When at the end of the day's work Alf now drove his employer, as he often did, to Cow Gap to study progress, he, too, would descend and poke and pry amid skeleton walls and crude dank passages with sharp eyes and sharper whispered questions to labourers, foreman, and even the architect. Never a Sunday passed but found him bustling across the golf-links before church, to ascend ladders, walk along precarious scaffoldings, and march with proprietory air and incredible swagger along the terraces of the newly laid-out gardens that patched with brown the green quilt of the coombe.
Once, on such a Sunday visit, he climbed the hill at the back to obtain a bird's-eye view of the building. Amid spurting whin-chats and shining gossamers, he climbed in the brilliant autumn morning till he had almost reached the crest. He was lost to the world and the beauty lavished all about him; his eyes shuttered to the whispered suggestions of the infinite; his heart closed to the revealing loveliness of Earth, round-limbed and bare, as he revolved in the dark prison-house of self the treadmill of his insect projects. The sidesman of St. Michael's, spruce, scented, oiled, in fancy waistcoat, with boots of glace kid, and waxed moustache, moving laboriously between sky and sea, was civilised man at the height of his imperfection and vain-glorious in his fatuous artificiality.
Suddenly a bare head and collarless stark neck blurted up out of a deep gorse-clump before him.
"Who goes there?" came a challenge, deep and formidable, as the roar of some jungle lord disturbed in his covert.
Alf collapsed as a soap-bubble, blown from a clay pipe and brilliant in the sunshine, bursts at the impact of an elemental prickle. He fled down the hill incontinently.
The man who had barked, shoulder-deep in gorse, his eyes still flashing, turned to the woman squandered beneath him in luxurious splendour. Native of the earth on which she lay, and kin to it as some long-limbed hind of the forest, she regarded him with amused content. The sudden battle-call of her male roused what there was of primitive in her, soothed, and flattered her womanhood. Comfortably she fell back upon the sense of security it called up, delighting behind half-drawn lids in the surprising ferocity of her man. That roar of his, startling the silence like a trumpet-note, had spoken to her deeps. Swiftly, and perhaps for the first time, she recognised what the man above her stood for in her life, and why one with whom she did not pretend to be in love so completely satisfied her most urgent present need. He was a break-water behind which she lay with furled sails after a hazardous voyage over uncharted deeps. Outside was still the roar and batter of seas. The sound of guns booming overhead as she lay, stripped of her canvas, and rocking pleasantly in the inner waters, did not alarm, rather indeed lulled, her to sleep: for they spoke to her of protection at last.
"Who was it, Ernie?" she murmured, raising a lazy head from the hands on which they were pillowed, the dark hair strewn about her like wind-slashed rain.
The man turned, outraged still and bristling.
"Alf!" he snorted. "Just bob me head over the hawth at him. That was enough—quite enough! I knaw the colour of Alf's liver."
He stood above her with his air of a fighting male.