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 highwalls that had protected the villa-gardens of Buenos Ayres lay inheaps, cumbering the roadway, and in places obliterating it.
About a hundred and fifty yards down the road, by what had been thewalled entrance to the Hakes' garden, they sighted two forlorn smallfigures--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 standin the middle of the road while she ran back to call daddy. She saidno 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 hecame back, and his face was grave.
She noted it. "What can we do with them?" she asked, and added witha haggard little smile, "I had actually begun to tell them to run upto 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 theroad; and bade the little ones rest still as their mother hadcommanded. She was but going down to the city (she said) to see ifthe danger was as terrible down there. The two little ones cried andclung to her; but she put them aside firmly, promising to look fortheir mamma when she returned. Langton did not dare to glance at herface.
The dark cloud dust met them, a gunshot below, rolling up thehillside from the city. They passed within the fringe of it, and atonce the noonday sun was darkened for them. In the unnatural lightthey 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. . . . Oneside of her skull was broken. I pulled down some branches andcovered her."
"Your own face is bleeding."
"Is it?" He put up a hand. "Yes--I remember, a brick struck me, onmy way from the stables--no, a beam grazed me as I ran for theback-stairs, meaning to get you out that way. The stairs werechoked. . . . 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 theblack pall stretching over the city. Flames shot up through it, hereand there. Lisbon was on fire in half a dozen places at least; andnow for the first time she became aware that the wind had sprung upagain and was blowing violently. She could not remember when itfirst started: the morning had been still, the Tagus--she recalledit--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 thewind should hold. Among the ruins of a house, right in the face ofthe fire, squatted a dozen persons, men and women, all dazed byterror. The women had opened their parasols--possibly to screentheir faces from the heat--albeit they might have escaped this quiteeasily by shifting their positions a few paces. None of these folkbetrayed the smallest interest in Ruth or in Langton. Indeed, theyscarcely lifted their eyes.
The suburbs were deserted, for the earthquake had surprised allLisbon in a pack, crowded within its churches, or in its centralstreets and squares. Yet the emptiness of what should have been thethoroughfares astonished them scarcely less than did the piles ofmasonry, breast-high in places, over which they picked their way inthe uncanny twilight. They had scarcely passed beyond the glare ofthe burning houses when Langton stumbled over a corpse--the firstthey encountered. He drew Ruth aside from it, entreating her in alow 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 fewasked them no questions, but went by, stumbling, with hands groping,as though they moved in a dream. A voice wailed "Jesus! Jesus!" andthe cry, issuing Heaven knew whence, shook Ruth's nerve for a moment.
Once Langton plucked her by the arm and pointed to some men withtorches moving among the ruins. She supposed that they were seekingfor the dead; but they were, in fact, incendiaries, already at workand in search of loot.
She passed three or four of these blazing houses, some kindled nodoubt by incendiaries, but others by natural consequences of theearthquake; for the kitchens, heated for the great feast, hadcommunicated their fires to the falling timberwork on which thehouses were framed; and by this time the city was on fire in at leastthirty different places. The scorched smell mingled everywhere withan odour of sulphur.
There were rents in the streets, too--chasms, half-filled withrubble, reaching right across the roadway. After being snatched backby Langton from the brink of one of these chasms, Ruth steeled herheart to be thankful when a burning house shed light for herfootsteps. At the houses themselves, after an upward glance or two,she dared not look again. They leaned this way and that, the frontsof some thrust outward at an angle to forbid any but the foolhardiestfrom passing underneath.
But, indeed, they had little time to look aloft as they penetrated tostreets littered, where the procession had passed, with wreckedchaises, dead mules, human bodies half-buried and half-burnt, charredlimbs protruding awkwardly from heaps of stones. Here, by ones andtwos, pedestrians tottered past, crying that the world was at an end;here, on a heap where, belike, his shop had stood, a man kneltpraying aloud; here a couple of enemies met by chance, seeking theirdead, and embraced, beseeching forgiveness for injuries past.These sights went by Ruth as in a dream; and as in a dream she heardthe topple and crack of masonry to right and left. Langton guidedher; and haggard, perspiring, they bent their heads to the strangewind now howling down the street as through a funnel, and foot byfoot battled their way.
The wind swept over their bent heads, carrying flakes of fire tostart new conflagrations. The stream of these flakes became sosteady that Ruth began to count on it to guide her. She began tothink that amid all this dissolution to right and left, some charmmust be protecting them both, when, as he stretched a hand to helpher across a mound of rubble she saw him turn, cast a look up andfall back beneath a rush of masonry. A flying brick struck her onthe shoulder, cutting the flesh. For the rest, she stood unscathed;but her companion lay at her feet, with legs buried deep, body buriedto the ribs.
"Your hand!" she gasped.
He stretched it out feebly, but withdrew it in an agony; for thestones crushed his bowels.
"You are hurt?"
"Killed." He contrived a smile. "Not so wide as a church door," hequoted, looking up at her strangely through the wan light; "but'twill serve."
"My friend! and I cannot help you!" She plucked vainly at the massof stones burying his legs.
He gasped on his anguish, and controlled it.
"Let be these silly bricks. . . . They belong to some grocer'skitchen-chimney, belike--but they have killed me, and may as wellserve 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 tinystiletto.
"The sheath too . . . it is sewn by a few stitches only." He lookedup into her eyes. "You are too beautiful to be wandering thesestreets alone."
"I understand," she said gravely.
"Now go." He pressed the back of her hand to his lips, and releasedit.
"Can I do nothing?" she asked, with a hard sob.
"Yes . . . 'tis unlucky, they say, to accept a knife without payingfor 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, andto-day you have kissed me.
Go now."
She went. The dog ran with her a little way, then turned and creptback to its master.
Chapter V.
Lady Good-for-Nothing: A Man's Portrait of a Woman Page 46