CHAPTER LVI

FROGS' HALL

It was just about the time of Ernie's discovery of Ruth that Mrs. Trupp announced firmly to her husband one evening, a propos of nothing in particular,

"I shall tell him where she is now."

"She mustn't be let down again," grunted Mr. Trupp, who was devoted to Ruth.

"Ernie won't let her down," answered Mrs. Trupp with bright confidence. "He's an absolute gentleman. All the Beauregards are."

"Alf, for instance," commented the curmudgeon across the hearth.

"So that's _that_," continued the lady with the emphasis of one who scents opposition. "She wants help; and he wants her. And he's been true to her for a year and a half now. That's a long time in that class," she went on with fine inconsistency. "So _that's_ settled."

"Pity," grumbled the recalcitrant. "He's doing nicely now, Pigott tells me--and will so long as he doesn't get what he wants. If she marries him she'll make him happy and comfortable. She's just the sort of woman who would. And he'll go to pieces at once. There's nothing to muck a man's career like a happy marriage."

Mrs. Trupp looked severely at the wicked man over her spectacles.

"It's lucky _your_ marriage has proved such a failure, William Trupp," she said.

The other drank his coffee and licked his lips.

"What's done can't be undone, my dear," he grinned. "Bess, ask your mother to give me another cup of cawfee."

Mrs. Trupp had no need to send for Ernie after all. For he called, and sitting in the dusk of the great French-windowed drawing-room in the very chair in which eighteen months before he had told of his loss, he told now of his treasure trove.

There was no reserve or concealment between the two. What one did not know of the story the other could add. They were friends, intimates, made one by their common feeling for a woman who had suffered and endured.

"One thing I knaw," said Ernie deeply. "She didn't commit adultery, whoever did."

Mrs. Trupp, as often, wondered at and was made ashamed by the direct and spiritual insight of a rough-handed working man.

"She loved him," said Ernie. "That's just all about it. Didn't know what he was, no more than a lamb knows what a tiger is till he's got her."

"She's a good woman," responded Mrs. Trupp soberly; and added on a note, half-mischievous, half-cautious, not a little provocative--"I wonder if she'll have you."

Whatever fears for the outcome of his enterprise Mrs. Trupp might entertain, Ernie himself had none.

Indeed for so diffident a man he was astonishingly confident in a quiet way; and besieged his lady with a conquering sense of victory that would brook no doubt and little delay.

Every Sunday morning found him crossing the white bridge at Aldwoldston; and many a week-day evening saw him in Frogs' Hall.

It took him just an hour to trundle an ancient bicycle, lent by Mr. Pigott, from Billing's Corner to the Market Cross after his day's work was done; and an hour back, with the moon hanging over Wind-hover and the night-jars purring in the woods under the northern escarpment of the Downs. But he was young; the August evenings were long-drawn and full of scents and the cries of partridges; and the hour he spent with Ruth in the Brooks, strolling along the tow-path under the pollarded willows to the sound of rooks homing and high-strewn in the heaven, was worth the toil.

The time was between the hay and the straw; and Ruth, apart from her milking at the Barton, was not pressed with work.

She liked his visits, and looked for them; but she drew no nearer to him, nor ever invited him to come. Friendly always, even affectionate, she kept between them a cloud, impalpable and impenetrable. At the end of a month he knew that he was no closer to his goal than when he had met her first upon the river-bank.

The old folks grew to love the constant visitor, nor did he disguise the errand on which he was bent; while little Alice, with her father's eyes peeping from beneath her mother's curls, greeted her new friend with screams of joy, bangings on her drum, and the loveliest and most intimate of smiles.

Ernie made the child a cradle-swing of willow-withes, hung it from the bough of an apple-tree, in the garden, and passed many a happy hour alone with her.

One evening Ruth, returning from the Dower-house, her yoke upon her shoulders, found him in the garden on the hill at the back of the cottage, swinging the child and singing.

She bent her knees and lowered her milk-cans to the ground. The clanking of the cans on the stone caught Ernie's ears. He turned from his labour of love to see Ruth standing in the door in her earth-coloured gabardine.

She smiled at him; and in her eyes there was the gleam, mysterious and darkling, with which good men are sometimes blessed by their women.

Ernie bent over the cradle.

"Who'm I, baby?" he asked.

The little singing voice from the basket-cradle made answer sweetly in one brief bubble-word.

Ruth heard it, put her hand to her heart, and turned slowly away, the chains of the yoke upon her shoulders jingling faintly.

Ernie came to her.

"You mustn't, Ernie," she murmured.

"I must then," he whispered in her ear, "my dear love--my lady."

His arm stole about her; but she put it aside, and regarded him with eyes that were great and grieved under the evening sky.

"Ernie," she said in her gently thrilling voice. "Goo away, there's a dear lad--afoor worse comes of it. You can't help me; and I might harm you."

He took her hands in his, and kissed them.

A working-man in speech, in habit, and in garb, he made love always as a Beauregard. Indeed in the great moments of his life it was always one of those pale chivalrous gentlemen who stood out amid the motley and tumultuous concourse of the forbears who thronged his path.

"But you _can_ help me, Ruth," he told her. "I got my weakness. I dare say you've heard tell."

For the first time the girl in her, long hidden, peeped out at him, shy yet shrewd.

"I remember what they used to say at the Hotel," she answered, with the overwhelming simplicity of the pure in heart.

"You can help me conquer that," he urged. "No one else can, only you."

She said nothing, but gazed at him with new eyes, sweet and very grave, that seemed to sum him up.

At last he had moved her. Swift and sensitive almost as was she, he saw it instantly; and with the profound wisdom of the true lover said no more.