CHAPTER LVIII

THE DOWER-HOUSE

When his father asked him how the chase went, Ernie answered with a grin,

"She hangs back a bit, dad. I spun and I pounced. What next?"

"Spin again," said the old man. "First the web; then the fly; and last the cocoon."

Ernie chuckled. Lying on the hillside amid the gorse and scrub he had often watched the spider at his work. The method was exactly as described by his father. The hunter spun his web and then retired to an ambush to wait. When the prey was caught and the wires brought the message to the citadel, he pounced. Next with incredible speed he wrapped his victim round in silk till it was but a swathed mummy to be absorbed at leisure.

"It's what I am a-doin, dad," said Ernie, and continued to wind his silken meshes about his prey; while others aided in the pleasant conspiracy.

One August afternoon Mrs. Trupp, after calling at the Dower-house, looked in at Frogs' Hall.

The little river ran like a white riband across the Brooks under shaggy willows tossing silvery tails. A flotilla of ducks came down the stream and landed quacking under the white bridge clumsily to climb the bank and waddle towards Parson's Tye. On the lower slopes of Wind-hover the corn still stood in sheaves, the stubble ruddy in the sunset on the bow-backed foothill across the stream.

Ruth sat and listened to her friend; on her face the perturbed look of the good woman genuinely determined to do what is right and honestly puzzled as to her course.

"Don't you love him, Ruth?" asked the other. "Is that the trouble?"

The young woman was deeply moved.

"I've left my heart behind me," she said. "I shall never love a man again--not like that. All that's left of me has gone to the child."

"Ruth," said the elder woman, "d'you know that most of the successful marriages I know are based on friendship? It's very few who pull off the Big Thing. And those that do often come to grief. They expect too much, and are disappointed."

She found herself, as always, talking to Ruth as she would have done to a girl of her own kind. There was no sense of class or caste between the two. They met simply on the ground of common humanity.

"Aye, I could be his friend," said Ruth slowly. "And more than his friend. There's none like Ernie. I'd give him all I got to give. That's a sure thing. I'd be that grateful to him and all."

"And there's little Alice," continued Mrs. Trupp.

"That's just it," cried Ruth passionately. "It's little Alice is all I think on. It's that makes me afear'd--lest I should be unfair to Ernie. See, I do love Ernie. You ca'an't help it. He's that good and unselfish. And I wouldn't hurt him for all the world--not if it was ever so."

"He's the kind of man who needs a woman to help him along the way," said Mrs. Trupp.

Ruth peeped at the other warily, even a thought jealously. What did she know of Ernie's weakness? For Ruth, if she was not in love with Ernie, felt for him that profound protective sense which the mother-woman invariably feels for a man who has shown himself dependent on her.

"Cerdainly it aren't as if he were one of the ambitious ones," she mused. "Cerdainly not. All for himself and gettin to de top, no matter about no one else."

"Like his brother," said Mrs. Trupp crisply.

"Aye," Ruth agreed, "like Alf. That's where it is. Both brothers want me, only they want me different. Alf thought I was his for the askin. Because I made my mistake he thought I was anybody's wench--to be had for money. That's where the difference lays atween him and Ernie. You could trust Ernie anywheres, a woman could."

"And that's the whole battle from the woman's point of view," said Mrs. Trupp, rising. "To trust your man. To know that, wherever he is and whatever he's doing, he won't let you down."

After her visitor had left, Ruth took the child and walked up River Lane to the butcher's at the top.

Marching thoughtfully between high walls, she met Miss Eldred, the daughter of a neighbouring Vicar.

Miss Eldred was an austere and lonely young woman, with a reputation for learning and advanced views, who took no part in the church life of the locality, and was even said to be a rationalist.

She and Ruth had known each other from childhood, and had always been somewhat antipathetic.

As the young woman coming down the lane saw the young woman coming up it, babe perched on shoulder, her lavender-grey eyes, remote and almost smouldering, kindled suddenly. The veil fell from before her face, and the spirit behind the clouds shone forth in wistful radiance.

She stopped.

"Ruth," she said in her staccato voice, "I envy you."

The young mother experienced a swift revulsion of feeling. A profound sympathy stirred her for this ungainly fellow-creature, the slave of circumstances, for whom the door of what Ruth now knew to be Eternity was little likely ever to open, unless forced.

Her instinct told her truly that she could best succour the other in her distress by herself seeking aid.

"See, I got the chance to marry, Miss," she began with beautiful awkwardness. "I don't rightly knaw what to be at."

The other's eyes became shrewd and critical.

"D'you like the man?" she asked harshly.

"We fits in pretty fair like," Ruth made answer without enthusiasm.

"Is he fond of the child?" continued the inquisitor.

"O, aye. He fairly dotes on her."

"I should take the chance," said the other with a gasp. "You've got the child.... That's the thing that matters.... You must put the child first.... Nothing else counts.... She'll be the better for a father."

Next Saturday Ernie strolled across the Brooks, as his custom on that evening was, to meet Ruth on her return from milking.

Her course never varied. She milked at the Barton, and carried the milk to the Dower-house. There she emptied her cans and filled them again with water which she carried home to Frogs' Hall to serve the uses of the cottage.

Ernie wandered across Parson's Tye, with the long green-backed clergy-house showing its thatch and black and white timber work above the hedge of _arbor vitae_, and out on to the main road at the sea-ward end of the village.

Here the Dower-house lay on the left of the road behind a wall. A solid building, comfortable and warm, with russet roof and dormer-windows under a dark sycamore, it had changed little maybe since the great days of old when Aldwoldston on the Ruther, with its tannery, its brewery, its river traffic, and procession of pilgrims passing through from Sea-foord to Michelham Priory, had challenged the supremacy of Lewes on the Ouse, and been something of a city when Beachbourne was still but a tiny hamlet on the hill between the sheep-runs of Beau-nez and the snipe-haunted Levels.

Ernie walked soberly along the dry moat that separated the garden-wall from the road. In the middle of the wall was a gate of open ironwork, wrought from Sussex ore, smelted by a Hammer Pond on Ashdown Ridge, and dating from the days when Heathfield was the centre of England's Black Country. The gate, high and narrow, made an eye in the wall with a heavy brow of ivy overhanging it. Ernie crossed the little bridge that spanned the moat between box-hedges, and half-hidden under a lilac against the ivy-covered wall, he peered through the open-work of the gate.

From his feet a long grass-path ran up between rank herbaceous borders to the house, ambushed by trees.

The clink of cans told him he had timed himself aright. At the far end of the walk was a thick bower over which the leaves of a vine, already turning, scrambled.

From the rich darkness of this bower Ruth now emerged, marching solemnly down the path. Her yoke was on her shoulders, her pails swinging, clanking, slopping.

She walked very deliberately, dressed in the worn earth-coloured gabardine that fell in nobly simple lines about her figure. Her eyes were down, her face grave; and the rakish orange turban wound about her head contrasted strangely with the noble seriousness of her face.

Ernie breathed deep as he watched her coming towards him down the grass-walk under pergolas crowned with roses and honeysuckle. From his covert his eyes followed her with tender content, for he thought she was not aware of his presence. But he was wrong.

A few yards from him, with a graceful dipping motion of the knees, she lowered her shining cans to the ground, disengaged them, and came to him, paler than her wont, the chains of the yoke she still carried now swinging free.

He opened the gate and approached her.

"Ernie," she said with a little sigh, "I'll marry you if you wish it." She paused. Her bosom was heaving, her eyes shuttered. Then she raised her head. "And I'm sure I thank you very much--me and baby."

Hard by a young fig-tree grew against the wall, low-branched and with long-fingered leaves. He drew her beneath the shelter of it, and gathered her slowly in his arms like a sheath of corn. He kissed her patient lips, her eyes; his tears bedewed her cheek; his hand was in hers, and she was kneading it.... Both hands were rough with toil.

Then she opened her eyes; and down in the brown deeps of them shone a lovely star.

"I pray I done you no wrong, Ern," she said, and smiled at him through mists.

Tenderly he removed the yoke from her shoulders and placed it on his own.

Then he bowed to the burden, and taking the road trudged solemnly homeward by her side, the cans clinking and water spilling as he moved.