Lady Good-for-Nothing: A Man's Portrait of a Woman Read online

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  LADY GOOD-FOR-NOTHING

  A Man's Portrait of a Woman

  by

  ARTHUR THOMAS QUILLER-COUCH ('Q')

  First Published in 1910.

  This story originally appeared in the weekly edition of the "Times,"and is now issued in book form by arrangement with the Proprietors ofthat Journal.

  TO My Commodore and old Friend Edward Atkinson, Esq.of Rosebank, Mixtow-by-Fowey.

  NOTE

  Some years ago an unknown American friend proposed my writing a story onthe loves and adventures of Sir Harry Frankland, Collector of the Portof Boston in the mid-eighteenth century, and Agnes Surriage, daughter ofa poor Marble-head fisherman. The theme attracted me as it hasattracted other writers--and notably Oliver Wendell Holmes, who built apoem on it. But while their efforts seemed to leave room for another, Iwas no match for them in knowledge of the facts or of local details;and, moreover, these facts and details cramped my story. I repented,therefore and, taking the theme, altered the locality and thecharacters--who, by the way, in the writing have become real enough tome, albeit in a different sense. Thus (I hope) no violence has beenoffered to historical truth, while I have been able to tell the tale inmy own fashion.

  "Q."

  CONTENTS.

  BOOK I.--PORT NASSAU.

  I. THE BEACH.

  II. PORT NASSAU.

  III. TWO GUINEAS.

  IV. FATHER AND SON.

  V. RUTH.

  VI. PARENTHETICAL--OF THE FAMILY OF VYELL.

  VII. A SABBATH-BREAKER.

  VIII. ANOTHER SABBATH-BREAKER.

  IX. THE SCOURGE.

  X. THE BENCH.

  XI. THE STOCKS.

  XII. THE HUT BY THE BEACH.

  XIII. RUTH SETS OUT.

  BOOK II.--PROBATION.

  I. AFTER TWO YEARS.

  II. MR. SILK.

  III. MR. HICHENS.

  IV. VASHTI.

  V. SIR OLIVER'S HEALTH.

  VI. CAPTAIN HARRY AND MR. HANMER.

  VII. FIRST OFFER.

  VIII. CONCERNING MARGARET.

  IX. THE PROSPECT.

  X. THREE LADIES.

  XI. THE ESPIAL.

  XII. LADY CAROLINE.

  XIII. DIANA VYELL.

  XIV. MR. SILK PROPOSES.

  XV. THE CHOOSING.

  BOOK III.--THE BRIDALS.

  I. BETROTHED.

  II. THE RETURN.

  III. NESTING.

  IV. THE BRIDEGROOM.

  V. RUTH'S WEDDING DAY.

  VI. "YET HE WILL COME--".

  VII. HOUSEKEEPING.

  VIII. HOME-COMING.

  BOOK IV.--LADY GOOD-FOR-NOTHING.

  I. BATTY LANGTON, CHRONICLER.

  II. SIR OLIVER SAILS.

  III. MISCALCULATING WRATH.

  IV. THE TERRACE.

  V. A PROLOGUE TO NOTHING.

  VI. CHILDLESS MOTHER.

  BOOK V.--LISBON AND AFTER.

  I. ACT OF FAITH.

  II. DONNA MARIA.

  III. EARTHQUAKE.

  IV. THE SEARCH.

  V. THE FINDING.

  VI. DOCUMENTS.

  VII. THE LAST OFFER.

  EPILOGUE

  "An innocent life, yet far astray." Wordsworth's _Ruth_.

  BOOK I.

  PORT NASSAU.

  Chapter I.

  THE BEACH.

  A coach-and-six, as a rule, may be called an impressive Object.But something depends on where you see it.

  Viewed from the tall cliffs--along the base of which, on a strip ofbeach two hundred feet below, it crawled between the American continentand the Atlantic Ocean--Captain Oliver Vyell's coach-and-six resemblednothing so nearly as a black-beetle.

  For that matter the cliffs themselves, swept by the spray and hummingwith the roar of the beach--even the bald headland towards which theycurved as to the visible bourne of all things terrestrial--shrank incomparison with the waste void beyond, where sky and ocean welteredtogether after the wrestle of a two days' storm; and in comparison withthe thought that this rolling sky and heaving water stretched all theway to Europe. Not a sail showed, not a wing anywhere under the leadenclouds that still dropped their rain in patches, smurring out thehorizon. The wind had died down, but the ships kept their harbours andthe sea-birds their inland shelters. Alone of animate things, CaptainVyell's coach-and-six crept forth and along the beach, as though temptedby the promise of a wintry gleam to landward.

  A god--if we may suppose one of the old careless Olympians seated thereon the cliff-top, nursing his knees--must have enjoyed the comedy of it,and laughed to think that this pert beetle, edging its way along thesand amid the eternal forces of nature, was here to take seizin ofthem--yes, actually to take seizin and exact tribute. So indomitable afellow is Man, _improbus Homo_; and among men in his generation CaptainOliver Vyell was Collector of Customs for the Port of Boston,Massachusetts.

  In fairness to Captain Vyell be it added that he--a young English blood,bearing kinship with two or three of the great Whig families at home,and sceptical as became a person of quality--was capable as any one ofrelishing the comedy, had it been pointed out to him. With equalreadiness he would have scoffed at Man's pretensions in this world anddenied him any place at all in the next. Nevertheless on a planet thefolly of which might be taken for granted he claimed at least his shareof the reverence paid by fools to rank and wealth. He was travellingthis lonely coast on a tour of inspection, to visit and report upon asite where His Majesty's advisers had some design to plant a fort; and afine ostentation coloured his progress here as through life. He hadbrought his coach because it conveyed his claret and his _batterie decuisine_ (the seaside inns were detestable); but being young andextravagantly healthy and, with all his faults, very much of a man, hepreferred to ride ahead on his saddle-horse and let his pomp follow him.

  Six horses drew the coach, and to each pair of leaders rode apostillion, while a black coachman guided the wheelers from thebox-seat; all three men in the Collector's livery of white and scarlet.On a perch behind the vehicle--which, despite its weight, left but theshallowest of wheel-ruts on the hard sand--sat Manasseh, the Collector'scook and body-servant; a huge negro, in livery of the same white andscarlet but with heavy adornments of bullion, a cockade in his hat, anda loaded blunderbuss laid across his thighs. Last and alone within thecoach, with a wine-case for footstool, sat a five-year-old boy.

  Master Dicky Vyell--the Collector's only child, and motherless--sat andgazed out of the windows in a delicious terror. For hours that morningthe travellers had ploughed their way over a plain of blown sand, dottedwith shrub-oaks, bay-berries, and clumps of Indian grass; then, at apoint where the tall cliffs began, had wound down to the sea betweenlow foothills and a sedge-covered marsh criss-crossed by watercoursesthat spread out here and there into lagoons. At the head of thisdescent the Atlantic had come into sight, and all the way down itsechoes had grown in the boy's ears, confusing themselves with adelicious odour which came in fact from the fields of sedge, though heattributed it to the ocean.

  But the sound had amounted to a loud humming at most; and it was with aleap and a shout, as they rounded the last foothill and saw the vastempty beach running northward before them, league upon league, that thethunder of the surf broke on them. For a while the boom and crash of itfairly stunned the child. He caught at an arm-strap hanging by thewindow and held on wi
th all his small might, while the world he knewwith its familiar protective boundaries fell away, melted, left him--aspeck of life ringed about with intolerable roaring emptiness.To a companion, had there been one in the coach, he must have clung insheer terror; yes, even to his father, to whom he had never clung andcould scarcely imagine himself clinging. But his father rode ahead,carelessly erect on his blood-horse--horse and rider seen in a blurthrough the salt-encrusted glass. Therefore Master Dicky held on asbest he might to the arm-strap.

  By degrees his terror drained away, though its ebb left him shivering.Child though he was, he could not remember when he had not been curiousabout the sea. In a dazed fashion he stared out upon the breakers.The wind had died down after the tempest, but the Atlantic kept itsagitation. Meeting the shore (which hereabouts ran shallow for five orsix hundred yards) it reared itself in ten-foot combers, rank stampedingon rank, until the sixth or seventh hurled itself far up the beach,spent itself in a long receding curve, and drained back to the foamingforces behind. Their untiring onset fascinated Dicky; and now andagain he tasted renewal of his terror, as a wave, taller than the restor better timed, would come sweeping up to the coach itself, spreadingand rippling about the wheels and the horses' fetlocks. "Surely thisone would engulf them," thought the child, recalling Pharaoh and hischariots; but always the furious charge spent itself in an edge of whitefroth that faded to delicate salt filigree and so vanished. When thishad happened a dozen times or more, and still without disaster, he tookheart and began to turn it all into a game, choosing this or thatbreaker and making imaginary wagers upon it; but yet the spectaclefascinated him, and still at the back of his small brain lay wonder thatall this terrifying fury and uproar should always be coming to nothing.God must be out yonder (he thought) and engaged in some mysterious formof play. He had heard a good deal about God from Miss Quiney, hisgoverness; but this playfulness, as an attribute of the Almighty, wasnew to him and hitherto unsuspected.

  The beach, with here and there a break, extended for close upon twentymiles, still curving towards the headland; and the travellers coveredmore than two-thirds of the distance without espying a single livingcreature. As the afternoon wore on the weather improved. The sun, soonto drop behind the cliff-summits on the left, asserted itself with alast effort and shot a red gleam through a chink low in the cloud-wrack.The shaft widened. The breakers--indigo-backed till now and turbid withsand in solution--began to arch themselves in glass-green hollows, withrainbows playing on the spray of their crests. And then--as though thesavage coast had become, at a touch of sunshine, habitable--ourtravellers spied a man.

  He came forth from a break in the cliffs half a mile ahead and slowlycrossed the sands to the edge of the surf, the line of which he began,after a pause, to follow as slowly northwards. His back was turned thusupon the Collector's equipage, to which in crossing the beach he hadgiven no attention, being old and purblind.

  The coach rolled so smoothly, and the jingle of harness was so entirelyswallowed in the roar of the sea, that Captain Vyell, pushing ahead andovertaking the old fellow, had to ride close up to his shoulder andshout. It appeared then, for further explanation, that his hearing aswell as his eyesight was none of the best. He faced about in a puzzledfashion, stared, and touched his hat--or rather lifted his hand a littleway and dropped it again.

  "Your Honour will be the Collector," he said, and nodded many times, atfirst as if proud of his sagacity, but afterwards dully--as though hisinterest had died out and he would have ceased nodding but had forgottenthe way. "Yes; my gran'-darter told me. She's in service at theBowling Green, Port Nassau; but walks over on Lord's Days to cheer upher mother and tell the news. They've been expectin' you at Port Nassauany time this week."

  The Collector asked where he lived, and the old man pointed to a gullyin the cliff and to something which, wedged in the gully, might at afirst glance be taken for a large and loosely-constructed bird's nest.The Collector's keen eyes made it out to be a shanty of timber roofedwith shingles and barely overtopping a wood pile.

  "Wreckwood, eh?"

  "A good amount of it ought to be comin' in, after the gale."

  "Then where's your hook?"--for the wreckwood gatherers along this partof the coast carry long gaffs to hook the flotsam and drag it abovereach of the waves.

  "Left it up the bank," said the old man shortly. After a moment hepulled himself together for an explanation, hollowed his palms aroundhis mouth, and bawled above the boom of the surf. "I'm old. I don'tcarry weight more'n I need to. When a log comes in, my darter spies itan' tells me. She's mons'rous quick-sighted for wood an' such like--though good for nothin' else." (A pause.) "No, I'm hard on her; shecan cook clams."

  "You were looking for clams?" Captain Vyell scrutinised the man's face.It was a patriarchal face, strikingly handsome and not much wrinkled;the skin delicately tanned and extraordinarily transparent.Somehow this transparency puzzled him. "Hungry?" he asked quickly; andas quickly added, "Starving for food, that's what you are."

  "It's the Lord's will," answered the old man.

  The coach had come to a halt a dozen paces away. The child within itcould hear nothing of this conversation; but to the end of his life hismemory kept vivid the scene and the two figures in it--his father, inclose-fitting riding-coat of blue, with body braced, leaning sideways alittle against the wind, and a characteristic hint of the cavalrymanabout the slope of the thigh; the old wreck-picker standing just forwardof the bay's shoulder and looking up, with blown hair and patient eyes.Memory recalled even the long slant of the bay's shoulder--a perfectlytrue detail, for the horse was of pure English race and bred by theCollector himself.

  After this, as he remembered, some command must have been given, forManasseh climbed down, opened the coach door and drew from under theseat a box, of which he raised the lid, disclosing things good to eat--among them a pasty with a crisp brown crust.

  The wreck-picker broke off a piece of the pasty and wrapped it in ahandkerchief--and memory recalled, as with a small shock of surprise,that the handkerchief was clean. The old man, though ragged enough toscare the crows, was clean from his bare head to his bare sea-bleachedfeet. He munched the rest of the pasty, talking between mouthfuls. Tohis discourse Dicky paid no heed, but slipped away for a scamper on thesands.

  As he came running back he saw the old man, in the act of wiping hismouth with the back of his hand, suddenly shoot out an arm and point.Just beyond the breakers a solitary bird--an osprey--rose with a fishshining in the grip of its claws. It flew northward, away for theheadland, for a hundred yards or so; and then by some mischance let sliphis prey, which fell back into the sea. The boy saw the splash.To his surprise the bird made no effort to recover the fish--neitherstooped nor paused--but went winging sullenly on its way.

  "That's the way o' them," commented the old wreck-picker. "Good food,an' to let it go. I could teach him better."

  But the boy, years after, read it as another and different parable.