Fortune had favoured him.
Just at the moment Ruth had baffled him, another enemy of his, the Red Cross Garage Syndicate, which in the early days of his career had throttled him, came to grief.
Alf saw his chance, and flung himself into the new project with such characteristic energy as to drown the bitterness of sex-defeat. He had no difficulty in raising the necessary capital for the little Syndicate he proposed to start. Some he possessed himself; his bank was quite prepared to give him accommodation up to a point; and there was a third source he tapped with glee. That source was Captain Royal. Alf was in a position to squeeze the Captain; and he was not the man to forego an advantage, however acquired.
Royal put a fifth of his patrimony into the venture, and was by no means displeased to do so. Thereby he became the principal shareholder in the concern, with a predominant voice in its affairs. That gave him the leverage against Alf, which, with the instinct of a commander, he had seen to be necessary for the security of his future directly that young man showed a blackmailing tendency. Moreover Royal was not blind to the consideration that the new Syndicate, under able management, bid fair to be a singularly profitable investment.
Backed then by Royal and his bank, Alf bought up certain of the garages of the defaulting company at knockout prices. Thereafter, if he still coveted Ruth, he was far too occupied to worry her; while she on her side, purged by the busyness and natural intercourse of married life of all the disabling morbidities that had their roots in a sense of outlawry and the forced restraint put upon a roused and powerful temperament, had completely lost her fear of him.
Ruth, surely, was changing rapidly now. At times in family life she assumed the reins not because she wished to, but because she must; and on occasion she even took the whip from the socket.
Ernie had, indeed, climbed a mountain peak and with unbelievable effort and tenacity won to the summit, which was herself. But then, instead of marching on to the assault of the peak which always lies beyond, he had sat down, stupidly content; with the inevitable consequence that he tended to slither down the mountain-side and lose all he had gained in growth and character by his hard achievement.
The pair had been married four years now; and Ruth knew that her house was built on sand. That comfortable sense of security which had accompanied the first years of her married life, affording her incalculable relief after the hazards which had preceded them, had long passed. Dangers, less desperate perhaps in the appearance than in the days of her darkness, but none the less real, were careering up from the horizon over a murky sea like breakers, roaring and with wrathful manes, to overwhelm her. In particular the threat that haunts through life the working-woman of all lands and every race beset her increasingly. Her man was always skirting now the bottomless pit of unemployment. One slip and he might be over the edge, hurtling heavily down into nothingness, and dragging with him her and the unconscious babes.
The home, always poor, began to manifest the characteristics of its tenants, as homes will. When the young man came for the rent on Monday mornings, Ruth would open just a crack so that he might not see inside, herself peeping out of her door, wary as a woodland creature. Apart from Joe Burt, whom she did not count, there was indeed only one visitor whom Ruth now received gladly; and that was Mr. Edward Caspar, whose blindness she could depend upon.
There had grown up almost from the first a curious intimacy between the dreamy old gentleman, fastidious, scholarly, refined, and the young peasant woman whom destiny had made the mother of his grandchildren. Nothing stood between them, not even the barrier of class. They understood each other as do the children of Truth, even though the language they speak is not the same.