with his own thoughts.  Nor did he observe her face.
"I would not speak of this before," he went on, still with his eyes
turned to the window, "because I wanted to think it all out.  But it
is 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 God
has 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 both
deserved to die.  She died with her teeth in my flesh--the flesh
whose 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 would
he persist in talking thus?

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

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

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

"I, Oliver?"

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

Somehow with this new piety he had caught the very phraseology and
intonation of its everyday professors, even those very tricks of bad
logic at which he had been used to laugh.  Ruth had always supposed,
for example, that the presumption of instructing the Deity in
appropriate conduct was impossible even to second-rate minds until by
imitation slowly acquired as a habit.  It was monstrous to her that
he should so suddenly and all unconsciously be guilty of it.
Indeed for the moment these small evidences of the change in him
distressed her more than the change itself, which she had yet to
realise; just as in company a solecism of speech or manners will make
us wince before we have time to trace it to the ill-breeding from
which it springs.  His mother, she had heard (he, in fact, had told
her), was given to these pious tricks of speech.  Surely his fine
brain had suffered some lesion.  He was not himself, and she must
wait for his recovery.  But surely, too, he would recover and be
himself again.

"Ruth, I have done you great wrong."

"O cease! cease, Oliver!"  Her voice cried it aloud now, as she
dropped to her knees and buried her face in the coverlet.  "Do not
talk like this--I had a hundred times rather you neglected me than
hear 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 in
that my great, great happiness?  You, in whose light my life has
moved? . . . Ah, love, do not break my heart!"

"You misunderstand," he said quietly.  "Why should what I am saying
break 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 his
gaze, which had not ceased to rest on her as she stood with her
beautiful figure silhouetted against the evening light.

"You really think my marrying you would make a difference?"

"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 gratitude, to be sure.  Did you not win me back from
death?--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 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.

"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 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 ashore 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.
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 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 passed 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 fortitude, 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--asserting
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 assure 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 assent.

"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 ashore, 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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

The little woman stretched out her hands, and then, before Ruth could
take them, they were lifted and touched her temples softly, and she
bent 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 shine
upon you all your days!"