Arthur Quiller-Couch

“ Diana Vyell seated herself, eyed her steadily for a moment, and nodded again. "Mamma can be raide, there's no denying. She was wrong, of course; that's understood. . . . Still, on the whole you have done pretty well, and had your revenge."
Ruth's eyes widened, for this was beyond her.
Diana explained. "You have let us make the most impossible fools of ourselves. It may have been more by luck than by good management, as they say; but there it is. Now don't say that revenge isn't sweet. . . . I've done you what justice I can; but if you pose as an angel from heaven, it's asking too much." ”

“ Captain Vyell did not understand children. Least of all did he understand this son of his begetting. He could be kind to him, even extravagantly, by fits and starts; desired to be kind constantly; could rally and chat with him in hearing of a third person, though that third person were but a servant waiting at table. But to sit alone facing the boy and converse with him was a harder business, and gave him an absurd feeling of gene; and this (though possibly he did not know it) was the real reason why, having brought Dicky in the coach for a treat, he himself had ridden all day in saddle. ”

“ Oliver Vyell loved his bride as passionately as his nature, hardened by his past, allowed him. To the women who envied her, to the gossips and backbiters, he opposed a nescience inexpugnable, unscalable as a wall of polished stone: but the mischief was, he equally ignored her sensitiveness.
Being sensitive, she understood the hostile shadows better than the hard protecting fence. To noble natures enemies are often nearer than friends, and more easily forgiven.
But Mr. Langton was also right in guessing her ignorant of the rumours set going by Silk, who, as yet, had whispered falsehoods only. ”

“ I beg your Honour's pardon for saying so much."
"Hullo!" exclaimed the Collector. "Why, yes, to be sure, you must be grandchild to the old man of the sea—him that I met on the beach this afternoon, t'other side of the headland. Lives in a hovel with a wood pile beside it, and a daughter that looks out for wreckage?"
"Your Honour spoke with them?" Into Ruth's face there mounted a deeper tide of colour. But whereas the first flush had been dark with distress, this second spread with a glow of affection. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But Sir Oliver had come and gone a month before and selected the best for her. Its roof-timbers, shaped like the ribs of a ship, curved outwards and downwards from a veritable keelson; and it was reached by way of a zig-zagging corridor, lit by port-holes, and adorned in every niche and corner with cases of stuffed wildfowl. Ruth supped well on game Mr. Strongtharm's gun had provided, and slept soundly, lulled between her dreams by the ripple of water swirling between the piles that supported, far below her, the house's cellarage. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The wine was at Ruth's lip, scarcely wetting it. She lowered the glass steadily and turned half-about in her chair at the moment when, as before a whirlwind, the curtain flew wide and a stranger burst in on the run with Manasseh at his heels.
"Oliver!" The stranger drew himself up in the doorway—a well-knit figure of a man, clear of eye, bronzed of hue, clad in blue sea-cloth faced with scarlet, and wearing a short sword at the hip. "Where's my Oliver?" he shouted. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ The groom led a light chestnut mare, delicate of step us a dancer, and carrying a side-saddle.
Ruth's ear had caught the sound of hoofs. She looked forth at her open window as Sir Oliver reined up and hailed, frank as a schoolboy.
"Your first riding lesson!" he announced.
"But I have no riding-skirt," she objected, her eyes opening wide with delight as they looked down and scanned the mare.
"You shall have one to-morrow." He swung himself out of saddle and gave over his own horse to the groom. "To-day you have only to learn how to sit and hold the reins and ride at a walk." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Chapter II. PORT NASSAU. They left the beach, climbed a road across the neck of the promontory, and rattled downhill into Port Nassau. Dusk had fallen before they reached the head of its cobbled street; and here one of the postillions drew out a horn from his holster and began to blow loud blasts on it. This at once drew the townsfolk into the road and warned them to get out of the way.
To the child, drowsed by the strong salt air and the rocking of the coach, the glimmering whitewashed houses on either hand went by like a procession in a dream. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ruth feared and distrusted all religious folk—clergymen above all; yet instinct had told her at the first that Mr. Hichens was honest, even good in an unlovely fashion; and by many small daily tests she had proved this. Was it possible that Mr. Hichens had ever gathered roses in his youth? Was it possible that, expecting Heaven and professing a spiritual joy in redemption, a man could symbolise his soul's state by wearing these dingy weeds? ”

“ Chapter II. THE RETURN. The breakers boomed up the beach, and in the blown spray Old Josselin pottered, bareheaded and barefoot. His eyesight had grown dimmer, but otherwise his bodily health had improved, for nowadays he ate food enough: and, as for purblindness, why there was no real need to keep watch on the sea. He did it from habit.
Ruth came on him much as Sir Oliver had come on him three years before; the roar of the breakers swallowing all sound of Madcap's hoofs until she was close at his shoulder. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ruth sighed inaudibly. Dicky's companionship would have been delightful. But she knew the child's craze, and would not claim him, to mar his bliss—though she well knew that at a word from her he would renounce it.
"Diplomacy?" she echoed.
"Well," said Sir Oliver, looking straight before him. "Sally—my brother insists on calling her Sally—appears to have her head fixed well on her shoulders: she looks—as you must not forget to look— straight between the horse's ears. But your young bride is apt to be the greatest prude in the world. ”

“ Men have done, in the name of religion and not so long ago—indeed are perhaps doing now and daily—deeds so vile that mere decency cannot face describing them. It is a question if mere decency (by which I mean the good instinct of civilised man) will not in the end purge faith clean of religion; if, while men dispute and hate and inflict cruelty for religion, they are not all the while outgrowing it. ”

“ She was indeed gathering up her skirts for the run, when in the hall she almost collided with the Reverend Malachi Hichens, who stood there with his nose buried in a vase of roses, while behind his back his hands interwove themselves and pulled each at the other's bony knuckles.
"Ah!" He faced about with a stiff bow, and a glance up at the tall clock. "You are late this morning, Miss Josselin. But I dare say my good brother Silk has been detaining you in talk?"
"On the contrary," answered Ruth, "his talk has rather hastened me than not." ”

“ The house was of timber, with a deep timbered verandah; and in the verandah, not twenty paces away, beside a table laid for coffee, stood Tatty with three ladies about her—three ladies all elegantly dressed and staring.
Ruth's hand went up quickly, involuntarily, to her dishevelled hair; and at the same moment the little lady, as though making a bolt from captivity, stepped down from the verandah and came shuffling across the yard towards her, almost at a run.
"Ruth, dear!" she panted. "Oh, dear, dear! I am so glad you have come!" ”

“ 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 shifting 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. ”

“ If the precisians of Port Nassau had made religion her tragedy, this man had come in, by an after-blow, to turn it into a blasphemous farce. If Ruth had lost Faith, she yet desired good thoughts, to have everything about her pure and holy—and on this day, of all days!
Surely Oliver—she had taught herself to call him Oliver—would never misunderstand her so! Why, it was a misunderstanding that went down, down, almost to the roots. Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder . ”

“ Manasseh watched him from the beach. From the cliff above two scandalised householders calling to one another across their gardens' boundary pointed seaward and summoned their families to the windows to note the reprobate swimmer and a Sabbath profaned.
The eyes of a long-shore population are ever on the sea from which comes their livelihood, and nothing on the sea escapes them long. The Collector's head by this time was but a speck bobbing on the waves, but ere he turned back for shore maybe two hundred of Port Nassau's population were watching, from various points. ”

“ Your connoisseur does not collect chipped chinaware. . . . There's the chance, too, that the mare, having once fallen, will throw herself again by the same trick."
"And women are like horses," thought Ruth as they rode on. The night was paling about them, and she watched the rolling champaign as little by little it took shape, emerging from the morning mist and passing from monochrome into faint colours: for albeit the upper sky was clear as ever, mist filled the hollows of the hills and rolled up their sides like a smoke.
"Look!" commanded Sir Oliver, reining up and turning in his saddle. ”