TWO ALFRED OLLIVANT TWO MEN: A ROMANCE OF SUSSEX BY THE SAME AUTHOR BOB, SON OF BATTLE DANNY THE GENTLEMAN REDCOAT CAPTAIN THE TAMING OF JOHN BLUNT THE ROYAL ROAD THE BROWN MARE BOY WOODBURN TWO MEN: A ROMANCE OF SUSSEX BY ALFRED OLLIVANT Necessity the Spring of Faith and Mould of Character GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLED AY, PAGE & COMPANY 1919 Copyright, 1919, by DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign language}, including the Scandinavian TO BEACHBOURNE AND THE FRIENDS I MADE THERE 19011911 2137515 CONTENTS BEAU-NEZ BOOK I FATHER AND SON CHAPTER PAGE I MR. TRUPP 7 II EDWARD CASPAR 10 III ANNE CASPAR 17 IV OLD MAN CASPAR 23 V ERNIE MAKES His APPEARANCE 28 VI THE MANOR-HOUSE 32 VII HANS CASPAR'S WILL 39 BOOK II THE TWO BROTHERS VIII BEACHBOURNE 43 IX THE Two BOYS 46 X OLD AND NEW 51 XI THE STUDY 55 XII ALF SHOWS His COLOURS 60 XIII ALF MAKES A REMARK 67 XIV EVIL 77 XV MR. TRUPP INTRODUCES THE LASH 81 XVI FATHER, MOTHER AND SON 87 XVII ERNIE GOES FOR A SOLDIER 92 BOOK III THE SOLDIER XVIII ERNIE GOES EAST 99 XIX THE REGIMENT 104 vii via CONTENTS CHAPTER XX ERNIE IN INDIA no XXI THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 117 XXII OLD TOWN 121 XXIII THE CHANGED MAN 126 XXIV ALF 130 XXV THE CHURCHMAN 135 XXVI MR. PIGOTT 141 BOOK IV RUTH BOAM XXVII THE HOHENZOLLERN HOTEL 149 XXVIII THE THIRD FLOOR 154 XXIX THE MAN OF AFFAIRS 160 XXX REALITY 163 XXXI THE RIDE ON THE Bus 167 XXXII ON THE HILL 171 XXXIII UNDER THE STARS 176 BOOK V CAPTAIN ROYAL XXXIV His ARRIVAL 181 XXXV His ORIGIN 184 XXXVI THE CAPTAIN BEGINS His SIEGE 189 XXXVII HE DRIVES A SAP 195 XXXVIII THE SERPENT 200 XXXIX THE LASH AGAIN 203 XL CLASH OF MALES 208 XLI THE DECOY POND 211 XLII THE CAPTAIN'S FLIGHT 217 XLIII THE EBB-TIDE 221 XLIV ERNIE LEAVES THE HOTEL 225 BOOK VI THE QUEST XLV OLD Mus BOAM 831 XLVI ERNIE TURNS PHILOSOPHER 237 CONTENTS ix CHAPTER PAGH XLVII ALF TRIES TO HELP 240 XLVIII Two MEETINGS 245 XLIX ALF MARKS TIME 251 BOOK VII THE OUTCAST L THE CRUMBLES 259 LI EVELYN TRUPP 264 LII THE RETURN OF THE OUTCAST 267 LIII THE FIND 272 LIV THE BROOKS 278 BOOK VIII TREASURE TROVE LV THE POOL 283 LVI FROGS' HALL 291 LVII THE SURPRISE 295 LVIII THE DOWER-HOUSE 299 LIX ALF TRIES TO SAVE A SOUL 304 LX THE END OF A CHAPTER 310 BEAU-NEZ BOOK I FATHER AND SON TWO MEN BEAU-NEZ OLD BEAU-NEZ shouldered out into the sea, immense, im- movable, as when the North-men, tossing off him in their long-boats, had first named him a thousand years before. Like a lion asleep athwart the doors of light, his head mas- sive upon his paws, his flanks smooth as marble, he rested. The sea broke petulantly and in vain against the boulders that strewed his feet. He lay squandered in the sunshine that filled the hollows in his back and declared the lines of his ribs gaunt beneath the pelt. Overhead larks poured down rivulets of song from the brimming bowl of heaven. The long-drawn swish of the sea, a sonorous under-current that came and went in rhyth- mical monotone, rose from the foot of the cliff to meet the silvery rain of sound and mingle with it in deep and myste- rious harmony. It was May. The sides of the coombes were covered with cloth of gold: for the gorse was in glory, and filled the air with heavy fragrance ; while the turf, sweet with thyme, was bejewelled with a myriad variety of tiny flowers. In earth and sea and sky there was a universal murmuring content, as though after labour, enduring for scons, the Mother of Time had at last brought forth her Son and, as she nursed him, crooned her thankfulness. Out of the West, along the back of the Downs, dipping and dancing to the curve of the land like the wake of a ship over a billowy sea, a rough road swept up to the head, pass- ing a dew-pond, the old race-course still fenced in, and a farm amid stacks at the head of a long valley that curled away towards a lighthouse pricking up white against the blue 3 4 TWO MEN on the summit of the cliff in the eye of the misty morning sun. The name of the lighthouse was Bel- or Baal-tout, re- minding men by its title of the god their fathers worshipped on high places here and elsewhere throughout the world with human sacrifices the god of the Philistine of every age and country, and not least our own. On Beau-nez itself a tall flagstaff overtopped a little clus- ter of white coast-guard stations, outside which a tethered goat grazed. Beside the flagstaff stood a man, watching a tan-sailed Thames barge leisurely flapping across the shining floor of water beneath. He too was massive: a big man with swarthy eyes set in a pale face, very sure of himself. So much you could tell by the carriage of his head, and the way he stood on his feet. He was not used to opposition, it was clear, and would not brook it; while the coat with the astrakhan collar he was wearing added to his air of consequence. Behind him in the road stood the dingy fly and moth-eaten horse that had brought him up the hill. The big man turned his back on the sun and walked slowly to the top of the steep coombe which overlooked the town that lay beneath him like a fairy city in the mists along the foam-lined edge of the bay, reaching out over the Levels to the East, and flinging its red-coated skirmishers up the lower slopes of the Downs. " How the town grows! " mused the big man. A brown excrescence on the smooth turf of the coombe beneath him caught his eye. At first he mistook it for a badger's earth; then he saw that it was a man lying on his back. The man's hands were behind his head, and his soft hat over his eyes ; but he was not sleeping. One lank leg was crossed over a crooked knee, and the dangling foot kicked restlessly to and fro. That foot was sandalled. The man in the astrakhan coat slowly descended towards the recumbent figure. His eyes were ironical, his expression almost grim. For a moment he stood looking down upon the unconscious dreamer whose pale brown hair peeped from beneath a hat of BEAU-NEZ 5 a shape more familiar in the Quartier Latin than on English shores. Then he prodded the other in the side with his toe. The young fellow roused with a start and blinked up into the big man's face. " Hullo, f father," he cried with a slight stutter, and rose in perturbation: a ramshackle young fellow, taller even than his father, but entirely lacking the other's girth and au- thoritative presence. A soft beard framed his long face, and he was wearing the low flannel collar that in the seventies was the height of bad form. " Just like you, Ned," said the elder with a grimness that was not entirely unkind. The son bent and brushed his knees unnecessarily. His face twitched, but he did not attempt to answer. " Your mother's very ill," said the big man casually. He took a letter from his pocket and thrust it towards his son. The young man read it and handed it back. " Is she h happy? " he asked, his face moved and moving. " She's away all the time like her son," the other an- swered; and added more mildly " She doesn't know any one now not even the latest parson." He turned and climbed the hill again. On the summit by the flagstaff he paused and looked round deliberately. " Might build an hotel here," he said thoughtfully. " Should pay." BOOK I FATHER AND SON CHAPTER I MR. TRUPP WHEN in the late seventies young Mr. Trupp, aban- doning the use of Lister's spray, but with meticu- lous antiseptic precautions derived from the great man at University Hospital, performed the operation of va- riotomy on the daughter of Sir Hector Moray, and she lived, his friends called it a miracle, his enemies a lucky fluke. All were agreed that it had never been done before, and the more foolish added that it would never be done again. Sir Hector was a well-known soldier; and the operation made the growing reputation of the man who performed it. William Trupp was registrar at the Whitechapel at the time, and a certainty for the next staff appointment. When, therefore, while the columns of the Lancet were still hot with the controversy that raged round the famous case, the young man told Sir Audrey Rivers, whose house-surgeon he had been, that he meant to leave London and migrate to the country, the great orthopaedist had said in his grim way to this his favourite pupil: " If you do, I'll never send you a patient." Even in his young days Mr. Trupp was remarkable for the gruff geniality which characterized him to the end. " Very well, sir," he said with that shrewd smile of his. " I must go all the same." Next day Sir Audrey read that his understudy was engaged to Evelyn, only daughter of Sir Hector Moray of Pole. Evelyn Moray came of warrior ancestry; and her father, known on the North-West Frontier as Mohmund Moray, was not the least distinguished of his line. The family had 7 8 TWO MEN won their title as Imperialists, not on the platform, but by generations of laborious service in the uttermost marches of the Empire. The Morays were in fact one of those rare families of working aristocrats, which through all the insin- cerities of Victorian times remained true to the old knightly ideal of service as the only test of leadership. Evelyn then had been brought up in a spacious atmosphere of high endeavour and chivalrous gaiety remote indeed from the dull and narrow circumstance of her lover's origin. Pro- foundly aware of it, the young man was determined that his lady should not suffer as the result of her choice. Moreover he loved the sea ; he loved sport ; and, not least, he was something of a natural philosopher. That is to say, he cherished secret dreams as to the part his profession was to play in that gradual Ascent of Man which Darwin had recently revealed to the young men of William Trupp's gen- eration. Moreover he held certain theories as to the practice of his profession, which he could never work out in Harley Street. It was his hope to devote his life to a campaign against that enemy of the human race the tubercle bacillus. And to the realization of his plans the sea and open spaces were necessary. A colleague at the Whitechapel, who was his confidant, said one day : "WTiy don't you look at Beachbourne? It's a coming town. And you get the sea and the Downs. It's ideal for your purpose." " It's so new," protested the young surgeon. " I can't take that girl out of that home and plant her down in a raw place like Beachbourne. She'd perish like a violet in Com- mercial Road." " There's an Old Town," replied the other. . . . In those days, Mr. Trupp kept greyhounds at the Pelham Arms, Lewes, and spent his Saturday afternoon scampering about Furrel Beacon and High-'nd-Over and the flanks of the hills above Aldwoldston and the Ruther Valley. In the evening, after his sport, he would ride over to spend the night at Pole, which lay " up country," as the shepherds and carters in the Down villages still called the Weald. MR. TRUPP 9 One spring evening he arrived very late by gig instead of on horseback, and coming from the East instead of from the South. The beautiful girl, awaiting him somewhat coldly at the gate, was about to chide him, when she saw his face; and her frosts melted in a moment. " My dear," he said, dismounting and taking her by both hands, " I've done it." " What have you done? " she cried, a-gleam like an April evening after rain. " Taken the Manor-house at Beachbourne." Six months later Mr. Trupp was settled in his home, with for capital the love of a woman who believed in him, his own natural capacity and shrewd common sense, and a blue grey- hound bitch called She. CHAPTER II EDWARD CASPAR THE days when the parish priest knew the secrets of every family within his cure have long gone by, never to return. His place in the last generation has been taken to a great extent by the family doctor, who in his turn perhaps will give way to the psycho-therapist in the generation to come. Mr. Trupp had not been long in Beachbourne before he began to know something of the inner histories of many of the families about him. Those shrewd eyes of his, peering short-sightedly through pince-nez as he rolled about the steep streets of Old Town, or drove in his hooded gig along the broad esplanades of New, allowed little to escape them. Moreover he was a man of singular discretion ; and his fellow citizens, men alike and women, learned soon to trust him and never had cause to regret their confidence. It was quite in the early days of his residence in the little township on the hill that the young surgeon received a letter from Mr. Caspar, the famous railway contractor, asking him to look after my boy, Ned, who has seen good to pitch his tent on your accursed Downs heaven knows why. Hans Caspar owed his immense success in life as much to his habit of almost brutal directness as to anything, save per- haps his equally brutal energy. A Governor of the Whitechapel Hospital, and a regular attendant at the Board-meetings, he knew the young surgeon well, believed in him, and did not hesitate to tell the naked truth about his son. He's not a scamp, he wrote. Nobody could say that of Ned. He's got no enemies but himself. You know his trouble. His address is 60, Rectory Walk. Look him up. 10 EDWARD CASPAR N /* VQjB //e wont come to you shy as a roe-deer. But once you ve established connection he'll love you like a dog. I've told him I'm sending you. In a postscript he added, I'll foot the bill. I keep the boy mighty short. It's the-sr^* one thing I can do to help him. Mr. Trupp, in those days none too busy, went. . . . The Manor, a solid Queen Anne house, fronted on to the street opposite the black-timbered Star, where of old pilgrims who had landed from the continent at Pevensey would, after a visit to Holy Well in Coombe-in-the-Cliff under Beau-nez, pass their first night before taking the green-way that led along the top of the Downs to the Lamb at Aldwoldston on the road to the shrine of good St. Richard-de-la-Wych at Chich ester. Mr. Trupp, muffled to the chin for even in those days he was cultivating the cold which he was to cherish to the end climbed Church Street, little changed for centuries, passed the massive-towered St. Michael's on the Kneb, and turned to the left at Billing's Corner. Here at once were evidences of the change that had driven Squire Caryll to for- sake the home of his fathers and retreat westward to the valley of the Ruther before the onrush of those he called the barbarians. " They've squeezed me out, the ! " the old man said with tears in his eyes. " But, by God, I've made em pay! " The Manor farm had been cut up into building lots; the Moot, as the land under the Kneb crowned by the parish- church was still called, would shortly follow suit; and Saf- frons Croft, with its glory of great elms that stood like a noble tapestry between the Downs and the sea, was being turned by a progressive Town Council into a public park. At the back of Church Street old and new met and clashed unhappily ; a walnut peeping amid houses, an ancient fig tree prisoned in a back yard, a length of grim flint wall patching red brick. Here a row of substantial blue-slated houses, larger than cottages, less pretentious than villas, each with its tiny gar- den characteristic of its occupant, stood at right angle to the 12 TWO MEN Downs and looked across open ground to Beech-hangar and the spur which hides Beau-nez from view. A white house across the way, standing apart in pharisaic aloofness amid a gloom of unhappy-seeming trees, told that this was Rectory Walk. At the end of the Walk a new road set a boundary to the town. Beyond the road a dark crescent-sea of culti- vated land washed the foot of the Downs which rose here steep as a green curtain, shutting off with radiant darkness the wonder-world that lay beyond in the light of setting suns. No. 60 was almost opposite the Rectory. Mr. Trupp, as he entered the gate, remarked that in the upper window of the house there was a chocolate coloured card, on which was printed in deep grooved silver letters the word Apartments. A woman opened to him, but kept the door upon the chain. Through the crack he glanced at her, and saw at once that but for her hardness she would have been beautiful, while even in her hardness there was something of the quality of a sword. " Is Mr. Caspar in? " he asked. " Yes," she answered. Whether the woman was surly or suspicious, he wasn't sure ; but she undid the chain. " Will you step inside ? " she said, thawing ever so little. "Mr. Trupp, isn't it?" She stood back to let him pass. Her blue overall, falling straight to her feet, showed the fine lines of her figure; her eyes met his straight as the point of a lance and much the colour of one; her lips were fine almost to cruelty, her nose fine; she was fine all through as an aristocrat, if her accent and manner were those of a small shop-keeper; and her col- ouring was of finest porcelain. She showed him into the room upon the right. The room was unusual. There was little furniture in it, and that little exquisite; no carpet, but a lovely Persian rug lay before the fire. All round the walls and half-way up them, were oak book-shelves with glass doors of a pattern new to Mr. Trupp, but designed he was sure in Germany. On the top of one of them was a Jacobean tankard with a crest upon it ; in the bow a broad writing-table with the new EDWARD CASPAR 13 roll-top. On the brown wall were two pictures, both fa- miliar to the young surgeon who was interested in Art and knew something of it: Botticelli's Primavera and a perfect print of young Peter Lely's famous Cavalier Raoul Beau- regard, the long-faced languorous first Earl Ravenwood, who died so beautifully in his master's arms at Naseby. " I had rather lost my crown," the stricken monarch had remarked, so we all as children read in our nursery histories. " Sire," the wounded man had answered. " You are los- ing little. I am gaining all. . . ." As Mr. Trupp entered, a very tall man, smoking by the fireside, put down a volume of Swinburne, and rose. He was as unusual as the room in which he lived. Young though he was, he had a soft brown beard that suited his weak and charming face and served partially to hide an uncertain mouth and chin. It was noon, but he was wearing slippers and a quilted dressing gown, with the arms of a famous Cambridge College worked in silk on the breast-pocket. Certainly he was hardly the type you ex- pected to find in the little room of a tiny house in a back- water of a seaside resort. His long face had something of the contour of a sheep, and something of a sheep's expression. In a flash of recog- nition Mr. Trupp glanced from it to that of the love-locked cavalier on the wall above his head. Edward Caspar too had those unforgettable eyes shy, fugitive, and above all far too sensitive. He had, moreover, the delightful ease of manner of one who has been bred at the most ancient of pub- lic schools and universities and has responded to the some- what stagnant atmosphere of those old-world treasuries of dignity and peace. But a less shrewd eye than Mr. Trupp's would have detected behind the apparent assurance a com- plete lack of self-confidence. " My father tut tut told me you were going to be kind enough to lul lul look me up," the young man said with a stutter in the perfect intonation of his kind. " It's good of you to come." " Just looked in for a chat," growled Mr. Trupp, un- usually shy for some reason. The two young men talked awhile at random of the 14 TWO MEN Hospital, of Mr. Caspar Senior and the Grand Northern Railway, of Beachbourne, old and new, its origin, growth, and prospects. Then conversation flagged. Edward Caspar, it was clear, was trying to say something and found it difficult. He stood before the fire, wrapping his dressing-gown about him, and moving elephant-wise from one foot to the other. His brow puckered; his face wrought ; his eyes were on the floor. Mr. Trupp, intuitive and sympathetic as few would have believed, gave him every chance and mute encouragement. At last the thing came out. " You know what my tut tut trouble is," said the young man, over-riding obstacles with motions of the head. " I find it hard to keep off it." He nodded to the writing- desk on which stood a soda-water syphon and a glass. " We must see what can be done," the other answered. " You're young. You've got life before you. It's worth making a fight." The young man showed himself troubled and eager as a child. " D'you think there's hup hup hope for me ? " he asked. " Every hope," replied Mr. Trupp with the gruff cheer- fulness that so often surprised his patients. " You're honest with yourself. That's the main thing. First thing we must do is to find you a job." The other stared into the fire. " I've got a job," he said at last reluctantly. "What's that?" Edward Caspar answered after a pause and much facial emotion. "I'm writing a book on the Philosophy of M Mysti- cism." He wound himself up and his speech flowed more freely. " It'll take me my lifetime. Professor Zweibrucker of Leipzig is helping me. That's why I've settled here. At least," he corrected, stumbling once again, " that's one rea- son why. To be quiet and near the Public Library." Mr. Trupp nodded. " It's the best in the South of England bar Brighton," he said. " And it'll beat that soon." He rose to go. EDWARD CASPAR 15 " Does that woman look after you properly? " he asked. The young man's colour changed; and the momentary glow of enthusiasm roused in him as he touched on his work vanished. Edward Caspar was too weak or too honest to make a good conspirator. He became self-conscious, and blinked rapidly as he stared at the fire. " What wow woman's that? " he asked in a flustered way. " Your landlady." The other's face wrought. His stammer possessed him. He flapped about like a wounded bird in a tumult of fear and pain. " What? " he said. " She? She's all right." He did not show his visitor to the door. Mr. Trupp noticed it and wondered : for his host's manners were obvi- ously perfect both by nature and tradition. In the passage was the woman who had admitted him, feigning to dust. She opened the door for him as he wound himself elaborately up in his muffler. " D'you let lodgings? " he asked. Those steel blue eyes of hers were on him challenging and armed for resistance. " He's my lodger." "Yes," said Mr. Trupp. "But have you other rooms? I see your card's up." " Sometimes." " Because my patients ask me now and then if I can recommend them lodgings." The woman was clearly resentful rather than grateful. Mr. Trupp, amused, pursued his mild persecution with the glee of the tormenting male. " Let me see. What's your name? " For a second the woman hesitated baffled it seemed and fighting. Then she said with a note of obvious relief as of one who has overcome a difficulty. " Anne, I believe." " Thank you, Mrs. Anne, I'll remember." He rolled on his way chuckling to himself. The woman watched his back suspiciously from the door. 16 TWO MEN Then she retired, not into the kitchen, but into her lodg- er's sitting-room. " Your father's spy," she said tartly. " Nonsense, nonsense," the young man answered with the desperate exasperation of the neurotic. " My f father's not like that." CHAPTER III ANNE CASPAR EDWARD CASPAR, something of the scholar, some- thing of the artist, even a little of the saint, was no- toriously bad at keeping secrets. " Old Ned leaks," his friends at Harrow and Trinity used to say. The charge was unfortunately true. It was because he had a secret it was important he should keep that, knowing his own weakness, he had settled in Old Town, to be out of danger. Up there on the hill he would meet none of his quondam friends, who, if they came to Beachbourne at all, would go to one of the fine hotels in New Town along the sea front by the Wish. But Nature, which has no mercy on weakness in any form, was too much for the soft young man. It was barely a week after his first visit to 60 Rectory Walk that Mr. Trupp was sent for again. The same woman opened to him with the same fierce, al- most defiant face. "Well?" he said. " It's pleurisy, he says," she answered. " Pretty sharp." He unwound himself in the passage. " He may want a nurse then." " He won't," cried the woman, the note of challenge in her voice. " I'll nurse him." " Can you manage it with your work? " " If I can't no one else shan't," the woman snorted, al- most threateningly. " First door on the left." Mr. Trupp, grinning to himself, went up the stairs, and was aware that the woman was standing at the foot watch- ing his back. She did not follow. The young surgeon climbed thoughtfully, absorbing his 17 1 8 TWO MEN environment, as the good doctor does. The varnished paper on the wall, the cheap carpet under his feet, the sham drain- pipe that served as an umbrella-stand in the passage; they were all the ordinary appurtenances of the house of this class, commonplace, even a little coarse, and affording a strange contrast to the almost exotic refinement and distinction of the sitting-room on the ground floor. The house too was bright and clean as a hospital, hard too, he thought, as its landlady. There was no lodging-house smell, his nose, trained in the great wards of the Whitechapel, noted with approval. Windows were kept clearly open, sunshine ad- mitted as a friend. He trailed his fingers up the bannisters and examined them, when he had turned the corner and was out of sight of the woman watching in the passage. Not a trace of dust! Yes, when he was in a position to start his Open-air Hostel on the cliff for tuberculous patients, this was the woman he should get for housekeeper. He knocked at the door on the left, suddenly remember- ing that this must be the room in the window of which hung the chocolate-coloured Apartments card. Young Caspar's voice bid him enter. The room was a bed-room and contained a double bed. In the window, where dangled the card, was a dressing- table, and on it, undisguised, the paraphernalia of a woman's toilet. Edward Caspar lay in bed, breathing shortly, his face pinched with physical and spiritual suffering. Beside the bed was a chair and on it a manuscript. Mr. Trupp glanced at the inscription The Philosophy of Mysticism. Part I. The History of Animism. " You've fuf fuf found us out early," gasped the young man with a ghastly smile. " Nothing very terrible," said Mr. Trupp. " I'm not ashamed of it," answered the other. " She's a good woman. Only my f father's a bit old-fashioned. You see, I'm the only son." " I don't suppose he knows," grunted Mr. Trupp. " No, he don't know." " And I don't see any reason why he should," continued the doctor. ANNE CASPAR 19 Edward Caspar raised his wistful eyes. " Thank you, Mr. Trupp," he stuttered in his pathetic and dependent way. " Thank you. Very good of you, I'm sure. We're fond of each other, Anne and I. I owe her a lot. And my father's getting an old man." On the mantelpiece was the photograph of a lady in court dress. Mr. Trupp studied the long and refined face. There was no mistaking the type. It was Beauregard all through, exhibiting the same sheep-like contour as that of the man in the bed, the same unquenchable spiritual longings as the Cavalier in the room below added in this case to that ex- asperating weakness which provokes a pagan world to blows. " Is that your mother? " asked Mr. Trupp. "Yes." " She's like you." " She's supposed to be." When the doctor left the sick room and went down- stairs he was aware that the door of the sitting-room was open. The woman was inside, standing duster in hand, under the picture of the Cavalier, whose eyes seemed now to the young doctor faintly ironical. Mr. Trupp entered quietly and shut the door behind him. " We're married," she said, blurting the words at him. " I know," he grunted. She* looked at him suspiciously. "Did he tell you?" " That you were married ? " " Yes." " No." "Who did? "fiercely. " Your face." She relaxed slowly. " You mean I don't look the sort to stand any nonsense." She nodded, grimly amused. " You're right. That's me. I'm chapel." Then she let herself go. " I'm fond of Ned," she flashed. " I wouldn't have married him else, for all his family. He's reel gentry, Ned is. I don't mean his mother being Lady Blanche, I'm not that kind. I mean in him here." She put her hand on her chest. " I know I'm not 20 TWO MEN his sort. But I can help him. And he needs help. Think any of them could support him up?" with scorn. ' Too flabby by half. Can't support emselves, some of em. Lays on their backs in bed and drinks tea out of a spout before they can get up o mornings. I know. My sister's in serv- ice." She stopped abruptly. " What do you think about it yourself? Straight now." " I think," said Mr. Trupp, sententious and dour, " the only sensible thing he ever did in his life was to marry you." She eyed him shrewdly, sweetly. Then the hard young woman softened, and her face became beautiful, the lovely colour deepening. She was still wearing the blue over-all in which he had first seen her. " You see me how I am," she said. " I can guess," answered Mr. Trupp. " Will you see me through? " " With pleasure." " I don't want no one else, only you. Mr. Pigott the schoolmaster told me of you." Mr. Trupp nodded. " He's chapel too," he said. Her eyes became ironical. " Yes," she answered. " He's a good man though. You'll be church, I suppose. Manor-house always is." Mr. Trupp shook his head forcibly. " I'm an agnostic," he replied. The word, recently coined by Huxley, was on the lips of all the young men of Science of the day. " That's a kind of honest heathen," he added, seeing she did not understand. She nodded at him with a gleam of almost merry malice. " Hope for the best and fear the worst sort," she said. " I know em." Then she returned to her subject, and her face became grave and sweet again. " I'm due in April," she said. " That's the right time," he answered. " All children should be born in the spring. Then they're greeted with a song because Nature wants em ; and they've got the ANNE CASPAR 21 summer before them to get established in. I'll come and look you up in a day or two." "And Ned?" " He's all right. Keep him in bed. I'll send him round some medicine to ease the pain." She eyed him shrewdly. " I didn't mean that. I meant the big thing. What chance has he? " Mr. Trupp buttoned himself up. " He's honest with himself. That's the great thing. For the rest it depends mostly on you. You may pull him up. He's young. Is he ambitious? " She shook her head. " What about his writing? " " The Basis of Animalism," said Mrs. Caspar thought- fully. " That's the essay that got him the Fellowship at King's only he gave it up after a year. Too drudgery- fied. See where it is," confidentially, " he's got the brains, Ned has. The teachers at Cambridge thought no end of him. I've seen their letters. You can do what you like, the Head Teacher wrote. Question is Do you like? And that's where it is with him. There's no stay in Ned. He'll write away one day, and then drop it for a month. Then he'll paint a bit ; and after that a bit of poetry. But he don't go at it. He don't understand work. That sort don't," with scorn. " They've no need. A man works when he's got to and not before. Dad worked. He was a tobacconist at Ealing in a small way. Cleared three pound a week if he kept at it steady and went under if he didn't. Why should a man work when he's only got to open his mouth and the pocket-money'll drop in. "Tain't in Nature." Mr. Trupp nodded quiet approval. " Must's the only word that matters," he said. " Must's the man. He's the boy to kill your can't." The woman followed him to the door. " Of course if old Mr. Caspar knew he'd disinherit him. And Ned could never earn." "And you'd be done?" queried Mr. Trupp with quiet glee. 22 TWO MEN " Never ! " cried the woman, up in arms at once. " I could keep us both at a pinch, I'll lay then." " I'll lay you could," answered the other. " But Mr. Caspar won't know, so you'll be all right." The two lingered for a moment in the door, as do those who find themselves in sympathy. " He's a hard un's Old Man Caspar," said Anne. " And he's not the only one," grinned the young doctor. " And a good job too." CHAPTER IV OLD MAN CASPAR THAT was how it came about that Mr. Trupp helped young Ernie Caspar into the world. There was no doubt who the lad took after. " He's his father's child," said the young surgeon. Whether Mrs. Caspar was angry with her son for his resemblance to her husband, it was hard to say, but she was fierce even in her mothering. Now she nodded at the photograph of the woman in court- dress upon the mantelpiece. " It's her he favours," she said shortly, one stern eye on the sucking infant. " He's the spit of her same as Ned. None of Old Man Caspar about him" "Have you seen him?" asked Mr. Trupp, washing his hands. "The Old Man? Yes. Once. He came to lunch. Met Ned on Beau-nez. I was landlady that day." She nodded grimly at the window where hung the card. " That's why I keep that up lest he should come down on us sudden. We're done if he finds us out." Mr. Trupp grunted as he dried his hands. " I'm not so sure," he said. " Well, that's what Ned says," the woman retorted. " He would," replied the surgeon. She looked at him sharply. " You mean Ned's afraid of the old man? " The other didn't answer. " You're right there," said the young mother. " He is. And I don't wonder. I'm afraid of him and I've never feared a man before." " Most people are," replied Mr. Trupp. " He's a bit of a terror; but he's got his points. You needn't worry," he 23 24 TWO MEN added as he said good-bye. " You're not likely to see much of him. He's too busy with his Grand Northern Railway." The woman was unconvinced. " He's that sudden," she said. " There he was in the door me in me wrapper and all. Of course Ned never give me no warning. Too flabbergasted by half. Learnt me a lesson, though, never to sit in the back-room with my sewing about." " Did you know him? " asked Mr. Trupp, amused. " Know him ? " cried the other. " Seen his picture in the papers time and again. Astrakhan coat and all ! " Happily for the peace of mind of the young couple Mr. Trupp proved right. All the energies of the great contractor were set on driving the new commercial railway from London to the North, tapping the Black Country, and linking the Yorkshire ports with the Metropolis by the most direct route. It was in fact two years and more before Mr. Caspar made another of his sudden appearances at the door of 60. Young Mrs. Caspar, one of those women who is always on her guard, guessed her visitor by that peremptory knock. She dried her hands, shut the kitchen-door on the children there were two now ; peeped into the study, saw that Edward was out, and faced the stranger. Old Mr. Caspar was not really old: a dark, powerful man, almost magnificent, in the familiar coat with the astrakhan collar of the picture papers, and a black-and-silvered beard. A close observer would have detected a Semitic strain in him and more than a strain of the South. In fact, Hans Caspar's father came from Frankfurt and his mother from Trieste, though he had lived in England from his earliest years and spoke without a trace of accent. Now his dark eyes met the woman's blue ones, and seemed to approve of what they saw. " Mr. Edward Caspar in? " he asked. " He will be in a moment. Mr. Hans Caspar, isn't it? " She showed him into the little back sitting-room. Then the task before her was to warn her husband before he came blundering in and began to coo and call to her and the children from the passage. Anne Caspar was always at her best in a crisis. OLD MAN CASPAR 25 Her baby was asleep ; and Ernie was happy bestriding a new hobby-horse and chanting to himself. She took off her apron, put on her hat, and paused a mo- ment on the door-step, looking up and down the road. Which way had her husband gone? Once a week or so he went down town to consult the Public Library. For the rest he always went towards the Downs to lose himself amid the hollows of the hills. She made for the huge green wall that blocked the end of the road, shimmering and mysterious in the April sunshine. Her choice proved right. She saw him coming off the hill above Beech-hangar, and went to meet him. He would have blundered past her, oblivious of her pres- ence but that she stopped him. Briefly she told him the news and gave him his instruc- tions. They must not be seen entering the house together. She would return directly to the house: he must go along the new Road, down Church Street at the back, and approach by way of Billing's Corner. Obedient as a child, he lumbered off at that curious bear- like trot of his, his sandals tapping the pavement. Ten minutes later, when he entered the back sitting-room, he was perspiring but as prepared as such a flabby soul could ever be. He had always been in terror of his father; and Hans Caspar saw nothing strange in his son's greeting. " Hullo, Edward," he said in his deep voice. " Just run down to see you." " Hullo, father," replied the son with the forced cheeri- ness he always adopted when addressing his sire. " You'll stop for luncheon ? " " Thank-you. If you can give me a bite." The young man rang. His wife came to the door. " Mr. Caspar'll stay for luncheon," said Edward, lower- ing his voice appropriately. " Can you let us have some- thing?" " ^ry good," replied his wife surlily. The father looked after her, grimly amused. 24 TWO MEN added as he said good-bye. " You're not likely to see much of him. He's too busy with his Grand Northern Railway." The woman was unconvinced. " He's that sudden," she said. " There he was in the door me in me wrapper and all. Of course Ned never give me no warning. Too flabbergasted by half. Learnt me a lesson, though, never to sit in the back-room with my sewing about." " Did you know him? " asked Mr. Trupp, amused. " Know him? " cried the other. " Seen his picture in the papers time and again. Astrakhan coat and all ! " Happily for the peace of mind of the young couple Mr. Trupp proved right. All the energies of the great contractor were set on driving the new commercial railway from London to the North, tapping the Black Country, and linking the Yorkshire ports with the Metropolis by the most direct route. It was in fact two years and more before Mr. Caspar made another of his sudden appearances at the door of 60. Young Mrs. Caspar, one of those women who is always on her guard, guessed her visitor by that peremptory knock. She dried her hands, shut the kitchen-door on the children there were two now ; peeped into the study, saw that Edward was out, and faced the stranger. Old Mr. Caspar was not really old: a dark, powerful man, almost magnificent, in the familiar coat with the astrakhan collar of the picture papers, and a black-and-silvered beard. A close observer would have detected a Semitic strain in him and more than a strain of the South. In fact, Hans Caspar's father came from Frankfurt and his mother from Trieste, though he had lived in England from his earliest years and spoke without a trace of accent. Now his dark eyes met the woman's blue ones, and seemed to approve of what they saw. " Mr. Edward Caspar in? " he asked. " He will be in a moment. Mr. Hans Caspar, isn't it? " She showed him into the little back sitting-room. Then the task before her was to warn her husband before he came blundering in and began to coo and call to her and the children from the passage. Anne Caspar was always at her best in a crisis. OLD MAN CASPAR 25 Her baby was asleep ; and Ernie was happy bestriding a new hobby-horse and chanting to himself. She took off her apron, put on her hat, and paused a mo- ment on the door-step, looking up and down the road. Which way had her husband gone? Once a week or so he went down town to consult the Public Library. For the rest he always went towards the Downs to lose himself amid the hollows of the hills. She made for the huge green wall that blocked the end of the road, shimmering and mysterious in the April sunshine. Her choice proved right. She saw him coming off the hill above Beech-hangar, and went to meet him. He would have blundered past her, oblivious of her pres- ence but that she stopped him. Briefly she told him the news and gave him his instruc- tions. They must not be seen entering the house together. She would return directly to the house: he must go along the new Road, down Church Street at the back, and approach by way of Billing's Corner. Obedient as a child, he lumbered off at that curious bear- like trot of his, his sandals tapping the pavement. Ten minutes later, when he entered the back sitting-room, he was perspiring but as prepared as such a flabby soul could ever be. He had always been in terror of his father; and Hans Caspar saw nothing strange in his son's greeting. " Hullo, Edward," he said in his deep voice. " Just run down to see you." " Hullo, father," replied the son with the forced cheeri- ness he always adopted when addressing his sire. " You'll stop for luncheon? " " Thank-you. If you can give me a bite." The young man rang. His wife came to the door. " Mr. Caspar'll stay for luncheon," said Edward, lower- ing his voice appropriately. " Can you let us have some- thing?" " Very good," replied his wife surlily. The father looked after her, grimly amused. CHAPTER V ERNIE MAKES HIS APPEARANCE THE little room in which they lunched looked out on a tiny back-garden bounded by a high old flint-wall. The view was limited; and yet, for those who knew, it contained much of the history of Beachbourne. Over the top of the wall could be seen the chimney-pots and long blue roofs of what was now the Workhouse, which had, Ned told his father, been a cavalry barracks in the days of Napoleon. Against the wall a fine fig-tree revealed that the new house stood where not long since an old garden, its soil enriched by centuries of the toil of man, had grown the pleasant fruits of the earth. The room was dark but singularly clean. It was distin- guished, moreover, by the complete absence of all the ordinary insignia of a lodging-house. There were no pictures on the walls. The furniture, what there was of it, was mahogany, solid and plain, the chairs and sofa horse-hair. If the room lacked the distinction and delicacy of the study, neither was it stamped as was the rest of the house with the conventional hall-mark of the lower middle class. Rather, in its strength and its simplicity it was like the parlour of a yeoman-farmer. The two men talked little at their meal ; but all went well until they had resumed their chairs in the sunny front sitting- room that looked over to the solitary stucco house, gloomy amid trees and evergreens, behind a high wall across the road. " The Rectory, I suppose," said the older man, standing in the bow, picking his teeth. " Always the best house in the parish. D'you know the man ? " " Just," Edward answered. "What's his sort?" " Oh, the ordinary cleric. A bit of a pagan ; a bit of a 28 ERNIE MAKES HIS APPEARANCE 29 Pharisee; and a whole-hearted snob. He's a Prebendary who insists on being called a Canon." His father flashed a twinkling eye at him. Just sometimes Hans Caspar wondered whether there might not be more in this poor creature of a son of his than appeared. " How like em ! " he mused. " Yet I've an immense ad- miration for the Church as a commercial concern. Look at the business they've built up. Look at the property they've accumulated. Look at the way the Ecclesiastical Commis- sioners sweat blood out of the foulest slums in Christendom. They deserve to succeed. Do it all in such style too. House their head-managers in palaces, and pay em 15,000 a year and perks and plenty of em. The Hanseatic League was nothing to em." The young man's eyes became quizzical. Then he began to titter in the feeble and deprecatory way of one who half dissents and dares not say so. The door opened quietly. Hans Caspar, standing in the bow, turned round. A small brown-smocked figure, a-stride a dappled grey horse, looked in ; and a lovely little singing voice like that of water pouring from a jug, said in a slight stutter with mys- terious intimacy, "Daddy!" The little lad stood smiling in the door, the image of his father, of his father's mother, of the Cavalier upon the wall, of those high-bred, rather ineffective faces that look down on visitors from the famous portrait-gallery at Ravensrood, the Somersetshire home of the Beauregards. Edward Caspar sat and sweated. It was of course the elder man who spoke first. "Hullo, youngster!" he called cheerily. "What might be your name? " The child's face wrought just like his father's, as he strug- gled with some invisible obstacle. " Ernie Gug gug Gaspod," he said at last. " Ernie Gaspipe," laughed the other. " Is your daddy a plumber? " The child's hand left his horse's mane and shot out a chubby finger. 30 TWO MEN " That's my dad daddy," he said. There was the sound of swift feet in the passage, a blue arm reached fiercely forth, and the child was swept back to the kitchen. Mr. Caspar's eye flashed on his son's grey and quaking face and flashed away again. " Nice-looking kiddy," he said calmly. " Just the age to take us all for his dad." " Yes," panted Ned, his moist hands gripping the arm of his chair. " How many's she got? " " Two, I believe." "Boys?" " Yes, both." The father took a cigar leisurely from his case, cut it and began to smoke. " I'd have liked a large family," he said quietly. The son raised his eyes of a hunted hare. " I know, father," he stuttered. " I'm afraid I've been a great dud disappointment to you." "Stop it!" grunted the other. "Or I'll go into the kitchen." He puffed away, lost in his reflections. " It was your mother," he went on. " She couldn't stand the racket. That sort can't. The English aristocracy breed in and in too much. That's why they always fail. No red blood in em." He added, after a pause, "You almost killed her; and you were only a five-pounder when you were born. ..." Before he left Mr. Caspar did go into the kitchen alone. " I'm going to give that woman half-a-sovereign," he ex- plained. " She gave me a decent luncheon." He went down the passage and knocked at the kitchen- door. " Come in," said a voice. He entered. The woman faced him, formidable as a tigress guarding her cubs. Her enemy eyed her with something more than kindness. " I've seen one child," he said with the charm he could assume at will. " Where's tother ?" His manner disarmed her. Half-hidden behind a towel- ERNIE MAKES HIS APPEARANCE 3i horse was a cot. Anne Caspar stood aside while the big man bent over the sleeping child. " Ern's all right," she said. " This'n's not much to talk on as yet. I'd not have rared him only for Mr. Trupp." " Mr. Trupp's a great man," said the other, and laid two sovereigns on the table. " One for each of em," he explained. The woman coloured faintly. There was about her the beauty of a clear and frosty day. " Thank-you," she said. He held out his hand. She took it, and he would not let it go, those eyes of his, in which light and darkness, cruelty and kindness, chased each other, engaging hers. " Good-bye," he said. " I don't know what your name is Look after him." He jerked his head towards the door. " He needs it." The woman dropped her eyes, the lovely colour deepening in her cheeks. " I'll try," she said, her natural surliness dashed with un- gracious graciousness. In the passage he put on his coat. Edward came out to him. " Good-bye, Ned," he said. " Good luck," and put his hand almost affectionately on his son's shoulder. " I'm go- ing down to look in on Trupp and curse him from the Board for leaving the Whitechapel. Damn tomfoolery. He'd a career before him, that man." CHAPTER VI THE MANOR-HOUSE WHEN he left his son to carry out his threat, Mr. Caspar struck into the steep main street of Old Town, which preserved strll the somewhat stag- nant atmosphere of a country village. On the left the parish church, square-towered, massive, grey, stood on a slight emi- nence over a green hollow, called still the Moot, in which was a pond that may have been the source of the original bourne. Beneath the church the old Star inn hung its sign- board across the way. Here Borough Lane crossed the street, running steeply down between the church and the inn and as steeply up under noble beech-trees along the garden- wall of the Queen Anne mansion which must clearly be the Manor-house. The brass-plate on the door confirmed the visitor's con- jecture. Yes; Mr. Trupp was in. The house was beautiful within as it was plain and solid outside. In the hall wainscoted, spacious, and with shining oaken floors, a grandfather's clock swung its pendulum rhyth- mically. The room into which Mr. Caspar was shown had a wide bow-window looking out over gracious lawns and laburnum- trees in blossom to the elms in Saffrons Croft. Mr. Trupp entered. He was a slight man with a mous- tache, who tilted his shrewd, rather sharp face to inspect his visitor through pince-nez. " Well, Mr. Caspar," he growled genially. "Ah, you runagate!" scolded the other. "What d'you mean by it?" The doctor nodded at the window. A beautiful young woman with chestnut hair, bare to the 32 THE MANOR-HOUSE 33 sun, was walking with extreme deliberation across the lawn, leaning on the arm of a nurse. " That's one reason," he said. The other gazed. "Yes; you've given her the right setting," he remarked at last in a strangely quiet voice, touched with melancholy. A greyhound emerged from a shrubbery and crossed the lawn after the two women at a stealthy trot. " That's another," said Mr. Trupp. " Sport! " cried the other. " Bah ! and you might have been a great man ! a credit to the Whitechapel. What's the next? " " Professional," grunted the Doctor. " Third and last of course," retorted the other. " That's you English all over. You don't know what work is. Still, Old Town for your wife and New Town for your practice may be something in it after all." The surgeon opened the window. " Come and be introduced," he said, and led the way across the lawn. " She'd like to meet you." Mrs. Trupp showed herself delightfully shy in her large and royal way. Mr. Caspar was Mr. Caspar; and the fair creature knew the secret of Mr. Caspar's son. She was in- deed the only woman in Beachbourne who knew it, and that not because Mr. Trupp had told her, but because she was the only woman in whom Anne Caspar had confided, as had, in fact, Edward too. Her meeting therefore with Mr. Caspar senior was full of dramatic possibilities. Her inno- cent soul thrilled with pleasurable alarm at the perilous char- acter of the situation. She felt a little guilty and wholly defensive; and her transparent face betrayed every emotion as a pool reflects a cloud. Mr. Caspar watched her as she worked, with admiration and amusement. " You've come down to see your son, I expect," she said in her charming leisured voice. " I have," he answered brusquely, the light flashing in his eyes. " He seems snug enough. Not bad lodgings." " As lodgings go," said Mrs. Trupp, delicately, bending over her work as her colour came and went. 34 TWO MEN " That's a queer creature," continued Mr. Caspar. "Who?" " The woman my son's lodging with." Mrs. Caspar held up her work to inspect it. " She is a little funny in her manner," she replied, and began to pride herself on her skill in evading the enemy with- out telling a downright lie. " She's a fine cook, I believe." " She's a fine woman," said Mr. Caspar. The beautiful creature tossed her head as though he was suggesting something improper, which no doubt he was. Mr. Caspar chuckled without shame or mercy; but as he walked back to the house his mood changed. " Well," he said gravely, " I congratulate you, Trupp. Children may be the greatest blessing in a man's life." Back in the consulting-room he was still very quiet. All the teasing laughter was gone from him. The mischievous boy, the trampling conqueror, had disappeared. Their place had been taken by a sad and even pathetic man. " What is it? " asked Mr. Trupp, as his visitor sank back in the big chair. " I'm sick as herrings," replied the other. "Labour troubles?" The big man, with his black hair, pale face and swarthy eyes, shook his head. " I wish it was." He put his hand to his heart. " I've got notice to quit. Rivers gives me eighteen months at most. Damn nuisance." He stared out of the window at the two women under the elm. " I don't feel like dying. And there was so much to do." " Let's see," said the Doctor. He applied the stethoscope, and then replaced it in his pocket without comment. It was clear from the negative expression of his face that he agreed with Sir Audrey Rivers' judgment. Mr. Caspar, intuitive as his friend, asked no questions. " That's it," said he. " Machine wearing out. I've rat- tled her about too much, I suppose. Well, a man must live my sort of man at least. I could never be content to rust. There's nothing to be done. It's just good-bye and no au revoir this time. That's why I came down. I wanted to THE MANOR-HOUSE 35 see the boy before I pushed off." He turned suddenly. " How's he getting on? " Mr. Trupp shrugged his shoulders. " No improvement? " asked the other. " I wouldn't say that. He's put the brake on a bit of late." " Or had it put on for him," muttered Mr. Caspar. He mused for some time. " I'd have taken a peerage but for him," he said at last. " I can't see Ned as a hereditary legislator." " Oh, I don't know," mumbled Mr. Trupp. He was an aggressive radical of the then active school of Dilke and Chamberlain. " I think he'd do very well in the House of Lords." The young man had touched the springs of laughter in the other's heart. Hans Caspar's immense vitality asserted it- self again. He resumed himself with a shout, sweeping the clouds boisterously away. " Ned's a true Beauregard," he said. " Just his mother over again. So charming and so ineffectual! Always some weak strain in an hereditary aristocracy." " Must be," muttered Mr. Trupp. " They're never weeded out. They're above the laws of Nature. Case of Survival of the Unfittest protected by Law and living on you and me to whom they dictate the Law. Albino bunnies in a gilded hutch with a policeman watching over em ! " "Good!" cried Mr. Caspar. "Albino bunnies is good. It took my albino in the way of religious orgies. I prefer Ned's trouble of the two. Less humbug about it." He got up and began restlessly to pace the room. " There's nothing like religion to eat a man's soul away, Trupp to say noth- ing of a woman's. You don't let your wife go to church, I understand. Well, you're a shrewd fellow. That way lies the bottomless pit. Mine took to it it was in her blood, mind you when I was away in the River Plate driving the Trans-Argentine Railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific. When I came back good Lord ! Priests to luncheon, Bishops to dinner, Deaconesses to tea. Missionary meetings in the drawing-room, altars in the alcove, parasites every- where. In her last illness she would have a religeuse to see 36 TWO MEN to her instead of one of our nurses from the Whitechapel. Of course she died. Serve her right, too, say I." He paused. " With Ned it was just touch and go which way it would take him. I thought at one time his mother's trouble'd got him, but in the end it was . . ." He jiggled his elbow. " He's not a bad sort," muttered Mr. Trupp. Hans Caspar took the other by the lapel of his coat. " But that's just what makes me so mad, man ! " he cried. " If he'd been vicious I could have kicked his back-side with joy. But you couldn't kick Ned. You can't kick a pathetic vacuum." He added with a swagger : " No man can ac- cuse Hans Caspar of being afraid to use the jack-boot. You don't kick bottoms half enough in England." " There's plenty of kicking bottoms," answered the other. " The trouble is that the men who kick bottoms never get their own kicked. If every man who kicked knew for cer- tain that he would automatically be kicked in his turn, we might get on a bit." Hans Caspar chuckled. " Your idea of Utopia," he said. " Everybody standing round in a circle, w r ith his hands on the shoulders of the man in front, hacking him. I like it." " I believe," chanted Mr. Trupp, " in the Big Stick. That's my creed. But I want it applied by everybody to everybody not by the strong to the weak as we do in this country, and you do in yours." " My firm belief you're this new-fangled creature a Socialist," said Hans Caspar. " What if I am ! " grunted the other. In fact, in London he had attended meetings of the recently born Fabian So- ciety, and had heard William Morris preach on Sunday eve- nings in the stables of Kelmscott House. The young surgeon had found himself in general sympathy with the views ex- pounded, but like many another man could not tolerate the personalities of the expounders of the new creed. " Apart from Morris, they're such prigs," he would say, " and so blatant about it. Always thrusting their alleged intellectual superiority down your throat. And after all, they're only THE MANOR-HOUSE 37 advocating what every sensible man must advocate the application of the method of Science to the problems of Government." Mr. Caspar had gone to the window and was staring out. " How long'll that boy of mine last the pace he's going? " he asked, subdued again. " He might last thirty years yet," the other answered. Hans Caspar turned round. " With that woman to run him, you mean? " " What woman's that? " " His wife." It was Mr. Trupp's turn to look away. " She's the sort for him," he mumbled warily. The other broke in with vehement enthusiasm. "The sort for him! why, if I'd married a woman like that with a back-bone like steel, and the jaws of a rat- trap I'd have been a Napoleon." Mr. Trupp's face was still averted. Its naturally shrewd expression had for the moment a satirical touch. "You think he's a lucky fellow to get her?" said the other. Mr. Trupp's silence was eloquent enough. " Ah," continued Hans Caspar knowingly. " I see. You think she got him. I dare say. She's the sort of woman who'd get anything she wanted. And he's the kind of man who'd be got by the first woman who wanted him. I took the measure of her at first sight. Fact I was just going to offer her the job of manageress of my canteen at rail- head when I found out. She'd make the navvies sit up, I'll swear." " Her hands are pretty full as it is," commented Mr. Trupp. The other nodded. " I expect so," he said. " Ned alone's one woman's job. And the two children." He put his hand on the surgeon's arm. " That eldest boy, Trupp! " "What about him? " " He's his grandmother over again. Watch him! " A bell in the street clanged. 38 TWO MEN "What's that? "he asked. " Station-bus," said Mr. Trupp. " The driver strikes the coaching-bell over the Star as he passes." " I must catch it." The big man put on his coat and went out. At the door of the inn a two-horse bus was drawn up. Mr. Caspar climbed up beside the driver. The young surgeon closed the front-door and turned. His wife stood framed in the garden-window against a background of green. " Did he find out? " she asked anxiously. " My dear," her husband answered, " he did." The tender creature's face fell. " Oh, the poor Caspars! " she cried. CHAPTER VII HANS CASPAR'S WILL SIR AUDREY RIVERS' diagnosis proved correct. Just a year after his visit to Beachbourne Mr. Cas- par died. His will caused malicious merriment to those who knew " Unser Hans," as he was called in Society. He left the bulk of his vast fortune in trust for the White- chapel Hospital with one proviso : that no clergyman was to act as a trustee. For the rest he bequeathed 300 a year for life, free of Income Tax, to his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Edward Caspar; and should she pre-decease her husband, the sum was to be continued to his son. " Sound fellow that," said Mr. Trupp, when he heard. " Old Man Caspar to the end." " It's rather hard on our Mr. Caspar," remarked his wife, who had known Edward Caspar in London before either had married. " My dear," replied the surgeon, with the slight senten- tiousness peculiar to him, " the only way to help that sort of son is to be hard on him." " I hope you'll never help my Joe like that," cried the beautiful woman warmly. Mr. Trupp loved to tease his wife. " If your Joe goes that way I will," he grinned " and worse. So mind your eye ! " Another woman who was not amused by Hans Caspar's will was the woman who benefited by it. Anne Caspar had the qualities of her kind. If she was hard, she was passionately loyal and genuinely devoted to her Ned. When she had told Mr. Trupp that her marriage had been a love-match she had but spoken the truth as regards her part in it. Therefore on the morning she opened the letter from the lawyers announcing that she had come by 39 40 TWO MEN miracle into what was for the daughter of the Ealing tobac- conist a fortune, she felt a slight had been put upon her hus- band and was perturbed accordingly. With pensive face she went into the study, wearing the long blue over-all in which Edward Caspar had first seen her. Her husband stood in his shirt-sleeves, pipe in mouth, a loose, round-shouldered figure, splashing away with vague enthusiasm at a canvas in the sunny bow-window. She realized in a moment that she had caught him in one of his rare uplifted moods. " Ned," she said. "What-ho, my Annie!" " Your father's left us 300 a year." He chuckled as he painted, one eye on the gleaming mys- tery of the Downs. " Been opening my letters, you burglar ? " " The letter's to me." This time he turned, saw her face, and steadied. She offered him the envelope. He glanced at the address. "Yes, it's to you all right. Funny they didn't write to me." " Won't you read it, Ned? " she said gently. He skimmed the contents and winced. " That's all right, Anne," he said, handing it back to her, and patting her hand. " The old man's been as good as his word and better, by the amount of Income Tax." " Such a way to do it and all," said Anne censoriously. He pinched her arm. " Perhaps it's for the best," he said. " And anyway, it doesn't much matter." If Edward Caspar was by no means sure of himself, he was sure beyond question of the woman life had given him. She lifted her face to his, and it was beautiful. " Ned," she said ; and he kissed her. BOOK II THE TWO BROTHERS CHAPTER VIII BEACHBOURNE THE Domesday Book tells us that King Edward the Confessor held the Manor of Burne, and gave the endowment of the Church of St. Michael to the Abbey of Fecamp, along with the Lordships of Steyning and Rye and Winchelsea and other jewels from the crown of Sussex; as all who have read Mr. Dudgeon's scholarly his- tory of Beachbourne will recall. Harold cancelled the grant, with the result, so legend has it, that William the Norman landed at Pevensey just across the way to enforce restitution. In those days the parish of Burne covered like a blanket the western promontory of the great Bay. At each of the four corners of the blanket, hold- ing it down as it were, was a rude hamlet. On the bourne itself a few hovels clustered round the wooden church upon the Kneb ; in Coombe-in-the-Cliff, carved out of the flank of Beau-nez, was Holy Well, haunted by pilgrims from the Continent; on the sea-front there was the Wish, beneath which of old a Roman dock had been; and further east was Sea-gate with its fishing-station and the earth-work which guarded the entrance to the Bay whose waters swept inland over what are now the Levels to Ratton and Horsey and the borders of Hailsham. In the reign of Henry II the Norman church, much as we know it to-day, succeeded the crazy wooden building in which our Saxon forefathers heard the Word of the Promise first brought to Sussex by Bishop Wilfrith, who starting from the North, dared the perils of the Forest, and somehow fought his way through brake and marsh and thicket, among wild beasts and wilder men, to the ancient Roman settlement at Chichester ; thence to spread the news all along the high bleak coast-line on which at river-mouths and lagoon-like estuaries the Saxon adventurers had gained a footing. 43 44 TWO MEN Till the nineteenth century the parish that lay scattered thus between the Downs, the marshes, and the sea, changed but little, experiencing the ordinary vicissitudes of an English village. Bishops made their visitations. Rectors lived and died. Outlaws sought sanctuary at the altar of the church above the Moot, which was still the centre of the life of the little pastoral community. In the last half of the fourteenth century the massive tower was added which dominated the village as it dominates the town to-day; built perhaps as a thank-offering for the passing of the Black Death, which slew half the population, reduced the monks at Michelham to five, and, with indiscriminating zeal, laid a clammy hand on the Abbot of Battle and Prior of St. Pancras, Lewes; while giv- ing rise to a wave of industrial unrest which a few years later sent the rebellious men of Sussex Londonwards behind the ragged banner of Jack Cade. In 1534 the Proclamation repudiating the Pope was read from the pulpit of the church upon the Kneb ; and ten years later the first outburst of Puritanism stripped the conse- crated building of many shrines, pictures, ornaments, as our historian has recently reminded us. The village thrilled to the threat of the Spanish Armada, and, what is more, prepared to meet it; the inhabitants hav- ing time out of memory of man, we are told a reputa- tion, the outcome of experience and necessity, for dealing with the landings of forraine enemies. During the Parliamentary troubles the Squire of Beach- bourne was of course a stout-hearted Royalist ; and his friend the Rector was brought up before the authorities on a charge of " malignancy." Found guilty, he was removed from of- fice ; whereupon, as his brass quaintly reminds us, the gallant gentleman mori maluit preferred to die. And it is on record that the parish was only saved from the ravages of Civil War by the abominable condition of the roads of East Sussex. Perhaps the same factor told against the prosperity of the place. For, by the middle of the eighteenth century, Beachbourne, as it was now called, had dwindled in popula- tion to a few hundred souls. Later in the same century, about the time Newhaven was born, it began to blossom out as a health resort. A celebrity or two discovered its re- BEACHBOURNE 45 mote charm. A peer succeeded the Squire at the big house. Behind the Wish a row of sea-houses sprang into being on the front. But Dr. Russell of Lewes and the Prince Regent, in turning the fishing-village of Brightelmstone into fashion- able Brighton, ruined for the moment its rival under Beau- nez. Beachbourne had to wait its turn until the iron horse, running on an iron road, across country that not long since had been washed by tides, overcame with astounding ease the difficulties that teams of snorting oxen up to the hocks in mud had found insuperable. Then, and only then, the four corners of the parish came together apace. The old bourne disappeared, the source of it in the Moot under the church-crowned Kneb now no more than a stagnant pond. And by the time of our story a city of tens of thousands of inhabitants had risen where men, still middle-aged, could recall meadows that swept down to the sea, the voice of the corn-crake harsh everywhere as they sauntered down Water Lane of evenings after church, and the last fight of the " gentlemen " and the Revenue Officers that took place on a desolate strip of shore to the sound of calling sea-birds, on the site of what is now the Cecil Hotel. CHAPTER IX THE TWO BOYS NEXT time Mr. Trupp called at 60 Rectory Walk, he marked that the familiar chocolate notice in the upper window had gone. He chaffed Mrs. Caspar in his grim way. " No more rooms to let, I see," he said. " No," the woman answered. " No more lies to have to tell just at present." She was in one of her tartest moods; and when he con- gratulated her on being through her troubles, she answered, " Some of em. Plenty more to follow. There'll be enough money for Ned and me and the boys. That's one thing." " And a big thing too," said Mr. Trupp. " The biggest," admitted the woman surlily. " Speaking worldly-wise, I don't say nay to that." After the birth of her second son, Mr. Trupp had told her that she would have no more children and she was glad : for her hands were going to be full enough throughout her life ; so much the shrewd woman saw clearly. There was her husband; and there was her eldest son, Ernie, who was his father over again. He had his father's face, his father's charm, his father's soft and generous heart; and, unless she was mistaken, other qualities of his father that were by no means so desirable. And the curious thing was that the characteristics which in her husband Anne Caspar secretly admired, only exasperated her in Ernie. Alf, the second son, whatever his faults, certainly did not trace them to his dad. He was as much his mother's child as Ernie was his father's. And whether for that reason or because for years she had to wrestle for his miserable little 46 THE TWO BOYS 47 life with the Angel of Death, his mother loved him with the fierce, protecting passion of an animal. " Nobody but his mother could have saved him," Mr. Trupp told his wife. While Mrs. Caspar said to the same lady, " But for Mr. Trupp he wouldn't be here." A proud woman, Mrs. Caspar was also a very lonely one. Her genuine pride in her rather ramshackle husband his birth, his breeding, his obvious air of a gentleman which evinced itself in her almost passionate determination that he should dress himself " as such," prevented her from asso- ciating with her own class; and the women of her husband's class would not associate with her. Mrs. Trupp, the kind- est of souls, was the solitary exception. But the two women were antipathetic. The doctor's wife, who possessed in full measure the noble toleration that marks the best of her kind, was forced to admit to her conscience, that she could not bring herself to like Mrs. Caspar. The large and beautiful nature of the former, brought to fruition in the sunshine and shelter of a cultivated home, could not understand the harsh combativeness of the daughter of the small tobacconist, who had fought from childhood for the right to live. " She's like a wolf," Mrs. Trupp told her husband. " Even with her children." " My dear," said the wise Doctor, " she's had to snap to survive. You haven't. Others have done your snapping for you." " She needn't snap and snarl at that dear, gentle husband of hers," retorted Mrs. Trupp. " If she didn't," replied her husband drily, " she'd be a widow in a week." " Anyway she might be kind to that eldest boy," continued Mrs. Trupp, who at Edward Caspar's request had stood sponsor to Ernie. " He's beautiful, and such breeding. A true Beauregard." " What d'you make of the baby? " asked her husband with sudden interest. " Why, he's like a little rat," answered Mrs. Trupp. " He's the only baby I've ever seen I didn't want to handle." " Yet there's something in him," replied the other thought- 48 TWO MEN fully. " He wouldn't have lived else. A touch of Old Man Caspar about that child somewhere. He'll bite all right if he lives to be a man." And to the Doctor's shrewd and seeing eye it was clear from the start that Alfred meant to live to be a man. Some- where in the depths of his wretched little body there glowed a spark that all the threats and frosts of a hostile Nature failed to extinguish. On that spark his mother blew with a tenacity surpassing words; Mr. Trupp blew in his wise way, working the bellows of Science with the easy skill of the master-workman; little Ernie, most loving of children, blew too. Even Edward Caspar leaned over the cot in his quilted dressing gown and said, " He's coming on." But even as he leant, the sensitive fellow knew that there was not and could never be any bond between him and his youngest born. His heart was with Ernie. And the way his mother rebuffed the elder lad, only endeared him the more to his father. The two lads grew : Ernie strong in body, loving in heart, lacking in will ; Alf ardent of spirit, ruthless as a stoat upon the trail, and rickety as an old doll. There was a first-rate elementary school in Old Town to which the two boys went when the time came. The head- master, Mr. Pigott, was also manager of the chapel in the Moot which Mrs. Caspar attended regularly. The hard woman was religious in the common Puritan way, so dear to the English lower-middle-class of her genera- tion. Her Chapel and her God were both a great deal to the austere woman, especially the former. She had a stern and narrow moral code of her own which she mistook for love of Christ. From that code she never departed herself, and punished to the utmost of her power all those who did depart from it. In a chapel of her own denomination she had insisted on being married, in spite of the fact that she risked by her obstinacy losing the only man she had ever loved. Ned Caspar, for his part, took his religion, as most of us do, from his mother. He was High Church at a time when THE TWO BOYS 49 to be so was far less fashionable than it is at present. He called himself a Catholic, and spoke always of the Mass in a way that shocked his fellow-churchmen who were in those days still content to speak of themselves as Protestants and the sacramental act as Holy Communion. And after mar- riage he maintained his position with a far greater tenacity than most would have expected of the soft-willed man. In- deed, it was the one point on which, aided by his mother's memory, he stood up to his wife for long. " I'll wear you down yet, my son," Anne told him grimly. " May as well come off the perch now as later." In this one matter her taunts served only, so it seemed, to strengthen her husband's resistance. He went white, shook, perspired, and continued to attend High Mass at St. Michael's, in spite of his growing distaste for the man who administered it his neighbour, Preben- dary Willcocks, across the road. A far wiser woman than she seemed, Mrs. Caspar recog- nized her mistake, desisted from her original line of attack, and let her husband go his own way for a time without pro- test as the cat permits the mouse a little liberty. When she began to take the children to chapel with her, she said and Anne Caspar could be beautiful upon occa- sion " Ned, I wish you'd come along with me and the boys sometimes. I do feel it so that we never worship in com- mon." That was the beginning of the end of his resistance. He became an occasional attendant at the chapel, if he could never bring his aesthetic spirit, seeking everywhere for colour, harmony and form, to become a professed member of the rather dreary little community. And later, for quite other reasons, he dropped St. Michael's entirely. But for twenty years after he had ceased to call himself a member of the Church of England, often of Sunday after- noons in the spring and summer he would take the train to London Bridge, and wander East on the top of a dawdling bus, to find himself, about the time most churches close their doors, outside St. Jude's in Commercial Street, the " chuck- 50 TWO MEN ers in " already busy at their work among the street-roughs and righting factory girls. Edward Caspar was not a " chucker-in " himself; but when the quiet doorkeeper of the House of the Lord opened it at 8.30 he was of the first to enter the lighted church, the side-aisles of which were dark- ened that tramp and prostitute might sit there unnoticed and unashamed. And in that motley assembly of hooligans from the East End, of respectable artisans from streets drab as their inmates, of intellectuals from Toynbee Hall, and occa- sional visitors from the West End, he would join in that irregular and beautiful Hour of Worship, of song, silent meditation, solos on organ or violin, extempore prayer, read- ings from Mazzini, Maurice, Ruskin, and Carlyle, that made him and others dream of that Society of the Redeemed which in days to come should gather thus, without priest or cere- monial, simply to rejoice together in the blessing of a com- mon life and universal Father. CHAPTER X OLD AND NEW EDWARD CASPAR went occasionally to chapel in order to gratify his wife. He ceased attending church because his always growing spirit, intensely modern and aspiring in spite of its inherent weakness, no longer found satisfaction in the ornate ritual, the quaint mediaeval formulae, the iterations and reiterations of the sacerdotalism which had held his mother in its grip. As a student of comparative religion his intellect was still interested in forms which his seeking mind had long rejected as empty, ludicrous, or inadequate. His reading for his book, his experience of life, and most of all an inner urge, led him in time to look for the spiritual comfort that was his most vital need outside the walls of the consecrated prison in which he had been bred. Quid fecisti nos ad Te cor nostrum inquietum est donee requiscat in Te was the motto that hung above his writing- desk. And his restless heart found increasingly its peace sometimes in music, sometimes amid the hum of men and women in the crowded streets of the East End of the town, and most often in quiet communion with Nature on the Downs or beside the sea in some gap far from the haunts of men. He would ramble the lonely hills by the hour, lost in thought, Ernie skirmishing about him. Sometimes Mr. Trupp, riding with his little daughter up there between the sky and sea, would meet the couple. " Like a bear and a terrier, Bess," he would smile. Then in some secluded valley, father and son would lie down in the " loo " of the hill, as Ernie called it. Resting there with contented spirits amid the gorse, they would watch the gulls, white-winged and desolately crying over the plough, while the larks purred above them. Si 52 TWO MEN These were the best moments of Ernie's childhood, never to pass from him in the tumult and battle of later life. A child of the earth, even his tongue, touched with the soft slur of Sussex caught from school-mates, betrayed him for a coun- tryman. He loved the feel of the turf solid beneath him ; he loved the sound of the gorse-pods snapping in the sun; he loved the thump of the sea crashing on the beach far below ; and most of all he loved the larks pouring comfort into the cistern of his mind until it too seemed to brim with the music of praise. "Loving, idn't they?" he would say in his sweet little voice, his hands behind his head, his eyes on a speck of song thrilling in the blue. " That's it, Boy-lad," his father's answer would come from beneath the cavern of his hat ; and Edward Caspar forthwith would repeat, in a voice that seemed to co-ordinate the har- monies of earth and sky and sea, Wordsworth's Lines above Tintern Abbey: . . . That serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended,