Lady Good-for-Nothing Part 53

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 a.s.ses and always in the end discovering a kingdom. Other nations build the dream, dreams being no gift of hers. Then she steps in, thrusts out the dreamers, inherits the reality. America, though you laugh at it, has cost the best dreaming of two nations--Spain first, and now France--and the best blood of both. Bating Joan of Arc--a woman--France hasn't bred a finer spirit than Montcalm's since she bred Froissart's men. But to what end?

England will break that great heart of his."

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

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

Mrs. Hake said, "I prefer to believe Mr. Castres. My brother writes that every one is quitting New York, and I'm only thankful-if war must come, over there--that we've taken our house on a three years'

lease only. No one troubles about Portugal, and I must say that I've never found a city to compare with Lisbon. The suburbs! . . . Why, this very morning I saw the city itself one pall of smoke.

You'd have thought a main square was burning. Yet up here, in Buenos Ayres, it might have been midsummer. . . . The children, playing in the garden, called me out to look at the smoke. _Was_ there a fire?

I must ask Sir Oliver."

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

All the while she was thinking, thinking to herself.--"And he, who can speak thus, once endured shame to shield me! He laughs at things infinitely crueller. . . . Yet they differ in degree only from what then stirred him to fight. . . ."

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

--"Or did the curse but delay to work in him?--in him, my love and my hero? Was it foreordained to come to this, though I would at any time have given my life to prevent it?"

Again she thought.--"I have been wrong in holding religion to be the great cause why men are cruel,--as in believing that free-thought must needs humanise us all. Strange! that I should discover my error on this very day has showed me men being led by religion to deaths of torture. . . . Yet an error it must be. For see my lord--hear how he laughs as cruelly, even, as the _devote_ at his elbow!"

They had loitered some while over dessert, and Ruth's eye sought Donna Maria's, to signal her before rising and leaving the gentlemen to their wine. But Donna Maria was running a preoccupied glance around the table and counting with her fingers. . . . Presently the glance grew distraught and the silly woman fell back in her chair with a cry.

"Jesus! We are thirteen!"

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

"And I the uninvited one! The calamity must fall on _me_--there is no other way!"

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

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

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

Chapter III.

EARTHQUAKE.

The auto-da-fe was but a preliminary to the festivities and great processions of All Saints. For a whole week Lisbon had been sanding its squares and streets, painting its signboards, draping its balconies and windows to the fourth and fifth stories with hangings of crimson damask. Street after street displayed this uniform vista of crimson, foil for the procession, with its riot of gorgeous dresses, gold lace, banners, precious stones.

Ruth leaned on the bal.u.s.trade of her villa garden, and looked down over the city, from which, made musical by distance, the bells of thirty churches called to High Ma.s.s. 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 Ma.s.s 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 bal.u.s.trade 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 bal.u.s.trade. 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 bal.u.s.trade. 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 bal.u.s.trade 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 ma.s.s 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 G.o.d! 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 anch.o.r.ed ships high and dry.