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Lady Good-for-Nothing, a novel by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
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Book 5. Lisbon And After - Chapter 2. Donna Maria |
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_ BOOK V. LISBON AND AFTER 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?" _ |
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