Lady Good-for-Nothing Part 54

Some lay canted almost on their beam ends. As the bottom sank again they slowly righted, but too late; for the ma.s.s of water, flung to the opposite sh.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 bal.u.s.trade 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 G.o.ds 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 Ma.s.s 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, c.u.mbering 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+vered. 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.

At the very foot of the hill they came on the first of three fires-- two houses blazing furiously, and a whole side-street doomed, if the wind should hold. Among the ruins of a house, right in the face of the fire, squatted a dozen persons, men and women, all dazed by terror. The women had opened their parasols--possibly to screen their faces from the heat--albeit they might have escaped this quite easily by s.h.i.+fting their positions a few paces. None of these folk betrayed the smallest interest in Ruth or in Langton. Indeed, they scarcely lifted their eyes.

The suburbs were deserted, for the earthquake had surprised all Lisbon in a pack, crowded within its churches, or in its central streets and squares. Yet the emptiness of what should have been the thoroughfares astonished them scarcely less than did the piles of masonry, breast-high in places, over which they picked their way in the uncanny twilight. They had scarcely pa.s.sed beyond the glare of the burning houses when Langton stumbled over a corpse--the first they encountered. He drew Ruth aside from it, entreating her in a low voice to walk warily. But she had seen.

"We shall see many before we reach the Cathedral," she said quietly.

They stumbled on, meeting with few living creatures; and these few asked them no questions, but went by, stumbling, with hands groping, as though they moved in a dream. A voice wailed "Jesus! Jesus!" and the cry, issuing Heaven knew whence, shook Ruth's nerve for a moment.

Once Langton plucked her by the arm and pointed to some men with torches moving among the ruins. She supposed that they were seeking for the dead; but they were, in fact, incendiaries, already at work and in search of loot.

She pa.s.sed three or four of these blazing houses, some kindled no doubt by incendiaries, but others by natural consequences of the earthquake; for the kitchens, heated for the great feast, had communicated their fires to the falling timberwork on which the houses were framed; and by this time the city was on fire in at least thirty different places. The scorched smell mingled everywhere with an odour of sulphur.

There were rents in the streets, too--chasms, half-filled with rubble, reaching right across the roadway. After being s.n.a.t.c.hed back by Langton from the brink of one of these chasms, Ruth steeled her heart to be thankful when a burning house shed light for her footsteps. At the houses themselves, after an upward glance or two, she dared not look again. They leaned this way and that, the fronts of some thrust outward at an angle to forbid any but the foolhardiest from pa.s.sing underneath.

But, indeed, they had little time to look aloft as they penetrated to streets littered, where the procession had pa.s.sed, with wrecked chaises, dead mules, human bodies half-buried and half-burnt, charred limbs protruding awkwardly from heaps of stones. Here, by ones and twos, pedestrians tottered past, crying that the world was at an end; here, on a heap where, belike, his shop had stood, a man knelt praying aloud; here a couple of enemies met by chance, seeking their dead, and embraced, beseeching forgiveness for injuries past.

These sights went by Ruth as in a dream; and as in a dream she heard the topple and crack of masonry to right and left. Langton guided her; and haggard, perspiring, they bent their heads to the strange wind now howling down the street as through a funnel, and foot by foot battled their way.

The wind swept over their bent heads, carrying flakes of fire to start new conflagrations. The stream of these flakes became so steady that Ruth began to count on it to guide her. She began to think that amid all this dissolution to right and left, some charm must be protecting them both, when, as he stretched a hand to help her across a mound of rubble she saw him turn, cast a look up and fall back beneath a rush of masonry. A flying brick struck her on the shoulder, cutting the flesh. For the rest, she stood unscathed; but her companion lay at her feet, with legs buried deep, body buried to the ribs.

"Your hand!" she gasped.