"Well, motherkin," said he with the finest air of importance, "a man would say that if a crew of British sailors could be useful anywhere—We'll teach your Portuguese, anyhow. Oh, yes, the Pegasus was at Gibraltar—we felt the shock there pretty badly—and the Admiral sent us up the coast to give help where we could. A coaster found us off Lagos with word that Lisbon had suffered worst of all. So we hammered at it, wind almost dead foul all the way . . . and here we are. Captain Hanmer brought me ashore in his gig. My word, but the place is in a mess!"
"That is Captain Hanmer's footstep I hear by the gate."
"Yes, he has come to pay his respects. But come," said the boy, astonished, "you don't tell me you know Old Han's footstep—begging his pardon—at all this distance."
Yes she did. She could have distinguished that tread had it marched among a thousand. Her brain had held the note of it ever since the night she had heard it at Sabines, crushing the gravel of the drive. Dicky laughed, incredulous. She held the boy at arm's length, lovingly as Captain Hanmer came and stood by the tent door.
So life might yet sound with honest laughter; ay, and at the back of laughter, with the firm tread of duty.
The story of Ruth Josselin and Oliver Vyell is told. They were married ten days later in the hospital at Belem by a priest of the Church of Rome; and afterwards, on their way to England in His Majesty's frigate Calliope, which had brought out stores for the relief of the suffering city and was now returning with most of the English survivors, Sir Oliver insisted on having the union again ratified by the services of the ship's chaplain. Ruth, whose sense of humour had survived the earthquake, could smile at this supererogation.
They landed at Plymouth and posting to Bath, were tenderly welcomed by Lady Jane, to whom her son's conversion was hardly less a matter of rejoicing than his rescue from a living tomb. In Bath Ruth Lady Vyell might have reigned as a toast, a queen of society; but Sir Oliver had learnt a distaste for fashionable follies, nor did she greatly yearn for them.
He remained a Whig, however, and two years later received appointment to the post of Consul-General at Lisbon. Its duties were not arduous, and allowed him to cross the Atlantic half a dozen times with Lady Vyell and revisit Eagles, where Miss Quiney held faithful stewardship. He never completely recovered his health. The pressure under which he had lain during those three terrible hours had left him with some slight curvature of the spine. It increased, and ended in a constriction of the lungs, bringing on a slow decline. In 1767 he again retired to Bath, where next year he died, aged fifty-one years. His epitaph on the wall of the Abbey nave runs as follows:—
"To the memory of Sir Oliver Hastings Pelham Vyell of Carwithiel, Co. Cornwall, Baronet, Consul-General for many years at Lisbon, whence he came in hopes of Recovery from a Bad State of Health to Bath. Here, after a tedious and painful illness, sustained with the Patience and Resignation becoming to a Christian, he died Jan. 11, 1768, in the Fifty-second Year of his Life, without Heir. This Monument is erected by his affectionate Widow, Ruth Lady Vyell."