Her face was white, but she answered him steadily.  "I believe you to
be a good man. . . . I will go to them.  Where is Dicky?"
She glanced back along the alley.

"Dicky will stand where I have told him to stand: for hours unless I
release him."

"Is that your naval code?  And can a mere child stand by it so
proudly?  Oh," cried she, fixing on him a look he remembered all his
days, "would to God I had been born a man!"


Yet fearlessly as any man she entered the great drawing-room.  Miss
Quiney still lay collapsed on her sofa.  Mrs. Harry bent over her,
but faced about.

"Mr. Hanmer managed, then, to discover you?  Two women have called.
. . . I thought it better, their errand being what it was, to show
them out."

"I can guess it, perhaps," Ruth caught her up with a wan smile.
"They managed to talk with him before he gave them their dismissal."

"Forgive me.  I had not thought them capable--"

"There is nothing to forgive," Ruth assured her.  "They probably told
the truth, and the fault is mine."

Miss Quiney, incredulous, slowly raised her face from the cushions
and stared.

"Yes," repeated Ruth, "the fault is entirely mine."


"But--but," stammered Mrs. Harry.  Ruth had turned away towards the
window, and the honest wife stared after her, against the light.
"But he will make it all right when he returns."  She started, of a
sudden.  Cunningly as Ruth had dressed herself, Mrs. Harry's eyes
guessed the truth.  "You have written to him?"

"No."

"He guesses, at least?"

"No."

"Then you are writing to him?  There is enough time."

"No."

Their eyes met.  Ruth's asked, "And if I do not, will you?" Mrs.
Harry's met them for a few seconds and were abased.

No words passed between these two.  "And as for my Tatty," said Ruth
lightly, stepping to the sofa, "she is not to write.  I command her."



Chapter V.


A PROLOGUE TO NOTHING.


Sir Oliver wrote cheerfully.  His lawsuit was prospering; his prompt
invasion of the field had disconcerted Lady Caroline and her
advisers.  He had discovered fresh evidence of the late Sir Thomas's
insanity.  His own lawyers were sanguine.  They assured him that, at
the worst, the Courts would set aside the '46 will, and fall back for
a compromise on that of '44, which gave the woman a life-interest
only in the Downton estates.  But the case would not be taken this
side of the Long Vacation. . . . (It was certain, then, that he could
not return in time.)

He had visited Bath and spent some weeks with his mother.  He devoted
a page or two to criticism of that fashionable city.  It was clear he
had picked up many threads of his younger days; had renewed old
acquaintances and made a hundred new ones.  Play, he wrote, was a
craze in England; the stakes frightened a home-comer from New
England.  For his part, he gamed but moderately.

"As for the women, you have spoilt me for them.  I see none--not one,
dearest--who can hold a taper to you.  Their artifices disgust me;
and I watch them, telling myself that my Ruth has only to enter their
balls and assemblies to triumph--nay, to eclipse them totally. . . .
And this reminds me to say that I have spoken with my mother.
She had heard, of course, from more than one.  Lady Caroline's
account had been merely coarse and spiteful; but by that lady's later
conduct she was already prepared to discount it.  The pair
encountered in London, at my Lady Newcastle's; and my mother (who has
spirit) refused her bow.  Diana, to her credit, appears to have done
you more justice; and Mrs. Harry writes reams in your praise.
To be sure my mother, not knowing Mrs. Harry, distrusts her judgment
for a Colonial's; but I vow she is the soundest of women. . . .
In short, dear Ruth, we have only to regularise things and we are
forgiven.  The good soul dotes on me, and imagines she has but a few
years left to live.  This softens her. . . .

"There is a rumour--credit it, if you can!--that my Aunt Caroline
intends to espouse a Mr. Adam Rouffignac, a foreigner and a wine
merchant; I suppose (since he is reputed rich) to arm herself with
money to pay her lawyers.  What _his_ object can be, poor man, I am
unable to conjecture.  It is a strange world.  While her ugly mother
mates at the age of fifty, Diana--who started with all the advantages
of looks--withers upon the maiden thorn. . . ."

His letters, every one, concluded with protests of affection.
She rejoiced in them.  But it was now certain that he could not
return in time.


At length, as her day drew near, she wrote to him, conceiving this to
be her duty.  She knew that he would take a blow from what she had to
tell, and covered it up cleverly, lightly covering all her own dread.
She hoped the child would be a boy.  ("But why do I hope it?" she
asked herself as she penned the words, and thought of Dicky.)


She said nothing of Mr. Silk's treachery; nothing of her ostracism.
This indeed, during the later months, she recognised for the blessing
it was.


Towards the end she felt a strange longing to have her mother near,
close at hand, for her lying-in.  The poor silly soul could not travel
alone. . . . Ruth considered this and hit on the happy inspiration of
inviting Mrs. Strongtharm to bring her.  Tatty was useless, and among
the few women who had been kind Mrs. Strongtharm had been the
kindest.

Ruth sat down and penned a letter; and Mrs. Strongtharm, unable to
write, responded valiantly.  She arrived in a cart, with Mrs.
Josselin at her side; and straightway alighting and neglecting Mrs.
Josselin, sailed into a seventh heaven of womanly fuss.  She examined
the baby-clothes critically.

"Made with your own pretty hands--and with all this mort o' servants
tumblin' over one another to help ye.  But 'tis nat'ral. . . .
It came to nothing with me, but I know.  And expectin' a boy o'
course. . . . La! ye blushin' one, don't I know the way of it!"


When Ruth's travail came on her the three were gathered by
candle-light in Sir Oliver's dressing-room.  Beyond the door,
attended by her maid and a man-midwife, Ruth shut her teeth upon her
throes.  So the prologue opens.

PROLOGUE.

_Mrs. Josselin sits in an armchair, regarding the pattern of the
carpet with a silly air of self-importance; Mrs. Strongtharm in a
chair opposite.  By the window Miss Quiney, pulling at her knuckles,
stares out through the dark panes.  A clock strikes_.

_Miss Quiney (with a nervous start)_.  Four o'clock . . .
nine hours. . . .

_Mrs. Strongtharm._  More.  The pains took her soon after six. . . .
When her bell rang I looked at the clock.  I remember.

_Miss Quiney_.  My poor Ruth.

_Mrs. Strongtharm_.  Eh?  The first, o' course. . . .  But a long
labour's often the best.

_Miss Quiney_.  There has not been a sound for hours.

_Mrs. Strongtharm_.  She's brave.  They say, too, that a man-child,
if he's a real strong one, will wait for daybreak; but that's old
women's notions, I shouldn't wonder.

_Miss Quiney_.  A man-child?  You think it will be?

_Mrs. Strongtharm_.  (She exchanges a glance with Mrs. Josselin, who
has looked up suddenly and nods.)  Certain.

_Mrs. Josselin_.  Certain, certain!  I wonder, now, what they'll call
him!  After Sir Oliver, perhaps.  Her own father's name was Michael.
In my own family--that's the Pocock's--the men were mostly Williams
and Georges.  Called after the Kings of England.

_Mrs. Strongtharm (yawns)_.  Oliver Cromwell was as good as any king,
and better.  Leastways my mar says so.  For my part, I don't bother
my head wi' these old matters.

_Miss Quiney (tentatively)_.  Do you know, I was half hoping it would
be a girl, just like my darling.  _(To herself)_ God forgive me, when
I think--

_Mrs. Strongtharm (interrupting the thought)_.  _She_ won't be hoping
for a girl.  You don't understand these things, beggin' your pardon,
ma'am.

_Miss Quiney (meekly)_.  No.

_Mrs. Josselin_.  You don't neither of you understand.  How should
you?

_Mrs. Strongtharm (stung)_.  I understand as well as a fool, I should
hope!  _(She turns to Miss Quiney.)_  'Twas a nat'ral wish in ye,
ma'am, that such a piece o' loveliness should bear just such another.
But wait a while; they're young and there's time. . . . My lady wants
a boy first, like every true woman that loves her lord.
There's pride an' wonder in it.  All her life belike she's felt
herself weak an' shivered to think of battles, and now, lo an'
behold, she's the very gates o' strength with an army marchin' forth
to conquer the world.  Ha'n't ye never caught your breath an' felt
the tears swellin' when ye saw a regiment swing up the street?

_Miss Quiney_.  Ah! . . . Is it like that?

_Mrs. Strongtharm_.  It's like all that, an' more. . . . An' though
I've wet my pillow afore now with envy of it, I thank the Lord for
givin' a barren woman the knowledge.

_A pause_.

_Mrs. Josselin (with a silly laugh)_.  What wonderful patterns they
make in the carpets nowadays!  Look at this one, now--runnin' in and
out so that the eye can't hardly follow it; and all for my lord's
dressing-room!  Cost a hundred pound, I shouldn't wonder.

_Mrs. Strongtharm_.  T'cht!

_Mrs. Josselin_.  He must be amazing fond of her.  Fancy, my Ruth!
. . . It's a pity he's not home, to take the child.

_Mrs. Strongtharm_.  Men at these times are best out o' the way.

_Mrs. Josselin_.  When my first was born, Michael--that's my
husband--stayed home from sea o' purpose to take it.  My first was a
girl.  No, not Ruth; Ruth was born after my man died, and I had her
christened Ruth because some one told me it stood for "sorrow."
I had three before Ruth--a girl an' two boys, an' buried them all.

_Miss Quiney (listening)_.  Hush!

_Mrs. Josselin (not hearing, immersed in her own mental flow)_.
If you call a child by a sorrowful name it's apt to ward off the
ill-luck.  Look at Ruth now--christened in sorrow an' married, after
all, to the richest in the land!

_Miss Quiney (in desperation)_.  Oh, hush! hush!

_A low moan comes from the next room.  The women sit silent, their
faces white in the dawn that now comes stealing in at the window,
conquering the candle-light by little and little_.

_Mrs. Strongtharm_.  I thought I heard a child's cry. . . . They cry
at once.

_Miss Quiney_.  Ah?  I fancied it, too--a feeble one.

_Mrs. Strongtharm (rising after a long pause)_.  Something is
wrong. . . .

_As she goes to listen at the door, it opens, and the man-midwife
enters.  His face is grave_.

_Mrs. Strongtharm and Miss Quiney ask him together, under their
breath_--Well?

_He answers:_ It is well.  We have saved her life, I trust.

--And the child?

--A boy.  It lived less than a minute. . . . Yet a shapely
child. . . .

_Miss Quiney clasps her hands.  Shall she, within her breast, thank
God?  She cannot.  She hears the voice saying_,--

A very shapely child. . . . But the labour was difficult.  There was
some pressure on the brain, some lesion.

They would have denied Ruth sight of the poor little body, but she
stretched out her arms for it and insisted.  Then as she held it,
flesh of her flesh, to her breast and felt it cold, she--she, whose
courage had bred wonder in them, even awe--she who had smiled between
her pangs, murmuring pretty thanks--wailed low, and, burying her
face, lay still.



Chapter VI.


CHILDLESS MOTHER.


In the sad and cheated days that followed, she, with the milk of
motherhood wasting in her, saw with new eyes--saw many things
heretofore hidden from her.

She did not believe in any scriptural God.  But she believed--she
could not help believing--in an awful Justice overarching all human
life with its law, as it overarched the very stars in heaven.
And this law she believed to rest in goodness, accessible to the pure
conscience, but stern against the transgressor.

Because she believed this, she had felt that the marriage rite, with
such an one as Mr. Silk for intercessor between her vows and a clean
Heaven, could be but a sullying of marriage.  Yes, and she felt it
still; of this, at any rate, she was sure.

But in her pride--as truly she saw it, in her pride of chastity--she
had left the child out of account.  _He_ had inherited the world to
face, not armed with her weapon of scorn.  _He_ had not won freedom
through a scourge.  He had grown to his fate in her womb, and in the
womb she had betrayed him.

She had been blind, blind!  She had lived for her lover and herself.
To him and to her (it had seemed) this warm, transitory life
belonged; a fleeting space of time, a lodge leased to bliss. . . .
Now she fronted the truth, that between the selfish rapture of lovers
Heaven slips a child, smiling at the rapture, provident for the race.
Now she read the secret of woman's nesting instinct; the underlying
wisdom stirring the root of it, awaking passion not to satisfy
passion, but that the world may go on and on to its unguessed ends.
Now she could read ironically the courtship of man and maid, dallying
by river-paths, beside running water, overarched by boughs that had
protected a thousand such courtships.  Each pair in turn--poor fools!
--had imagined the world theirs, compressed into their grasp; whereas
the wise world was merely flattering, coaxing them, preparing for the
child.

She should have been preparing, too.  For what are women made but for
motherhood?  She?  She had had but a hand to turn, a word to utter,
and this child--healthily begotten, if ever child was, and to claim,
if ever child could, the best--has broken triumphing through the gate
of her travail.  But she had betrayed him.  The new-born spirit had
arrived expectant, had cast one look across the threshold, and with
one wail had fled.  Through and beyond her answering wail, as she
laid her head on the pillow, she heard the lost feet, the small
betrayed feet, pattering away into darkness.


When she grew stronger, it consoled her a little to talk with Mrs.
Strongtharm; not confiding her regrets and self-reproaches, but
speculating much on this great book of Maternity into which she had
been given a glimpse.  The metaphor was Mrs. Strongtharm's.

"Ay," said that understanding female, "a book you may call it, and a
wonderful one; written by all the women, white an' black, copper-skin
an' red-skin, that ever groped their way in it with pangs an' joys;
for every one writes in it as well as reads.  What's more, 'tis all
in one language, though they come, as my man would say, from all the
airts o' Babel."

"I wonder," mused Ruth, "if somewhere in it there's a chapter would
tell me why, when I lie awake and think of my lost one, 'tis his
footsteps I listen for--feet that never walked!"

"Hush ye, now. . . . Isn't it always their feet, the darlings!
Don't the sound of it, more'n their voices, call me to door a dozen
times a day? . . .  I never bore child; but I made garments in hope
o' one.  Tell me, when you knitted his little boots, wasn't it
different from all the rest?"

"Ah, put them away!"

"To be sure, dearie, to be sure--all ready for the next."

"I shall never have another child."

Mrs. Strongtharm smiled tolerantly.

"Never," Ruth repeated; "never; I know it."


With the same assurance of prophesy she answered her lover on his
return, a bare two months later.

"But you must have known. . . .  Even your letters kept it secret.
Yet, had you written, the next ship would have brought me.  Surely
you did not doubt _that?_"

"No."

"Then why did you not tell me?"

It was the inevitable question.  She had forestalled it so often in
her thoughts that, when uttered at last, it gave her a curious
sensation of re-enacting some long-past scene.

"I thought you did not care for children."

He was pacing the room.  He halted, and stared at her in sheer
astonishment.  Many a beautiful woman touches the height of her
beauty after the birth of her first child; and this woman had never
stood before him in loveliness that, passing comprehension, so nearly
touched the divine.  But her perversity passed comprehension yet
farther.

"Do you call that an answer?" he demanded.

"No. . . . You asked, and I had to say something; but it is no
answer.  Forgive me.  It was the best I could find."

He still eyed her, between wrath and admiration.

"I think," she said, after a pause, "the true answer is just that I
did wrongly--wrongly for the child's sake."

"That's certain.  And your own?"

"My own? That does not seem to me to count so much. . . .  Neither of
us believe that a priest can hallow marriage; but once I felt that
the touch of a certain one could defile it."

"You have never before reproached me with that."

"Nor mean to now.  I chose to run from him; but, dear, I do not ask
to run from the consequences."

"The blackguard has had his pretty revenge.  Langton told me of it.
. . . All the prudes of Boston gather up their skirts, he says."

"What matter?  Are we not happier missing them? . . .  Honester,
surely, and by that much at any rate the happier."

"Marry me, and I promise to force them all back to your feet."

She laughed quietly, almost to herself, a little wearily.  "Can you
not see, my dear lord, that I ask for no such triumph?  It is good of
you--oh, I see how good!--to desire it for me.  But did we want these
people in our forest days?"

"One cannot escape the world," he muttered.

"What?  Not when the world is so quick to cast one out?"

"Ruth," he said, coming and standing close to her, "I do not believe
you have given me the whole answer even yet.  The true reason,
please!"

"Must a woman give all her reasons? . . .  She follows her fate, and
at each new turning she may have a dozen, all to be forgotten at the
next."

"I am sure you harbour some grudge--some reservation?"  His eyes
questioned her.

She kept him waiting for some seconds.

"My lord, women have no consistency but in this--they are jealous
when they love.  As your slave, I demand nothing; as your mistress, I
demand only you.  But if you wished also to set me high among women,
you should have given me all or nothing. . . . You did not offer to
take me with you.  I was not worthy to be shown to that proud folk,
your family."

"If you had breathed a wish, even the smallest hint of one--"

"I had no wish, save that you should offer it.  I had only some
pride.  I was--I am--well content; only do not come back and offer me
these women of Boston, or anything second best in your eyes, however
much the gift may cost you."

"Have it as you will," said he, after a long pause.  "I was wrong,
and I beg your pardon.  But I was less wrong than your jealousy
suspects.  My family will welcome you.  Forgive me that I thought it
well--that it might save you any chance of humiliation--to prepare
them."

She swept him a curtsy.  "They are very good," she said.

He detected the irony, yet he persisted, holding his temper well in
control.  "But all this presupposes, you see, that you marry me.
. . . Ruth, you confess that you were wrong, for the child's sake.
He is dead; and, on the whole, so much the better, poor mite!
But for another, should another be born--"

"There would be time," she said quietly.  "But we shall never have
another."


She had hardened strangely.  It was as if the milk of motherhood,
wasting in her, had packed itself in a crust about her heart.
He loved her; she never ceased to love him; but whereas under the
public scourge something had broken, letting her free of opinion, to
love the good and hate the evil for their own sakes, under this
second and more mysterious visitation, she kept her courage indeed,
but certainty was hers no longer; nor was she any longer free of
opinion, but hardened her heart against it consciously, as against an
enemy.

Not otherwise can I account for the image of Ruth Josselin--my Lady
Vyell--Lady Good-for-Nothing--as under these various names it flits,
for the next few years, through annals, memoirs, correspondence,
scandalous chronicles; now vindicated, now glanced at with unseemly
nods and becks, anon passionately denounced; now purely shining, now
balefully, above and between the clouds of those times; but always a
star and an object of wonder.

"In all Massachusetts," writes the Reverend Hiram Williams, B.D., in
his tract entitled _A Shoe Over Edom_, "was no stronghold of Satan to
compare with that built on a slope to the rearward of Boston, by Sir
O--V--, Baronet.  Here with a woman, born of this Colony, of passing
wit and beauty (both alike the dower of the Evil One), he kept house
to the scandal of all devout persons, entertaining none but professed
Enemies of our Liberties, Atheists, Gamesters."  Here one may pause
and suspect the reverend castigator of confusing several dislikes in
one argument.  It is done sometimes, even in our own day, by
religious folk who polemise in politics.  "Cards they played on the
Sabbath.  Plays they rehearsed too, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Congreve
and others, whose names may guarantee their lewdness. . . .  The
woman, I have said, was fair; but of that sort their feet go down
ever _to_ Hell. . . ."

"My Noll's _Belle Sauvage_," writes Langton to Walpole, "continues a
riddle.  I shall never solve it; yet 'till I have solved it, expect
me not.  'Tis certain she loves him; and because she loves him, her
loyalty allows not hint of sadness even to me, his best friend.
Guess why she likes me?  'Tis because (I am sure of it) even in the
old clouded days I never took money from Noll, nor borrowed a
shilling that I didn't repay within the week.  She is a puzzle, I
say; but somehow the key lies in this--_She is a woman that pays her
debts_. .  . .

"They sail for Europe next spring; but not, as I understand for
England, where his family may not receive her, and where by
consequence he will not expose her to their slights.  If I have made
you impatient to set eyes on her, you must e'enpack and pay that
long-promised visit to Florence.  She is worth the pilgrimage."


They sailed in the early spring of 1752--Langton with them--and duly
came to port in the Tagus.  From Lisbon, after a short stay, they
travelled to Paris, and from Paris across Switzerland to Italy,
visiting in turn Turin, Venice, Ravenna, Florence, Rome, Naples, and
returning from that port to Lisbon, where (the situation so charmed
him) Sir Oliver bought and furnished a villa overlooking the Tagus.


As she passes through Paris we get a glimpse of her in the Memoirs of
that agreeable rattle, Arnauld de Jouy:--

"I must not forget to tell of an amusing little comedy of error
played at the Opera-house this season (1752).  All Paris was agog to
see the famous English--or rather Irish--beauty, my Lady Coventry,
newly arrived in the Capital.  She was one of the Gunning sisters,
over whom all London had already lost its head so wildly that I am
assured a shoemaker made no small sum by exhibiting their
_pantoufles_ to the porters and chairmen at three sous a gaze. . . .
On a certain night, then, it was rumoured that she would pay her
first visit to the Opera, but none could say whose box she intended
to honour. . . . It turned out to be the Duc de Luxembourg's, and
upon my lady's entrance--a little late--the whole audience rose to
its feet in homage, though Visconti happened just then to be midway
in an _aria_.  The singer faltered at the interruption, perplexed;
her singing stopped, and lifting her eyes to the lines of boxes she
dropped a sweeping curtsy--to the opposite side of the house! . . .
All eyes turn, and behold! right opposite to Beauty Number One, into
the box of Mme. the Marechale de Lowendahl there has just entered a
Beauty Number Two, not one whit less fair--so regally fair indeed
that the audience, yet standing, turn from one to the other,
uncertain which to salute.  Nor were they resolved when the act
closed.

"Meantime my Lady Coventry (for in truth the first-comer was she) has
sent her husband out to the _foyer_, to make enquiries.  He comes
back and reports her to be the lady of Sir Oliver Vyell, a great
American Governor [But here we detect de Jouy in a slight error]
newly arrived from his Province; that she is by birth an American,
and has never visited Europe before.  'She must be Pocahontas
herself, then,' says the Gunning, and very prettily sends across
after the second Act, desiring the honour of her acquaintance.
Nay, this being granted, she goes herself to the Marechale's box, and
the pair sit together in full view of all--a superb challenge, and
made with no show (as I believe, with no feeling) of jealousy.  The
audience is entranced. . . . Report said later that my Lady Coventry,
who was given to these small indiscretions, asked almost in her first
breath, yet breathlessly, her rival's age.  Her rival smiled and told
it.  'Then you are older than I--but how long have you been married?'
This, too, her rival told her.  'Then,' sighed the Gunning, 'perhaps
you do not love your lord as I love my Cov.  It _is_ wearing to the
looks; but 'faith, I cannot help it!'"


From Lisbon Sir Oliver paid several flying visits to England, where
his suit against Lady Caroline still dragged.  Nor was it concluded
until the summer of 1754, when the _Gentleman's Magazine_ yields us
the following:--


"_June 4_.  A cause between Sir Oliver Vyell, baronet, plaintiff, and
the lady of the late Sir Thomas, defendant, was tried in the Court of
King's Bench by a special jury.  The subject of the litigation was a
will of Sir Thomas, suspected to be made when he was not of sound
mind; and it appeared that he had made three--one in 1741, another in
1744, and a third in 1746.  In the first only a slender provision was
made for his lady, by the second a family estate in Devonshire, of
2,000 pounds per annum, was given her for her life, and by the third
the whole estate real and personal was left to be disposed of at her
discretion without any provision for the heir-at-law.  The jury,
after having withdrawn for about an hour and a half, set aside the
last and confirmed the second.  In a hearing before the Lord
Chancellor some time afterwards in relation to the costs, it was
deemed that the lady should pay them all, both at common law and in
Chancery."


Thus we see our Ruth by glimpses in these years which were far from
being the best or the happiest of her life--"an innocent life, yet
far astray."

But one letter of hers abides, kept in contrition by the woman to
whom she wrote it, and in this surely the noble soul of her mounts
like a star and shines, clear above the wreck of her life.


"MY DEAR MRS. HARRY,--"

"Let there be few words between us.  My child
did not live, and I shall never bear my lord another; therefore,
outside of your feelings and mine, what you did or left undone
matters not at all in this world.  You talk of the next, and there
you go beyond me; but if there be a next world, and my forgiveness
can help you there, why you had it long ago! . . . 'You reproach
yourself constantly,' you say; 'You should have told him and you
withheld the letter;' 'You did wickedly'--and the rest.  Oh, my dear,
will you not see that I have been a mother, too, and understand?
In your place I might have done the same.  Yes?  No?  At any rate I
should have known the temptation.

"Yours affectionately,"

"RUTH."


The law business ended, she and Sir Oliver sailed for Boston and
spent a few weeks at Eagles.  He had resigned the Collectorship of
Customs, but with no intent to return and make England his home.
His attachment to Eagles had grown; he was perpetually making fresh
plans to enlarge and adorn it; and he proposed henceforth, laying
aside all official cares, to spend his summers in New England, his
winters in the softer climate of Lisbon.