Lady Good-for-Nothing: A Man's Portrait of a Woman

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

  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 leftarm, Ruth attending with splints and bandages.

  When all was done and the patient asleep, she crept forth. She wouldfain have stayed to watch by him; but this would have meant crowdingthe air for the sufferers, who already had much ado to breathe.She crept forth, therefore, and slept that night out on the nakedground, close under the lee of the canvas.

  Early next morning she was up and doing. A dozen hospitals had beenimprovised and each was crying out for helpers. She chose that ofher friend Mr. Castres, the British envoy. It stood within ahigh-walled garden, sheltered from the wind which, for some daysafter the earthquake, blew half a gale. At first the hospitalconsisted of two tents; but in the next three days these increased toa dozen, filling the enclosure. Then, just as doctors and nursesdespaired of coping with it, the influx of wounded slackened andceased, almost of a sudden. In the city nothing remained now but tobury the dead, and in haste, lest their corpses should breedpestilence. It was horribly practical; but every day, as she awoke,her first thought was for the set of the wind; her first fear that inthe night it might have shifted, and might be blowing from the eastacross Lisbon. The wind, however, kept northerly, as though it hadbeen nailed to that quarter. She heard that gangs were at workclearing the streets and collecting the dead; at first burying themlaboriously after the third day, burning them in stacks. As thePenitent had said, in an earthquake one gets down to nakedness.During those next ten days Ruth lived hourly face to face with herkind, men and women, naked, bleeding, suffering.

  She contrived too, all this while, to have the small motherless Hakechildren 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 worstbroodings of bereavement, and, on the whole, watching them at times,as their small hands were busy tearing up bandages or washing outmedicine bottles, she felt satisfied that their mother would havewished it so.

  Sir Oliver's arm healed well, and in general (it seemed) he wasmaking a rapid recovery. It was remarkable, though, that he seldomsmiled, 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 ashock 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 fordays. But I wanted also to think it all out. . . . I have not yetasked 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 fordeath--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 blessingwas God's special grace; the new life I speak of was a lifeacknowledging that grace."

  There was silence for many seconds; for a minute almost, Ruth's handshad locked themselves together, and she pulled at the intertwistedfingers.

  "I beg your pardon," she said at length. "You are right--I do notunderstand." Her voice had lost its ring; the sound of it wasleaden, spiritless. But he failed to note this, being preoccupiedwith his own thoughts. Nor did he observe her face.

  "I would not speak of this before," he went on, still with his eyesturned to the window, "because I wanted to think it all out. But itis 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 Godhas 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 bothdeserved to die. She died with her teeth in my flesh--the fleshwhose 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 wouldhe persist in talking thus?

  "I shall always keep that coat. If ever I am tempted to forget themercy of God, the rent in that coat shall remind me."

  She wanted to cry aloud, "Oh, cease, cease!" This new pietism of hisrevolted her almost to physical sickness. She recognised in it theselfishness she had too fatally learned to detect in all pietism."At least he had owed enough to his poor little fellow-sinner tospare a thought of pity!" . . . But a miserable restraint held hertongue 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 toHim 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 helpme, if there be a God!--that this should be the man I loved!"

  "And another oath I swore," he went on solemnly: "to do whatcompensation I may to any my sinning has injured. You are the chiefof these."

  "I, Oliver?"

  "You, who under Heaven were made, and properly, the means of savingmy life to repentance."

  Somehow with this new piety he had caught the very phraseology andintonation of its everyday professors, even those very tricks of badlogic at which he had been used to laugh. Ruth had always supposed,for example, that the presumption of instructing the Deity inappropriate conduct was impossible even to second-rate minds until byimitation slowly acquired as a habit. It was monstrous to her thathe should so suddenly and all unconsciously be guilty of it.Indeed for the moment these small evidences of the change in himdistressed her more than the change itself, which she had yet torealise; just as in company a solecism of speech or manners will makeus wince before we have time to trace it to the ill-breeding fromwhich it springs. His mother, she had heard (he, in fact, had toldher), was given to these pious tricks of speech. Surely his finebrain had suffered some lesion. He was not himself, and she mustwait for his recovery. But surely, too, he would recover and behimself again.

  "Ruth, I have done you great wrong."

  "O cease! cease, Oliver!" Her voice cried it aloud now, as shedropped to her knees and buried her face in the coverlet. "Do nottalk like this--I had a hundred times rather you neglected me thanhear 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 inthat my great, great happiness? You, in whose light my life hasmoved? . . . Ah, love, do not break my heart!"

  "You misunderstand," he said quietly. "Why should what I am sayingbreak 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 hisgaze, which had not ceased to rest on her as she stood with herbeautiful figure silhouetted against the evening light.

  "You real
ly think my marrying you would make a difference?"

  "To me it would make all the difference," he urged, but still verygently, 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 fromdeath?--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 weatherbeing chilly) the guard of the gate usually kept a small brazieralight 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; softlaughter, terrible to hear.

  In the midst of it a voice--a high, jolly, schoolboy voice--calledout from the gateway demanding, in execrable Portuguese, to be shownLady Vyell's tent. She dropped the raking-iron with a clatter andstood 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 allplaces?"

  "Well, motherkin," said he with the finest air of importance, "a manwould say that if a crew of British sailors could be usefulanywhere--We'll teach your Portuguese, anyhow. Oh, yes, the_Pegasus_ was at Gibraltar--we felt the shock there pretty badly--andthe Admiral sent us up the coast to give help where we could.A coaster found us off Lagos with word that Lisbon had suffered worstof all. So we hammered at it, wind almost dead foul all theway . . . and here we are. Captain Hanmer brought me ashore in hisgig. 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--begginghis pardon--at all this distance."

  Yes she did. She could have distinguished that tread had it marchedamong a thousand. Her brain had held the note of it ever since thenight 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 oflaughter, with the firm tread of duty.

  The story of Ruth Josselin and Oliver Vyell is told. They weremarried ten days later in the hospital at Belem by a priest of theChurch of Rome; and afterwards, on their way to England in HisMajesty's frigate _Calliope_, which had brought out stores for therelief of the suffering city and was now returning with most of theEnglish survivors, Sir Oliver insisted on having the union againratified by the services of the ship's chaplain. Ruth, whose senseof humour had survived the earthquake, could smile at thissupererogation.

  They landed at Plymouth and posting to Bath, were tenderly welcomedby Lady Jane, to whom her son's conversion was hardly less a matterof rejoicing than his rescue from a living tomb. In Bath Ruth LadyVyell might have reigned as a toast, a queen of society; but SirOliver had learnt a distaste for fashionable follies, nor did shegreatly yearn for them.

  He remained a Whig, however, and two years later received appointmentto the post of Consul-General at Lisbon. Its duties were notarduous, and allowed him to cross the Atlantic half a dozen timeswith Lady Vyell and revisit Eagles, where Miss Quiney held faithfulstewardship. He never completely recovered his health. The pressureunder which he had lain during those three terrible hours had lefthim with some slight curvature of the spine. It increased, and endedin a constriction of the lungs, bringing on a slow decline. In 1767he again retired to Bath, where next year he died, aged fifty-oneyears. 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'sepitaph, and conned it, puckering her brow slightly in the effort tokeep her thoughts collected.

  She had not set eyes on the tablet since the day the stonemasons hadfixed it in place; and that was close upon eight years ago. On themorrow, her pious duty fulfilled, she had taken post for Plymouth,there to embark for America; and the intervening years had been livedin widowhood at Eagles until the outbreak of the Revolution hadforced her, early in 1775, to take shelter in Boston, and in the latefall of the year to sail back to England. For Eagles, thoughunravaged, had passed into the hands of the "rebels"; and Ruth,though an ardent loyalist, kept her old clearness of vision, andforesaw that King George could not beat his Colonists; that the starsin their courses fought against this stupid monarch.

  This pilgrimage to Bath had been her first devoir on reachingEngland. She had nursed him tenderly through his last illness, asshe had been in all respects an exemplary wife. Yet, standingbeneath his monument, she felt herself an impostor. She could findhere 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?--yearsago, under a fallen pillar in a street of Lisbon. Doubtless the sitehad been built over; it would be hard to find now, so actively hadthe Marquis de Pombal, Portugal's First Minister, renovated theruined city. But whether discoverable or not, there and not here waswritten 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 twoseparate men. The one had possessed her; she had merely married theother.

  With the blank sense of having been cheated mingled a sense that sheherself was the cheat. The tablet accused her of it, confronting herwith words which, all too sharply, she remembered as of her owncomposing. "_After a tedious and painful Illness, sustained with thePatience and resignation becoming to a Christian_." Why to aChristian more than to another? Was it not mere manliness to bear(as, to do him justice, he had borne) ill-health with fortitude, andface dissolution with courage? How had she ever come to utter cointhat 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 ageneral odour of humbug, sickly, infectious, insinuating itself,stealing along the darkened Gothic aisles. Since nothing is surerthan death, nothing can be corrupter than mortality deceiving itself. . . . The west door of the Abbey stood open. Ruth, striving tocollect her thoughts, saw the sunlight beyond it spread broad uponthe city's famous piazza. Sounds, too, were wafted in through thedoorway, penetrating the hush, distracting her; rumble of workdaytraffic, voices of vendors in distant streets; among these--assertingitself quietly, yet steadily, regularly as a beat in music--afootfall on the pavement outside. . . . She knew the footfall.She distinguished it from every other. Scores of times in thewatches of the night she had lain and listened to it, hearing it inimagination only, echoed from memory, yet distinct upon the ear asthe tramp of an actual foot, manly and booted; hearing it always witha sense of helplessness, as though with that certain deliberate treadmarched her fate upon her, inexorably nearing. This once again--shetold 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 themselv
es to thesunlight, and Captain Hanmer came towards her from the shadow of thecolonnade by the great Pump-room. He carried his left arm in asling, and with his right hand lifted his hat, but awkwardly.

  "I had heard of your promotion," she said after they had exchangedgreetings, "and of your wound, and I dare say you will let mecongratulate you on both, since the same gallantry earned them. . . . But what brings you to Bath? . . . To drink the waters, Isuppose, and help your convalescence."

  "They have a great reputation," he answered gravely; "but I havenever heard it claimed that they can extract a ball or the splintersfrom a shattered forearm. The surgeons did the one, and time must dothe other, if it will be so kind. . . . No, I am in Bath because mymother 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 plainlysurprised. "You knew that I was here, then?"

  "Not until a moment ago, when I heard your footstep." As thisappeared to surprise him still more, she added, "You have, whetheryou 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 provedits quickness?"

  He bent his head as sign for assent.

  "It was in Boston," she said, "last June--on the evening after thefight at Bunker Hill. At midnight, rather. Before seven o'clock thehospitals were full, and they brought half a dozen poor fellows to mylodgings in Garden Court Street. Towards midnight one of them, thathad lain all the afternoon under the broiling sun by the _Mystic_ andhad taken a sunstroke on top of his wound, began raving. My maid andI 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 someone had been patrolling the side-walk before the house; and I badeher go downstairs and desire him to fetch a surgeon. You were thatsentinel."

  Again he bent his head. "I was serving on board the _Lively_," hesaid, "in the ferry-way between you and Charlestown. I had heard ofyou--that you had taken lodgings in Boston, and that the temper ofthe mob might be uncertain. So that night I got leave ashore, on thechance of being useful. I brought the doctor, if you remember."

  "But would not present yourself to claim our thanks." She looked athim 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_, amongthe fashionable announcements." He did not add, but she divined,that he had waited for her by the Abbey, well guessing that her stepswould piously lead her thither and soon. She changed the subject insome 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 heracquaintance to cheer me."

  "It was unlikely that you should meet. We live in the humblest ofways."

  "Nevertheless it would be kind of you to make us acquainted.Indeed," she went on, "I very earnestly desire it, having a greatneed--since you are so hard to thank directly--to thank you throughsomebody for many things, and especially for helping Dicky."

  He laughed grimly as he fell into step with her, or tried to--but hisobstinate stride would not be corrected. "All the powers that everwere," he said, "could not hinder Dicky. He has his captaincy insight--at his age!--and will be flying the blue before he reachesforty. Mark my words."

  On their way up the ascent of Lansdowne Hill he told her muchconcerning Dicky--not of his success in the service, which she knewalready, but of the service's inner opinion of him, which set herblood tingling. She glanced sideways once or twice at the strong,awkward man who, outpaced by the stripling, could rejoice in hispromotion without one twinge of jealousy, loving him merely as onegood sailor should love another. She noted him as once or twice hetried to correct his pace by hers. Her thoughts went back to thetablet in the Abbey, commemorating a husband who (if it told truth)had never been hers. She compared him, all in charity, with two whohad given her an unpaid devotion. One slept at Lisbon, in theEnglish cemetery. The other walked beside her even with such a treadas out somewhere on the dark floor of the sea he had paced hisquarter-deck many a night through, pausing only to con his helmbeneath the stars.

  They turned aside into an unfashionable by-street, and halted beforea modest door in a row. Ruth noted the railings, that they werespick-and-span as paint could make them; the dainty window-blinds.Through the passage-way, as he opened the door, came wafted from aback garden the clean odour of flowering stocks.

  In the parlour to the right of the passage, a frail, small woman rosefrom her chair to welcome them.

  "Mother," said her son, "this is Lady Vyell."

  The little woman stretched out her hands, and then, before Ruth couldtake them, they were lifted and touched her temples softly, and shebent 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 shineupon you all your days!"