Chapter 54

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!"