"Strike as you please," he snarled; "Ruth Josselin is a--" But

before the word could out Batty Langton's first blow beat down his

guard. The second fell across his exposed shoulders, the third

stunningly on the nape of his neck. The fourth--a back-hander--

welted him full in the face, and the wretched man sank screaming for

pity.

Batty Langton had no pity. "Stand up, you hound!" he commanded.

The command was absurd, and he laughed savagely, tickled by its

absurdity even in his fury, while he smote again and again.

He showered blows until, between blow and blow, he caught his breath

and panted. Mr. Silk's screams had sunk to blubbings and whimpers.

Between the strokes he heard them.

His valet was knocking timorously on the door. "All right!" called

Langton, lifting his cane and lowering it slowly--for his victim lay

still. He stooped to drag aside the arm covering the huddled face.

As he did so, Mr. Silk snarled again, raised his head and bit

blindly, fastening his teeth in the flesh of the left hand. Langton

wrenched free and, as the man scrambled to his feet, dealt him with

the same hand a smashing blow on the mouth--a blow that sent him

reeling, to overbalance and pitch backward to the floor again across

an overturned chair.

Somehow the pleasure of getting in that blow restored--literally at a

stroke--Langton's good temper. He laughed and tossed the cane into a

corner.

"You may stand up now," said he sweetly. "You are not going to be

beaten any more."

Mr. Silk stood up. His mouth trickled blood, and he nursed his right

wrist, where the cane had smitten across the bone. Langton stepped

to the door and, unlocking it, admitted his trembling valet.

"My good fool," he said, "didn't I call to you not to be alarmed?

Mr. Silk, here, has been seized with a--a kind of epileptic fit.

Help him downstairs and call a chair for him. Don't stare; he will

not bite again for a very long time."

But in this Mr. Langton was mistaken.

He took the precaution of cauterising his bitten hand; and before

retiring to rest that night contemplated it grimly, holding it out to

the warmth of his bachelor fire. It was bandaged; but above the edge

of the bandage his knuckles bore evidence how they had retaliated

upon Mr. Silk's teeth.

He eyed these abrasions for a while and ended with a soft complacent

laugh. "Queer, how little removed we are, after all, from the

natural savage!" he murmured. "Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to

introduce to your notice Batty Langton, Esquire, a child of nature--

not perhaps of the best period--still using his naked fists and for a

woman--primitive cause of quarrel. And didn't he enjoy it, by

George!"

He laughed again softly. But, could he have foreseen, he had been

willing rather to cut the hand off for its day's work.

Chapter IV.

THE TERRACE.

Ruth was happy. To-day, and for a whole week to come, she was

determined to be purely happy, blithe as the spring sunshine upon the

terrace. For a week she would, like Walton's milkmaid, cast away

care and refuse to load her mind with any fears of many things that

will never be. Her spirit sang birdlike within her. And the

reason?--that the _Venus_ had arrived in harbour, with Dicky on

board.

Peace had been signed, or was on the point to be signed, and in the

North Atlantic waters His Majesty's captains of frigates could make

a holiday of duty. Captain Harry used his holiday to sail up for

Boston, standing in for Carolina on his way and fetching off his

wife and his firstborn--a bouncing boy. It was time, they agreed,

to pay their ceremonial visit to Sir Oliver and his bride; high

time also for Dicky to return and embrace his father.

Sir Oliver had written of his approaching marriage. "Well, dear,"

was Mrs. Harry's comment, "'twas always certain he would marry. As

for Ruth Josselin, she is an amazingly beautiful girl and I believe

her to be good. So there's no more to be said but to wish 'em joy."

Captain Harry kissed his wife. "Glad you take it so, Sally. I was

half afraid--for of course there _was_ the chance, you know--"

"I'm not a goose, I hope, to cry for the moon!"

"Is that the way of geese?" he asked, and they both laughed.

A second letter had come to them from Eagles, telling them of his

happiness, and franking a note in which Ruth prettily acknowledged

Mrs. Harry's congratulations.

A third had been despatched; a hurried one, announcing his departure

for England. Before this reached Carolina, however, the _Venus_ had

sailed, and Dicky rushed home to find his father gone.

But a message came down to Boston Quay, with the great coach for Mrs.

Vyell, and the baggage and saddle-horses for the gentlemen. There

were three saddle-horses, for Ruth added an invitation for

Mr. Hanmer, "if the discipline of the ship would allow."

"She always was the thoughtfullest!" cried Dicky. "Why, sir, to be

sure you must come too. . . . We'll go shooting. Is it too late for

partridge? . . . One forgets the time of year, down in the islands."

Strangely enough Mr. Hanmer, so shy by habit, offered but a slight

resistance.

It was Dicky who, as Ruth sped to him with a happy little cry, hung

on his heel a moment and blushed violently. She took him in her

arms, exclaiming at his growth.

"Why--look, Tatty--'tis a man! And is that what he means?--Ah,

Dicky, don't say you're too tall to kiss your old playmate."

Then, holding him a little away and still observing his confusion,

she remembered his absurd boyish love for her and how he had

confessed it. Well, she must put him at his ease. . . . She turned

laughingly to welcome the others, and now for a moment she too

flushed rosy-red as she shook hands with Mr. Hanmer. She could not

have told why; but perhaps it was that instead of returning her

smile, his eyes rested on her face gravely, intently, as though

unable to drag themselves away.

Captain Harry and his wife marvelled, as well they might, at the

house and its wonders. Sir Oliver had chosen to take his meals

French fashion and at French hours; and Ruth apologised for having

kept up the custom. Captain Harry, after protesting against so

ungodly a practice, admitted that his ride had hungered him, and at

_dejeuner_ proved it not only upon the courses but upon the cold

meats on the side-table.

"You must have a jewel of a housekeeper, my dear!" Mrs. Harry had

been taking in every detail of the ordered service. "'Housekeeper,'

do I say? 'Major-domo'--you'll forgive me--"

Ruth swept her a bow. "I take the compliment."

"And she deserves it," added Miss Quiney.

"What? You don't tell me you manage it all yourself? . . . This

palace of a house!"

"Already you are making it feel less empty to me. Yes, alone I do

it; but if you wish to praise me, you should see my accounts. _They_

are my real pride. But no, they are too holy to be shown!"

They sat later--the gentlemen by their wine--on the stone terrace

overlooking the wide champaign.

"But," said Ruth, for she observed that the boy was restless, "I must

leave Tatty to play hostess while I take a scamper with Dick.

There's a pool below here, Dicky, with oh, such trout!"

Dicky was on his feet in a trice. "Rods?"

"Rods, if you will. But there are the stables, too, to be seen; and

the gunroom--"

"Stables? Gunroom?--Oh, come along!--the day is too short!" Here

Dicky paused. "But would you like to come too, sir?" he asked,

addressing Mr. Hanmer.

Mrs. Harry laughed. "Those two," she told Ruth, "are like master and

dog, and one never can be quite sure which is which."

"My dear boy," said Mr. Hanmer, "you must surely see that Lady Vyell

wants you all to herself. Yet I dare say the captain and I will be

strolling around to the stables before long."

"Ay, when this decanter is done," agreed Captain Harry.

"That was rather pretty of you," said Ruth, as she and the boy went

down the terrace stairs together.

"What?--asking old Hanmer to come with us? . . . Oh, but he's the

best in the world, and, what's more, never speaks out of his turn.

He has a tremendous opinion of you, too."

"Indeed?"

"Worships the very ground you tread on."

Ruth laughed. "Were those his words?"

Dicky laughed too. "Likely they would be! Fancy old Han talking like

a sick schoolgirl! I made the words up to please you: but it's the

truth, all the same."

They reached the pool; and the boy, after ten minutes spent in

discovering the biggest monster among the trout and attempting to

tickle him with a twig, fell to prodding the turfed brink

thoughtfully.

"We talked a deal about you, first-along," he blurted at length. "I

fancy old Han guessed that I was--was--well, fond of you and all that

sort of thing."

"Dear Dicky!"

"Boys are terrible softies at this age," my young master admitted.

"And, after all, it was rather a knockdown, you know, when papa's

letter came with the news."

"But we're friends, eh?--you and I--just as before?"

"Oh, of course--only you might have told. . . . And I've brought you

a parrot. Remember the parrots in that old fellow's shop in Port

Nassau?"

She led him to talk of his sea adventures, of the ship, of the West

Indies among which they had been cruising; and as they wandered

back from terrace to terrace he poured out a stream of boyish

gossip about his shipmates, from Captain Vyell down to the cook's

dog. Half of it was Hebrew to her; but in every sentence of it, and

in the gay, eager voice, she read that the child had unerringly

found his vocation; that the sea lent him back to the shore for a

romp and a holiday, but that to the sea he belonged.

"There's one thing against shipboard though." He had come to a halt,

head aslant, and said it softly, eyeing a tree some thirty yards

distant.

"What?"

"No stones lying about." Picking up one, he launched it at a

nuthatch that clung pecking at the moss on the bark. "Hit him, by

George! Come--"

He ran and she raced after him for a few paces, but stopped half-way,

with her hand to her side. The nuthatch was not hit after all, but

had bobbed away into the green gloom.

"Tell you what--you can't run as you used," he said critically.

"No? . . ." She was wondering at the mysterious life a-flutter in

her side--that it should be his brother.

"Not half. I'll have to get you into training. . . . Now show me the

stables, please."

They were retracing their steps when along a green alley they saw Mr.

Hanmer coming down to meet them. He was alone, and his face, always

grave, seemed to Ruth graver than ever.

"Dicky!" said he. "Service, if you please."

"Ay, sir!" Dicky's small person stiffened at once, and Dicky's hand

went up to the salute.

"Wait here, please. I wish a word in private with Lady Vyell--if you

will forgive me, ma'am?"

"Why to be sure, sir," she answered, wondering. As he turned, she

walked on with him. After some fifty paces she confronted him under

the pale-green dappled shadows of the alley.

"Something has happened? Is it serious?"

"Yes."

Looking straight before him, as they resumed their walk, he told her;

in brief words that seemed, as he jerked them out, to be pumped from

him; that made no single coherent sentence, and yet were concise as a

despatch.

This in substance was Mr. Hanmer's report:--

They had remained on the terrace, seated, as she had left them--

Captain and Mrs. Harry, Miss Quiney and he. The Captain was talking.

. . . A servant brought word that two ladies--Mr. Hanmer could not

recall their names--had called from Boston and desired to see Mrs.

Vyell. "Surely," protested Mrs. Harry, "they must mean Lady Vyell?"

The servant was positive: Mrs. Captain Vyell had been the name.

"They are anxious to pay their respects," suggested Miss Quiney.

"Anxious indeed! Why we landed but a few hours since. They must

have galloped." Miss Quiney was sent to offer them refreshment and

discover their business.

Miss Quiney goes off on her errand. Minutes elapse. After many

minutes the servant reappears. "Miss Quiney requests Mrs. Harry's

attendance." Mrs. Harry goes.

"Women are queer cattle," says Captain Harry sententiously, and

talks on. By-and-by the servant appears yet again. Mr. Hanmer is

sent for. "Why, 'tis like a story I've read somewhere, about a

family sent one by one to stop a tap running," says Captain Harry.

"But I'll say this for the women--I'm always the last they bother."

Following the servant, Mr. Hanmer--so runs his report--enters the

great drawing-room to find Miss Quiney stretched on the sofa, her

face buried in cushions, and Mrs. Harry standing erect and

confronting two ladies of forbidding aspect.

"In brief," concluded Mr. Hanmer, "she sent me for you."

"To confront them with her? I wonder what their business can

be. . . ." With a glance at his side face she added, "I think you

have not told me all."

"No," he confessed haltingly; "that's true enough. In--in fact

Mrs. Harry first employed me to show them to the door."

"And--on the way?"

"Honoured madam--"

"They said--what?--quoting whom?"

"A Mr. Silk. But again--ma'am, I am awkward at lying. I cannot

manage it."

"I like you the better for it."

"I did not believe--"

"Yet you might have believed. . . . And suppose that it were true,

sir?"

He shook visibly. "I pray God to protect you," he managed to

stammer.

Her face was white, but she answered him steadily. "I believe you to

be a good man. . . . I will go to them. Where is Dicky?"

She glanced back along the alley.

"Dicky will stand where I have told him to stand: for hours unless I

release him."

"Is that your naval code? And can a mere child stand by it so

proudly? Oh," cried she, fixing on him a look he remembered all his

days, "would to God I had been born a man!"

Yet fearlessly as any man she entered the great drawing-room. Miss

Quiney still lay collapsed on her sofa. Mrs. Harry bent over her,

but faced about.

"Mr. Hanmer managed, then, to discover you? Two women have called.

. . . I thought it better, their errand being what it was, to show

them out."

"I can guess it, perhaps," Ruth caught her up with a wan smile.

"They managed to talk with him before he gave them their dismissal."

"Forgive me. I had not thought them capable--"

"There is nothing to forgive," Ruth assured her. "They probably told

the truth, and the fault is mine."

Miss Quiney, incredulous, slowly raised her face from the cushions

and stared.

"Yes," repeated Ruth, "the fault is entirely mine."

"But--but," stammered Mrs. Harry. Ruth had turned away towards the

window, and the honest wife stared after her, against the light.

"But he will make it all right when he returns." She started, of a

sudden. Cunningly as Ruth had dressed herself, Mrs. Harry's eyes

guessed the truth. "You have written to him?"

"No."

"He guesses, at least?"

"No."

"Then you are writing to him? There is enough time."

"No."

Their eyes met. Ruth's asked, "And if I do not, will you?" Mrs.

Harry's met them for a few seconds and were abased.

No words passed between these two. "And as for my Tatty," said Ruth

lightly, stepping to the sofa, "she is not to write. I command her."

Chapter V.

A PROLOGUE TO NOTHING.

Sir Oliver wrote cheerfully. His lawsuit was prospering; his prompt

invasion of the field had disconcerted Lady Caroline and her

advisers. He had discovered fresh evidence of the late Sir Thomas's

insanity. His own lawyers were sanguine. They assured him that, at

the worst, the Courts would set aside the '46 will, and fall back for

a compromise on that of '44, which gave the woman a life-interest

only in the Downton estates. But the case would not be taken this

side of the Long Vacation. . . . (It was certain, then, that he could

not return in time.)

He had visited Bath and spent some weeks with his mother. He devoted

a page or two to criticism of that fashionable city. It was clear he

had picked up many threads of his younger days; had renewed old

acquaintances and made a hundred new ones. Play, he wrote, was a

craze in England; the stakes frightened a home-comer from New

England. For his part, he gamed but moderately.

"As for the women, you have spoilt me for them. I see none--not one,

dearest--who can hold a taper to you. Their artifices disgust me;

and I watch them, telling myself that my Ruth has only to enter their

balls and assemblies to triumph--nay, to eclipse them totally. . . .

And this reminds me to say that I have spoken with my mother.

She had heard, of course, from more than one. Lady Caroline's

account had been merely coarse and spiteful; but by that lady's later

conduct she was already prepared to discount it. The pair

encountered in London, at my Lady Newcastle's; and my mother (who has

spirit) refused her bow. Diana, to her credit, appears to have done

you more justice; and Mrs. Harry writes reams in your praise.

To be sure my mother, not knowing Mrs. Harry, distrusts her judgment

for a Colonial's; but I vow she is the soundest of women. . . .

In short, dear Ruth, we have only to regularise things and we are

forgiven. The good soul dotes on me, and imagines she has but a few

years left to live. This softens her. . . .

"There is a rumour--credit it, if you can!--that my Aunt Caroline

intends to espouse a Mr. Adam Rouffignac, a foreigner and a wine

merchant; I suppose (since he is reputed rich) to arm herself with

money to pay her lawyers. What _his_ object can be, poor man, I am

unable to conjecture. It is a strange world. While her ugly mother

mates at the age of fifty, Diana--who started with all the advantages

of looks--withers upon the maiden thorn. . . ."

His letters, every one, concluded with protests of affection.

She rejoiced in them. But it was now certain that he could not

return in time.

At length, as her day drew near, she wrote to him, conceiving this to

be her duty. She knew that he would take a blow from what she had to

tell, and covered it up cleverly, lightly covering all her own dread.

She hoped the child would be a boy. ("But why do I hope it?" she

asked herself as she penned the words, and thought of Dicky.)

She said nothing of Mr. Silk's treachery; nothing of her ostracism.

This indeed, during the later months, she recognised for the blessing

it was.

Towards the end she felt a strange longing to have her mother near,

close at hand, for her lying-in. The poor silly soul could not travel

alone. . . . Ruth considered this and hit on the happy inspiration of

inviting Mrs. Strongtharm to bring her. Tatty was useless, and among

the few women who had been kind Mrs. Strongtharm had been the

kindest.

Ruth sat down and penned a letter; and Mrs. Strongtharm, unable to

write, responded valiantly. She arrived in a cart, with Mrs.

Josselin at her side; and straightway alighting and neglecting Mrs.

Josselin, sailed into a seventh heaven of womanly fuss. She examined

the baby-clothes critically.

"Made with your own pretty hands--and with all this mort o' servants

tumblin' over one another to help ye. But 'tis nat'ral. . . .

It came to nothing with me, but I know. And expectin' a boy o'

course. . . . La! ye blushin' one, don't I know the way of it!"

When Ruth's travail came on her the three were gathered by

candle-light in Sir Oliver's dressing-room. Beyond the door,

attended by her maid and a man-midwife, Ruth shut her teeth upon her

throes. So the prologue opens.

PROLOGUE.

_Mrs. Josselin sits in an armchair, regarding the pattern of the

carpet with a silly air of self-importance; Mrs. Strongtharm in a

chair opposite. By the window Miss Quiney, pulling at her knuckles,

stares out through the dark panes. A clock strikes_.

_Miss Quiney (with a nervous start)_. Four o'clock . . .

nine hours. . . .

_Mrs. Strongtharm._ More. The pains took her soon after six. . . .

When her bell rang I looked at the clock. I remember.

_Miss Quiney_. My poor Ruth.

_Mrs. Strongtharm_. Eh? The first, o' course. . . . But a long

labour's often the best.

_Miss Quiney_. There has not been a sound for hours.

_Mrs. Strongtharm_. She's brave. They say, too, that a man-child,

if he's a real strong one, will wait for daybreak; but that's old

women's notions, I shouldn't wonder.

_Miss Quiney_. A man-child? You think it will be?

_Mrs. Strongtharm_. (She exchanges a glance with Mrs. Josselin, who

has looked up suddenly and nods.) Certain.

_Mrs. Josselin_. Certain, certain! I wonder, now, what they'll call

him! After Sir Oliver, perhaps. Her own father's name was Michael.

In my own family--that's the Pocock's--the men were mostly Williams

and Georges. Called after the Kings of England.

_Mrs. Strongtharm (yawns)_. Oliver Cromwell was as good as any king,

and better. Leastways my mar says so. For my part, I don't bother

my head wi' these old matters.

_Miss Quiney (tentatively)_. Do you know, I was half hoping it would

be a girl, just like my darling. _(To herself)_ God forgive me, when

I think--

_Mrs. Strongtharm (interrupting the thought)_. _She_ won't be hoping

for a girl. You don't understand these things, beggin' your pardon,

ma'am.

_Miss Quiney (meekly)_. No.

_Mrs. Josselin_. You don't neither of you understand. How should

you?

_Mrs. Strongtharm (stung)_. I understand as well as a fool, I should

hope! _(She turns to Miss Quiney.)_ 'Twas a nat'ral wish in ye,

ma'am, that such a piece o' loveliness should bear just such another.

But wait a while; they're young and there's time. . . . My lady wants

a boy first, like every true woman that loves her lord.

There's pride an' wonder in it. All her life belike she's felt

herself weak an' shivered to think of battles, and now, lo an'

behold, she's the very gates o' strength with an army marchin' forth

to conquer the world. Ha'n't ye never caught your breath an' felt

the tears swellin' when ye saw a regiment swing up the street?

_Miss Quiney_. Ah! . . . Is it like that?

_Mrs. Strongtharm_. It's like all that, an' more. . . . An' though

I've wet my pillow afore now with envy of it, I thank the Lord for

givin' a barren woman the knowledge.

_A pause_.

_Mrs. Josselin (with a silly laugh)_. What wonderful patterns they

make in the carpets nowadays! Look at this one, now--runnin' in and

out so that the eye can't hardly follow it; and all for my lord's

dressing-room! Cost a hundred pound, I shouldn't wonder.

_Mrs. Strongtharm_. T'cht!

_Mrs. Josselin_. He must be amazing fond of her. Fancy, my Ruth!

. . . It's a pity he's not home, to take the child.

_Mrs. Strongtharm_. Men at these times are best out o' the way.

_Mrs. Josselin_. When my first was born, Michael--that's my

husband--stayed home from sea o' purpose to take it. My first was a

girl. No, not Ruth; Ruth was born after my man died, and I had her

christened Ruth because some one told me it stood for "sorrow."

I had three before Ruth--a girl an' two boys, an' buried them all.

_Miss Quiney (listening)_. Hush!

_Mrs. Josselin (not hearing, immersed in her own mental flow)_.

If you call a child by a sorrowful name it's apt to ward off the

ill-luck. Look at Ruth now--christened in sorrow an' married, after

all, to the richest in the land!

_Miss Quiney (in desperation)_. Oh, hush! hush!

_A low moan comes from the next room. The women sit silent, their

faces white in the dawn that now comes stealing in at the window,

conquering the candle-light by little and little_.

_Mrs. Strongtharm_. I thought I heard a child's cry. . . . They cry

at once.

_Miss Quiney_. Ah? I fancied it, too--a feeble one.

_Mrs. Strongtharm (rising after a long pause)_. Something is

wrong. . . .

_As she goes to listen at the door, it opens, and the man-midwife

enters. His face is grave_.

_Mrs. Strongtharm and Miss Quiney ask him together, under their

breath_--Well?

_He answers:_ It is well. We have saved her life, I trust.

--And the child?

--A boy. It lived less than a minute. . . . Yet a shapely

child. . . .

_Miss Quiney clasps her hands. Shall she, within her breast, thank

God? She cannot. She hears the voice saying_,--

A very shapely child. . . . But the labour was difficult. There was

some pressure on the brain, some lesion.

They would have denied Ruth sight of the poor little body, but she

stretched out her arms for it and insisted. Then as she held it,

flesh of her flesh, to her breast and felt it cold, she--she, whose

courage had bred wonder in them, even awe--she who had smiled between

her pangs, murmuring pretty thanks--wailed low, and, burying her

face, lay still.

Chapter VI.

CHILDLESS MOTHER.

In the sad and cheated days that followed, she, with the milk of

motherhood wasting in her, saw with new eyes--saw many things

heretofore hidden from her.

She did not believe in any scriptural God. But she believed--she

could not help believing--in an awful Justice overarching all human

life with its law, as it overarched the very stars in heaven.

And this law she believed to rest in goodness, accessible to the pure

conscience, but stern against the transgressor.

Because she believed this, she had felt that the marriage rite, with

such an one as Mr. Silk for intercessor between her vows and a clean

Heaven, could be but a sullying of marriage. Yes, and she felt it

still; of this, at any rate, she was sure.

But in her pride--as truly she saw it, in her pride of chastity--she

had left the child out of account. _He_ had inherited the world to

face, not armed with her weapon of scorn. _He_ had not won freedom

through a scourge. He had grown to his fate in her womb, and in the

womb she had betrayed him.

She had been blind, blind! She had lived for her lover and herself.

To him and to her (it had seemed) this warm, transitory life

belonged; a fleeting space of time, a lodge leased to bliss. . . .

Now she fronted the truth, that between the selfish rapture of lovers

Heaven slips a child, smiling at the rapture, provident for the race.

Now she read the secret of woman's nesting instinct; the underlying

wisdom stirring the root of it, awaking passion not to satisfy

passion, but that the world may go on and on to its unguessed ends.

Now she could read ironically the courtship of man and maid, dallying

by river-paths, beside running water, overarched by boughs that had

protected a thousand such courtships. Each pair in turn--poor fools!

--had imagined the world theirs, compressed into their grasp; whereas

the wise world was merely flattering, coaxing them, preparing for the

child.

She should have been preparing, too. For what are women made but for

motherhood? She? She had had but a hand to turn, a word to utter,

and this child--healthily begotten, if ever child was, and to claim,

if ever child could, the best--has broken triumphing through the gate

of her travail. But she had betrayed him. The new-born spirit had

arrived expectant, had cast one look across the threshold, and with

one wail had fled. Through and beyond her answering wail, as she

laid her head on the pillow, she heard the lost feet, the small

betrayed feet, pattering away into darkness.

When she grew stronger, it consoled her a little to talk with Mrs.

Strongtharm; not confiding her regrets and self-reproaches, but

speculating much on this great book of Maternity into which she had

been given a glimpse. The metaphor was Mrs. Strongtharm's.

"Ay," said that understanding female, "a book you may call it, and a

wonderful one; written by all the women, white an' black, copper-skin

an' red-skin, that ever groped their way in it with pangs an' joys;

for every one writes in it as well as reads. What's more, 'tis all

in one language, though they come, as my man would say, from all the

airts o' Babel."

"I wonder," mused Ruth, "if somewhere in it there's a chapter would

tell me why, when I lie awake and think of my lost one, 'tis his

footsteps I listen for--feet that never walked!"

"Hush ye, now. . . . Isn't it always their feet, the darlings!

Don't the sound of it, more'n their voices, call me to door a dozen

times a day? . . . I never bore child; but I made garments in hope

o' one. Tell me, when you knitted his little boots, wasn't it

different from all the rest?"

"Ah, put them away!"

"To be sure, dearie, to be sure--all ready for the next."

"I shall never have another child."

Mrs. Strongtharm smiled tolerantly.

"Never," Ruth repeated; "never; I know it."

With the same assurance of prophesy she answered her lover on his

return, a bare two months later.

"But you must have known. . . . Even your letters kept it secret.

Yet, had you written, the next ship would have brought me. Surely

you did not doubt _that?_"

"No."

"Then why did you not tell me?"

It was the inevitable question. She had forestalled it so often in

her thoughts that, when uttered at last, it gave her a curious

sensation of re-enacting some long-past scene.

"I thought you did not care for children."

He was pacing the room. He halted, and stared at her in sheer

astonishment. Many a beautiful woman touches the height of her

beauty after the birth of her first child; and this woman had never

stood before him in loveliness that, passing comprehension, so nearly

touched the divine. But her perversity passed comprehension yet

farther.

"Do you call that an answer?" he demanded.

"No. . . . You asked, and I had to say something; but it is no

answer. Forgive me. It was the best I could find."

He still eyed her, between wrath and admiration.

"I think," she said, after a pause, "the true answer is just that I

did wrongly--wrongly for the child's sake."

"That's certain. And your own?"

"My own? That does not seem to me to count so much. . . . Neither of

us believe that a priest can hallow marriage; but once I felt that

the touch of a certain one could defile it."

"You have never before reproached me with that."

"Nor mean to now. I chose to run from him; but, dear, I do not ask

to run from the consequences."

"The blackguard has had his pretty revenge. Langton told me of it.

. . . All the prudes of Boston gather up their skirts, he says."

"What matter? Are we not happier missing them? . . . Honester,

surely, and by that much at any rate the happier."

"Marry me, and I promise to force them all back to your feet."

She laughed quietly, almost to herself, a little wearily. "Can you

not see, my dear lord, that I ask for no such triumph? It is good of

you--oh, I see how good!--to desire it for me. But did we want these

people in our forest days?"

"One cannot escape the world," he muttered.

"What? Not when the world is so quick to cast one out?"

"Ruth," he said, coming and standing close to her, "I do not believe

you have given me the whole answer even yet. The true reason,

please!"

"Must a woman give all her reasons? . . . She follows her fate, and

at each new turning she may have a dozen, all to be forgotten at the

next."

"I am sure you harbour some grudge--some reservation?" His eyes

questioned her.

She kept him waiting for some seconds.

"My lord, women have no consistency but in this--they are jealous

when they love. As your slave, I demand nothing; as your mistress, I

demand only you. But if you wished also to set me high among women,

you should have given me all or nothing. . . . You did not offer to

take me with you. I was not worthy to be shown to that proud folk,

your family."

"If you had breathed a wish, even the smallest hint of one--"

"I had no wish, save that you should offer it. I had only some

pride. I was--I am--well content; only do not come back and offer me

these women of Boston, or anything second best in your eyes, however

much the gift may cost you."

"Have it as you will," said he, after a long pause. "I was wrong,

and I beg your pardon. But I was less wrong than your jealousy

suspects. My family will welcome you. Forgive me that I thought it

well--that it might save you any chance of humiliation--to prepare

them."

She swept him a curtsy. "They are very good," she said.

He detected the irony, yet he persisted, holding his temper well in

control. "But all this presupposes, you see, that you marry me.

. . . Ruth, you confess that you were wrong, for the child's sake.

He is dead; and, on the whole, so much the better, poor mite!

But for another, should another be born--"

"There would be time," she said quietly. "But we shall never have

another."

She had hardened strangely. It was as if the milk of motherhood,

wasting in her, had packed itself in a crust about her heart.

He loved her; she never ceased to love him; but whereas under the

public scourge something had broken, letting her free of opinion, to

love the good and hate the evil for their own sakes, under this

second and more mysterious visitation, she kept her courage indeed,

but certainty was hers no longer; nor was she any longer free of

opinion, but hardened her heart against it consciously, as against an

enemy.

Not otherwise can I account for the image of Ruth Josselin--my Lady

Vyell--Lady Good-for-Nothing--as under these various names it flits,

for the next few years, through annals, memoirs, correspondence,

scandalous chronicles; now vindicated, now glanced at with unseemly

nods and becks, anon passionately denounced; now purely shining, now

balefully, above and between the clouds of those times; but always a

star and an object of wonder.

"In all Massachusetts," writes the Reverend Hiram Williams, B.D., in

his tract entitled _A Shoe Over Edom_, "was no stronghold of Satan to

compare with that built on a slope to the rearward of Boston, by Sir

O--V--, Baronet. Here with a woman, born of this Colony, of passing

wit and beauty (both alike the dower of the Evil One), he kept house

to the scandal of all devout persons, entertaining none but professed

Enemies of our Liberties, Atheists, Gamesters." Here one may pause

and suspect the reverend castigator of confusing several dislikes in

one argument. It is done sometimes, even in our own day, by

religious folk who polemise in politics. "Cards they played on the

Sabbath. Plays they rehearsed too, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Congreve

and others, whose names may guarantee their lewdness. . . . The

woman, I have said, was fair; but of that sort their feet go down

ever _to_ Hell. . . ."

"My Noll's _Belle Sauvage_," writes Langton to Walpole, "continues a

riddle. I shall never solve it; yet 'till I have solved it, expect

me not. 'Tis certain she loves him; and because she loves him, her

loyalty allows not hint of sadness even to me, his best friend.

Guess why she likes me? 'Tis because (I am sure of it) even in the

old clouded days I never took money from Noll, nor borrowed a

shilling that I didn't repay within the week. She is a puzzle, I

say; but somehow the key lies in this--_She is a woman that pays her

debts_. . . .

"They sail for Europe next spring; but not, as I understand for

England, where his family may not receive her, and where by

consequence he will not expose her to their slights. If I have made

you impatient to set eyes on her, you must e'enpack and pay that

long-promised visit to Florence. She is worth the pilgrimage."

They sailed in the early spring of 1752--Langton with them--and duly

came to port in the Tagus. From Lisbon, after a short stay, they

travelled to Paris, and from Paris across Switzerland to Italy,

visiting in turn Turin, Venice, Ravenna, Florence, Rome, Naples, and

returning from that port to Lisbon, where (the situation so charmed

him) Sir Oliver bought and furnished a villa overlooking the Tagus.

As she passes through Paris we get a glimpse of her in the Memoirs of

that agreeable rattle, Arnauld de Jouy:--

"I must not forget to tell of an amusing little comedy of error

played at the Opera-house this season (1752). All Paris was agog to

see the famous English--or rather Irish--beauty, my Lady Coventry,

newly arrived in the Capital. She was one of the Gunning sisters,

over whom all London had already lost its head so wildly that I am

assured a shoemaker made no small sum by exhibiting their

_pantoufles_ to the porters and chairmen at three sous a gaze. . . .

On a certain night, then, it was rumoured that she would pay her

first visit to the Opera, but none could say whose box she intended

to honour. . . . It turned out to be the Duc de Luxembourg's, and

upon my lady's entrance--a little late--the whole audience rose to

its feet in homage, though Visconti happened just then to be midway

in an _aria_. The singer faltered at the interruption, perplexed;

her singing stopped, and lifting her eyes to the lines of boxes she

dropped a sweeping curtsy--to the opposite side of the house! . . .

All eyes turn, and behold! right opposite to Beauty Number One, into

the box of Mme. the Marechale de Lowendahl there has just entered a

Beauty Number Two, not one whit less fair--so regally fair indeed

that the audience, yet standing, turn from one to the other,

uncertain which to salute. Nor were they resolved when the act

closed.

"Meantime my Lady Coventry (for in truth the first-comer was she) has

sent her husband out to the _foyer_, to make enquiries. He comes

back and reports her to be the lady of Sir Oliver Vyell, a great

American Governor [But here we detect de Jouy in a slight error]

newly arrived from his Province; that she is by birth an American,

and has never visited Europe before. 'She must be Pocahontas

herself, then,' says the Gunning, and very prettily sends across

after the second Act, desiring the honour of her acquaintance.

Nay, this being granted, she goes herself to the Marechale's box, and

the pair sit together in full view of all--a superb challenge, and

made with no show (as I believe, with no feeling) of jealousy. The

audience is entranced. . . . Report said later that my Lady Coventry,

who was given to these small indiscretions, asked almost in her first

breath, yet breathlessly, her rival's age. Her rival smiled and told

it. 'Then you are older than I--but how long have you been married?'

This, too, her rival told her. 'Then,' sighed the Gunning, 'perhaps

you do not love your lord as I love my Cov. It _is_ wearing to the

looks; but 'faith, I cannot help it!'"

From Lisbon Sir Oliver paid several flying visits to England, where

his suit against Lady Caroline still dragged. Nor was it concluded

until the summer of 1754, when the _Gentleman's Magazine_ yields us

the following:--

"_June 4_. A cause between Sir Oliver Vyell, baronet, plaintiff, and

the lady of the late Sir Thomas, defendant, was tried in the Court of

King's Bench by a special jury. The subject of the litigation was a

will of Sir Thomas, suspected to be made when he was not of sound

mind; and it appeared that he had made three--one in 1741, another in

1744, and a third in 1746. In the first only a slender provision was

made for his lady, by the second a family estate in Devonshire, of

2,000 pounds per annum, was given her for her life, and by the third

the whole estate real and personal was left to be disposed of at her

discretion without any provision for the heir-at-law. The jury,

after having withdrawn for about an hour and a half, set aside the

last and confirmed the second. In a hearing before the Lord

Chancellor some time afterwards in relation to the costs, it was

deemed that the lady should pay them all, both at common law and in

Chancery."

Thus we see our Ruth by glimpses in these years which were far from

being the best or the happiest of her life--"an innocent life, yet

far astray."

But one letter of hers abides, kept in contrition by the woman to

whom she wrote it, and in this surely the noble soul of her mounts

like a star and shines, clear above the wreck of her life.

"MY DEAR MRS. HARRY,--"

"Let there be few words between us. My child

did not live, and I shall never bear my lord another; therefore,

outside of your feelings and mine, what you did or left undone

matters not at all in this world. You talk of the next, and there

you go beyond me; but if there be a next world, and my forgiveness

can help you there, why you had it long ago! . . . 'You reproach

yourself constantly,' you say; 'You should have told him and you

withheld the letter;' 'You did wickedly'--and the rest. Oh, my dear,

will you not see that I have been a mother, too, and understand?

In your place I might have done the same. Yes? No? At any rate I

should have known the temptation.

"Yours affectionately,"

"RUTH."

The law business ended, she and Sir Oliver sailed for Boston and

spent a few weeks at Eagles. He had resigned the Collectorship of

Customs, but with no intent to return and make England his home.

His attachment to Eagles had grown; he was perpetually making fresh

plans to enlarge and adorn it; and he proposed henceforth, laying

aside all official cares, to spend his summers in New England, his

winters in the softer climate of Lisbon.

BOOK V.

LISBON AND AFTER.

Chapter I.

ACT OF FAITH.

"How is it possible for people beholding that glorious Body to

worship any Being but Him who created it!"

Upon the stroke of nine the procession filed forth into the Square.

It was headed by about a hundred Dominican friars, bearing the banner

of their founder. The banner displayed a Cross betwixt an olive tree

and a sword, with the motto _Justitia et Misericordia_.

After the Dominicans walked five penitents; each with a sergeant, or

Familiar, attending. Two of the five wore black mitres, three were

bareheaded. All walked barefoot, clad in black sleeveless coats, and

each carried a long wax candle. These had escaped the extreme

sentence; and after them came one, a woman, who had escaped it also,

but narrowly and as by fire. In token of this her black robe was

painted over with flames, having their points turned downward.

Close behind followed three men on whose san-benitos the flames

pointed upward. These were being led to execution, and two of them

who carried boards on their breasts, painted with dogs and serpents,

were to die by fire for having professed doctrines contrary to the

Faith; the third, who carried no board, was a "Relapsed," and might

look forward to the privilege of being strangled before being cast to

the flame. To each of these three was assigned, in addition to the

Familiar, a couple of Jesuit priests, to walk beside him and exhort

him.

The man who was to be strangled came through the gateway of the

Inquisition Office with his gaze bent to the ground, apparently

insensible to the mob of sightseers gathered in the Square.

The doomed man who followed--a mere youth, and, by his face,

a Jew--stared about him fiercely and eagerly. The third was an old

man, with ragged hair and beard, and a complexion bleached by long

imprisonment in the dark. He halted, blinking, uncertain how to

plant his steps. Then, feeling rather than seeing the sun, he

stretched up both arms to it, dropping his taper, calling aloud as

might a preacher, "How is it possible for people, beholding that

glorious Body, to worship any Being but Him who created it!"

A Jesuit at his side flung an arm across the old man's mouth; and as

quickly the Familiar whipped out a cloth, pulled his head back, and

gagged him. The young Jew had turned and was staring, still with his

fierce, eager look. He was wheeled about and plucked forward.

Next through the gateway issued a troupe of Familiars on horseback,

some of them nobles of the first families in Portugal; after them the

Inquisitors and other Officers of the Court upon mules; last of all,

amid a train of nobles, the Inquisitor-General himself on a white

horse led by two grooms: his delicate hands resting on the reins, his

face a pale green by reason of the sunlight falling on it through a

silken scarf of that colour pendant over the brim of his immense

black hat.

All this passed before Ruth's eyes, and close, as she sat in the

mule-chaise beside Sir Oliver. She would have drawn the leathern

curtains, but he had put out a hand forbidding this.

She could not at any rate have escaped hearing the old man's

exclamation; for their chaise was jammed in the crowd beside the

gateway. Her ears still kept the echo of his vibrant voice; almost

she was persuaded that his eyes had singled her out from the crowd.

--And why not? Had not she, also, cause to know what cruelties men

will commit in the name of religion?

Her heart was wrathful as well as pitiful. Her lord had given her no

warning of the auto-da-fe, and she now suspected that in suggesting

this Sunday morning drive he had purposely decoyed her to it.

Presently, as the crowd began to clear, he confirmed the suspicion.

"Since we are here, we may as well see the sp--" He was going to say

"sport," but, warned by a sudden stiffening of her body, he corrected

the word to "spectacle." "They erect a grand stand on these

occasions; or, if you prefer, we can bribe them to give room for the

chaise."

He bent forward and called to the coachman, "Turn the mules' heads,

and follow!"

"Indeed I will not," she said firmly. "Do you go--if such crimes

amuse you. . . . For me, I shall walk home."

He shrugged his shoulders. "It is the custom of the country. . . .

But, as for your walking, I cannot allow it for a moment. Juan shall

drive you home."

She glanced at him. His eyes were fixed on the opposite side of the

square, and she surprised in them a look of recognition not intended

for her. Following the look, she saw a chaise much like their own,

moving slowly with the throng, and in it a woman seated.

Ruth knew her. She was Donna Maria, Countess of Montalagre; and of

late Sir Oliver's name had been much coupled with hers.

This Ruth did not know; but she had guessed for some time that he was

unfaithful. She had felt no curiosity at all to learn the woman's

name. Now an accident had opened her eyes, and she saw.

Her first feeling was of slightly contemptuous amusement.

Donna Maria, youthful wife of an aged and enfeebled lord, passed for

one of the extremely devout. She had considerable beauty, but of an

order Ruth could easily afford to scorn. It was the _bizarrerie_ of

the affair that tickled her, almost to laughter--Donna Maria's

down-dropt gaze, the long lashes veiling eyes too holy-innocent for

aught but the breviary; and he--he of all men!--playing the lover to

this little dunce, with her empty brain, her narrow religiosity!

But on afterthought, she found it somewhat disgusting too.

"I thank you," she said. "Juan shall drive me home, then. It will

not, I hope, inconvenience you very much, since I see the Countess of

Montalagre's carriage across the way. No doubt she will offer you a

seat."

He glanced at her, but her face was cheerfully impassive.

"That's an idea!" he said. "I will run and make interest with her."

He alighted, and gave Juan the order to drive home. He lifted his

hat, and left her. She saw Donna Maria's start of simulated

surprise. Also she detected, or thought she detected, the sly

triumph of a woman who steals a man.

All this she had leisure to observe; for Juan, a Gallician, was by no

means in a hurry to turn the mules' heads for home. He had slewed

his body about, and was gazing wistfully after the throng.

"Your Excellency, it would be a thousand pities!"

"Hey?"

"There has not been a finer burning these two years, they tell me.

And that old blasphemer's beard, when they set a light to it! . . .

I am a poor Gallego, your Excellency, and at home get so few chances

of enjoyment. Also I have dropped my whip, and it is trodden on,

broken. In the crowd at the Terreiro de Paco I may perchance borrow

another."

Ruth alighted in a blaze of wrath.

"Wretched man," she commanded, "climb down!"

"Your Excellency--"

"Climb down! You shall go, as your betters have gone, to feed your

eyes with these abominations. . . . Nay, how shall I scold you, who

do what your betters teach? But climb down. I will drive the mules

myself."

"His Excellency will murder me when he hears of it. But, indeed, was

ever such a thing heard of?" Nevertheless the man was plainly in two

minds.

"It is not for you to argue, but to obey my orders."

He descended, still protesting. She mounted to his seat, and took

the reins and whip.

"The brutes are spirited, your Excellency. For the love of God have

a care of them!"

For answer she flicked them with the whip--he had lied about the

broken whip--and left him staring.

The streets were deserted. All Lisbon had trooped to the auto-da-fe.

If any saw and wondered at the sight of a lady driving like a mere

_bolhero_, she heeded not. The mules trotted briskly, and she kept

them to it.

She had ceased to be amused, even scornfully. As she drove up the

slope of Buenos Ayres--the favourite English suburb, where his villa

stood overlooking Tagus--a deep disgust possessed her. It darkened

the sunshine. It befouled, it tarnished, the broad and noble mirror

of water spread far below.

"Were all men beasts, then?"

Chapter II.

DONNA MARIA.

They would dine at four o'clock. On Sundays Sir Oliver chose to dine

informally with a few favoured guests; and these to-day would make

nine, not counting Mr. Langton, who might be reckoned one of the

household.

By four o'clock all had arrived--the British envoy, Mr. Castres, with

his lady; Lord Charles Douglas, about to leave Lisbon after a visit

of pleasure; Mrs. Hake, a sister of Governor Hardy of New York--she,

with an invalid husband and two children, occupied a villa somewhat

lower down the slope of Buenos Ayres; white-haired old Colonel

Arbuthnot, _doyen_ of the English residents; Mr. Hay, British Consul,

and Mr. Raymond, one of the chiefs of the English factory, with their

wives. . . . Ruth looked at the clock. All were here save only their

host, Sir Oliver.

Mr. Langton, with Lord Charles Douglas, had returned from the

auto-da-fe. Like his friend George Selwyn--friend these many years

by correspondence only--Mr. Langton was a dilettante in executions

and like horrors, and had taken Lord Charles to the show, to initiate

him. He reported that they had left Sir Oliver in a press of the

crowd, themselves hurrying away on foot. He would doubtless arrive

in a few minutes. Mr. Langton said nothing of the executions.

Mr. Castres, too, ignored them. He knew, of course, that the

auto-da-fe had taken place, and that the Court had witnessed it in

state from a royal box. But his business, as tactful Envoy of a

Protestant country, was to know nothing of this. He went on talking

with Mrs. Hake, who--good soul--actually knew nothing of it.

Her children absorbed all her care; and having heard Miriam, the

younger, cough twice that morning, she was consulting the Envoy on

the winter climate of Lisbon--was it, for instance, prophylactic

against croup.

At five minutes past four Sir Oliver arrived. Before apologising he

stood aside ceremoniously in the doorway to admit a companion--the

Countess of Montalegre.

"I have told them," said he as Donna Maria tripped forward demurely

to shake hands, "to lay for the Countess. The business was long, by

reason of an interminable sermon, and at the end there was a crush at

the exit from the Terreiro de Paco and a twenty good minutes' delay--

impossible to extricate oneself. Had I not persuaded the Countess to

drive me all the way home, my apologies had been a million instead of

the thousand I offer."

Had he brought the woman in defiance? Or was it merely to discover

how much, if anything, Ruth suspected? If to discover, his design

had no success. Ruth saw--it needed less than half a glance--Batty

Langton bite his lip and turn to the window. Lord Charles wore a

faintly amused smile. These two knew, at any rate. For the others

she could not be sure. She greeted Donna Maria with a gentle

courtesy.

"We will delay dinner with pleasure," she said, "while my

waiting-woman attends on you."

During the few minutes before the Countess reappeared she conversed

gaily with one and another of her guests. Her face had told him

nothing, and her spirit rose on the assurance that, at least, she was

puzzling him.

Yet all the while she asked herself the same questions. Had he done

this to defy her? Or to sound her suspicions?

In part he was defying her; as he proved at table by talking freely

of the auto-da-fe. Donna Maria sat at his right hand, and added a

detail here and there to his description. The woman apparently had

no pity in her for the unhappy creatures she had seen slowly and

exquisitely murdered. Were they not heretics, serpents, enemies of

the true Faith?

"But ah!" she cried once with pretty affectation. "You make me

forget my manners! . . . Am I not, even now, talking of these things

among Lutherans? Your good lady, for instance?"

At the far end of the table, Ruth--speaking across Mr. Castres and

engaging Mrs. Hake's ear, lest it should be attracted by this

horrible conversation--discussed the coming war with France.

She upheld that the key of it lay in America. He maintained that

India held it--"Old England, you may trust her; money's her blood,

and the blood she scents in a fight. She'll fasten on India like a

bulldog." Colonel Arbuthnot applauded. "Where the treasure is,"

quoted Ruth, "there the heart is also. You give it a good British

paraphrase. . . . But her real blood--some of the best of it--beats

in America. There the French challenge her, and she'll have, spite

of herself, to take up the challenge. Montcalm! . . . He means to

build an empire there." "Pardon me"--Mr. Castres smiled

indulgently--"you are American born, and see all things American in

a high light. We skirmish there . . . backwoods fighting, you may

call it."

"With a richer India at the back of the woods. Oh! I trust England,

and Pitt, when his hour comes. England reminds me of Saul, always

going forth to discover a few asses and always in the end discovering

a kingdom. Other nations build the dream, dreams being no gift of

hers. Then she steps in, thrusts out the dreamers, inherits the

reality. America, though you laugh at it, has cost the best dreaming

of two nations--Spain first, and now France--and the best blood of

both. Bating Joan of Arc--a woman--France hasn't bred a finer spirit

than Montcalm's since she bred Froissart's men. But to what end?

England will break that great heart of his."

She was talking for talking's sake, only anxious to divert Mrs.

Hake's ears from the conversation her own ears caught, only too

plainly.

Mrs. Hake said, "I prefer to believe Mr. Castres. My brother writes

that every one is quitting New York, and I'm only thankful-if war

must come, over there--that we've taken our house on a three years'

lease only. No one troubles about Portugal, and I must say that I've

never found a city to compare with Lisbon. The suburbs! . . . Why,

this very morning I saw the city itself one pall of smoke.

You'd have thought a main square was burning. Yet up here, in Buenos

Ayres, it might have been midsummer. . . . The children, playing in

the garden, called me out to look at the smoke. _Was_ there a fire?

I must ask Sir Oliver."

Mrs. Hake had raised her voice; but Ruth managed to intercept the

question.

All the while she was thinking, thinking to herself.--"And he, who

can speak thus, once endured shame to shield me! He laughs at things

infinitely crueller. . . . Yet they differ in degree only from what

then stirred him to fight. . . ."

--"Have I then so far worsened him? Is the blame mine?"

--"Or did the curse but delay to work in him?--in him, my love and my

hero? Was it foreordained to come to this, though I would at any

time have given my life to prevent it?"

Again she thought.--"I have been wrong in holding religion to be the

great cause why men are cruel,--as in believing that free-thought

must needs humanise us all. Strange! that I should discover my error

on this very day has showed me men being led by religion to deaths of

torture. . . . Yet an error it must be. For see my lord--hear how he

laughs as cruelly, even, as the _devote_ at his elbow!"

They had loitered some while over dessert, and Ruth's eye sought

Donna Maria's, to signal her before rising and leaving the gentlemen

to their wine. But Donna Maria was running a preoccupied glance

around the table and counting with her fingers. . . . Presently the

glance grew distraught and the silly woman fell back in her chair

with a cry.

"Jesus! We are thirteen!"

"Faith, so we are," said Sir Oliver with an easy laugh, after

counting.

"And I the uninvited one! The calamity must fall on _me_--there is

no other way!"

"But indeed there is another way," said Ruth, rising with a smile.

"In my country the ill-luck falls on the first to leave the table.

And who should that be, here, but the hostess?"

Chapter III.

EARTHQUAKE.

The auto-da-fe was but a preliminary to the festivities and great

processions of All Saints. For a whole week Lisbon had been sanding

its squares and streets, painting its signboards, draping its

balconies and windows to the fourth and fifth stories with hangings

of crimson damask. Street after street displayed this uniform vista

of crimson, foil for the procession, with its riot of gorgeous

dresses, gold lace, banners, precious stones.

Ruth leaned on the balustrade of her villa garden, and looked down

over the city, from which, made musical by distance, the bells of

thirty churches called to High Mass. Their chorus floated up to her

on the delicate air; and--for the chimneys of Lisbon were smokeless,

the winter through, in all but severest weather, and the citizens did

their cooking over braziers--each belfry stood up distinct, edged

with gold by the brilliant morning sun. Aloft the sky spread its

blue bland and transparent; far below her Tagus mirrored it in a lake

of blue. Many vessels rode at anchor there. The villas to right and

left and below her, or so much of them as rose out of their

embosoming trees, took the sunlight on walls of warm yellow, with

dove-coloured shadows.

She was thinking. . . . He had tried to discover how much she

suspected; and when neither in word or look would she lower her

guard, he had turned defiant. This very morning he had told her

that, if she cared to use it, a carriage was at her disposal.

For himself, the Countess of Montalegre had offered him a seat in

hers, and he had accepted. . . . He had told her this at the last

moment, entering her room in the full court dress the state

procession demanded; and he had said it with a studied carelessness,

not meeting her eyes.

She had thanked him, and added that she was in two minds about going.

She was not dressed for the show, and doubted if her maid could array

her in time.

"We go to the Cathedral," said he. "I should recommend that or the

Church of St. Vincent, where, some say, the Mass is equally fine."

"If I go, I shall probably content myself with the procession."

"If that's so, I've no doubt Langton will escort you. He likes

processions, though he prefers executions. To a religious service I

doubt your bribing him."

Upon this they had parted, each well aware that, but a few weeks ago,

this small expedition would have been planned together, discussed,

shared, as a matter of course. At parting he kissed her hand--he had

always exquisite manners; and she wished him a pleasant day with a

voice quite cheerful and unconstrained.

From the sunlit terrace she looked almost straight down upon the

garden of Mrs. Hake's villa. The two little girls were at play

there. She heard their voices, shrill above the sound of the church

bells. Now and again she caught a glimpse of them, at hide-and-seek

between the ilexes.

She was thinking. If only fate had given her children such as these!

. . . As it was, she could show a brave face. But what could the

future hold?

She heard their mother calling to them. They must have obeyed and

run to her, for the garden fell silent of a sudden. The bells, too,

were ceasing--five or six only tinkled on.

She leaned forward over the balustrade to make sure that the children

were gone. As she did so, the sound of a whimper caught her ear.

She looked down, and spoke soothingly to a small dog, an Italian

greyhound, a pet of Mr. Langton's, that had run to her trembling, and

was nuzzling against her skirt for shelter. She could not think what

ailed the creature. Belike it had taken fright at a noise below the

terrace--a rumbling noise, as of a cart mounting the hill heavily

laden with stones.

The waggon, if waggon it were, must be on the roadway to the left.

Again she leaned forward over the balustrade. A faint tremor ran

through the stonework on which her arms rested. For a moment she

fancied it some trick of her own pulse.

But the tremor was renewed. The pulsation was actually in the

stonework. . . . And then, even while she drew back, wondering, the

terrace under her feet heaved as though its pavement rested on a wave

of the sea. She was thrown sideways, staggering; and while she

staggered, saw the great flagstones of the terrace raise themselves

on end, as notes of a harpsichord when the fingers withdraw their

pressure.

She would have caught again at the balustrade. But it had vanished,

or rather was vanishing under her gaze, toppling into the garden

below. The sound of the falling stones was caught up in a long, low

rumble, prolonged, swelling to a roar from the city below. Again the

ground heaved, and beneath her--she had dropped on her knees, and

hung, clutching the little dog, staring over a level verge where the

balustrade had run--she saw Lisbon fall askew, this way and that: the

roofs collapsing, like a toy structure of cards. Still the roar of

it swelled on the ear; yet, strange to say, the roar seemed to have

nothing to do with the collapse, which went on piecemeal, steadily,

like a game. The crescendo was drowned in a sharper roar and a crash

close behind her--a crash that seemed the end of all things. . . .

The house! She had not thought of the house. Turning, she faced a

cloud of dust, and above it saw, before the dust stung her eyes,

half-blinding her, that the whole front of the villa had fallen

outwards. It had, in fact, fallen and spread its ruin within two

yards of her feet. Had the terrace been by that much narrower, she

must have been destroyed. As it was, above the dust, she gazed,

unhurt, into a house from which the front screen had been sharply

caught away, as a mask snatched from a face.

By this the horror had become a dream to her. As in a dream she saw

one of her servants--a poor little under-housemaid, rise to her knees

from the floor where she had been flung, totter to the edge of the

house-front, and stand, piteously gazing down over a height

impossible to leap.

A man's voice shouted. Around the corner of the house, from the

stables, Mr. Langton came running, by a bare moment escaping death

from a mass of masonry that broke from the parapet, and crashed to

the ground close behind his heels.

"Lady Vyell! Where is Lady Vyell?"

Ruth called to him, and he scrambled towards her over the gaping

pavement. He called as he came, but she could distinguish no words,

for within the last few seconds another and different sound had grown

on the ear--more terrible even than the first roar of ruin.

"My God! look!" He was at her side, shouting in her ear, for a wind

like a gale was roaring past them down from the hills. With one hand

he steadied her against it, lest it should blow her over the verge.

His other pointed out over Tagus.

She stared. She did not comprehend; she only saw that a stroke more

awful than any was falling, or about to fall. The first convulsion

had lifted the river bed, leaving the anchored ships high and dry.

Some lay canted almost on their beam ends. As the bottom sank again

they slowly righted, but too late; for the mass of water, flung to

the opposite shore, and hurled back from it, came swooping with a

refluent wave, that even from this high hillside was seen to be

monstrous. It fell on their decks, drowning and smothering: their

masts only were visible above the smother, some pointing firmly,

others tottering and breaking. Some rose no more. Others, as the

great wave passed on, lurched up into sight again, broken, dismasted,

wrenched from their moorings, spinning about aimlessly, tossed like

corks amid the spume; and still, its crest arching, its deep note

gathering, the great wave came on straight for the harbour quay.

Ruth and Langton, staring down on this portent, did not witness the

end; for a dense cloud of dust, on this upper side dun-coloured

against the sunlight, interposed itself between them and the city,

over which it made a total darkness. Into that darkness the great

wave passed and broke; and almost in the moment of its breaking a

second tremor shook the hillside. Then, indeed, wave and earthquake

together made universal roar, drowning the last cry of thousands; for

before it died away earthquake and wave together had turned the

harbour quay of Lisbon bottom up, and engulfed it. Of all the

population huddled there to escape from death in the falling streets,

not a corpse ever rose to the surface of Tagus.

But Ruth saw nothing of this. She clung to Langton, and his arm was

about her. She believed, with so much of her mind as was not

paralysed, that the end of the world was come.

As the infernal hubbub died away on the dropping wind, she glanced

back over her shoulder at the house. The poor little _criada-moga_

was no longer there, peering over the edge she dared not leap. Nay,

the house was no longer there--only three gaunt walls, and between

them a heap where rooms, floors, roof had collapsed together.

Of a sudden complete silence fell about them. As her eyes travelled

along the edge of the terrace where the balustrade had run, but ran

no longer, she had a sensation of standing on the last brink of the

world, high over nothingness. Langton's arm still supported her.

"As safe here as anywhere," she heard him saying. "For the chance

that led you here, thank whatever Gods may be."

"But I must find him!" she cried.

"Eh? Noll?--find Noll? Dear lady, small chance of that!"

"I must find him."

"He was to attend High Mass in the Cathedral--"

"Yes . . . with that woman. What help could such an one bring to him

if--if--Oh, I must find him, I say!"

"The Cathedral," he repeated. "You are brave; let your own eyes look

for it." He had withdrawn his arm.

"Yet I must search, and you shall search with me. You were his

friend, I think?"

"Indeed, I even believed so. . . . I was thinking of _you_. . . .

It is almost certain death. Do you say that he is worth it?"

"Do you fear death?" she asked.

"Moderately," he answered. "Yet if you command me, I come; if you

go, I go with you."

"Come."

Chapter IV.

THE SEARCH.

They set out hand in hand. The small dog ran with them.

Even the beginning of the descent was far from easy, for the high

walls that had protected the villa-gardens of Buenos Ayres lay in

heaps, cumbering the roadway, and in places obliterating it.

About a hundred and fifty yards down the road, by what had been the

walled entrance to the Hakes' garden, they sighted two forlorn small

figures--the six and five year old Hake children, Sophie and Miriam,

who recognised Ruth and, running, clung to her skirts.

"Mamma! Where is mamma?"

"Dears, where did you leave her last?"

"She pushed us out through the gateway, here, and told us to stand

in the middle of the road while she ran back to call daddy. She said

no stones could fall on us here. But she has been gone ever so long,

and we can't hear her calling at all."

While Ruth gathered them to her and attempted to console them,

Mr. Langton stepped within the ruined gateway. In a minute or so he

came back, and his face was grave.

She noted it. "What can we do with them?" she asked, and added with

a haggard little smile, "I had actually begun to tell them to run up

to our house and wait, forgetting--"

"They had best wait here, as their mother advised."

"It is terrible!"

He lifted his shoulders slightly. "If once we begin--"

"No, you are right," she said, with a shuddering glance down the

road; and bade the little ones rest still as their mother had

commanded. She was but going down to the city (she said) to see if

the danger was as terrible down there. The two little ones cried and

clung to her; but she put them aside firmly, promising to look for

their mamma when she returned. Langton did not dare to glance at her

face.

The dark cloud dust met them, a gunshot below, rolling up the

hillside from the city. They passed within the fringe of it, and at

once the noonday sun was darkened for them. In the unnatural light

they picked their way with difficulty.

"She was lying close within the entrance," said Langton.

"The gateway arch must have fallen on her as she turned. . . . One

side of her skull was broken. I pulled down some branches and

covered her."

"Your own face is bleeding."

"Is it?" He put up a hand. "Yes--I remember, a brick struck me, on

my way from the stables--no, a beam grazed me as I ran for the

back-stairs, meaning to get you out that way. The stairs were

choked. . . . I made sure you were in the house. The horses . . .

have you ever heard a horse scream?"

She shivered. At a turn of the road they came full in view of the

black pall stretching over the city. Flames shot up through it, here

and there. Lisbon was on fire in half a dozen places at least; and

now for the first time she became aware that the wind had sprung up

again and was blowing violently. She could not remember when it

first started: the morning had been still, the Tagus--she recalled

it--unruffled.

At the very foot of the hill they came on the first of three fires--

two houses blazing furiously, and a whole side-street doomed, if the

wind should hold. Among the ruins of a house, right in the face of

the fire, squatted a dozen persons, men and women, all dazed by

terror. The women had opened their parasols--possibly to screen

their faces from the heat--albeit they might have escaped this quite

easily by shifting their positions a few paces. None of these folk

betrayed the smallest interest in Ruth or in Langton. Indeed, they

scarcely lifted their eyes.

The suburbs were deserted, for the earthquake had surprised all

Lisbon in a pack, crowded within its churches, or in its central

streets and squares. Yet the emptiness of what should have been the

thoroughfares astonished them scarcely less than did the piles of

masonry, breast-high in places, over which they picked their way in

the uncanny twilight. They had scarcely passed beyond the glare of

the burning houses when Langton stumbled over a corpse--the first

they encountered. He drew Ruth aside from it, entreating her in a

low voice to walk warily. But she had seen.

"We shall see many before we reach the Cathedral," she said quietly.

They stumbled on, meeting with few living creatures; and these few

asked them no questions, but went by, stumbling, with hands groping,

as though they moved in a dream. A voice wailed "Jesus! Jesus!" and

the cry, issuing Heaven knew whence, shook Ruth's nerve for a moment.

Once Langton plucked her by the arm and pointed to some men with

torches moving among the ruins. She supposed that they were seeking

for the dead; but they were, in fact, incendiaries, already at work

and in search of loot.

She passed three or four of these blazing houses, some kindled no

doubt by incendiaries, but others by natural consequences of the

earthquake; for the kitchens, heated for the great feast, had

communicated their fires to the falling timberwork on which the

houses were framed; and by this time the city was on fire in at least

thirty different places. The scorched smell mingled everywhere with

an odour of sulphur.

There were rents in the streets, too--chasms, half-filled with

rubble, reaching right across the roadway. After being snatched back

by Langton from the brink of one of these chasms, Ruth steeled her

heart to be thankful when a burning house shed light for her

footsteps. At the houses themselves, after an upward glance or two,

she dared not look again. They leaned this way and that, the fronts

of some thrust outward at an angle to forbid any but the foolhardiest

from passing underneath.

But, indeed, they had little time to look aloft as they penetrated to

streets littered, where the procession had passed, with wrecked

chaises, dead mules, human bodies half-buried and half-burnt, charred

limbs protruding awkwardly from heaps of stones. Here, by ones and

twos, pedestrians tottered past, crying that the world was at an end;

here, on a heap where, belike, his shop had stood, a man knelt

praying aloud; here a couple of enemies met by chance, seeking their

dead, and embraced, beseeching forgiveness for injuries past.

These sights went by Ruth as in a dream; and as in a dream she heard

the topple and crack of masonry to right and left. Langton guided

her; and haggard, perspiring, they bent their heads to the strange

wind now howling down the street as through a funnel, and foot by

foot battled their way.

The wind swept over their bent heads, carrying flakes of fire to

start new conflagrations. The stream of these flakes became so

steady that Ruth began to count on it to guide her. She began to

think that amid all this dissolution to right and left, some charm

must be protecting them both, when, as he stretched a hand to help

her across a mound of rubble she saw him turn, cast a look up and

fall back beneath a rush of masonry. A flying brick struck her on

the shoulder, cutting the flesh. For the rest, she stood unscathed;

but her companion lay at her feet, with legs buried deep, body buried

to the ribs.

"Your hand!" she gasped.

He stretched it out feebly, but withdrew it in an agony; for the

stones crushed his bowels.

"You are hurt?"

"Killed." He contrived a smile. "Not so wide as a church door," he

quoted, looking up at her strangely through the wan light; "but

'twill serve."

"My friend! and I cannot help you!" She plucked vainly at the mass

of stones burying his legs.

He gasped on his anguish, and controlled it.

"Let be these silly bricks. . . . They belong to some grocer's

kitchen-chimney, belike--but they have killed me, and may as well

serve for my tomb. Reach me your hand."

He took it and thrust it gently within the breast of his waistcoat.

There, guided by him, her fingers closed on the handle of a tiny

stiletto.

"The sheath too . . . it is sewn by a few stitches only." He looked

up into her eyes. "You are too beautiful to be wandering these

streets alone."

"I understand," she said gravely.

"Now go." He pressed the back of her hand to his lips, and released

it.

"Can I do nothing?" she asked, with a hard sob.

"Yes . . . 'tis unlucky, they say, to accept a knife without paying

for it. One kiss. . . . You may tell Noll. Is it too high a price?"

She knelt and kissed him on the brow.

"Ah! . . ." He drew a long sigh. "I have held you to-day, and

to-day you have kissed me. Go now."

She went. The dog ran with her a little way, then turned and crept

back to its master.

Chapter V.

THE FINDING.

"Hola!" hailed a man, signalling by a brazier with his back to the

wind. "For what are you seeking?"

Ruth halted, gripping her stiletto. This man might help her,

perhaps. At any rate, he seemed a cool-headed fellow who made the

best of things.

For two hours she had searched, and for the time her strength was

nearly spent. Dust filled her hair and caked her long eyelashes.

Her face, haggard with woe and weariness, was a mask of dust.

"For one," she answered, "who was to have attended High Mass in the

Cathedral."

"Eh?" The man swept a hand to the ruined shell of that building, at

the end of the Square, and to a horrible pile of masonry covering

many hundreds of bodies. "If he reached there, your Excellency had

better go home and pray for his soul; that is, if your Excellency

believes it efficacious. But first, will your Excellency sit here

and rest?--no, not on the lee side, in the fumes of the charcoal, but

to windward here, where the fire is bright, and where I have the

honour to give room. . . . So your Excellency did not attend the

Mass?--not approving of it, maybe?"

"It would seem that you know me?" said Ruth, answering something in

his tone, not his words.

The question set him chuckling. "Not by that token--though 'faith

'tis an ill wind blows nobody good. This earthquake, considered

philosophically, is a great opportunity for heretics. You and I, for

example, may sit here in the very middle of the square and talk

blasphemy to our heart's content; whereas--" He broke off.

"But I forget my manners. I ought to have started by saying that no

one, having once set eyes on your Excellency's face could ever forget

it; and, by St. James, that is no more than the truth!"

"Where have you seen me before?"

"By the gateway of the Holy Office, in a carriage with your lord

beside you. I marked his face, too. What it is to be young and rich

and beautiful! . . . And yet you might have remembered me, seeing

that I made part of the procession, though--praise be to fate!--

A modest one."

Ruth gazed at him. "I remember you," she said slowly; "you were one

of the Penitents."

"They were gracious enough to call me so. Yes, I can understand that

a san-benito makes some difference to a man's personal appearance.

. . . And old Gonsalvez--I saw your Excellency wince and your

Excellency's beauty turn pale when he cast up his hands to the sun.

. . . Hey? _How is it possible_--how went the words?"

Ruth had them well by heart. "_How is it possible for people,

beholding that glorious Body, to worship any Being but Him who

created it?_"

Right--word for word! Well, they made a lens for that glorious Body

and fried old Gonsalvez with it. Were you looking on?"

"No," said Ruth, and shivered.

"Well, I did--perforce. 'Twas part of my lesson; for you must know

that I, too, had had my little difficulty over that same glorious

Sun, touching his standing still over Gibeon at the command of

ancient Joshua. 'Faith, I've no quarrel with a miracle or so, up and

down; but that one! . . . Well, they convinced me I was a fool to

have any doubt, and a worse fool to let it slip off the tongue.

And yet," said the Penitent, warming his hands and casting a look up

at the sky, where the dust-cloud had given place to a rolling pall of

smoke, "what a treat it is to let the tongue wag at times!"

Ruth, her strength refreshed by the few minutes' rest, thanked him

and arose to continue her search.

"Stay," said the Penitent. "Your Excellency has not heard all the

story, nor yet arrived near the moral. . . . Between ourselves the

reverend fathers were lenient with me because--well, it may have been

because I hold some influence among the beggars of Lisbon, who are

numerous and not always meek, in spite of the promise that meekness

shall inherit the earth. I may confess, in short, that my presence

in the procession was to some extent a farce, and the result of a

compromise. But, all the same, your Excellency does ill to

disbelieve in miracles: as I dare say your Excellency, casting an eye

about Lisbon on this particular day of All the Saints, will not

dispute?"

"Alas, sir! I have seen too many horrors to-day to be in any mood to

argue."

"Then," said the Penitent, skipping up, "you are in the precise mood

to be convinced; as I have seen men, under extremity of torture,

ready to believe anything. Come!"

She hesitated. "Where would you lead me?"

"To a miracle," he answered, and, with a fine gesture, flinging his

tattered cloak over his shoulder, he led the way. He strode rapidly

down a couple of streets. Once or twice coming to a chasm across the

roadway he paused, drew back, and cleared it with a leap. But at

these pitfalls he neither turned nor offered Ruth a hand.

She followed him panting, so agile was his pace.

The first street ran south, the second east. He entered a third

which turned north again as if to lead back into the Square.

After following it for twenty yards he halted and allowed her to

catch up with him.

"You are a devoted wife," said the Penitent admiringly. "Would it

alter your devotion at all to know that he was with another woman?"

"No," answered Ruth. "I knew it, in fact." She wondered that this

beggar man could force her to speak so frankly.

"In an earthquake," said he, "one gets down to naked truth, or near

to it. If he were unfaithful now--would that alter your desire to

find and save him?"

"Sir, why do you ask these things?"

"Did your Excellency not know that its beggars are the eyes of

Lisbon? But you have not answered me."

"Nor will. That I am here--is it not enough?"

The Penitent peered at her in the dim light and nodded. He led her

forward a pace or two and pointed to something imbedded in a pile of

stones, lime, rubble. It was the wreck of a chaise. Two males lay

crushed under it, their heads and a couple of legs protruding.

A splintered door, wrenched from its hinges, lay face-uppermost

crowning the heap. It bore a coronet and the arms of Montalegre.

"Are they--" she stammered, but caught at her voice and recovered it.

"--Are they _here_, under this?"

"No," he said, and again led the way, crossing the street to a house

of which the upper storey overhung the street, supported by a line of

pillars. Three or four of these pillars had fallen. Of the rest,

nine out of ten stood askew, barely holding up the house, through the

floors of which stout beams had thrust themselves and stuck at all

angles from the burst plaster.

"Here is Milord Vyell," said the Penitent, picking up a broken lath

and pointing with it.

He lay on his back, as he had lain for close upon three hours, deep

in the shadow of the overhanging house. His eyes were wide open.

They stared up at the cobwebs that dangled from the broken plaster.

A pillar, in weight maybe half a ton, rested across his thighs; an

oaken beam across his chest and his broken left arm. The two pinned

him hopelessly.

Clutched to him in his right lay Donna Maria. She seemed to sleep,

with her head turned from his breast and laid upon the upper arm.

The weight of the pillar resting on her bowels had squeezed the life

out of her. She was dead: her flesh by this time almost cold.

"Oliver!--Ah, look at me!--I am here--I have come to help!"

The lids twitched slightly over his wide eyes. In the dim light she

could almost be sworn that the lips, too, moved as though to speak.

But no words came, and the eyes did not see her.

He was alive. What else mattered?

She knelt and flung her arms about the pillar. Frantically, vainly,

she tugged at it: not by an inch or the tenth part of an inch could

she stir it.

"Speak to me, Oliver! . . . Look at least!"

"If your Excellency will but have patience!" The Penitent stepped

out into the street and she heard him blowing a whistle. Clearly he

was a man to be obeyed; for in less than ten minutes a dozen figures

crowded about the entrance, shutting out the day. This darkness of

their making was in truth their best commendation. For against any

one of them coming singly Ruth had undoubtedly held her dagger ready.

They grumbled, too, and some even cursed the Penitent for having

dragged them away from their loot. The Penitent called them

cheerfully his little sons of the devil, and adjured them to fall to

work or it would be the worse for them.

For his part, he lifted no hand: but stood overseer as the ruffians

lifted the pillar, Ruth straining her strength with theirs.

But when they came to lift Donna Maria, for a moment something

hitched, and Ruth heard the sound of rending cloth. The poor wretch

in her death-agony had bitten through Sir Oliver's arm to the bone.

The corpse yet clenched its jaws on the bite. They had to wrench the

teeth open--delicate pretty teeth made for nibbling sweetmeats.

To his last day Oliver Vyell bore the mark of those pretty teeth, and

took it to the grave with him.

Ruth drew out a purse. But the Penitent, though they grumbled, would

suffer his scoundrels to take no fee. Nay, he commanded two, and

from somewhere out of devastated Lisbon they fetched a sedan-chair

for the broken man. "You may pay these if you will," said he.

"Honestly, they deserve it."

On her way westward, following the chair, she called to them to stop

and search whereabouts Mr. Langton had fallen. They found him with

the small greyhound standing guard beside the body. His head was

pillowed on his arm, and he lay as one quietly sleeping.

Chapter VI.

DOCUMENTS.

I.

_From Abraham Castres Esq.: his Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary to the

King of Portugal, to the Secretary of State, Whitehall, London._

LISBON, _November 6th_, 1755.

"SIR,--You will in all likelihood have heard before this of the

inexpressible Calamity befallen the whole Maritime Coast, and in

particular this opulent City, now reduced to a heap of Rubbish and

Ruin, by a most tremendous Earthquake on the first of this Month,

followed by a Conflagration which has done ten times more Mischief

than the Earthquake itself. I gave a short account of our Misfortune

to _Sir Benjamin Keene_, by a _Spaniard_, who promised (as all

intercourse by Post was at a stand) to carry my Letter as far as

_Badajoz_ and see it safe put into the Post House. It was merely to

acquaint His Excellency that, God be praised, my House stood out the

Shocks, though greatly damaged; and that, happening to be out of the

reach of the Flames, several of my Friends, burnt out of their

Houses, had taken refuge with me, where I have accommodated them as

well as I could, under Tents in my large Garden; no Body but _Lord

Charles Dowglass_, who is actually on board the Packet, besides my

Chaplain and myself having dared hitherto to sleep in my House since

the Day of our Disaster. The Consul and his Family have been saved,

and are all well, in a Country House near this City. Those with me

at present are the _Dutch_ Minister, his Lady, and their three

Children, with seven or eight of their Servants. The rest of my

Company of the better Sort consists of several Merchants of this

Factory, who, for the most part have lost all they had; though some

indeed, as Messrs. _Parry_ and _Mellish's_ House, and Mr. _Raymond_,

and _Burrell_, have had the good Fortune to save their Cash, either

in whole or in part. The number of the Dead and Wounded I can give

no certain Account of as yet; in that respect our Poor Factory has

escaped pretty well, considering the number of Houses we have here.

I have lost my Good and Worthy Friend the _Spanish_ Ambassador, who

was crushed under the Door, as he attempted to make his Escape into

the Street. This with the Anguish I have been in for these five Days

past, occasioned by the dismal Accounts brought to us every instant

of the Accidents befallen to one or other of our Acquaintance among

the Nobility, who for the most part are quite Undone, has greatly

affected me; but in particular the miserable Objects among the lower

sort of His Majesty's Subjects, who fly also to me for Bread, and lie

scattered up and down in my Garden, with their Wives and Children.

I have helped them all hitherto, and shall continue to do so, as long

as Provisions do not fail Us, which I hope will not be the Case, by

the Orders which _M. de Carvalho_ has issued in that respect.

One of our great Misfortunes is, that we have neither an _English_ or

_Dutch_ Man of War in the Harbour. Some of their Carpenters and

Sailors would have been of great use to me on this occasion, in

helping to prop up my House; for as the Weather, which has hitherto

been remarkably fair, seems to threaten us with heavy Rains, it will

be impossible for the Refugees in my Garden to hold out much longer;

and how to find Rooms in my House for them all I am at a loss to

devise; the Floors of most of them shaking under our Feet; and must

consequently be too weak to bear any fresh number of Inhabitants.

The Roads for the first Days having been impracticable, it was

but yesterday I had the Honour in Company with _M. de la Calmette_,

of waiting on the King of _Portugal_, and all the Royal Family at

_Belem_, whom we found encamped; none of the Royal Palaces being fit

to harbour Them. Though the loss His Most Faithful Majesty has

sustained on this occasion is immense, and that His Capital-City is

utterly Destroyed; He received us with more Serenity than we

expected, and among other things told us, that He owed Thanks to

Providence for saving His and His Family's Lives: and that He was

extremely glad to see us both safe. The Queen in her own Name, and

all the young Princesses, sent us word that they were obliged to us

for our attention; but that being under their Tents, and in a Dress

not fit to appear in, They desired that for the present we would

excuse their admitting our Compliments in Person. Most of the

considerable Families in our Factory have already secured to

themselves a passage to _England_, by three or four of our _London_

Traders, that are preparing for their departure. As soon as the

fatigue and great trouble of Mind I have endured for these first Days

are a little over, I shall be considering of some proper method for

sheltering the poorer Sort, either by hiring a _Portuguese_ Hulk, or

if that is not to be had, some _English_ Vessel till they can be sent

to _England; _and there are many who desire to remain, in hopes of

finding among the Ruins some of the little Cash they may have lost in

their Habitations. The best orders have been given for preventing

Rapine, and Murders, frequent instances of which we have had within

these three Days, there being swarms of _Spanish_ Deserters in Town,

who take hold of this opportunity of doing their business. As I have

large sums deposited in my House, belonging to such of my Countrymen

as have been happy enough to save some of their Cash, and that my

House was surrounded all last Night with _Ruffians_; I have wrote

this Morning to _M. de Carvalho_, to desire a Guard, which I hope

will not be refused. We are to have in a Day or two a Meeting of our

scattered Factory at my House, to consider of what is best to be done

in our present wretched Circumstances. I am determined to stay

within call of the Distressed, as long as I can remain on Shore with

the least Appearance of Security: and the same Mr. _Hay_ (the Consul)

seemed resolved to do, the last time I conferred with him about it.

I most humbly beg your Pardon, Sir, for the Disorder of this Letter,

surrounded as I am by many in Distress, who from one instant to the

other are applying to me either for Advice or Shelter. The Packet

has been detained at the Desire of the Factory, till another appears

from _England_, or some Man of War drops in here from the

_Streights_. This will go by the first of several of our Merchant

Ships bound to _England_. I must not forget to acquaint you, that

_Sir Oliver Vyell_ and Lady are safe and well, and have the Honour to

be, &c."

II.

_From the Same to the Same._

'BELEM, _November 7th_, 1755.

"Sir,--. . . The present Scene of Misery and Distress is not to be

described; the Kingdom of _Portugal_ is ruined and undone, and

_Lisbon_, one of the finest Cities that ever was seen, is now no

more. The Escape of the forementioned _Sir. O. Vyell_ is one of the

most providential Things that ever was heard of; for whilst he was

riding about the middle of the City in his Chaise, on the first

instant, he observed the Driver to look behind him, and immediately

to make the Mules gallop as fast as possible, but both he and they

were very soon killed and buried in the Ruins of a House which fell

on them; whereupon _Sir Oliver_ jumped out of the Chaise, and ran

into a House that instantly fell also to the Ground, and buried him

in the Ruins for a considerable Time; but it pleased God that he was

taken out alive, and not much bruised. His Lady likewise was

providentially in the Garden when their House fell, and so escaped.

About half an Hour after the first Shock, the City was on fire in

five different Parts, and has been burning ever since, so that the

_English_ Merchants here are entirely ruined. There have been three

Shocks every Day since the first, but none so violent as the first.

The King has ordered all the Soldiers to assist in burying the Dead,

to prevent a Plague; and indeed upon that Account the Fire was of

Service in consuming the Carcasses both of Men and Beasts.

The _English_ have miraculously escaped, for notwithstanding the

Factory was so numerous, not more than a Dozen are known to have been

killed; amongst whom was poor _Mrs. Hake_, Sister to Governor _Hardy_

of _New York_, who suffered as she was driving her Children before

her; and the _Spanish_ Ambassador was killed also, with his young

Child in his Arms. Every person, from the King to the Beggar, is at

present obliged to lie in the Fields, and some are apprehensive that

a Famine may ensue."

III.

_An Extract of a Letter from on board a Ship in Lisbon Harbour,

Nov: 19, to the same Purport_.

"Mine will not bring you the first News of the most dreadful Calamity

befallen this City and whole Kingdom. On _Saturday_ the first

instant, about half an Hour past nine o'clock, I was retired to my

Room after Breakfast, when I perceived the House began to shake, but

did not apprehend the Cause; however, as I saw the Neighbours about

me all running down Stairs, I also made the best of my Way; and by

the time I had cross'd the Street, and got under the Piazzas of some

low House, it was darker than the darkest Night I ever was out in,

and continued so for about a Minute, occasioned by the Clouds of Dust

from the falling of Houses on all sides. After it cleared up, I ran

into a large Square adjoining; but being soon alarmed with a Cry that

the Sea was coming in, all the People crowded foreward to run to the

Hills, I among the rest, with Mr. _Wood_ and Family. We went near

two Miles thro' the Streets, climbing over the Ruins of Churches,

Houses, &c., and stepping over hundreds of dead and dying People,

Carriages, Chaises and Mules, lying all crushed to Pieces; and that

Day being a great Festival in their Churches, and happening just at

the time of celebrating the first Mass, thousands were assembled in

the Churches, the major part of whom were killed; for the great

Buildings, particularly those which stood on any Eminence, suffered

the most Damage. Very few of the Churches or Convents have escaped.

We staid near two Hours in an open Campo; and a dismal scene it was,

the People howling and crying, and the Sacrament going about to dying

persons: so I advised, as the best, to return to the Square near our

own House and there wait the event, which we did immediately; but by

the Time we got there the City was in Flames in several distant

Parts, being set on fire by some Villains, who confessed it before

Execution. This completed the Destruction of the greatest Part of

the City; for in the Terror all Persons were, no Attempt was made to

stop it; and the Wind was very high, so that it was communicated from

one Street to another by the Flakes of Fire drove by the Winds.

It raged with great Violence for eight Days, and this in the

principal and most thronged Parts of the City; People being fled into

the Fields half naked, the Fire consumed all sorts of Merchandise,

Household Goods, and Wearing Apparel, so that hardly anything is left

to cover People, and they live in Tents in the Fields. If the Fire

had not happened, People would have recovered their Effects out of

the Ruins; but this has made such a Scene of Desolation and Misery as

Words cannot describe."

"The King's Palace in the City is totally destroyed, with all the

Jewels, Furniture, &c. The _India_ Warehouses adjoining, full of

rich Goods, are all consumed. The Custom-house, piled up with Bales

upon Bales, is all destroyed; and the Tobacco and other Warehouses,

with the Cargoes of three _Brazil_ Fleets, shared the same Fate.

In short, there are few Goods left in the whole City."

IV.

_From a Ship's Captain writing home under the same date_.

". . . On Saturday the first instant, I arose at Five, in order to

remove my Ship from the Custom-house, agreeable to my Order; by Nine

we sailed down and anchored off the upper end of the _Terceras_.

Wind at N.E. a small Breeze, and a fine clear morning. Ten Minutes

before Ten, I felt the Ship have an uncommon Motion, and could not

help thinking she was aground, although sure of the Depth of Water.

As the Motion increased, my Amazement increased also; and as I was

looking round to find out the Meaning of this uncommon Motion, I was

immediately acquainted with the direful Cause; when at that Instant

looking towards the City, I beheld the tall and stately Buildings

tumbling down, with great Cracks and Noise, and particularly that

part of the City from _St. Paul's_ in a direct Line to _Bairroalto_;

as also, at the same Time, that Part from the said Church along the

River-side Eastward as far as the Gallows, and so in a curve Line

Northward again; and the Buildings as far as _St. Joze_ and the

_Rofcio_, were laid in the three following Shocks, which were so

violent as I heard many say they could with great Difficulty stand on

their Legs. There is scarce one House of this great City left

habitable. The Earth opened, and rent in several Places, and many

expected to be swallowed up.--As it happened at a Time when the

Kitchens were furnished with Fires, they communicated their Heat to

the Timber with which their Houses were built or adorned, and in

which the Natives are very curious and expensive, both in Furniture

and Ceilings; and by this means the City was in a Blaze in different

Parts at once. The Conflagration lasted a whole Week.--What chiefly

contributed to the Destruction of the City, was the Narrowness of the

Streets. It is not to be expressed by Human Tongue, how dreadful and

how awful it was to enter the City after the Fire was abated: when

looking upwards one was struck with Terror at beholding frightful

Pyramids of ruined Fronts, some inclining one Way, some another; then

on the other hand with Horror, in viewing Heaps of Bodies crushed to

death, half-buried and half-burnt; and if one went through the broad

Places or Squares, there was nothing to be met with but People

bewailing their Misfortunes, wringing their Hands, and crying

_The World is at an End_. In short, it was the most lamentable Scene

that Eyes could behold. As the Shocks, though Small, are frequent,

the People keep building Wooden Houses in the Fields; but the King

has ordered no Houses to be built to the Eastward of _Alcantara_

Gate.--Just now four _English_ Sailors have been condemned for

stealing Goods, and hiding them in the Ballast, with Intent to make a

Property of them."

Chapter VII.

THE LAST OFFER

His villa being destroyed, they had carried Sir Oliver out to Belem,

to one of the wooden hospitals hastily erected in the royal grounds.

There the King's surgeon dressed his wounds and set the broken left

arm, Ruth attending with splints and bandages.

When all was done and the patient asleep, she crept forth. She would

fain have stayed to watch by him; but this would have meant crowding

the air for the sufferers, who already had much ado to breathe.

She crept forth, therefore, and slept that night out on the naked

ground, close under the lee of the canvas.

Early next morning she was up and doing. A dozen hospitals had been

improvised and each was crying out for helpers. She chose that of

her friend Mr. Castres, the British envoy. It stood within a

high-walled garden, sheltered from the wind which, for some days

after the earthquake, blew half a gale. At first the hospital

consisted of two tents; but in the next three days these increased to

a dozen, filling the enclosure. Then, just as doctors and nurses

despaired of coping with it, the influx of wounded slackened and

ceased, almost of a sudden. In the city nothing remained now but to

bury the dead, and in haste, lest their corpses should breed

pestilence. It was horribly practical; but every day, as she awoke,

her first thought was for the set of the wind; her first fear that in

the night it might have shifted, and might be blowing from the east

across Lisbon. The wind, however, kept northerly, as though it had

been nailed to that quarter. She heard that gangs were at work

clearing the streets and collecting the dead; at first burying them

laboriously after the third day, burning them in stacks. As the

Penitent had said, in an earthquake one gets down to nakedness.

During those next ten days Ruth lived hourly face to face with her

kind, men and women, naked, bleeding, suffering.

She contrived too, all this while, to have the small motherless Hake

children near her, inventing a hundred errands to keep them busy.

Thus, to be sure, they saw many things too sad for their young eyes,

yet Ruth perceived that in feeling helpful they escaped the worst

broodings of bereavement, and, on the whole, watching them at times,

as their small hands were busy tearing up bandages or washing out

medicine bottles, she felt satisfied that their mother would have

wished it so.

Sir Oliver's arm healed well, and in general (it seemed) he was

making a rapid recovery. It was remarkable, though, that he seldom

smiled, and scarcely spoke at all save to answer a question.

He would rest for hours at a time staring straight in front of him,

much as he had lain and stared up at the ceiling of the fatal house.

Something weighed on his mind; or maybe the brain had received a

shock and must have time to recover. Ruth watched him anxiously,

keeping a cheerful face.

But there came an evening when, as she returned, tired but cheerful,

from the hospital, he called her to him.

"Ruth!"

"My lord." She was beside his couch in a moment.

"I have something to say to you; something I have wanted to say for

days. But I wanted also to think it all out. . . . I have not yet

asked you to forgive me--"

"Dear, you were forgiven long ago."

"--But I have asked Heaven to forgive me."

Ruth gave a little start and stared at him doubtfully.

"Yes," he went on, "as I lay pinned--those hours through, waiting for

death--something opened to me; a new life, I hope."

"And by a blessing I do not understand--by a blessing of blessings--

you were given back to it, Oliver."

"Back to it?" he repeated. "You do not understand me. The blessing

was God's special grace; the new life I speak of was a life

acknowledging that grace."

There was silence for many seconds; for a minute almost, Ruth's hands

had locked themselves together, and she pulled at the intertwisted

fingers.

"I beg your pardon," she said at length. "You are right--I do not

understand." Her voice had lost its ring; the sound of it was

leaden, spiritless. But he failed to note this, being preoccupied

with his own thoughts. Nor did he observe her face.

"I would not speak of this before," he went on, still with his eyes

turned to the window, "because I wanted to think it all out. But it

is true, Ruth; I am a changed man."

"I hope not."

Again he did not hear, or he failed to heed. "Not," he pursued,

"that any amount of thinking could alter the truth. The mercy of God

has been revealed to me. When a man has been through such horrors--

lying there, with that infernal woman held to me--"

"Ah!" she interposed with a catch of the breath. "Do not curse her.

She was dead, poor thing!"

"I tell you that I cursed her as I cursed myself. . . . Yes, we both

deserved to die. She died with her teeth in my flesh--the flesh

whose desire was all we ever had in common."

"Yes . . . I knew."

"Have you the coat I wore?"

"It is folded away. Some boxes of clothes were saved from the house,

and I laid it away in one of them."

"Her teeth must have torn it?"

"Yes." Ruth would have moved away in sheer heart-sickness. Why would

he persist in talking thus?

"I shall always keep that coat. If ever I am tempted to forget the

mercy of God, the rent in that coat shall remind me."

She wanted to cry aloud, "Oh, cease, cease!" This new pietism of his

revolted her almost to physical sickness. She recognised in it the

selfishness she had too fatally learned to detect in all pietism.

"At least he had owed enough to his poor little fellow-sinner to

spare a thought of pity!" . . . But a miserable restraint held her

tongue as he went on--

"Yes, Ruth. God showed Himself to me in that hour; showed me, too,

all the evil of my past life. I had no hope to live; but I vowed to

Him then, if I lived, to live as one reformed."

He paused here, as if waiting for her to speak. She did not speak.

She felt her whole body stiffening; she wanted too to laugh outright,

scornfully. "The evil of his past life? Am I next to be expelled,

as a part of it? Is it up to _this_ he would lead? . . . God help

me, if there be a God!--that this should be the man I loved!"

"And another oath I swore," he went on solemnly: "to do what

compensation I may to any my sinning has injured. You are the chief

of these."

"I, Oliver?"

"You, who under Heaven were made, and properly, the means of saving

my life to repentance."

Somehow with this new piety he had caught the very phraseology and

intonation of its everyday professors, even those very tricks of bad

logic at which he had been used to laugh. Ruth had always supposed,

for example, that the presumption of instructing the Deity in

appropriate conduct was impossible even to second-rate minds until by

imitation slowly acquired as a habit. It was monstrous to her that

he should so suddenly and all unconsciously be guilty of it.

Indeed for the moment these small evidences of the change in him

distressed her more than the change itself, which she had yet to

realise; just as in company a solecism of speech or manners will make

us wince before we have time to trace it to the ill-breeding from

which it springs. His mother, she had heard (he, in fact, had told

her), was given to these pious tricks of speech. Surely his fine

brain had suffered some lesion. He was not himself, and she must

wait for his recovery. But surely, too, he would recover and be

himself again.

"Ruth, I have done you great wrong."

"O cease! cease, Oliver!" Her voice cried it aloud now, as she

dropped to her knees and buried her face in the coverlet. "Do not

talk like this--I had a hundred times rather you neglected me than

hear you talk so! _You_ have done me evil? _You_, my lord, my love?

You, who saved me? You, in whose eyes I have found grace, and in

that my great, great happiness? You, in whose light my life has

moved? . . . Ah, love, do not break my heart!"

"You misunderstand," he said quietly. "Why should what I am saying

break your heart? I am asking you to marry me."

She rose from her knees very slowly and went to the window.

Standing there, again she battled off the temptation to laugh wildly.

. . . She fought it down after a minute, and turned to encounter his

gaze, which had not ceased to rest on her as she stood with her

beautiful figure silhouetted against the evening light.

"You really think my marrying you would make a difference?"

"To me it would make all the difference," he urged, but still very

gently, as one who, sure of himself, might reason with a child.

"I doubt if I shall recover, indeed, until this debt is paid."

"A debt, Oliver? What kind of debt?"

"Why, of gratitude, to be sure. Did you not win me back from

death?--to be a new and different man henceforth, please God!"

Upon an excuse she left him and went to her own sleeping tent.

It stood a little within the royal garden of Belem and (the weather

being chilly) the guard of the gate usually kept a small brazier

alight for her. This evening for some reason he had neglected it,

and the fire had sunk low. She stooped to rake its embers together,

and, as she did so, at length her laughter escaped her; soft

laughter, terrible to hear.

In the midst of it a voice--a high, jolly, schoolboy voice--called

out from the gateway demanding, in execrable Portuguese, to be shown

Lady Vyell's tent. She dropped the raking-iron with a clatter and

stood erect, listening.

"Dicky?" . . . she breathed.

Yes; the tent flap was lifted and Dicky stood there in the twilight;

a Dicky incredibly grown.

"Dicky!"

"Motherkin!" He was folded in her arms.

"But what on earth brings you to this terrible Lisbon, of all

places?"

"Well, motherkin," said he with the finest air of importance, "a man

would say that if a crew of British sailors could be useful

anywhere--We'll teach your Portuguese, anyhow. Oh, yes, the

_Pegasus_ was at Gibraltar--we felt the shock there pretty badly--and

the Admiral sent us up the coast to give help where we could.

A coaster found us off Lagos with word that Lisbon had suffered worst

of all. So we hammered at it, wind almost dead foul all the

way . . . and here we are. Captain Hanmer brought me ashore in his

gig. My word, but the place is in a mess!"

"That is Captain Hanmer's footstep I hear by the gate."

"Yes, he has come to pay his respects. But come," said the boy,

astonished, "you don't tell me you know Old Han's footstep--begging

his pardon--at all this distance."

Yes she did. She could have distinguished that tread had it marched

among a thousand. Her brain had held the note of it ever since the

night she had heard it at Sabines, crushing the gravel of the drive.

Dicky laughed, incredulous. She held the boy at arm's length,

lovingly as Captain Hanmer came and stood by the tent door.

So life might yet sound with honest laughter; ay, and at the back of

laughter, with the firm tread of duty.

The story of Ruth Josselin and Oliver Vyell is told. They were

married ten days later in the hospital at Belem by a priest of the

Church of Rome; and afterwards, on their way to England in His

Majesty's frigate _Calliope_, which had brought out stores for the

relief of the suffering city and was now returning with most of the

English survivors, Sir Oliver insisted on having the union again

ratified by the services of the ship's chaplain. Ruth, whose sense

of humour had survived the earthquake, could smile at this

supererogation.

They landed at Plymouth and posting to Bath, were tenderly welcomed

by Lady Jane, to whom her son's conversion was hardly less a matter

of rejoicing than his rescue from a living tomb. In Bath Ruth Lady

Vyell might have reigned as a toast, a queen of society; but Sir

Oliver had learnt a distaste for fashionable follies, nor did she

greatly yearn for them.

He remained a Whig, however, and two years later received appointment

to the post of Consul-General at Lisbon. Its duties were not

arduous, and allowed him to cross the Atlantic half a dozen times

with Lady Vyell and revisit Eagles, where Miss Quiney held faithful

stewardship. He never completely recovered his health. The pressure

under which he had lain during those three terrible hours had left

him with some slight curvature of the spine. It increased, and ended

in a constriction of the lungs, bringing on a slow decline. In 1767

he again retired to Bath, where next year he died, aged fifty-one

years. His epitaph on the wall of the Abbey nave runs as follows:--

"To the memory of Sir Oliver Hastings Pelham Vyell of

Carwithiel, Co. Cornwall, Baronet, Consul-General for many

years at Lisbon, whence he came in hopes of Recovery from a Bad

State of Health to Bath. Here, after a tedious and painful

illness, sustained with the Patience and Resignation becoming

to a Christian, he died Jan. 11, 1768, in the Fifty-second Year

of his Life, without Heir. This Monument is erected by his

affectionate Widow, Ruth Lady Vyell."

EPILOGUE

Ruth Lady Vyell stood in the empty minster beneath her husband's

epitaph, and conned it, puckering her brow slightly in the effort to

keep her thoughts collected.

She had not set eyes on the tablet since the day the stonemasons had

fixed it in place; and that was close upon eight years ago. On the

morrow, her pious duty fulfilled, she had taken post for Plymouth,

there to embark for America; and the intervening years had been lived

in widowhood at Eagles until the outbreak of the Revolution had

forced her, early in 1775, to take shelter in Boston, and in the late

fall of the year to sail back to England. For Eagles, though

unravaged, had passed into the hands of the "rebels"; and Ruth,

though an ardent loyalist, kept her old clearness of vision, and

foresaw that King George could not beat his Colonists; that the stars

in their courses fought against this stupid monarch.

This pilgrimage to Bath had been her first devoir on reaching

England. She had nursed him tenderly through his last illness, as

she had been in all respects an exemplary wife. Yet, standing

beneath his monument, she felt herself an impostor. She could find

here no true memories of the man whose look had swayed her soul,

whose love she had served with rites a woman never forgets.

This city of Bath did not hold the true dust of her lord and love.

He had perished--though sinning against her, what mattered it?--years

ago, under a fallen pillar in a street of Lisbon. Doubtless the site

had been built over; it would be hard to find now, so actively had

the Marquis de Pombal, Portugal's First Minister, renovated the

ruined city. But whether discoverable or not, there and not here was

written the last of Oliver Vyell.

Somehow in her thoughts of him on the other side of the Atlantic,

in her demesne of Eagles where they had walked together as lovers,

she had not separated her memories of him so sharply. Now, suddenly,

with a sense of having been cheated, she saw Oliver Vyell as two

separate men. The one had possessed her; she had merely married the

other.

With the blank sense of having been cheated mingled a sense that she

herself was the cheat. The tablet accused her of it, confronting her

with words which, all too sharply, she remembered as of her own

composing. "_After a tedious and painful Illness, sustained with the

Patience and resignation becoming to a Christian_." Why to a

Christian more than to another? Was it not mere manliness to bear

(as, to do him justice, he had borne) ill-health with fortitude, and

face dissolution with courage? How had she ever come to utter coin

that rang with so false and cheap a note? She felt shame of it.

The taint of its falsehood seemed to blend and become one with a

general odour of humbug, sickly, infectious, insinuating itself,

stealing along the darkened Gothic aisles. Since nothing is surer

than death, nothing can be corrupter than mortality deceiving itself.

. . . The west door of the Abbey stood open. Ruth, striving to

collect her thoughts, saw the sunlight beyond it spread broad upon

the city's famous piazza. Sounds, too, were wafted in through the

doorway, penetrating the hush, distracting her; rumble of workday

traffic, voices of vendors in distant streets; among these--asserting

itself quietly, yet steadily, regularly as a beat in music--a

footfall on the pavement outside. . . . She knew the footfall.

She distinguished it from every other. Scores of times in the

watches of the night she had lain and listened to it, hearing it in

imagination only, echoed from memory, yet distinct upon the ear as

the tramp of an actual foot, manly and booted; hearing it always with

a sense of helplessness, as though with that certain deliberate tread

marched her fate upon her, inexorably nearing. This once again--she

told herself--it must be in fancy that she heard it. For how should

_he_ be in Bath?

She stepped quickly out through the porchway to assure herself.

She stood there a moment, while her eyes accustomed themselves to the

sunlight, and Captain Hanmer came towards her from the shadow of the

colonnade by the great Pump-room. He carried his left arm in a

sling, and with his right hand lifted his hat, but awkwardly.

"I had heard of your promotion," she said after they had exchanged

greetings, "and of your wound, and I dare say you will let me

congratulate you on both, since the same gallantry earned them.

. . . But what brings you to Bath? . . . To drink the waters, I

suppose, and help your convalescence."

"They have a great reputation," he answered gravely; "but I have

never heard it claimed that they can extract a ball or the splinters

from a shattered forearm. The surgeons did the one, and time must do

the other, if it will be so kind. . . . No, I am in Bath because my

mother lives here. It is my native city, in fact."

"Ah," she said, "I was wondering--"

"Wondering?" He echoed the word after a long pause. He was plainly

surprised. "You knew that I was here, then?"

"Not until a moment ago, when I heard your footstep." As this

appeared to surprise him still more, she added, "You have, whether

you know it or not, a noticeable footstep, and I a quick ear.

Shall I tell you where, unless fancy played me a trick, I last proved

its quickness?"

He bent his head as sign for assent.

"It was in Boston," she said, "last June--on the evening after the

fight at Bunker Hill. At midnight, rather. Before seven o'clock the

hospitals were full, and they brought half a dozen poor fellows to my

lodgings in Garden Court Street. Towards midnight one of them, that

had lain all the afternoon under the broiling sun by the _Mystic_ and

had taken a sunstroke on top of his wound, began raving. My maid and

I were alone in the house, and we agreed that he was dangerous.

I told her that there was nothing to fear; that for an hour past some

one had been patrolling the side-walk before the house; and I bade

her go downstairs and desire him to fetch a surgeon. You were that

sentinel."

Again he bent his head. "I was serving on board the _Lively_," he

said, "in the ferry-way between you and Charlestown. I had heard of

you--that you had taken lodgings in Boston, and that the temper of

the mob might be uncertain. So that night I got leave ashore, on the

chance of being useful. I brought the doctor, if you remember."

"But would not present yourself to claim our thanks." She looked at

him shrewdly. "To-day--did you know that I was in Bath?" she asked.

He owned, "Yes; he had read of her arrival in the _Gazette_, among

the fashionable announcements." He did not add, but she divined,

that he had waited for her by the Abbey, well guessing that her steps

would piously lead her thither and soon. She changed the subject in

some haste.

"Your mother lives in Bath?"

"She has lived here all her life."

"Sir Oliver spent his last days here. I am sorry that I had not her

acquaintance to cheer me."

"It was unlikely that you should meet. We live in the humblest of

ways."

"Nevertheless it would be kind of you to make us acquainted.

Indeed," she went on, "I very earnestly desire it, having a great

need--since you are so hard to thank directly--to thank you through

somebody for many things, and especially for helping Dicky."

He laughed grimly as he fell into step with her, or tried to--but his

obstinate stride would not be corrected. "All the powers that ever

were," he said, "could not hinder Dicky. He has his captaincy in

sight--at his age!--and will be flying the blue before he reaches

forty. Mark my words."

On their way up the ascent of Lansdowne Hill he told her much

concerning Dicky--not of his success in the service, which she knew

already, but of the service's inner opinion of him, which set her

blood tingling. She glanced sideways once or twice at the strong,

awkward man who, outpaced by the stripling, could rejoice in his

promotion without one twinge of jealousy, loving him merely as one

good sailor should love another. She noted him as once or twice he

tried to correct his pace by hers. Her thoughts went back to the

tablet in the Abbey, commemorating a husband who (if it told truth)

had never been hers. She compared him, all in charity, with two who

had given her an unpaid devotion. One slept at Lisbon, in the

English cemetery. The other walked beside her even with such a tread

as out somewhere on the dark floor of the sea he had paced his

quarter-deck many a night through, pausing only to con his helm

beneath the stars.

They turned aside into an unfashionable by-street, and halted before

a modest door in a row. Ruth noted the railings, that they were

spick-and-span as paint could make them; the dainty window-blinds.

Through the passage-way, as he opened the door, came wafted from a

back garden the clean odour of flowering stocks.

In the parlour to the right of the passage, a frail, small woman rose

from her chair to welcome them.

"Mother," said her son, "this is Lady Vyell."

The little woman stretched out her hands, and then, before Ruth could

take them, they were lifted and touched her temples softly, and she

bent to their benediction.

"My son has often talked of you. May the Lord bless you my dear.

May the Lord bless you both. May the Lord cause His face to shine

upon you all your days!"