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.

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. . . .”

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.

“Holà!” 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 Ja, 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!”