BOOK V.




LISBON AND AFTER.




Chapter I.


ACT OF FAITH.


"How is it possible for people beholding that glorious Body to
worship any Being but Him who created it!"


Upon the stroke of nine the procession filed forth into the Square.
It was headed by about a hundred Dominican friars, bearing the banner
of their founder.  The banner displayed a Cross betwixt an olive tree
and a sword, with the motto _Justitia et Misericordia_.

After the Dominicans walked five penitents; each with a sergeant, or
Familiar, attending.  Two of the five wore black mitres, three were
bareheaded.  All walked barefoot, clad in black sleeveless coats, and
each carried a long wax candle.  These had escaped the extreme
sentence; and after them came one, a woman, who had escaped it also,
but narrowly and as by fire.  In token of this her black robe was
painted over with flames, having their points turned downward.
Close behind followed three men on whose san-benitos the flames
pointed upward.  These were being led to execution, and two of them
who carried boards on their breasts, painted with dogs and serpents,
were to die by fire for having professed doctrines contrary to the
Faith; the third, who carried no board, was a "Relapsed," and might
look forward to the privilege of being strangled before being cast to
the flame.  To each of these three was assigned, in addition to the
Familiar, a couple of Jesuit priests, to walk beside him and exhort
him.

The man who was to be strangled came through the gateway of the
Inquisition Office with his gaze bent to the ground, apparently
insensible to the mob of sightseers gathered in the Square.
The doomed man who followed--a mere youth, and, by his face,
a Jew--stared about him fiercely and eagerly.  The third was an old
man, with ragged hair and beard, and a complexion bleached by long
imprisonment in the dark.  He halted, blinking, uncertain how to
plant his steps.  Then, feeling rather than seeing the sun, he
stretched up both arms to it, dropping his taper, calling aloud as
might a preacher, "How is it possible for people, beholding that
glorious Body, to worship any Being but Him who created it!"

A Jesuit at his side flung an arm across the old man's mouth; and as
quickly the Familiar whipped out a cloth, pulled his head back, and
gagged him.  The young Jew had turned and was staring, still with his
fierce, eager look.  He was wheeled about and plucked forward.

Next through the gateway issued a troupe of Familiars on horseback,
some of them nobles of the first families in Portugal; after them the
Inquisitors and other Officers of the Court upon mules; last of all,
amid a train of nobles, the Inquisitor-General himself on a white
horse led by two grooms: his delicate hands resting on the reins, his
face a pale green by reason of the sunlight falling on it through a
silken scarf of that colour pendant over the brim of his immense
black hat.


All this passed before Ruth's eyes, and close, as she sat in the
mule-chaise beside Sir Oliver.  She would have drawn the leathern
curtains, but he had put out a hand forbidding this.

She could not at any rate have escaped hearing the old man's
exclamation; for their chaise was jammed in the crowd beside the
gateway.  Her ears still kept the echo of his vibrant voice; almost
she was persuaded that his eyes had singled her out from the crowd.

--And why not?  Had not she, also, cause to know what cruelties men
will commit in the name of religion?


Her heart was wrathful as well as pitiful.  Her lord had given her no
warning of the auto-da-fe, and she now suspected that in suggesting
this Sunday morning drive he had purposely decoyed her to it.
Presently, as the crowd began to clear, he confirmed the suspicion.

"Since we are here, we may as well see the sp--"  He was going to say
"sport," but, warned by a sudden stiffening of her body, he corrected
the word to "spectacle."  "They erect a grand stand on these
occasions; or, if you prefer, we can bribe them to give room for the
chaise."

He bent forward and called to the coachman, "Turn the mules' heads,
and follow!"

"Indeed I will not," she said firmly.  "Do you go--if such crimes
amuse you. . . . For me, I shall walk home."

He shrugged his shoulders.  "It is the custom of the country. . . .
But, as for your walking, I cannot allow it for a moment.  Juan shall
drive you home."

She glanced at him.  His eyes were fixed on the opposite side of the
square, and she surprised in them a look of recognition not intended
for her.  Following the look, she saw a chaise much like their own,
moving slowly with the throng, and in it a woman seated.

Ruth knew her.  She was Donna Maria, Countess of Montalagre; and of
late Sir Oliver's name had been much coupled with hers.

This Ruth did not know; but she had guessed for some time that he was
unfaithful.  She had felt no curiosity at all to learn the woman's
name.  Now an accident had opened her eyes, and she saw.

Her first feeling was of slightly contemptuous amusement.
Donna Maria, youthful wife of an aged and enfeebled lord, passed for
one of the extremely devout.  She had considerable beauty, but of an
order Ruth could easily afford to scorn.  It was the _bizarrerie_ of
the affair that tickled her, almost to laughter--Donna Maria's
down-dropt gaze, the long lashes veiling eyes too holy-innocent for
aught but the breviary; and he--he of all men!--playing the lover to
this little dunce, with her empty brain, her narrow religiosity!

But on afterthought, she found it somewhat disgusting too.

"I thank you," she said.  "Juan shall drive me home, then.  It will
not, I hope, inconvenience you very much, since I see the Countess of
Montalagre's carriage across the way.  No doubt she will offer you a
seat."

He glanced at her, but her face was cheerfully impassive.

"That's an idea!" he said.  "I will run and make interest with her."

He alighted, and gave Juan the order to drive home.  He lifted his
hat, and left her.  She saw Donna Maria's start of simulated
surprise.  Also she detected, or thought she detected, the sly
triumph of a woman who steals a man.

All this she had leisure to observe; for Juan, a Gallician, was by no
means in a hurry to turn the mules' heads for home.  He had slewed
his body about, and was gazing wistfully after the throng.

"Your Excellency, it would be a thousand pities!"

"Hey?"

"There has not been a finer burning these two years, they tell me.
And that old blasphemer's beard, when they set a light to it! . . .
I am a poor Gallego, your Excellency, and at home get so few chances
of enjoyment.  Also I have dropped my whip, and it is trodden on,
broken.  In the crowd at the Terreiro de Paco I may perchance borrow
another."

Ruth alighted in a blaze of wrath.

"Wretched man," she commanded, "climb down!"

"Your Excellency--"

"Climb down!  You shall go, as your betters have gone, to feed your
eyes with these abominations. . . . Nay, how shall I scold you, who
do what your betters teach?  But climb down.  I will drive the mules
myself."

"His Excellency will murder me when he hears of it.  But, indeed, was
ever such a thing heard of?"  Nevertheless the man was plainly in two
minds.

"It is not for you to argue, but to obey my orders."

He descended, still protesting.  She mounted to his seat, and took
the reins and whip.

"The brutes are spirited, your Excellency.  For the love of God have
a care of them!"

For answer she flicked them with the whip--he had lied about the
broken whip--and left him staring.

The streets were deserted.  All Lisbon had trooped to the auto-da-fe.
If any saw and wondered at the sight of a lady driving like a mere
_bolhero_, she heeded not.  The mules trotted briskly, and she kept
them to it.

She had ceased to be amused, even scornfully.  As she drove up the
slope of Buenos Ayres--the favourite English suburb, where his villa
stood overlooking Tagus--a deep disgust possessed her.  It darkened
the sunshine.  It befouled, it tarnished, the broad and noble mirror
of water spread far below.

"Were all men beasts, then?"



Chapter II.


DONNA MARIA.


They would dine at four o'clock.  On Sundays Sir Oliver chose to dine
informally with a few favoured guests; and these to-day would make
nine, not counting Mr. Langton, who might be reckoned one of the
household.

By four o'clock all had arrived--the British envoy, Mr. Castres, with
his lady; Lord Charles Douglas, about to leave Lisbon after a visit
of pleasure; Mrs. Hake, a sister of Governor Hardy of New York--she,
with an invalid husband and two children, occupied a villa somewhat
lower down the slope of Buenos Ayres; white-haired old Colonel
Arbuthnot, _doyen_ of the English residents; Mr. Hay, British Consul,
and Mr. Raymond, one of the chiefs of the English factory, with their
wives. . . . Ruth looked at the clock.  All were here save only their
host, Sir Oliver.

Mr. Langton, with Lord Charles Douglas, had returned from the
auto-da-fe.  Like his friend George Selwyn--friend these many years
by correspondence only--Mr. Langton was a dilettante in executions
and like horrors, and had taken Lord Charles to the show, to initiate
him.  He reported that they had left Sir Oliver in a press of the
crowd, themselves hurrying away on foot.  He would doubtless arrive
in a few minutes.  Mr. Langton said nothing of the executions.

Mr. Castres, too, ignored them.  He knew, of course, that the
auto-da-fe had taken place, and that the Court had witnessed it in
state from a royal box.  But his business, as tactful Envoy of a
Protestant country, was to know nothing of this.  He went on talking
with Mrs. Hake, who--good soul--actually knew nothing of it.
Her children absorbed all her care; and having heard Miriam, the
younger, cough twice that morning, she was consulting the Envoy on
the winter climate of Lisbon--was it, for instance, prophylactic
against croup.

At five minutes past four Sir Oliver arrived.  Before apologising he
stood aside ceremoniously in the doorway to admit a companion--the
Countess of Montalegre.

"I have told them," said he as Donna Maria tripped forward demurely
to shake hands, "to lay for the Countess.  The business was long, by
reason of an interminable sermon, and at the end there was a crush at
the exit from the Terreiro de Paco and a twenty good minutes' delay--
impossible to extricate oneself.  Had I not persuaded the Countess to
drive me all the way home, my apologies had been a million instead of
the thousand I offer."

Had he brought the woman in defiance?  Or was it merely to discover
how much, if anything, Ruth suspected?  If to discover, his design
had no success.  Ruth saw--it needed less than half a glance--Batty
Langton bite his lip and turn to the window.  Lord Charles wore a
faintly amused smile.  These two knew, at any rate.  For the others
she could not be sure.  She greeted Donna Maria with a gentle
courtesy.

"We will delay dinner with pleasure," she said, "while my
waiting-woman attends on you."

During the few minutes before the Countess reappeared she conversed
gaily with one and another of her guests.  Her face had told him
nothing, and her spirit rose on the assurance that, at least, she was
puzzling him.

Yet all the while she asked herself the same questions.  Had he done
this to defy her?  Or to sound her suspicions?

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 asses 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 balustrade of her villa garden, and looked down
over the city, from which, made musical by distance, the bells of
thirty churches called to High Mass.  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 Mass 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 balustrade 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 balustrade.  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 balustrade.  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
balustrade 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 snatched 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 mass 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 God! 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 anchored ships high and dry.
Some lay canted almost on their beam ends.  As the bottom sank again
they slowly righted, but too late; for the mass of water, flung to
the opposite shore, and hurled back from it, came swooping with a
refluent wave, that even from this high hillside was seen to be
monstrous.  It fell on their decks, drowning and smothering: their
masts only were visible above the smother, some pointing firmly,
others tottering and breaking.  Some rose no more.  Others, as the
great wave passed on, lurched up into sight again, broken, dismasted,
wrenched from their moorings, spinning about aimlessly, tossed like
corks amid the spume; and still, its crest arching, its deep note
gathering, the great wave came on straight for the harbour quay.

Ruth and Langton, staring down on this portent, did not witness the
end; for a dense cloud of dust, on this upper side dun-coloured
against the sunlight, interposed itself between them and the city,
over which it made a total darkness.  Into that darkness the great
wave passed and broke; and almost in the moment of its breaking a
second tremor shook the hillside.  Then, indeed, wave and earthquake
together made universal roar, drowning the last cry of thousands; for
before it died away earthquake and wave together had turned the
harbour quay of Lisbon bottom up, and engulfed it.  Of all the
population huddled there to escape from death in the falling streets,
not a corpse ever rose to the surface of Tagus.

But Ruth saw nothing of this.  She clung to Langton, and his arm was
about her.  She believed, with so much of her mind as was not
paralysed, that the end of the world was come.

As the infernal hubbub died away on the dropping wind, she glanced
back over her shoulder at the house.  The poor little _criada-moga_
was no longer there, peering over the edge she dared not leap.  Nay,
the house was no longer there--only three gaunt walls, and between
them a heap where rooms, floors, roof had collapsed together.

Of a sudden complete silence fell about them.  As her eyes travelled
along the edge of the terrace where the balustrade had run, but ran
no longer, she had a sensation of standing on the last brink of the
world, high over nothingness.  Langton's arm still supported her.

"As safe here as anywhere," she heard him saying.  "For the chance
that led you here, thank whatever Gods may be."

"But I must find him!" she cried.

"Eh? Noll?--find Noll?  Dear lady, small chance of that!"

"I must find him."

"He was to attend High Mass in the Cathedral--"

"Yes . . . with that woman.  What help could such an one bring to him
if--if--Oh, I must find him, I say!"

"The Cathedral," he repeated.  "You are brave; let your own eyes look
for it."  He had withdrawn his arm.

"Yet I must search, and you shall search with me.  You were his
friend, I think?"

"Indeed, I even believed so. . . . I was thinking of _you_. . . .
It is almost certain death.  Do you say that he is worth it?"

"Do you fear death?" she asked.

"Moderately," he answered.  "Yet if you command me, I come; if you
go, I go with you."

"Come."



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 high
walls that had protected the villa-gardens of Buenos Ayres lay in
heaps, cumbering the roadway, and in places obliterating it.

About a hundred and fifty yards down the road, by what had been the
walled entrance to the Hakes' garden, they sighted two forlorn small
figures--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 stand
in the middle of the road while she ran back to call daddy.  She said
no 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 he
came back, and his face was grave.

She noted it.  "What can we do with them?" she asked, and added with
a haggard little smile, "I had actually begun to tell them to run up
to 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 the
road; and bade the little ones rest still as their mother had
commanded.  She was but going down to the city (she said) to see if
the danger was as terrible down there.  The two little ones cried and
clung to her; but she put them aside firmly, promising to look for
their mamma when she returned.  Langton did not dare to glance at her
face.

The dark cloud dust met them, a gunshot below, rolling up the
hillside from the city.  They passed within the fringe of it, and at
once the noonday sun was darkened for them.  In the unnatural light
they 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. . . . One
side of her skull was broken.  I pulled down some branches and
covered her."

"Your own face is bleeding."

"Is it?"  He put up a hand.  "Yes--I remember, a brick struck me, on
my way from the stables--no, a beam grazed me as I ran for the
back-stairs, meaning to get you out that way.  The stairs were
choked. . . . 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 the
black pall stretching over the city.  Flames shot up through it, here
and there.  Lisbon was on fire in half a dozen places at least; and
now for the first time she became aware that the wind had sprung up
again and was blowing violently.  She could not remember when it
first started: the morning had been still, the Tagus--she recalled
it--unruffled.