Ruth and her mother-in-law frequently met in the steep and curling streets of Old Town as they went about their business. They knew and tacitly ignored each other. But Ernie's children were not to be ignored. They knocked eternally at their granny's heart. When of summer evenings their mother took her little brood to Saffrons Croft and sat with them beneath the elms, her latest baby in her arms, the others clouding her feet like giant daisies, Anne Caspar, limping by on flat feet with her string bag, would be wrung to the soul.
She hungered for her grand-children, longed to feel their limbs, and see their bodies, to hold them in her lap, to bathe them, win their smiles, and hear their prattle.
Pride, which she mistook for principle, stood between her and happiness.
Ruth knew all that was passing in the elder woman's heart, and felt for the other a profound and disturbing sympathy. She had the best of it; and she knew that Anne Caspar, for all her pharisaic air of superiority, knew it too. Ruth had learnt from Mrs. Trupp something of the elder woman's story. Anne Caspar too, it seemed, had loved out of her sphere; but she, unlike Ruth, had achieved her man. Had she been happy? That depended on whether she had brought happiness to her husband--Ruth never doubted that. And Ruth knew that she had not; and knew that Anne Caspar knew that she had not.
Moreover, all that Ernie told her about his mother interested her curiously: the elder woman's pride, her loneliness, her passion for her old man.
"Alf's mother over again," Ern told Ruth, "with all her qualities only one--but it's the one that matters. He's a worker same as she is. He means to get on, same as she done. There's just this difference atween em: Alf can't love; Mother can--though it's only one." ...
A week after his first visit Alf appeared again on Ruth's door-step.
Ruth opened to him with so bright a smile that he was for once taken completely by surprise. He had expected resistance and come armed to meet it.
"Come in, won't you?" she said.
Then he understood. She had thought better of her foolishness.
"That's it, is it?" he said, licking his lips. "That's a good gurl."
"Yes," said Ruth. "Very pleased to see you, I'm sure." She was smarter than usual too, he noticed--to grace the occasion no doubt. And the plain brown dress, the hue of autumn leaves, with the tiny white frill at the collar, revealed the noble lines of her still youthful figure.
The conqueror, breathing hard, entered the kitchen, to be greeted by a cultivated voice from the corner.
"Well, Alfred," it said.
Alf, whose eyes had been on the floor, glanced up with a start.
His father was sitting beside the cradle, beaming mildly on him through gold spectacles.
"Hullo, dad," said Alf, surlily. This large ineffectual father of his had from childhood awed him. There was a mystery about even his mildness, his inefficiency, which Alf had never understood and therefore feared. "I didn't expect to find you here."
It seemed to Alf that the bottle-imp was twinkling in the old man's eyes. Alf remembered well the advent of that imp to the blue haunts he had never quitted since. That was during the years of Ern's absence in India. Now it struck him suddenly that his father, so seeming-innocent, so remote from the world, was in the joke against him.
A glance at Ruth, malicious and amused, confirmed his suspicion.
"I'm glad you come and visit your sister sometimes, Alfred," said the old man gently.
"Yes," purred Ruth, "he comes reg'lar, Alf do now--once a week. And all in the way of friendship as the savin is. See, he's our landlord now."
"That's nice," continued the old man with the dewy innocence of a babe. "Then he can let you off your rent if you get behind."
"So he could," commented Ruth, "if only he was to think of it. Do you hear your dad, Alf?"
She paid the week's rent into his hand, coin by coin, before his father's eyes. Then he turned and slouched out.
"Good-night, Alf," Ruth said, almost affectionately. "It 'as been nice seein you and all."
Determined to enjoy her triumph to the full, she followed him to the door. In the street he turned to meet her mocking glance, in which the cruelty gleamed like a half-sheathed sword. His own eyes were impudent and familiar as they engaged hers.
"Say, Ruth, what's he after?" he asked, cautiously, in lowered voice.
"Who?"
"That feller I caught you with the other night--when Ern wasn't there. Black-ugly. What's he after?"
"Same as you, hap."
He sniggered feebly.
"What's that?"
"Me."
She stood before him; a peak armoured through the ages in eternal ice and challenging splendidly in the sun.
He hoiked and spat and turned away.
"Brassy is it?" he said. "One thing, my lass, you been in trouble once, mind. I saved you then. But I mightn't be able to a second time."
Behind Ruth's shoulder a dim face, bearded and spectacled, peered at him with the mild remorselessness of the moon.
"Alfred," said a voice, dreadful in its gentle austerity.
When the old man said good-bye to Ruth ten minutes later he kissed her for the first time.
She smiled up at him gallantly.
"It's all right, dad," she said, consolingly. "I'm not afraid o him whatever else."
It was the first time she had called him dad, and even now she did it unconsciously.
Edward Caspar ambled home.
He did not attempt to conceal from his wife where he went on Tuesday mornings. Indeed, as he soared on mysterious wings, he seemed to have lost all fear of the woman who had tyrannised over him for his own good so long. Time, the unfailing arbitrator, had adjusted the balance between the two. And sometimes it seemed to Mrs. Trupp, observing quietly as she had done for thirty years, that in the continuous unconscious struggle that persists inevitably between every pair from the first mating till death, the victory in this case would be to the man intangible as air.
That morning, as Edward entered the house, his wife was standing in the kitchen before the range.
Anne Caspar was white-haired now. Her limbs had lost much of their comeliness, her motions their grace. She was sharp-boned and gaunt of body as she had always been of mind--not unlike a rusty sword.
As the front-door opened, and the well-trained man sedulously wiped his boots upon the mat, she looked up over her spectacles, dropping her chin, grim and sardonic.
"I know where you been, dad," she taunted.
He stayed at the study-door, like a great pawing bear.
Then he answered suddenly and with a smile.
"I've been in heaven."
She slammed the door of the range; smiling, cruel, the school-girl who teases.
"I know where your tobacco money goes, old dad," she continued.
His mind was far too big and vague and mooning often to be able to encounter successfully the darts his wife occasionally shot into his large carcase.
"He's a beautiful boy," was all he now made answer, as he disappeared.
Whether the wound he dealt was deliberately given in self-defence, or unconsciously because he had the power over her, his words stung Anne Caspar to the quick.
She turned white, and sat down in the lonely kitchen her wrung old hands twisted in her lap, hugging her wound.
Then she recovered enough to take reprisals.
"Alf's their landlord, now," she cried after him, the snakes in her eyes darting dreadful laughter.
Edward Caspar turned in the door.
"Anne," he said, "I wish you to pay Ruth's rent in future out of the money my father left you."
The voice was mild but there was a note of authority, firm if faint, running through it.
Anne rose grimly to her feet, thin as a stiletto, and almost as formidable.
"That woman!"
He nodded at her down the passage.
"My daughter."
Anne turned full face.
"D'you know she's had a love-child?" she shrilled, discordant as a squeaking wheel.
The old gentleman, fumbling at the door of his study, dropped his bearded chin, and beamed at the angry woman, moonwise over his spectacles.
"Why shouldn't she?" he asked.
There was something crisp, almost curt, in the interrogation.
"But she's not respectable!"
Again he dropped his chin and seemed to gape blankly.
"Why should she be?" he asked.
She heard the key turn, and knew that she was locked out for the night.
Later she crept in list-slippers to the door and knocked with the slow and solemn knuckles of fate, a calculated pause between each knock.
"Alf's going up, Ern's going down," she said, nodding with grim relish. "Good-night, old dad."
Next evening Joe called at the cottage, to fetch Ernie for the class. He arrived as he sometimes had done of late, a little before Ernie was due home from the yard. At this hour the little ones had already been put to bed; and Ruth would be alone with Alice, between whom and the engineer there had sprung up a singular intimacy ever since the evening on which he had carried her home like a dead thing in his arms from Saffrons Croft.
Ruth had not seen him since his clash with Alfred in the door; and he had obviously avoided her.
Now she thrilled faintly. Was he in love with her?--she was not sure.
He entered without speaking and took his seat as always before the fire, broad-spread and slightly huddled in his overcoat, chin on chest, staring into the fire.
Ruth, busy baking, her arms up to the elbow in dough, made her decision swiftly. She would meet him, face him, fight him.
"Well, Joe," she said, not looking at him.
It was the first time she had called him that.
He peeped up at her, only his eyes moving, small, black-brown, and burning like a bear's.
"That's better," he muttered.
She flashed up at him. Innocence and cunning, the schoolboy and the brute, Pan and Silenus fought, leered, and frolicked in his face.
Ruth dropped her gaze and kneaded very deliberately.
Yes ... it was so ... Now she would help him; and she could hold him. She would transmute his passion into friendship. She would bridle her bull, ride him, tame him. It was dangerous, and she loved danger. It was sport; and she loved sport. It was an adventure after the heart of a daring woman. He was a fine man, too, and fierce, warrior and orator; worth conquering and subduing to her will. His quality of a fighting male called to her. She felt the challenge and answered it with singing blood.
That laughing hidalgo who in Elizabethan days had landed from his galleon in the darks at the Haven to bring terror and romance to some Sussex maid; that Spaniard who lurked obscurely in her blood, gave her her swarthy colouring, her indolent magnificence and surprising quality, was stirring uneasily within her once again.
She lifted her eyes from the froth of yeast and looked across at him, accepting battle--if he meant battle. And he did: there was no doubt of that. He sat there, hunched, silent, breathing heavily. Then little Alice slipped down from the kitchen table on which she had been sitting at her mother's side, danced across to her friend, and climbed up on his knee. Ruth took her arms out of the bowl, white to the elbow with flour, came across to the pair, firm-faced, and deliberately removed the child.
Joe rose and went out. In the outer door he stumbled on a man half-hidden on the threshold.
"That you, Joe?" said Ernie quietly. "There he is! Alf--on the spy. See his head bob--there! At the bottom of Borough Lane--It's her he's after."
Joe peeped over his friend's shoulder, his bullet head thrust out like a dog who scents an enemy.
"That sort; is he?" he muttered. "I'll after him!"
