Lady Good-for-Nothing Part 58

"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 grat.i.tude, to be sure. Did you not win me back from death?--to be a new and different man henceforth, please G.o.d!"

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.

"d.i.c.ky?" . . . she breathed.

Yes; the tent flap was lifted and d.i.c.ky stood there in the twilight; a d.i.c.ky incredibly grown.

"d.i.c.ky!"

"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 ash.o.r.e 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.

d.i.c.ky laughed, incredulous. She held the boy at arm's length, lovingly as Captain Hanmer came and stood by the tent door.

So life might yet sound with honest laughter; ay, and at the back of laughter, with the firm tread of duty.

The story of Ruth Josselin and Oliver Vyell is told. They were married ten days later in the hospital at Belem by a priest of the Church of Rome; and afterwards, on their way to England in His Majesty's frigate _Calliope_, which had brought out stores for the relief of the suffering city and was now returning with most of the English survivors, Sir Oliver insisted on having the union again ratified by the services of the ship's chaplain. Ruth, whose sense of humour had survived the earthquake, could smile at this supererogation.

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

He remained a Whig, however, and two years later received appointment to the post of Consul-General at Lisbon. Its duties were not arduous, and allowed him to cross the Atlantic half a dozen times with Lady Vyell and revisit Eagles, where Miss Quiney held faithful stewardship. He never completely recovered his health. The pressure under which he had lain during those three terrible hours had left him with some slight curvature of the spine. It increased, and ended in a constriction of the lungs, bringing on a slow decline. In 1767 he again retired to Bath, where next year he died, aged fifty-one years. His epitaph on the wall of the Abbey nave runs as follows:--

"To the memory of Sir Oliver Hastings Pelham Vyell of Carwithiel, Co. Cornwall, Baronet, Consul-General for many years at Lisbon, whence he came in hopes of Recovery from a Bad State of Health to Bath. Here, after a tedious and painful illness, sustained with the Patience and Resignation becoming to a Christian, he died Jan. 11, 1768, in the Fifty-second Year of his Life, without Heir. This Monument is erected by his affectionate Widow, Ruth Lady Vyell."

EPILOGUE

Ruth Lady Vyell stood in the empty minster beneath her husband's epitaph, and conned it, puckering her brow slightly in the effort to keep her thoughts collected.

She had not set eyes on the tablet since the day the stonemasons had fixed it in place; and that was close upon eight years ago. On the morrow, her pious duty fulfilled, she had taken post for Plymouth, there to embark for America; and the intervening years had been lived in widowhood at Eagles until the outbreak of the Revolution had forced her, early in 1775, to take shelter in Boston, and in the late fall of the year to sail back to England. For Eagles, though unravaged, had pa.s.sed 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 fort.i.tude, 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--a.s.serting 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 a.s.sure 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 a.s.sent.

"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 ash.o.r.e, 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."