CHAPTER LIV

THE BROOKS

Ruth was standing on the bank opposite him, but she had turned her back upon him and the river.

He saw the heave of her shoulders, and the motion of her head, and knew that she was weeping.

In a second he had flung himself into the water and was wading towards her.

She turned at the sound of his surging, expecting fresh enemies, and prepared for them.

He stood in mid-stream, a picturesque and dishevelled figure, grimy with coal-dust, collarless, touzle-headed, his greasy overall braced above his waistcoat.

"Ruth!" he called uncertainly.

She stood on the bank among the willows and looked down on him.

He ducked his face in the stream, and washed away the coal-dust.

"Now d'ye know me?" he grinned.

Her face glowed.

"I knew you without that, Ernie," she answered, her voice deep and humming, as of old, like an inspired silver-top.

He surged towards her with wide arms amid the water-weeds.

She stretched out a strong hand to help him up.

He took it, and kissed the fine fingers.

In another moment he was standing at her side.

"O, Ernie!" she said, and passed her hand across her forehead. "Seems like you was sent."

He gathered her in his arms. Her eyes were closed; her face, wan now beneath the warm colouring, tilted back. He marked the perfect round, full and very large, of her sheathed pupils. Then in her ear he whispered,

"Ruth, will you marry me?"

She shook her head, the tears welling from under closed lids. Then she withdrew quietly from his arms.

"I couldn't do that, Ernie," she said.

He absorbed her with his eyes. Her gabardine, smocked at the breast, shewed the noble lines of her bosom, fuller and firmer than of old. It was open at the neck and revealed the amber necklace bound about a throat that was round and massive as a pillar, and touched to olive by the sun.

Alf was walking away towards the bridge which threw a red-brick span across the stream some hundreds of yards distant. Cows moved in the meadow. One came towards him along the tow-path, lowing in the dusk.

Alf stopped and watched it. He did not like cows: he did not like animals. "Machines are my line," he would say. "More sense in em." The cow, unaware of the disturbance she was causing in the other's breast, mooned forward. That was enough for Alf. On his right was a plank-bridge carelessly flung across the stream. Alf did not like plank-bridges either, but he preferred them to cows. And placed as he now was between the Devil and the Deep Sea, he chose the Deep Sea without a moment's hesitation, because he knew that here at least the Sea was fairly shallow.

He crossed the plank-bridge--on his hands and knees. The pair under the willow watched in silence with an awed curiosity.

"He's frit," murmured Ruth, the light and laughter peeping through her clouds.

"He's always frit, Alf is," Ernie answered out of the experience of thirty years.

"Alfs always is," commented Ruth.

Alf, the astounding, the perils of land and sea behind him, now rose from his humiliating position, and well knowing he had been watched, waved with the stupid bravado that is a form of self-defence towards the willow clump.

Then he disappeared into the wood. In another moment the swift thud-thud-thud of a motor-bike starting up was heard.

Ruth listened.

"He ain't coming back," said Ern comfortably.

"Ah," Ruth answered, unconvinced. "You don't know him. You don't know Alfs." She put out her hand towards him in that brave and gracious way of hers. "I'm glad you come though, Ern," she said.

Ernie's eyes filled with tears, as he caught her fingers.

"There!" he said. "He couldn't hurt you. He ain't no account, Alf ain't."

She answered soberly.

"No, he couldn't hurt _me_--not my body leastways. But I was like to ha killed _him_."

A little breeze stirred the willows. The turban on the ground flapped and fluttered like a winged bird. Then it opened suddenly and discovered a jagged flint, wrapped in its folds. Ruth took it out and tossed it into the stream.

"It aren't pretty, I knaw," she said. "But life is life; and Alfs are Alfs; and you never knaw."

He escorted her across the Brooks to the road, moving leisurely behind her in the dusk, his shoulder mumbling hers.

On the bridge she said good-bye.

He was outraged.

"I'm going home with you!" he cried.

"I'd liefer not, if you please, Ernie," she said, gently insistent. "Not through the village, Sadaday night and all."

"Very well," he answered reluctantly. "To-morrow then. A bit afoor cock-crow."