Lady Good-for-Nothing Part 57

Chapter VII.

THE LAST OFFER

His villa being destroyed, they had carried Sir Oliver out to Belem, to one of the wooden hospitals hastily erected in the royal grounds.

There the King's surgeon dressed his wounds and set the broken left arm, Ruth attending with splints and bandages.

When all was done and the patient asleep, she crept forth. She would fain have stayed to watch by him; but this would have meant crowding the air for the sufferers, who already had much ado to breathe.

She crept forth, therefore, and slept that night out on the naked ground, close under the lee of the canvas.

Early next morning she was up and doing. A dozen hospitals had been improvised and each was crying out for helpers. She chose that of her friend Mr. Castres, the British envoy. It stood within a high-walled garden, sheltered from the wind which, for some days after the earthquake, blew half a gale. At first the hospital consisted of two tents; but in the next three days these increased to a dozen, filling the enclosure. Then, just as doctors and nurses despaired of coping with it, the influx of wounded slackened and ceased, almost of a sudden. In the city nothing remained now but to bury the dead, and in haste, lest their corpses should breed pestilence. It was horribly practical; but every day, as she awoke, her first thought was for the set of the wind; her first fear that in the night it might have s.h.i.+fted, and might be blowing from the east across Lisbon. The wind, however, kept northerly, as though it had been nailed to that quarter. She heard that gangs were at work clearing the streets and collecting the dead; at first burying them laboriously after the third day, burning them in stacks. As the Penitent had said, in an earthquake one gets down to nakedness.

During those next ten days Ruth lived hourly face to face with her kind, men and women, naked, bleeding, suffering.

She contrived too, all this while, to have the small motherless Hake children near her, inventing a hundred errands to keep them busy.

Thus, to be sure, they saw many things too sad for their young eyes, yet Ruth perceived that in feeling helpful they escaped the worst broodings of bereavement, and, on the whole, watching them at times, as their small hands were busy tearing up bandages or was.h.i.+ng out medicine bottles, she felt satisfied that their mother would have wished it so.

Sir Oliver's arm healed well, and in general (it seemed) he was making a rapid recovery. It was remarkable, though, that he seldom smiled, and scarcely spoke at all save to answer a question.

He would rest for hours at a time staring straight in front of him, much as he had lain and stared up at the ceiling of the fatal house.

Something weighed on his mind; or maybe the brain had received a shock and must have time to recover. Ruth watched him anxiously, keeping a cheerful face.

But there came an evening when, as she returned, tired but cheerful, from the hospital, he called her to him.

"Ruth!"

"My lord." She was beside his couch in a moment.

"I have something to say to you; something I have wanted to say for days. But I wanted also to think it all out. . . . I have not yet asked you to forgive me--"

"Dear, you were forgiven long ago."

"--But I have asked Heaven to forgive me."

Ruth gave a little start and stared at him doubtfully.

"Yes," he went on, "as I lay pinned--those hours through, waiting for death--something opened to me; a new life, I hope."

"And by a blessing I do not understand--by a blessing of blessings-- you were given back to it, Oliver."

"Back to it?" he repeated. "You do not understand me. The blessing was G.o.d's special grace; the new life I speak of was a life acknowledging that grace."

There was silence for many seconds; for a minute almost, Ruth's hands had locked themselves together, and she pulled at the intertwisted fingers.

"I beg your pardon," she said at length. "You are right--I do not understand." Her voice had lost its ring; the sound of it was leaden, spiritless. But he failed to note this, being preoccupied 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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. G.o.d 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? . . . G.o.d help me, if there be a G.o.d!--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?"