a mistaken order. You remember, of course, he was navigating lieutenant. Another, Marcus, was SAID to have shot himself by accident while cleaning his gun—after a quarrel with his wife. But you have heard all about it. ‘The wrong was on my side,’ he moaned, you know, when they picked him up, dying, in the gun-room. And one of the Faskally girls, his cousin, of whom his wife was jealous—that beautiful Linda—became a Catholic, and went into a convent at once on Marcus’s death; which, after all, in such cases, is merely a religious and moral way of committing suicide—I mean, for a woman who takes the veil just to cut herself off from the world, and who has no vocation, as I hear she had not.”

She filled me with amazement. “That is true,” I exclaimed, “when one comes to think of it. It shows the same temperament in fibre.... But I should never have thought of it.”

“No? Well, I believe it is true, for all that. In every case, one sees they choose much the same way of meeting a reverse, a blunder, an unpremeditated crime. The brave way is to go through with it, and face the music, letting what will come; the cowardly way is to hide one’s head incontinently in a river, a noose, or a convent cell.”

“Le Geyt is not a coward,” I interposed, with warmth.

“No, not, a coward—a manly spirited, great-hearted gentleman—but still, not quite of the bravest type. He lacks one element. The Le Geyts have physical courage—enough and to spare—but their moral courage fails them at a pinch. They rush into suicide or its equivalent at critical moments, out of pure boyish impulsiveness.”

A few minutes later, Mrs. Mallet came in. She was not broken down—on the contrary, she was calm—stoically, tragically, pitiably calm; with that ghastly calmness which is more terrible by far than the most demonstrative grief. Her face, though deadly white, did not move a muscle. Not a tear was in her eyes. Even her bloodless hands hardly twitched at the folds of her hastily assumed black gown. She clenched them after a minute when she had grasped mine silently; I could see that the nails dug deep into the palms in her painful resolve to keep herself from collapsing.

Hilda Wade, with infinite sisterly tenderness, led her over to a chair by the window in the summer twilight, and took one quivering hand in hers. “I have been telling Dr. Cumberledge, Lina, about what I most fear for your dear brother, darling; and… I think… he agrees with me.”

Mrs. Mallet turned to me, with hollow eyes, still preserving her tragic calm. “I am afraid of it, too,” she said, her drawn lips tremulous. “Dr. Cumberledge, we must get him back! We must induce him to face it!”

“And yet,” I answered, slowly, turning it over in my own mind; “he has run away at first. Why should he do that if he means—to commit suicide?” I hated to utter the words before that broken soul; but there was no way out of it.

Hilda interrupted me with a quiet suggestion. “How do you know he has run away?” she asked. “Are you not taking it for granted that, if he meant suicide, he would blow his brains out in his own house? But surely that would not be the Le Geyt way. They are gentle-natured folk; they would never blow their brains out or cut their throats. For all we know, he may have made straight for Waterloo Bridge,”—she framed her lips to the unspoken words, unseen by Mrs. Mallet,—“like his uncle Alfred.”

“That is true,” I answered, lip-reading. “I never thought of that either.”

“Still, I do not attach importance to this idea,” she went on. “I have some reason for thinking he has run away… elsewhere; and if so, our first task must be to entice him back again.”

“What are your reasons?” I asked, humbly. Whatever they might be, I knew enough of Hilda Wade by this time to know that she had probably good grounds for accepting them.

“Oh, they may wait for the present,” she answered. “Other things are more pressing. First, let Lina tell us what she thinks of most moment.”

Mrs. Mallet braced herself up visibly to a distressing effort. “You have seen the body, Dr. Cumberledge?” she faltered.

“No, dear Mrs. Mallet, I have not. I came straight from Nathaniel’s. I have had no time to see it.”

“Dr. Sebastian has viewed it by my wish—he has been so kind—and he will be present as representing the family at the post-mortem. He notes that the wound was inflicted with a dagger—a small ornamental Norwegian dagger, which always lay, as I know, on the little what-not by the blue sofa.”

I nodded assent. “Exactly; I have seen it there.”