Produced by Al Haines








  TWO MEN:

  A ROMANCE OF SUSSEX

  BY

  ALFRED OLLIVANT



  _Necessity the Spring of Faith
  and Mould of Character_



  GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
  DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
  1919




  _Copyright, 1919, by_
  DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
  _All rights reserved, including that of
  translation into foreign languages,
  including the Scandinavian_




  _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




  TO
  BEACHBOURNE
  AND THE FRIENDS I MADE THERE
  1901-1911




  CONTENTS


  BEAU-NEZ

  BOOK I

  FATHER AND SON

  CHAPTER

  I Mr. Trupp
  II Edward Caspar
  III Anne Caspar
  IV Old Man Caspar
  V Ernie Makes His Appearance
  VI The Manor-House
  VII Hans Caspar's Will


  BOOK II

  THE TWO BROTHERS

  VIII Beachbourne
  IX The Two Boys
  X Old and New
  XI The Study
  XII Alf Shows His Colours
  XIII Alf Makes a Remark
  XIV Evil
  XV Mr. Trupp Introduces the Lash
  XVI Father, Mother and Son
  XVII Ernie Goes for a Soldier


  BOOK III

  THE SOLDIER

  XVIII Ernie Goes East
  XIX The Regiment
  XX Ernie in India
  XXI The Return of the Soldier
  XXII Old Town
  XXIII The Changed Man
  XXIV Alf
  XXV The Churchman
  XXVI Mr. Pigott


  BOOK IV

  RUTH BOAM

  XXVII The Hohenzollern Hotel
  XXVIII The Third Floor
  XXIX The Man of Affairs
  XXX Reality
  XXXI The Ride on the Bus
  XXXII On The Hill
  XXXIII Under the Stars


  BOOK V

  CAPTAIN ROYAL

  XXXIV His Arrival
  XXXV His Origin
  XXXVI The Captain Begins His Siege
  XXXVII He Drives a Sap
  XXXVIII The Serpent
  XXXIX The Lash Again
  XL Clash of Males
  XLI The Decoy Pond
  XLII The Captain's Flight
  XLIII The Ebb-Tide
  XLIV Ernie Leaves the Hotel


  BOOK VI

  THE QUEST

  XLV Old Mus Boam
  XLVI Ernie Turns Philosopher
  XLVII Alf Tries to Help
  XLVIII Two Meetings
  XLIX Alf Marks Time


  BOOK VII

  THE OUTCAST

  L The Crumbles
  LI Evelyn Trupp
  LII The Return of the Outcast
  LIII The Find
  LIV The Brooks


  BOOK VIII

  TREASURE TROVE

  LV The Pool
  LVI Frogs' Hall
  LVII The Surprise
  LVIII The Dower-House
  LIX Alf Tries to Save a Soul
  LX The End of a Chapter




BEAU-NEZ

BOOK I

FATHER AND SON




TWO MEN

BEAU-NEZ

Old Beau-Nez shouldered out into the sea, immense, immovable, 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 massive 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 rhythmical monotone, rose from the foot of the cliff
to meet the silvery rain of sound and mingle with it in deep and
mysterious 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 æons, 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, passing 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 on the summit of the cliff in the eye of the misty
morning sun.

The name of the lighthouse was Bel- or Baal-tout, reminding 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 cluster 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 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 authoritative 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 answered; 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, abandoning the use of
Lister's spray, but with meticulous antiseptic precautions derived from
the great man at University Hospital, performed the operation of
variotomy 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 orthopædist 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 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 insincerities 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.  Profoundly 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 generation.  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:--

"Why 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 Commercial 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.

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 greyhound 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 perhaps 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.  He won't come to you--shy as a roe-deer.
But once you're 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 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 Chichester.

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 forsake 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 Saffrons 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 garden characteristic
of its occupant, stood at right angle to the 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 cultivated 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 colouring 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
roll-top.  On the brown wall were two pictures, both familiar 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 Beauregard, 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 losing 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 expected to find in the little room of a tiny house in a backwater
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 recognition 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 public schools
and universities and has responded to the somewhat 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 complete 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, unusually shy for some
reason.

The two young men talked awhile at random--of the 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 cheerfulness 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--Mysticism."  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 reason 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.

"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 obviously 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.

Then she retired, not into the kitchen, but into her lodger'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, something of the artist, even
a little of the saint, was notoriously 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, almost 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, almost
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 watching his back.  She did not
follow.

The young surgeon climbed thoughtfully, absorbing his 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 admitted 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 remembering 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.

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
exasperating 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 downstairs 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 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
service."  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 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 thoughtfully.  "That's the
essay that got him the Fellowship at King's--only he gave it up after a
year.  Too drudgeryfied.  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.

"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 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.

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 moment 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 presence but that
she stopped him.

Briefly she told him the news and gave him his instructions.

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 cheeriness 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, lowering his voice
appropriately.  "Can you let us have something?"

"Very good," replied his wife surlily.

The father looked after her, grimly amused.

"Don't seem very obliging," he remarked.

Edward laughed uneasily.

"What!" he said.  "Oh, she's all right.  A bit fuf--funny in her
manner.  That's all."

Mr. Caspar prodded his son.

"You'd better mind your eye, Ned.  She's masterful, and a fine figure
of a woman too."

Edward tittered foolishly.

"What?--Oh, she--she's married.  Children and all that."

"What's her husband do?"

"What--him?--Oh, he does nothing much that I know of."

"Lives on her, I suppose," growled the other.  "Scoundrel!  I know the
sort.  The kind your Gladstones encourage."

He descanted at length and with more than even his usual violence on
the sins of all governments and especially radical ones.  Unlike his
usual self, he was clearly talking as a screen to gain time, sheltering
something behind a wall of words.  Ned was always embarrassed in his
father's presence; but for once Mr.  Caspar seemed himself uneasy in
the presence of this son who had been such a woeful disappointment to
him.

After his political outburst, there was a prolonged pause.

Then Mr.  Caspar leaned forward and kicked a cinder into its place.

"Pretty comfortable here?" he asked at last.

"Oh, I get along fuf--first-rate," answered the son.

"Three hundred a year's not much for a man in my position to allow his
only son, I know," the other said gruffly.

It was a new and unexpected note.  The young man, chivalrous to the
roots of him, and heir to all the qualities of his mother's family,
instantly answered his father's mute appeal.

"My dear fuf--father, it's a fortune," he said.  "We--I live like a
prince.  And anyway, it's three hundred a year more than I deserve."

His father was silent.

"I don't know if you've had any expectations from me," he said at last.
"I've been pretty blunt with you in the past."

The young man had risen and was standing before the fire, his face
working.

"I've no need for mum--much money," he explained.  "You see I've no
expensive tastes.  I don't hunt or shoot or gug--gamble.  If I can have
enough for the necessities of life, and to buy an occasional bub--book
or two, that's all I need."

"Ned," said the other, coming firmly to the point, "I've made
arrangements for the three hundred a year I allow you to be continued
throughout your life."

"I think it's mum--most _awfully_ good of you, father," said the young
man with obvious sincerity.

The other grunted.

"I don't know," he replied.  "Not every son would take it that way."

He was rarely moved.  His son saw it and was wretched.

Then the woman came in with luncheon.




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 distinguished,
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 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 admiration 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 Commissioners 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 mysterious 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 struggled 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.

"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 explained.  "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-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 ungracious
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 going 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 still the somewhat
stagnant atmosphere of a country village.  On the left the parish
church, square-towered, massive, grey, stood on a slight eminence 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 conjecture.

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 rhythmically.

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 moustache, 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 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 indeed 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 innocent soul thrilled with pleasurable
alarm at the perilous character 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.

"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 without 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 rattled 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 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 itself 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 nothing 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 everywhere.  In
her last illness she _would_ have a _religeuse_ to see 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 accuse 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 certain 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,
with 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 Society, and had heard William
Morris preach on Sunday evenings in the stables of Kelmscott House.
The young surgeon had found himself in general sympathy with the views
expounded, 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 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.

"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. Caspar 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 Whitechapel
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 sententiousness
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
miracle into what was for the daughter of the Ealing tobacconist a
fortune, she felt a slight had been put upon her husband 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 mystery 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 history 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, holding 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.

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 giving 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 consecrated 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 having--time out of memory
of man, we are told--a reputation, the outcome of experience and
necessity, for dealing with the landings of forraine enemies.

During the Parliamentary troubles the Squire of Beachbourne 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 office; 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 population 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 remote 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 fashionable 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 congratulated 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 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 associating with her own class; and the women of her
husband's class would not associate with her.  Mrs. Trupp, the kindest
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 thoughtfully.  "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.  Somewhere 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 headmaster, 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 generation.  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 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 marriage he
maintained his position with a far greater tenacity than most would
have expected of the soft-willed man.  Indeed, 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, Prebendary Willcocks, across the road.

A far wiser woman than she seemed, Mrs. Caspar recognized her mistake,
desisted from her original line of attack, and let her husband go his
own way for a time without protest--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 occasion--

"Ned, I wish you'd come along with me and the boys sometimes.  I do
feel it so that we never worship in common."

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 afternoons 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
"chuckers in" already busy at their work among the street-roughs and
fighting 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 darkened 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 occasional 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, readings 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 ceremonial, simply
to rejoice together in the blessing of a common 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 mediæval formulæ, 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.

_Quia fecisti nos ad Te cor nostrum inquietum est donec 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.

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 countryman.  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 harmonies 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, we are laid asleep
  In body, and become a living soul:_


Alf never came on these excursions.  The bent of the two brothers was
indeed entirely different.  If they left the house together, as often
as not they parted at the garden-gate.  Ern turned his face towards the
green hills that blocked the end of the road, Alf turned his back on
them.

"Nothin doin there," he would say with a knowing wink.  He hated
walking, and he feared the loneliness of the hills.  His heart was in
the East End of the growing town.  Down there, beyond the gas-works, at
the edge of the Levels, where the trams clanged continually, where you
heard strange tongues, and saw new types of faces, Alf found himself.
The little urchin, who seemed all eyes in a hideous square head, would
wander by the hour in Sea-gate, among the booths and barrows, drinking
in the life about him, and return home at night tired but contented.

In bed the two boys would compare their experiences.

"What did you see?" Ern would ask.

"Everythink," Alf would answer.  "Folks and a fight and all."

"I see something, too," said Ernie, deliberate alike of speech and mind.

"What then?" asked Alf, scornfully.

"I see angels," Ernie answered.  "Dad see em too."

But Alf only sniggered.

At that time Old Town hung, as it were, between the Past and the
Future.  It had not shaken off the one, and yet could not resist the
other.  Beneath it was New Town, a growing industrial city, absorbing
workers of every kind from every quarter; stretching back from the sea
to Rodmill and overrunning the marshes at an incredible speed; with the
slums, the Sunday agitators, the Salvationists and reformers, the
rumble of discontent, that mark the cities of our day.  Beyond it lay
the immemorial countryside with shepherds on the hills, oxen ploughing
in the valleys, villages clustered about the village-green, the squire,
the public-house, the parish-church as in the days of Elizabeth.  Old
Town still slept upon its hill about the parish-church, but the murmur
of the ungainly offspring at its feet disturbed slumbers that had
endured for centuries.  In its steep streets you might hear the
undulating Sussex tongue, little changed from Saxon times, clashing in
vain conflict with the aggressive cockney phrase and accent which is
conquering the British Isles as surely, if as slowly, as did the
English of the men of the Elbe in by-gone days.

Ernie was of the older life; Alf of the new.

Their very speech betrayed them: for the elder boy's tongue was touched
with the slow, cawing music of the shepherds and labourers with whom he
loved to consort, while Alf's was the speech of a city rat, sharp,
incisive, twanging.

In the holiday Ern worked on the hill in the harvest, and was known to
all the men and most of the animals at the Moot Farm, just across the
Lewes Road.  Once, in the early spring, he passed the night out in
Shadow Coombe, and came home fearfully just before school.

His mother was shaking the mat at the front-door.

"Where you been then?" she asked ferociously.

"With the shepherd in his hut," answered Ernie.  "Dis lambin time.  His
boy's run'd away."

The lad's manifest truthfulness disarmed the angry woman.

Alf peeped round his mother's skirts.

"Did he give you anythink?" he asked.

"I didn't ask him for nohun," Ern answered, aggrieved.

Alf sneered.

"Fat 'ead!" he cried.  "Aynt arf soft, Ern aynt!"

Their father, dressing at the upper window, heard the conversation and
agonized.  Tolerant as was Edward Caspar of grammatical solecisms, his
ear, sensitive as Lady Blanche's, writhed at the mangling of vowels by
his second son.  His wife, who came from the Bucks border of the great
city on the Thames, had indeed the Cockney phrase but not the offending
accent.

When he came downstairs, in a moment of despair, he poured his troubles
into Anne's unsympathetic ear.

"What a way to talk!" he groaned.

"I don't see it matters," his wife answered grimly.  "_They_ aren't
going to Harrow and Trinity."

The big man winced.  It was a real grief to him that his sons were not
to have in life the advantages that he believed himself to have been
given.

"You needn't throw that up at me," he grumbled into his brown beard.

She put her hand on his shoulder.

Her husband was the only creature in the world to whom Anne Caspar
sometimes demonstrated affection.

"And a good job, too, I says," she observed.  "They got to work."
Words that gave unconscious witness to the estimate she and her class
held of their rulers and their education.




CHAPTER XI

THE STUDY

Instead then of going to the Preparatory-school, the Public-school, and
the University in which their father had sought to learn the art of
useful citizenship, the two lads attended on week-days the Board-school
in the hollow between the church and Rodmill.

New amid much that was old, it reared its gaunt red head above a crowd
of workmen's cottages which stood on ground still called the Moot,
where of old, under the Kneb, beside the bourne, the Saxon folk from
hill and wold and marshy level gathered about the Moot-tree to discuss
affairs, deal justly between man and man and proclaim the common will.

Mr. Pigott, a short, shrewd, bearded man, with a merry grey eye, swift
to wrath, was the headmaster as he was manager of the chapel.
Thoroughly efficient in a day when the Gospel of Efficiency had been
little preached, he managed chapel and school admirably.

The boys attended both.

Alf was always at the head of his class, Ern never anywhere in
particular.

As Mr. Pigott told the boys' mother, Ern had plenty of brains, but he
didn't care to use them.

"He's a little gentleman though--like his father," ended the
schoolmaster.

Mr. Pigott was on the whole less of a snob than most of us.  As an
honest radical he scorned rank, perhaps a little ostentatiously; while
money was very little to him.  But for the mysterious quality of
breeding he had the respect the roughest of us confess in the presence
of something finer than ourselves.  And on the rare occasions in which
Mr. Edward Caspar had been induced to deliver an address at the new
Institute he would say to his teaching staff in awed voice--"There's
English for you!  Don't you wish you could talk like that...?"

Now his comparison of her son to her husband provoked Mrs. Caspar as it
never failed to do.

"That's all very well if you can afford it," she commented acridly.
"But Ern's got to make his own way in the world."

"He'll do," said Mr. Pigott.  "He won't be forgotten, you'll see.  He's
a good lad, and that's something even in these days."

And if Ernie was not a success in the schoolroom, in the playground he
excelled.  Like his father in being universally popular, he was unlike
him in his marked athletic capacity.

True, he was always in trouble for slacking with the masters, who none
the less were fond of him; while Alf, the most assiduous of youths, was
disliked by everybody and gloried in it.  He won all the gilt-edged
prizes, while Ern took the canings.

Alf reported his brother's misdoings gleefully at home.

"Ern got it again," he crowed jubilantly one evening.  "They fairly
sliced him, didn't they, Ern?"

His recollections of the scene were so spicy that--for once--he was
dreadfully affectionate to the brother who had given him such prurient
pleasure.

"Ern in trouble of course!" cried the mother angrily.  "You needn't
tell me!  A nice credit to his home and all!  I'm ashamed to look Mr.
Pigott in the face come Sunday!'

"Now then, mother!" grumbled Mr. Caspar.  "Let the boy alone!"

"Yes, you're always for him!" flared Mrs. Caspar, buttering the bread.
"Setting him against his mother!  But for you he'd be all right."

Alf sat like a little wizened devil at the end of the table in his high
chair, his eyes twinkling malignantly over his bib, enjoying the fun.

"It's him and Ern against you and me, mum, ayn't it?" he cried,
shuffling on his seat.

Whether it was his son's accent or a sense of the tragic truth
underlying his child's words, that affected him, Mr. Caspar rose and
shuffled out of the kitchen into the study, which was looked on in the
family as dad's sanctuary.

The scene had taken place in the kitchen at tea, which was the one meal
the family shared.  Breakfast, dinner, supper, Edward Caspar had by
himself in the little back room looking out on the fig-tree; and Mrs.
Caspar waited on him.

That was by her desire, not his: for from the start of their married
life Anne had determined that, so far as in her lay, her husband should
have everything just as he was accustomed to.  Thus from earliest
infancy the children had been taught by their mother to understand that
the two sitting-rooms were sacred to dad, and never to be entered
except by permission.  Their place was the kitchen.  She herself set
the example by always knocking on the door of either room before
entering.

And the atmosphere of these two rooms was radically different from that
of the rest of the house.  Anne knew it and rejoiced.  Everywhere else
the tobacconist's daughter reigned obviously supreme.  These rooms were
the habitat of a scholar and a gentleman.  The little back-room,
indeed, was remarkable for little but the solidity of its few articles
of furniture, and the old silver salver with the crest, reposing on the
mahogany side-board.  But the front sitting-room, with the bow-window
looking out on to Beech-hangar and the long spur of the Downs that hid
Beau-nez from view, was known in the family as the study, and looked
what it was called.

The room, flooded with sunshine, was Mrs. Caspar's secret pride.  She
knew very well that there was nothing quite like it in Beachbourne, Old
or New, and preserved it jealously.  She did not understand it, much
preferring her own kitchen, but she recognized that it stamped her
husband for what he was, admired its atmosphere of distinction, and
loved showing it to her rare visitors.  On these occasions she stood
herself in the passage, one arm of steel barring the door, like a
priest showing the sanctuary to one without the pale.  And it gave her
malicious pleasure when Canon Willcocks, from the Rectory, opposite,
calling one day, showed surprise, not untinged with jealousy, at what
he was permitted to see.  The Canon clearly thought it unseemly that
Lazarus living at the Rectory gate should boast a room like that.  And
he was seriously annoyed when Anne, pointing to the Cavalier upon the
wall, referred to the first Lord Ravensrood as "my children's ancestor."

On the evening of the squabble in the kitchen, Ernie joined his father
in the study after tea.

As Alf was fond of remarking, "Ern's welcome there if no one else
ayn't."

Edward Caspar was sitting by the fire as usual, brooding over the
meerschaum he was colouring.  His manuscript lay where it usually lay
on the chair at his side, and a critical eye would have noted that it
was little thicker than when Mr. Trupp had first seen it some years
before.

"Ain't you well then, dad?" asked the boy in his beautiful little
treble.

"I'm all right, Boy-lad," the other answered.  "Mother didn't touch
you, did she?"

There was something reassuring always about Ernie's manner with his
father, as of a woman dealing with a sick child.

"No," he replied.  "She said I was to come to you."

"Why were you caned at school?" asked the father, after a pause.

The boy's eyes were down, and he scraped the floor with one foot.

"Fighting," he said at last reluctantly.  "Where it were, Alf sauce
Aaron Huggett in de playground, and Aaron twist Alf's arm.  Allowed
he'd had more'n enough of Alf's lip.  And he wouldn't leggo.  So I
paint his nose for him.  And it bled."

Edward Caspar puffed.

"Why don't you let Alfred fight his own battles?"

Steadfast to the tradition of his own class in this matter if in no
other, he revolted against the common abbreviation of his younger son's
name.

"Alf fight!" cried Ernie with rare scorn.  "He couldn't fight no-hows.
D'isn't in him.  He'd just break."

"Then why does he sauce em?"

Ernie resumed his foot scraping.

"That's what I says to him," he admitted in his slow ca-a-ing speech.
"Only where it seems he ca'an't keep his tongue tidy.  Seems he ca'an't
elp issalf like.  Then he gets into trouble.  Then I avs to fight for
him."

"And if you don't fight for him no one else will?" said his father.

"No," replied Ernie with the delightful reluctance of innocence and
youth.  "See no one do'osn't like Alf--only issalf."  He added as a
slow after-thought, "And I be his brother like."

Edward Caspar held out a big hand.

Ern saw his father was pleased, he didn't know why; and he was glad.

In Ern's estimation there was no one in the world like dad--the kind,
the comforter.

Once indeed in Sunday-school, some years before, when Mr. Pigott had
been expatiating on the character of our Lord, the silence had been
broken by the voice of a very little lad,

"My dad's like that."




CHAPTER XII

ALF SHOWS HIS COLOURS

In fact, as Ernie said, the two were brothers, and in some sort
complementary.

Ern had to the full the chivalrous qualities of the Beauregards.  He
never forgot that he was Alf's elder brother, or that Alf was a poor
little creature with a chest in which Mr. Trupp took an abnormal
interest.  He fought many battles, bore many blows for his young
brother.  Alf took it all as a matter of course, regarding himself as a
little god whom Ernie was privileged to serve and suffer for.  Ern
accepted the other's constant suggestion of superiority without revolt,
and took the second place with the lazy good-nature characteristic of
him.

Ern indeed was nothing of a leader.  In all the adventurous
vicissitudes of boy-life the initiative lay with Alf, who planned the
mischief; while Ern, obedient to his brother, for whose brains he had
the profoundest admiration, carried it out and paid the penalty, as a
rule uncomplainingly, at home and abroad.

Old Town was now creeping west along the foot of the Downs towards
Lewes.  On its outskirts and in the corn-fields where are to-day rows
of red-brick villas, were still to be found flint cottages, long
blue-roofed barns, and timbered farmsteads among elms.  As little by
little the town, with its border of allotment gardens, flooded along
the New Road, sweeping up Rodmill and brimming over towards Ratton and
the Decoy on the edge of the marshes, these buildings that dated from
another age were gradually diverted from their pristine use to be the
habitations of those who no longer drew their living from the earth.

Thus in the house which had once been the huntsman's lodge, beside the
now abandoned kennels, lived Mr. Pigott--one foot in the country, as he
said, one in the town.

Every morning he walked across the foot-path, past Moot Farm, to
school.  Mr. Pigott's house stood in a hollow coombe a long way back
from the road.  The gorse-clad sides of the Down rose steeply at the
back of it.  In front was an orchard in which a walnut-tree lorded it,
conspicuous over the lesser trees.

It was towards the end of their school time, when Ern was nearly
fourteen, that Alf planned a raid upon this tree, famous in the
locality for its beauty and fruitfulness.

The adventure needed careful thinking out.

The approach to the house was along an unscreened path that led across
the arable land.  Between the path and the house was the orchard in
which stood the tree with its coveted treasure.

The trouble was that Mrs. Pigott's window overlooked the orchard, and
she was always in that window--so much Alf, in his many reconnaissances
of the position, discovered.

Now it was well known in the school that Mrs. Pigott had but one eye,
and that of glass, which accounted perhaps for its extraordinary powers
of vision.  And besides Mrs. Pigott with her one sharp eye, there was
Mrs. Pigott's little dog with his many sharp teeth.  There was also in
the background Mr. Pigott, who, outside the chapel, was athletic and
regrettably fierce.

Alf waited long for his opportunity, in terror lest the tree should be
beaten before he had worked his will upon it, but his chance came at
last.

One Saturday afternoon he and Ern were loitering in Church Street,
marching along with the starts and stops, the semi-innocent and
semi-surreptitious manner of boys waiting for Satan to enter into them
and prompt them to definite action, when Alf dug his brother with a
warning elbow.

Mrs. Pigott was staring with her glass eye into the ironmonger's
opposite the church.  On her arm was a basket and at her feet her dog.
It was clear that she was doing her week-end shopping.

Alf, swift to seize his opportunity, set off up the hill, hot-foot,
silent, with a bustle of arms and legs, his brow puckered as he
concentrated ruthlessly upon his purpose.

Ern followed the fierce, insistent, little figure more leisurely.

"Steady on!" he called.  "Where away then?"

"Walnut-tree," panted Alf.  "Now's yer chance."

Ern, who knew from experience that the dirty and dangerous work would
fall to his lot, lagged.

"Mr. Pigott's there," he grumbled.

"Now he ayn't then," cried Alf, spurring the laggard on.  "He's gone
over to Lewes for the Conference.  Didn't you hear mother at breakfast?"

There had been in truth a split in the chapel.  The Established
Methodists were breaking away from the Foundation Methodists, and the
Primitive Methodists were thinking of following suit.  The little
community was therefore a tumult of warring tongues.

Alf led up the hill, past the chalk-pit, along the side of the Downs,
and dropped down on his objective from the rear.  Coming to the fence
that ran round the orchard, he peeped at the low house lying in the
background under the green flank of the hill.

Ern followed reluctantly, as one drawn to his doom by a fate he cannot
withstand.

He wanted the walnuts; he wanted to be brave; but he liked Mr. Pigott,
and, usually obedient to his brother's suggestions, had qualms in this
case.

"Go on then!" urged Alf.  It was a favourite phrase of his.  "There
ayn't no one there."

"Come on yourself," answered Ern without enthusiasm.

"Now, I'll stay and watch the path for you against her," piped Alf.

But for once Ern was firm.

"I aren't a-gooin unless you cooms too," he said doggedly.

"What's the good of me, then?" scoffed Alf in his fierce and feverish
way.  "Can I climb the tree?  Only wish I could.  I'd show you.  I
suppose you'll be throwin that up at me next!  My belief you're afraid."

But Ernie was not to be moved from the position which he had taken up.
Just now and then Alf had remarked that his brother for all his
softness became hard--adamant indeed--in a way that rather frightened
Alf.

"I'll goo up the tree and shake em down to you," Ern said in his slow,
musical voice.  "You stand at the foot of her and gather em."

"Fine!" jeered Alf.  "And when Mr. Pigott comes out you'll be up the
tree safe as dysies, and I'll be on the floor for him to paste!"

"I thart you said he'd gone to Lewes," retorted Ern, unusually alert.

"So he has," replied Alf sourly.  "Only I suppose he won't stay there
for ever, will he?"

Ern, however, was proof against all the other's logic; and finally the
two boys climbed the fence together.

The walnut was a majestic tree, with boughs that dropped almost to the
ground, making a splendid pavilion of green.

Ern swarmed the tree.  Alf stood at the foot, sheltered by the drooping
branches.  Thus he could watch the house, while nobody in the house
could see anything of him but a pair of meagre black legs.

He was fairly safe and knew it, but even so his heart pattered, he bit
his nails continually, and kept a furtive eye on the line of his
retreat.

"Hurry!" he kept on calling.

Ern, up aloft, went to work like a man.  He tossed the branches to and
fro.  The ripe walnuts came rattling down.  Alf, underneath, gathered
rich harvest.  He filled his pockets, his cap, his handkerchief.
Opening his shirt, he stuffed the brown treasure into his bosom and
grew into a portly urchin who rattled when he moved.

"I got nigh a bushel!" he cried keenly.  "Throw your coat down, and
I'll fill the pockets!"

The little devil darted to and fro, tumbling spiderlike upon the
falling riches, absorbed in accumulation.  His heart and eyes burned.
There was money in this--money.  And money was already taking its
appointed place in Alf's philosophy.

He would sell the nuts at so much a pound--some wholesale to a
fruiterer he knew in the remote East End; some retail to his
schoolfellows.

The quality and quantity of the loot so absorbed him that he forgot his
fears.  And when he glanced up through the screen of thick branches to
see a pair of grey-stockinged legs, thick and formidable to a degree,
advancing upon the tree with dreadful deliberation, his heart stopped.

The enemy was on them.

Alf emptied handkerchief, pockets, cap: he emptied himself by a swift
ducking motion that sent the treasure heaped against his heart pouring
forth with a rattle about his neck and head and ears.

Then he cast fearful eyes to the rear.  It was thirty yards to the
fence and beyond there was but the unscreened path without a scrap of
cover, leading across the plough, past the Moot Farm and abandoned
kennels to the New Road.

Alf saw at a glance that escape was impossible.  Mr. Pigott, for all
his forty years, could sprint.

Swift as a cornered rat, Alf made his decision.

He marched out from his shelter towards the approaching legs, a puny
little creature with pale peaked face, and Ern's coat flung over his
arm.

Mr. Pigott was advancing, very grim and grey, across the rough grass,
his hands behind him, dragging something.  He seemed in no hurry, and
not in the least surprised to see Alf, whom he ignored.

"Please, sir," said Alf, perking his face up with an air of frankness,
"there's a boy up your tree.  Here's his coat."

Mr. Pigott walked slowly on, drawing behind him a sixty-foot hose,
which issued like a white snake from the scullery window.

"I know," he said with suppressed quiet.  "And I know who set him on to
it.  I can't beat you because you'd break if I touched you.  But I'll
take your brother's skin off him though he's twice the man you are, you
dirty little cur!"

He brought the hose to bear on the brigand in the tree, and loosed the
water-spout and the vials of his wrath together.

"Ah, you young scoundrel!" he roared, finding joy in explosive
self-expression.  "I'll teach you come monkeying after my nuts!"

Swish went the stream of water through the branches.

Ern hid as best he could on the leeward side of the trunk.

Mr. Pigott brought his artillery mercilessly to bear upon the boy's
clasping hands.  Ern, spluttering and sprawling, came down the tree
with a rush and made a bolt for the fence.

Mr. Pigott, roaring jovially, played the stream full on him.  It was a
powerful gush, and floored the boy.  The avenger knew no mercy and
drenched his victim as he lay.

It was a sodden little figure who crept home disconsolately ten minutes
later.

Alf had been back some time and had already told his tale, gibbering
with excitement and fear.

Ern's mother, in a white fury, was awaiting the boy in the kitchen.

"I'll learn you disgrace me!" she cried.  "Robbing your own
chapel-manager's orchard--and then come home like a drownded rat!"

She set about the lad in good earnest.

Alf, perched upon the dresser to be out of the way, watched the fun,
biting his nails.

"You mustn't hit her back then!" he screamed.  "Your own mother!"

"I aren't hittin' her back then!" cried Ern, dogged, dazed, and warding
off the blows as best he might.  "I'm only defendin of mesalf."

The noise of the scuffle was considerable.

Outside in the passage was the sound of slippered feet.  Then some one
tried the door.

"It's only dad!" cried the devil on the dresser, white and with little
black eyes that danced.

"What's up?" called an agitated voice from outside.  "Hold on, mother!
Give the boy a chance."

Some one rattled the door.

"Go about your business!" cried Mrs. Caspar.  "There's a pair of you!"

Her anger exhausted and shame possessing her, she was going out into
the yard to shelter herself in the little shed against the Workhouse
wall, when Alf's sudden scream stayed her.

"Mum!--down't leave me!--he'll kill me!"

She turned to mark a white flare burning in the face of her elder son.

She had seen it before and had been afraid.

When Ern looked like that he ceased to be Ern: he became
transfigured--yes, and terrible: like, she sometimes thought, the
cavalier in the picture must have been in anger.

"Take them sopping duds off," she said quietly, "and then go up and put
your Sundays on."


Half an hour later Ern, wearing dry clothes, entered the study.

He was sweet, smiling, and a thought abashed.

His father, on the other hand, evinced signs of terrible emotion.

His face was mottled, and he was shaking.

Wrapped in his dressing-gown, he stood before the fire, trying
pitifully to preserve his dignity, and moving uneasily from leg to leg
like a chained elephant.

"Did she hurt you?" he asked, seeking to steady his voice.

Ern shook his head.

"She laid about me middlin tidy," he admitted.  "But she didn't not to
say hurt me.  She don't know how--a woman don't.  Too much flusteration
along of it."

Edward Caspar collapsed into a chair.

"What happened?" he asked.

Ern recounted the story truthfully, the white glimmer in his face
coming and going between pants as he told.

"Why d'you let him lead you astray?" asked the father irritably, at the
end.

Ern wagged his head slowly and began to scrape once more with his foot.

"Alf's artfuller nor me!" he said at last in a shamefaced way.




CHAPTER XIII

ALF MAKES A REMARK

Both boys turned up at Sunday-school next morning: Alf defiant, Ern
abashed.

Mr. Pigott ignored the former, snubbed him brutally when occasion
offered, and showed himself benignant to the prime sinner.

After chapel Mrs. Caspar spoke to him.

"I don't know what you think of my son, Mr. Pigott," she began.

"Which son?" asked the other in his bluff way.

"Why, Ernie to be sure.  He's always bringing shame upon me."

"He's worth twice the other," cried Mr. Pigott, letting off steam.

"Ah, yes, you've got your favourites, Mr. Pigott!" retorted the woman.

"And I'm not the only one!" answered the outraged schoolmaster.  "Ern's
a boy.  And boys will be boys, as we all know.  But he's a little
gentleman, Ern is.  He's his father over again."

The comparison of Ernie to his father, however well intentioned, always
touched Mrs. Caspar on the raw.  Her eyes sparkled.  Every now and then
she reminded you forcibly that her grandmother had lived in a
by-street--off Greyhound Road, Fulham.

"Ah," she muttered vengefully, "I'll cut his little liver out yet,
you'll see."

Mr. Pigott rounded on her, genuinely shocked.

"And you a religious woman!" he cried.  "Shame on you!"

"I don't care," answered Mrs. Caspar.  "I see it coming.  I always
have.  And it's just more than I can bear."

Mr. Pigott did not understand the cause of the woman's emotion, but he
recognized that it was genuine and so respected it.

"Well, he's leaving school now," he said more gently.  "He'll settle
down once he's got his nose to the grindstone."

Later, at the meeting of the Bowling Green Committee, in the Moot, the
schoolmaster reported Mrs. Caspar's saying to Mr. Trupp.

"She's a hard un," he commented.

"She's need to be," growled the other.

"What's that, Doctor?" asked Mr. Pigott.

"If she let go of him, he'd be dead in a month," mumbled Mr. Trupp.

"Mr. Caspar would?"

The Doctor looked at the grey church-tower bluff against the sky.

"But she won't let go," he added.  "She's got her qualities."

"She has," said Mr. Pigott, treading the green.  "She's a diamond--as
hard, as keen."

The two always sparred when they met and loved their friendly bouts.
Both were radicals; but they had arrived at their convictions by very
different routes.  The schoolmaster had inherited his opinions from
tough, dissenting ancestors, the man of science had acquired them from
Huxley and Darwin.  Politics the pair rarely discussed, except at
election time; for on that subject they were in rough agreement.  But
the two men wrangled genially over religion, the ethics of sport, even
the two Caspar boys; for Mr. Trupp was the one man in Old Town who
alleged a preference for the younger boy--mainly, his wife declared,
because he must be "contrary."

Mr. Pigott now told the stubborn man almost with glee the story of
Alf's treachery.

"What d'ye think of that now?" he asked defiantly.

"Why," grunted the Doctor, "what I should expect."

"Of course," said the sarcastic Mr. Pigott.

"He's got the faults of his physique," continued the other.  "He's
afraid of a thrashing because he knows it'd kill him.
Self-preservation is always the first law of life."

"He's a little cur," said Mr. Pigott.  "That's what your young Alf is."

"I've no doubt he is," replied the Doctor.  "You would be too if you'd
got that body to live in."

"I'd be ashamed," shouted the other.  "I'd commit suicide offhand."

"The wonder is he's alive at all," continued Mr. Trupp, quite unmoved.
"Must have some grit in him somewhere or he'd have died when he was
born."

"That's you and his mother," said the schoolmaster censoriously.
"Saving useless human material that ought to be scrapped.  And you call
yourself a Man of Science!  In a properly ordered community you'd stand
your trial at Lewes Assizes, the two of you--for adding to the criminal
classes.  Now if we were back in the good old days, they'd have exposed
Alf at birth--and quite right, too."

"Quite so," said Mr. Trupp.  "Your Christianity has a lot to answer
for, as I've remarked before."


It fell to Mr. Pigott to find a job of work for Ernie when his
favourite left school: for at that date there were no Labour Bureaux,
no Juvenile Advisory Committees, no attempt to make the most of the
country's one solid asset--its Youth.  And the rich had not yet made
their grand discovery of the last twenty-five years--that the poor have
bodies; and that these bodies must be saved, even if it cost a little
more than saving their souls, which can always be done upon the cheap.

Mr. Pigott had little difficulty in his self-imposed task, for he did
not mean to remain a schoolmaster all his life, and was already
dabbling in the commercial life of the growing town.

Ernie started as an office-boy in a coal-merchant's office in Cornfield
Road by the Central Station, which formed the junction between the Old
Town and the New.

Before the boy embarked on his career, Mr. Pigott invited him to tea
and lecture.

"It's your own fault if you don't get on," said the schoolmaster
aggressively after the muffins.  "Rests with yourself.  Office boy to
President--like they do in America.  Make a romance of it."

"I shall try, sir," cried Era, with the easy enthusiasm characteristic
of him.

"I'll lay you won't, then!" retorted the other rudely.  "I'll lay all
the work I've put into you these ten years past goes down the drain.
Now your grandfather..."

He stopped short, remembering Mrs. Caspar had told him that their
origin had been kept from the two boys....

At his new job Ern did not work very hard.  It was not in him to do
that; for he had his father's complete lack of ambition.  But he worked
just enough to keep his place, to pay his mother for his keep by the
time he was seventeen, and have some "spending money," as he called it,
over, with which to buy cigarettes, and join the cricket club.  In time
he even attained to the dignity of an office stool: for his handwriting
was excellent, his ability undoubted, and his education as good as most.

"Ern don't lick the stamps no more.  He writes the letters," was Alf's
report at home.

The younger brother too had now launched out upon the world.  But Alf
was very different from Ern.  He had his own ideas from the start and
went his own way.  Somehow he had ferreted out the facts about his
grandfather's career; and that career it was his deliberate
determination to surpass.

Those were the early days of the motor industry and the petrol engine.
Alf made his mother apprentice him to Hewson and Clarke, an
enterprising young engineering firm in the East End, off Pevensey Road.

"No Old Town for me," he said knowingly.  "New Town's the bird!"

And the boy worked with the undeviating energy of an insect.  All day
he was busy at the shop, and in the evening came home, grimy and tired,
to have a wash and then settle down in the kitchen to study the theory
of the petrol-engine.

His mother, ambitious as her son, watched him with admiration, guarding
his hours of study jealously from interruption.

"He's his grand-dad over again," she confided to her husband in one of
their rare moments of intimacy.

Edward Caspar shook his head.  He was interested in his second son,
although in his heart of hearts he disliked the boy.  He disliked
ambitious men--their restlessness, their unhappy egoism, their
incapacity to give themselves to any cause from which they would not
reap personal advantage, offended his spiritual sense; and he followed
with amused benevolence the careers of his contemporaries at Harrow and
Trinity who were reaping now the fruits of Orthodoxy, and just becoming
Cabinet Ministers, Bishops, Judges, and the like.

"Alf hasn't got my father's physique," he said.

"You wait," Anne replied.  "He'll conquer that too.  Last time Mr.
Trupp saw him he said he'd do now--if he took care."

Ern watched his brother's feverish activities with ironical smiles.

"He's like a little engine himself," he said.  "No time to look around
and take a little pleasure in life.  All the while a-running along the
lines--puff-puff-puff!--with his nose to the ground.  Not knowin where
he's goin or why; only set on getting somewhere, he don't know where,
some day, he don't know when."

Himself he preferred the leisurely life, and was known among his
friends as Gentleman Ernie.  The office, which prided itself upon its
tone, for in it worked a youth who said he had been at a public school,
had taken the country accent off his tongue.  Ern was indeed a bit of a
dandy now, who oiled his hair, and took an interest in his ties; while
Alf never spent a penny on his clothes, was always shabby, and seldom
clean.  The dapper young clerk and the grimy little mechanic, on the
rare occasions when they appeared in the streets together, formed a
marked contrast, of which Ernie at least was aware.

"You'd never know em for brothers," the passers-by would remark.

Both had arrived at the age when the young male joins a gang, curious
about women, but inclining to be suspicious of them.  Alf, however,
strong in himself, continued on his prickly and independent way.  He
was not drawn to others, nor were others drawn to him.  Companionable
Ern, on the other hand, who was everybody's friend, was absorbed into a
gang; but he was different from his gang-mates.  He used less hair-oil
than they did, and wore more modest ties.  Moreover, there was nothing
of the hooligan about him.

"Such a gentlemanly lad," said Mrs. Trupp.  "That's his father coming
out in him."

"May the resemblance end there," muttered Mr. Trupp.

The lady speared her husband on the point of her needle.

"Croakie!" she remarked.

Ern could have been a leader among his mates, had he chosen to assume
authority.  His quiet, his distinction, his happy manner, and above all
the fact that he was a promising cricketer and had made half a century
on the Frying Pan at Lewes for the Sussex Colts against the Canterbury
Wanderers, marked him out.  But Ern would not lead.  He spent his
evenings in the main at home rather than in the lighted streets, and
was at his happiest sitting in the study opposite his father.  On these
occasions the two rarely spoke, but they enjoyed a silent communion
that was eminently satisfying to them both.  Just sometimes the father
would touch the revolving book-case on his right; take out one of the
little blue poetry books Ern knew so well, and read _The Scholar Gypsy_
or _The Happy Warrior_.

Ern loved that, but he was far too indolent to pursue the readings
himself.  When his father had finished, he would return the book to its
place and say,

"You should read a bit yourself, Boy-lad," and Ern's invariable reply
would be,

"I will, dad, when I got the time."

But Ern was one of those who never had the time and never would have.

Then the two would relapse into smoke and silence and vague dreams, out
of which Edward Caspar's voice would emerge,

"Where's Alfred?"

To which Ern would answer with a faint smirk,

"Studyin in the kitchen."

Ern's tendency to be a masher, as the phrase of the day went, delighted
Mr. Pigott.  He looked on it as the best sign he had yet detected in
the boy.

"Who's the lady, Ern?" he chaffed, meeting the lad.

The boy smiled shyly.  At such moments, in spite of his plainness, he
looked beautiful.

"Haven't got one, sir," he said.

It was true, too.  His attitude towards girls was unlike that of his
mates.  He neither chirped at them in the streets, nor avoided them
aggressively, nor was self-conscious in their presence.  He was always
friendly with them, even affectionate; but he went no farther.  Some of
the Old Town maidens wished he would.  But, in fact, this was not Ern's
weakness.

The Destroyer, who lies in wait to undo us all, if we give him but a
crevice through which to creep into our citadel, was taking the line of
least resistance, as he does in every case.

There began to be rumours in Old Town.  His father's weakness, known to
all, lent these rumours wing.  In Churchy Beachbourne, as the enemy
called the town by reason of the number and variety of its consecrated
buildings, people were swift to believe, eager to hand on their beliefs.

Prebendary Willcocks--which was his proper title--or Canon
Willcocks--as he had taught the locality to call him--who had reasons
of his own for disliking Edward Caspar, heard and shook his
aristocratic head, repeating the rumour to all and sundry in a lowered
voice.  The Lady Augusta Willcocks, that indefatigable worker in the
parish for God and the Tory Party, entirely lacking in her husband's
delicate feeling, echoed it resonantly.

Mr. Pigott was honestly aghast.

"Never!" he cried, and added--"God help him if his mother hears!"

He was so genuinely concerned indeed that he went round to 60 Rectory
Walk to find out by indirect examination if Mrs. Caspar had heard.

She had; and was distraught.

"If he takes to that, I'll turn him out of the house!" she cried
savagely.  "Straight I will!"

And there was no question that she meant what she said.

"The best way to make trouble is to meet it half-way," muttered the
schoolmaster, cowed for once by the woman's terrible emotion.  "Give
the boy a chance--even if he is your own son."

"Alf says he was blind at the match," the other answered doggedly.

"Alf!" scoffed Mr. Pigott, savage in his turn.  "I wouldn't care that
what Alf says about his brother.  I know your Alf."

"And I don't then," said Mrs. Caspar.  "I try to keep it fair between
em--for all what folks may say different."

That evening Mr. Pigott met Alf in Church Street.

The schoolmaster stopped, holding with his eye the youth in the stained
blue overall.  Alf approached him delicately, with averted face and a
sly smile.

It was clear that he courted the encounter.

Mr. Pigott came to the point at once.

"How's Ern?" he boomed in a voice of challenge.

Alf dropped his eyes.

"Beg pardon, sir," he said, "our Ern's goin the same way as dad."

Mr. Pigott gazed at him as one stupefied.

Then in a flash he understood ...  Mr. Trupp was right.  The boy was
abnormal: his spirit dwarfed and stunted by the miserable tenement in
which it was forced to dwell.

This sudden peep into one of the sewers of Nature, this illumination of
what before had been to him obscure, this swift suggestion of Evil
lurking obscenely in the dusk to leap on the unwary, brought him up
abruptly.  His anger passed for the moment.  Something between fear and
pity laid hold of him.

"I suppose you're glad," he said quietly.

Alf smiled that satyr-like smile of his, sickly and uncertain.

"Ah, you never did like me, Mr. Pigott!" he sneered.

"I don't," answered Mr. Pigott.  "I never did.  But I'm beginning to
understand you.  You're possessed."

He went on down the street and called at the Manor-house.

Mrs. Trupp was, he knew, a staunch friend of Ernie's.

The lady was playing with her children in the garden.  But she gave
both her ears to her visitor when she knew his errand.  Had she heard
anything?

Mrs. Trupp coloured.  She _had_ heard something which greatly perturbed
her pure and beautiful spirit.

Her Joe, home from Rugby, had reported that on the way back from a
match at Lewes Ernie Caspar had taken a drop which had made him funny.

"It was only a little," the lady ended.  "Joe said it wasn't enough to
make an ordinary canary queer.  But it upset Ernest for the moment."

Mr. Pigott marched on down the hill to the railway station.

It was shutting-up time, and the object of his concern was just leaving
the office.

Mr. Pigott unceremoniously seized the boy by the hand.

"For God's sake take a pull, Ern!" he said, most seriously.

Ernie looked up surprised, read the distress in the other's bearded
face, and burned one of those sudden white flares of his.

"I see!" he said.  "Alf's been at it again!" and he broke away.

Swiftly he went home, passed the study door, and entered the kitchen.

His mother was out.

Alf, his elbows on the table, and his chin on his hands, was studying a
model-engine under the gas-light.

He looked up surlily as Ern entered.

"Keep out of it!" he ordered.  "You've heard what mother says.  The
kitchen's mine at this time.  I don't want you."

"But I want you, my lad," answered Ernie, brutal in his bitterness.

He locked the door, and took off his coat.

"Been tellin the tale again!" he trembled, as he rolled up his sleeves.
"I've had more'n enough of it.  Put em up!  You're for it this journey!"

Alf had risen.  He knew that look upon his brother's face, and was
afraid.

"You mustn't touch me!" he screamed, shaking a crooked finger at the
other.  "I'm delicit, I am."

It was the ancient ruse which had stood him in good stead many a time
at home and in the playground.

"Else you'll tell mother!" sneered Ern.  "Very well.  Have it your own
way!"

He seized the model engine on the table, and smashed it down on to the
floor.  It lay at his feet, a broken mass, with spinning wheels.

Then Ern unlocked the door and went out.

At supper that evening he was still burning his white flare.

Alf saw it and was cowed; Mrs. Caspar saw it too and held her peace.
Edward Caspar was, as always, away in the clouds and aware of nothing
unusual when he looked in to say good-night.




CHAPTER XIV

EVIL

Alf took no overt steps to avenge himself.  Like old Polonius he went
round to work, lying in wait for the chance he knew would come.  He had
not to wait long.

On the August Bank Holiday there was a big dance at the Rink in
Cornfield Road.  Ern attended.  He danced well and was sought after as
a partner.

Alf went too.

Ern was surprised to see his brother there, and pleased: for it was not
in his nature to bear malice long.

"Hullo, Alf!" he chaffed.  "Didn't know you was a dancing-man.  Let me
find you a partner then."

Alf shook his head, smiling that shifty smile of his.

"I ain't," he said.  "I only come to watch."

That was true; but the words carried no sinister meaning to Ern's
innocent ear.

Alf watched.

He sat by himself on one of the faded plush-seats that went round the
hall.  Nobody spoke to him, nobody heeded him.  The seats on either
side of him were left vacant.

Sour, shabby, ill at ease, yet sure of himself, he watched with furtive
eyes the flow of boys and girls swirling by him in the dance.

One of Ern's friends pointed his brother out to him.

"I know," laughed Ern.  "Let him alone.  He don't want us.  He's above
larking, Alf is."

"Never seen him at a hop before," remarked the friend.  "And now he
don't look happy."

The evening was hot, the dancers thirsty, the drinks good.  Alf
observed his brother go to the bar once, twice, and again.  Then he
rose to go home, nodding to himself.

Ern passed him in the dance and stopped.

"What, Alf!  You're off early!"

"I got a bit of reading to do," answered Alf.

"So long, then," said Ernie.  "Shan't be long first myself."  And he
joined the current again, with flushed face and loquacious tongue.

It was just ten when Alf entered the kitchen.

His father had already retired to bed; his mother was sitting up.

"You're late," she remarked sharply.  "Where's Ern?"

"Heard em say he was at the Rink," Alf answered sheepishly.

Mrs. Caspar's face darkened.  The Puritan in her rose in arms.

"Dancing?" she asked.

Alf feigned uneasiness.

"I'll stay and let him in," he said.  "He mayn't be back yet a bit."

Mrs. Caspar took her candle.

Regular as a machine, she rose always at six, and expected to be in bed
by ten.

Anything that disturbed her routine she resented, surly as an animal.

"Let me know when he comes in," she said.  "I'll speak to him.  Keepin
us up to all hours and disturbin dad's rest while he carries on.  Might
be a disorderly house."

She left the room.

Alf turned out the gas, and sat in the darkness, watching the dying
fire, and waiting for his mouse.

A crisis in his life had come.

He was about to take the first big step along the road that was going
to lead him to success or ruin.

He was aware of it, and calm as a practised gambler.

Once he rose and locked the front door to make sure his brother could
not enter without his knowledge.

It was eleven o'clock when he heard feet outside.

Those feet told their own tale.

Alf turned up the light in the passage and opened the door.

His brother lolled against the side-wall like a mortally wounded man.

"Take my arm, old chap," said Alf, and supported his brother into the
kitchen.

Ern sat down suddenly at the table.  Alf lit the gas.

The light fell on his brother's foolish face and clearly irritated him.
He put up his hand to brush it away.

"Arf a mo'," said Alf soothingly, skipped light-footed upstairs, and
knocked at his mother's door.

She was half-undressed, brushing her hair, her neck and shoulders bare
in the moonlight.

Alf glanced at them and even in that moment of excitement thought how
beautiful they were.

Mrs. Caspar raised a finger.

Her husband was in bed and apparently asleep, Lady Blanche upon the
mantelpiece staring vacantly at the form of her recumbent son.

"Ern!" whispered Alf, and jerked his head significantly.  "You'd best
come."

Anne Caspar slipped on a wrap.  Candle in hand she descended the stairs
and entered the kitchen.

Alf followed stealthily.  Like a gnome he stood in the shadow at the
foot of the stairs, biting his nails uneasily, as he watched with lewd,
malignant eyes.

Ern sat at the table with the dreadful blind face of the living dead.

He saw his mother enter and paid no heed to her.  He was too much
occupied.  A troubled look crossed his face, and clouded it.  Then he
was very sick.

That amused Alf.

His mother shut the kitchen-door.

But Alf was not to be defrauded of his spectacle.

He opened the door quietly.

His mother, busy on her knees, with a slop pail and cloth, looked up.

"It's only me, mum," muttered Alf.

Her face frightened him: so did her breathing: so did her quiet.

"Come in then," she said.  "And shut the door."

Ern still sat at the table.

"You little og!" said Alf fiercely, and shook his brother.

His mother, still on her hands and knees, restrained him.

"Let him be," she said.  "It's past that.  It's past all."

The door opened slowly.

Mr. Caspar stood in it in the faded quilted dressing-gown that had once
graced historic rooms at Trinity.

He stood there, dishevelled from sleep, a tall, round-shouldered ruin
of a man, every sign of distress upon his face.

"What is it?" he asked nervously.

"Im!" said Alf.

Mr. Caspar saw Ern, and marked his wife busy on her knees.  Then he
understood.

The distress on his face deepened.

Anne Caspar rose sharply from her knees, the filthy rag still in her
hands.

"Two of you!" she cried thickly.  "It's too much!" and shoved him out
of the room.

The father's slippered feet shuffled along the passage.

"Take your brother up to bed," ordered Mrs. Caspar.

Alf, too discreet to argue, obeyed.

Anne Caspar locked the door, and sat down at the table.




CHAPTER XV

MR. TRUPP INTRODUCES THE LASH

There was no doubt that Anne Caspar was a woman of character.

"Too much character," said Mr. Trupp.

His wife was somewhat shocked.

"Can you have too much character?" she asked.

Her husband was in one of his philosophical moods.

"Character's only will," he growled.  "It's the repression or direction
of energy.  You may misdirect your energies.  Most so-called strong men
do.  Look at this fellow Chamberlain.  Willed us into this war.  If it
hadn't been for his superfluous character we should never have heard of
South Africa."

"And your investments would never have gone down," said Mrs. Trupp
delicately.

The Doctor may have been unjust to the Colonial Secretary, but he was
right about Anne Caspar, whom he knew rather better.

That dour woman had, indeed, just two friends in Beachbourne.  One was
Mr. Trupp, and the other was Mr. Trupp's wife.  Neither had ever failed
her; and she knew quite well that neither ever would.

The day after the calamity she went round to see the Doctor.

"He's got to go," she said, tight-lipped and trembling.  "That's flat.
You know what I been through with his father, Mr. Trupp.  You're the
only one as does.  I'm not going through it again with him.  Ned's my
man, and I'm going to see him through.  But Ern must go his own way.
Stew in his own juice, as Alf says.  They say I've been hard with the
boy.  So I have.  Because I've seen it a-comin ever since he was so
high.  And I've fought it and been beaten."

The gruff man was wonderfully tender with her.  He saw the woman's
distress and understood its cause as no other could have done.

"Don't do anything in a hurry," he said soothingly.  "Think it over for
a week and then come and see me again."

That evening he reported the interview to his wife.

"She'll never turn him out!" cried the kind woman.

"She will though," said Mr. Trupp.

Mrs. Trupp, pink and white with indignation, dropped her eyes to her
work to hide the flash in them.

"I'll never forgive her if she does," she said.

"Yes, you will," retorted Mr. Trupp.

Mrs. Trupp answered nothing for a time.

"I shall go round to see her," she said at last with determination.

"You won't move her," the Doctor answered, grimly cheerful.

"No," said Mrs. Trupp.  "She hasn't got a heart.  As Mr. Pigott says,
she's hard as the nether millstone in a frost."

Mr. Trupp put down his coffee-cup and licked his lips like a cat.

"My dear," he said, "you haven't been through her mill."

"Perhaps not," the other answered warmly.  "But I am a mother."

The sympathetic creature, all love and pity, was as good as her word.

Mrs. Trupp was always full of indignation against Mrs. Caspar when away
from her, and in her presence touched by the tragedy of the woman's
loneliness.

She found things at Rectory Walk as she had expected or worse.

Ern had lost his job.  His escapade at the Rink had reached his
employers' ears.  None too satisfied with the quality of the lad's
work, they had seized the excuse to dismiss him.

"There he is!" cried Mrs. Caspar.  "Just turn eighteen and back on my
hands.  Nobody won't have him, and I don't blame em neether."

"Where is he?" asked Mrs. Trupp.

The interview between the two women was taking place in the back
sitting-room, where Mrs. Caspar always saw her rare visitors.

Anne nodded in the direction of the study.

"Settin along o dad," she said briefly.  "Nothing but trouble along of
it all.  I took his cigarettes away.  _If he don't earn neether shan't
he smoke_, as Alf says.  And now dad won't smoke because Ern can't.
_Sympathetic strike_, Alf calls it.  And it's dad's one pleasure.  I
allow him a shilling bacca-money a week.  It's just all I do allow him."

"We all make mistakes--especially when we're young," said Mrs. Trupp
gently.

The other was adamant.

"There's slips and slips," she retorted.  "If he'd gone with a girl I'd
have said nothing.  But _this_!"

Mrs. Trupp was steadfast in her tranquil way, as her opponent was
dogged.

"I know if my Joe made a mistake what I should do," she said.

"What then?" sharply.

"Forgive him," replied the other.

Mrs. Caspar flared up.

"You wouldn't, not if your Joe's father----"

She pulled up short.

Loyalty to her husband was the soul of Anne Caspar.


On her way home the Doctor's wife met Mr. Pigott.

The sanguine little man stopped short.

"You've heard?" said Mrs. Trupp.

The other nodded, surly as a baited bear.

"Ern was round at my place first thing Sunday to tell me.  He kept
nothing back."  Mr. Pigott dropped his voice like a stage-conspirator.
"That young Alf's at the bottom of this, I'll lay."

Mrs. Trupp was shocked.

"Did Ernie say so?"

"No," fiercely.  "He wouldn't give his brother away--not he.  But I
know."  He came closer.  "I tell you the Devil's in that boy.  I can
see him leering at me from behind the mask of Alf's face.  There is no
Alf Caspar.  He's only a blind.  But there is a Devil!"

"O, Mr. Pigott!" murmured the lady.

"Yes, you may O Mr. Pigott me!" cried the wrathful man.  "But I've
watched.  I know.  He's the cuckoo kind, Alf is.  He wants the place to
himself.  It's me and mum all the time.  His father don't count; and
Ern's to be jostled out of the nest.  Then there'll be room for him to
grow.  I curse the day Mr. Trupp saved his miserable little life."

"Hush! hush! hush!" said the lady.

"Yes, I know Alf's one of Mr. Trupp's darlings," continued the other.
"And I know why.  You know my old bicycle they all laugh at.  I bought
it for ten shillings from a pedlar and patched it up myself.  It's the
worst bike in Old Town, but I saved it from the scrap-heap, so I think
the world of it.  Same with Mr. Trupp and young Alf."

Mrs. Trupp reported to her husband that Mr. Pigott had become almost
blasphemous over Alf.

"I know," grunted the Doctor.  "He's not fair to the boy.  Alf's
stunted; of course he's stunted.  He's grown up all wrong.  The wonder
is he's grown up at all.  He's a standing witness to the power of
Nature to make the most of a bad job."

It was next day that Mrs. Caspar came round, as appointed, to see the
Doctor, who was much more to her than a physician.

Mr. Trupp had now come to a decision as to the best course to be taken.

"You must send him right away," he said.  "That's his best chance."

"Dad won't hear of the Colonies," the other replied.  "Says it's so far
and he'll never see the boy again once he gets out there.  Stood up and
fought me fairly!"  And it was clear from the way she said it that the
resistance encountered from her husband had been as rare as it was
astonishing.

"I didn't mean the Colonies," the other replied.

"What then?"

"The Army."

Mrs. Caspar's face fell.  She was momentarily shocked: for she belonged
to a sect that had for generations been despitefully used by the powers
that be.  And the weapon of the powers that be is always in the last
resort the Army.

"Discipline is what the boy wants," said Mr. Trupp.  "It's what we all
want."

Anne Caspar nodded dubiously.

"If it's the right sort," she said.

"It may save him," continued her mentor.  "It can't do him any harm.
And anyway, it's worth trying.  You send Ernie round to me.  I'll have
a talk with him, and I'll drop in to-morrow and have a chat with his
father."

Ernie, when approached, made no difficulty.

He was young; his enthusiasms were easily stirred; and the most famous
of South Country regiments, the Forest Rangers, known in history as the
Hammer-men, had been more than living up to its reputation in South
Africa.

"You'll travel," Mr. Trupp told him.  "Go to India as like as not and
see a bit of the world.  Our Joe's going to Sandhurst next year.
Nothing'll do but he must be a Hammer-man--like his grandfather before
him.  I dare say he'll join you out there."

But if Ern was too young to fight his own battles, there was one
doughty warrior who meant to fight them for him.

Mr. Pigott came round to see the Doctor in roaring wrath.

The South African War was in full swing.  The frenzy of lusty paganism,
called Imperialism, which was sweeping the country, had revolted the
schoolmaster and many more.  In the estimation of these, the horrors
enacted at home in the name of God and Empire surpassed the obscenities
of the war itself.  Mr. Pigott saw Militarism as a raddled prostitute
dancing on the souls and bodies of men.

He burst like a tempest into Mr. Trupp's consulting room.

"The Army!" he cried.  "You're going to send that boy into the Army!
Take him a first-class ticket to Hell at once!  Where's your Militarism
led us?  The war's costing us half a million a week!  Over a thousand
casualties at Paardeberg alone!  Rowntree stoned in York; Leonard
Courtney boycotted in London; Lloyd George escaping for his life over
the house-tops for daring to preach Christ!  And you call yourself a
Radical, Mr. Trupp!--Shame on you!"

Mr. Trupp listened, amused and patient.

"It's discipline he wants," he said at last.  "He's soft and slack.
He'll never do any good without it.  The artist type like his father."

The other began to blaze again.

"Discipline!" he cried.  "You talk like a Prussian drill-sergeant.  I
tell you that lad's got a soul.  You _discipline_ beasts of the
field--with a Big Stick; but you _grow_ souls."

Mr. Trupp shook his head.

"We're only just emerging from the mud," he said.  "The Brute still
lurks in all of us.  Watch him or he'll catch you out.  And remember
the only thing the Brute understands is the Big Stick.  Without it
he'll either go to sleep--like Ernie; or pounce on some one who has
gone to sleep--like Alf."

Mr. Pigott drew himself up.  There was about him the dignity of
conviction.

"Mr. Trupp," he said.  "Fear never made a man yet.  Faith's the thing."

The Doctor lifted his shrewd kind face, and eyed the other through his
pince-nez.

"Fear plays its part too," he said.  "We none of us can do without the
Lash as yet."




CHAPTER XVI

FATHER, MOTHER AND SON

There was no difficulty with Edward Caspar.

He had made an immense effort and fought about the Colonies.  Easily
spent, he would not fight again.  Moreover, Ernie committed to the Army
was committed for a few years only, and not for life; and some of his
service might very well be passed in England.  In Edward Caspar too,
pacifist though he personally inclined to be, there was no inherited
prejudice to overcome: for the Beauregards had been soldiers for
generations.

Mr. Trupp came to talk things over; and that evening, as father and son
sat together in the study, Edward Caspar said out of the silence, very
quietly,

"Boy-lad, it's best you should go."

"I shall go all right, dad," the boy answered, feigning a cheerfulness
he by no means felt.  "Don't you worry."

"Mother wants it," the other continued.

"She's all right, mother is," said the lad.

It was settled that the boy should go over to Lewes and enlist in the
Hammer-men at the depot there, on Saturday.

The decision made, his mother relaxed somewhat.  While she still kept
Ernie without money, she allowed him cigarettes.

Father and son sat together and smoked in the evenings, watching the
trees swaying against the blue in the Rectory Garden across the road.

Alf reported surreptitiously to his mother that Ern was smoking with
dad.

"What's it to do with you if he is?" answered the other tartly.

The catastrophe which had severed the frayed string that joined the
mother and her eldest son had reacted unfavourably on her relations
with Alf.

The few days before Ern's departure went with accustomed speed.

On the last evening, as he and his father sat together, studying their
toes in the twilight, a small fire flickering in the grate, Edward
Caspar spoke out of the dark which he had been waiting to cover him.

"Boy-lad, I can't do by you as I should wish," he said tremulously.
"But here's a bit of something to show you I mean well."

In the half light he thrust an envelope towards his son.

Ern opened it and saw that it contained a five-pound note.

The great waters surged up into his throat and filled his eyes.

"Here!  I can't keep this, dad," he said chokily.  "I'm all right.
I've got..."

The old man--for such he was to his son, though not yet fifty--waved
his hand irritably.

"Put it away," he said, "put it away.  Let's hear no more of it."

Ernie sat dumb, moved and wondering.

Where had dad got the money from?

He knew very well that his mother jealously controlled the family
purse, doling out rare sixpences or shillings to his father; and he
knew why.

The boy's brain moved swiftly.

"What's the time, dad?" he asked, and lit the gas.

The clock on the mantel-piece never went: for it was Edward Caspar's
solitary household task to wind it up.

The father, by no means a match for his artful son, produced from a
baggy pocket a five-shilling Waterbury watch in place of the old gold
hunter that had come to him from Lady Blanche's father, the twelfth
Earl Ravensrood.

His ruse successful, Ernie delivered a direct attack.

"Where's the ticket, dad?" he asked casually.

"What ticket?"

"The pawn-ticket."

"I don't know," irritably.  "Don't worry me.  Turn out the light.  I
want to get a nap."

Ernie obeyed.

Soon Edward Caspar's breathing told its own tale.

Ernie rose, and, knowing his father's habits well as he knew his own,
put his hand into the Jacobean tankard that stood on the book-shelf.

There he found what he sought.

Quietly he went out into the passage.

On the ticket was the name he expected: Goldmann, the Jew pawn-broker
in the East-end off the Pevensey Road.

For a moment he paused, fingering the brown cardboard ticket under the
gas light.

It would not take him an hour to get down to Goldmann's and back; for
the tram almost passed the door; but he hadn't got the redemption
money.  He hadn't got a penny in the world.  Alf had seen to that.

With the impetuous gallantry peculiar to him he made up his mind and
opened the kitchen-door.  Where Ernie loved he would risk anything,
face anybody--even his mother.

She sat in her Windsor chair by the fire, a Puritan, still beautiful,
reading her Bible as she always did at this hour; and her silvering
hair added to her distinction.

All their married life the pair had sat thus of evenings, Edward in the
study, Anne Caspar in the kitchen.

The strange couple rarely met indeed except at night.  And the
arrangement was not of Edward Caspar's making, but of his wife's.  It
may be that in part the woman preferred the kitchen as the environment
to which she was most used: it was still more that she had determined
from the outset of their union never to intrude upon her husband's
spiritual life, or attempt to encroach upon a mind she could not
understand.  Her duty was as clear to her from the first as were her
limitations.  She could and would cherish, support, protect, and even
chasten her husband where it was necessary for his good.  For the rest
she was resolved to be no hindrance or inconvenience to him.  He should
gain by his marriage and not lose by it.  Therefore from the start she
had slammed the door without mercy or remorse on her own relatives.

When Ern entered, she looked up at him not unkindly through her
spectacles.

"What is it, Ernie?" she asked.

He rushed out his request.

"Please, mum," he panted, "could you let me have a shilling?"

He was determined not to give his father away.

To his relief his mother rose without a word, went to a drawer,
unlocked it, took out half a sovereign and gave it to him.

Ernie ran out without his hat, took the old horse-bus at Billing's
Corner, and riding on the top under a night splendid with stars that
hung in the elms of Saffrons Croft, he went down the hill, through the
Chestnuts, past the railway station, and along the gay main-street.

Just before Cornfield Road reaches the sea he exchanged the horse-bus
for the electric tram that swung him down Pevensey Road through the
thronged and always thickening East-end.

At the _Barbary Corsair_ in Sea-gate he descended, turned down a
side-street, and entered a door over which hung the three golden balls
taken from the coat-of-arms of the banker Medici.

Mr. Goldmann was a short, fair Jew, without a neck, immensely thick
throughout, though still under thirty.  When he walked he carried his
arms away from his side as though to aid him to inflate; and winter or
summer he could be found behind his counter, perspiring freely.  His
trousers were always too short, and his little legs protruded from them
like pillars.  He spoke Cockney without a trace of Yiddish.  His manner
was hearty; but he was honest of his kind.  The police had nothing
against him, while his innumerable clients complained less of him than
of his rivals.

Ern in the past had dealt with him.

"How much?" he asked, presenting the ticket.

"Only two-pence," said Goldmann, and took the watch out of the case.

He handled it with care, almost covetously, burnishing it on his sleeve.

"What arms is them?" he asked, displaying the back.

Ernie didn't know.

"If it had been any man but your father left it, I'd have communicated
with the police," said the pawn-broker cheerfully.

"Will you do it up in a piece of paper, please?" Ern requested.

The Jew obeyed.

"Lend me your stylo alf a mo," said Ernie, and wrote on the paper
covering the word _Dad_.

Then he raced home and re-entered the kitchen.

It was after ten, but his mother was still up, and apparently
unconscious of the lateness of the hour.

Ern, panting from the speed at which he had travelled, paid nine
shillings and four pence into his mother's lap.

Tram and bus had cost him sixpence, and the redemption money the rest.

"Eightpence all told," he gasped, "what I wanted.  Only a little
something for dad.  I'll send you the odd money when I draw me first
pay."  He put the little packet on the mantel-piece.  "Will you give
that to dad, please, when I'm gone, mum?"

His mother looked at him, a rare sweetness in her eyes.

"You may keep the change, Ern," she said gently.

Collecting the money from her lap, she handed it back to him.

A moment he demurred, taken aback; then slipped the cash into his
trouser pocket, mumbling and deeply moved.

"Thank you kindly, mum," he muttered.

Her eyes were still on his face, and he could not meet them.

"You're a good lad, Ern," she said quietly.

The words, and the way of saying them, moved the lad more than all her
rebuffs and brutalities in the past had done.  His chest began to
heave.  She stood before him stiff as a blade of steel, as slight and
straight.

For a second she laid her hand, fine still for all its toil, upon his
arm.

"Go up to bed now," she said in the same very quiet way.

He went hurriedly.

There were few things which happened in that house of which Anne Caspar
was not aware.  That morning on rising she had missed her husband's
watch on the dressing-table--and had said nothing.  Later she had found
the pawn-ticket in the tankard--and again had held her peace.

A wife before all things, yet to some extent a mother, she had known,
had understood, had perhaps sympathized.




CHAPTER XVII

ERNIE GOES FOR A SOLDIER

Next day, after dinner, when she heard Ern's feet slowly descending the
stairs, and knew he was coming to say good-bye, Anne Caspar shoved Alf
roughly out of the kitchen.

"You wait your brother outside," she said.  "Take his bag now, and
carry it to the bus for him.  Be a brother for once!"

"Well, I was going to," answered Alf, aggrieved.

Since the catastrophe he had kept discreetly in the background.

Ern entered the kitchen, uncertain of himself, uncertain of his
reception; but, true to the best that was in him, trying to carry a
pale feather of gallantry.

"I guess it's about time to be off, mum," he remarked huskily.

His mother shut the door behind him gently, and drew him to her.

"Kiss me, Ern," she said.

The boy gasped and obeyed.

"Now go and say good-bye to dad," continued his mother, quiet, firm,
authoritative.

As he went into the passage, he heard the kitchen-door close behind him.

Ern was his father's son, and nothing was to be allowed to intrude in
the parting between the two.


Edward Caspar stood before the fire in quilted dressing-gown, somewhat
faded now.

In its appointed place on the chair beside his chair lay the familiar
manuscript, much as Ern had known it since his childhood, save that the
titles on the covering page were typewritten now--_The Philosophy of
Mysticism, Part I, The Basis of Animism_.

His father's colourless hair was greying fast and becoming sparse;
while his always ungainly figure was losing any shape it had ever
possessed.

At fifty Edward Caspar was already old.  But age had enhanced the
wistfulness which had marked him, even in youth.  His was the face of a
man who has failed, and is conscious of his failure; but it was the
face of a Christian, gentle and very sad.  Here clearly was a man of
immense parts, scholar, thinker, artist, who, somehow baffled by the
wiles of Nature, had failed to make good.

Yet in spite of his failure there were few who could more surely rely
upon the limitless resources of the Spirit in the hour of his need than
Edward Caspar.

And now in this great moment of his life, when he was parting from his
dearest, he summoned to his aid all the powers that, massed unseen in
the silence, await our call.

There was a wonderful dignity and restraint about him.

Ern, the most intuitive of lads, felt it and drew from his father's
strength.

Simply and beautifully father and son kissed.

A moment the eyes of each rested in the other's.

Then it was over.


No one of us is entirely inhuman.

Something of the spirit of the scene enacted in the study had conveyed
itself even to Alf awaiting in the road outside, Ern's bag at his feet.

He was blinking when his brother, blowing his nose, joined him.

Ern glanced at the green rampart of the Downs rising like a wall at the
end of the road, and huge Shadow Coombe where the lambs were folded in
March and where once he had passed a night in the shepherd's hut.

Ern waved to them and Beech-hangar beyond.

"Good-bye, old Downs!" he called.  "You and me been good old pals!"

Then they set off for the bus at Billing's Corner, neither speaking,
neither wishing to, Alf carrying his brother's bag.  Both youths were
slight and colt-like, yet with loose unshackled limbs; Ern rather
smart, Alf distinctly shabby.

The Rector, tall and titupping, emerged from his gate as they passed,
but refrained from seeing them.  He did not approve of the two Caspar
boys--in the main because they were the sons of their father.

Canon Willcocks aped--successfully enough--the walk and deportment of a
thoroughbred weed.  His face--which was aquiline--inspired his pose,
which was aristocratic and satirical.  His solitary hero was Louis
Napoleon, whom he had worshipped from childhood.  And he bore himself
habitually as one who is too fine for the coarse world in which he
dwells perforce.  The two brothers nudged each other as he stalked by.
Then they climbed to the box-seat of the old bus and established
themselves beside the driver.

"Where away then?" he asked, seeing the bag.

"Off to see the world, Mr. Huggett," answered Ern, already cheering up.
"Goin for the week-end to the North Pole, me and Alf!"

The bus jolted down the street, past the long-backed church with its
mighty tower looking down upon the Moot as it had done for five
centuries, and stopped opposite the _Star_.  Ern for the last time
touched the old coaching bell with the driver's whip.  As it clanged
sonorously, a window in the Manor-house opened.

Ern looked up to see Mrs. Trupp and her daughter, a fair flapper now,
waving at him with eyes that smiled and shone.

"Good-bye!" they called.  "Good luck!"

Saffrons Croft was white with cricketers as they passed.  The honest
thump of the ball upon the bat, the recumbent groups under the elms,
even the imperious voice of Mr. Pigott umpiring on Lower Pitch, moved
Ern strangely.

Alf's presence somehow helped him to be hard.

At the Central Station the boys got down.

They paced the platform, waiting for the train.

Alf babbled at large, his brother paying little heed.

"Be the making of you!" Alf was saying in his rather patronizing way.
"See the world!--knock about!--come home a full-blown Hammer-man with a
fat pension and a V.C. on your chest and a Colonel's commission!  And
we'll all meet you at the stytion with a brass band playing _See the
Conquering Hero Comes!_ and be proud of you.  I'd come along meself for
company, only I'm too small."

Ern roused from his dreams.

"What will you do then?" he asked, faintly ironical.

"Me?" cried Alf, starting off on his favourite topic.  "I ain't a-goin
to stop in Beachbourne all me life, you lay.  When I'm through me
apprentice they may send me to the River Plate.  Got a big branch
there.  England's used up.  There's chances in a new country for a chap
that means to get on."

Ern installed himself in a smoking carriage.

"O, reservoir," said Alf, facetious to the end.

"See ye again some day," answered Ern, puffing away and exhibiting a
man-of-the-world-like stoicism he did not feel.

He took off his Trilby hat, unbuttoned the overcoat with the velvet
collar, and opened his orange-coloured _Answers_.

The train moved on.  The brothers waved.  Alf stood on the platform, a
mean little figure with a dishonest smile; his clothes rather shabby,
his trousers too short and creased behind the knees.

Then he turned to the bookstall and asked if _Motor Mems_, the paper on
the new industry, had arrived yet.


Ern leaned back in his corner; and his eyes sought, between hoardings
and roofs of crowded railway-shops, the familiar outline of the Downs
which would accompany him to Lewes--and far beyond.




BOOK III

THE SOLDIER



CHAPTER XVIII

ERNIE GOES EAST

The Army did for Ernie neither what Mr. Trupp hoped nor what Mr. Pigott
feared.

Ernie was in truth very much the modern man, and had absorbed
unconsciously the spirit of industrial democracy.  He was open-minded,
intelligent and sincere.  The false idealism that is at the back of all
Militarism, the bully-cum-bluff principle that has been the creed of
the barrack-square at all times all over the world, from Sparta to
Potsdam, made no appeal to him.  In the British Army, it is true, there
was even at that date little of the spirit of orthodox Militarism, but
the shadow of the Continental System and the heritage of a false
tradition still hung over it.

He found himself plucked out of the world of to-day with its quick flow
of ideas, its give and take, its elasticity, its vivid unconscious
spirituality, and plunged back into the darkness of medievalism: forced
labour, forced worship, forced obsequiousness, a feudal lord against
whom there was no appeal, with corrupt retainers who squeezed the serf
without mercy.

When his first drill-instructor in a moment of patronizing confidence
informed the squad of which Ernie was a member that "It's swank as
makes the soldier," others were amused; but Ernie, who giggled
dutifully with the rest, thought how silly and how disgusting.

Ernie always remembered that drill-sergeant's illuminating remark, and
placed it alongside that of a veteran Colonel, dating from Crimean
days, who said in Ernie's hearing with the offensive truculence that a
certain type of officer still thinks he owes it to himself and to his
position to cultivate,

"That man's no good to me."  He was speaking of a Company
Sergeant-Major who had the manners of a gentleman.  "Take him away and
shoot him.  I want a man who'll chuck his chest, and beat his leg, and
own the barrack square."

Ernie saw very soon that the Army system was based on the old two-class
conception with an insuperable barrier between the two classes, and the
underclass deprived of the right to appeal, the right to combine, the
right to strike.  And he saw equally clearly, and with far more
surprise, that in spite of its obvious limitations, and openness to
brutality and abuse, the system worked astonishingly well, given good
officers--and his own were unusually good upon the whole.

Ernie did not know that the barrack was in fact the heir of the old
monastic habit and tradition with its herding together of males, its
little caste of priests who alone possessed the direct access to God
denied to common men, its sacrosanct dogmas, its insuperable
prejudices, its life of unquestioning obedience to authority with the
consequent thwarting of intellectual and spiritual development that is
the outcome of free communion between man and man; and on the other
hand its genuine religious fervour, its abnegation, its devotion to
duty, and disinterested service of the Commonwealth.


Ern, it is true, who realized some of these things and was dimly
conscious of others, was different from most of his mates and superior
to them: rather more intelligent and much more refined.  The bulk of
them were the conscripts of Necessity; some, like himself, had made
mistakes; a few, nearly always themselves the sons of old soldiers,
were genuine volunteers.

And yet Ern was by no means unhappy.  If he was something of a critic,
he was not in the least a rebel.  At first the pressure of discipline
served to brace the boy, as Mr. Trupp had anticipated.  Moreover, if he
vaguely apprehended what was vicious in the military system, there was
much he could not fail to enjoy, because he was young, virile and
healthy; and not a little he could honestly admire.  He loved the
drill: the rhythmical marching _en masse_, the movements of great
bodies of men swinging this way and that like one, actuated by a single
purpose, directed by a single mind, worshipping a single God enthroned
at the saluting-point, satisfied his religious spirit, exalted and
transfigured him as did nothing he was to know in later days.  The
outdoor existence, the hard athleticism, the good fellowship, and above
all the communal life, appealed to all that was best in him.  Indeed in
this organization, abused by advanced thinkers in Press and Parliament
alike, he was to find a fullness of corporate life, an absorption of
the individual in the mass, a bee-like enthusiasm for the hive, such as
he was never to discover outside the Army in after years.

Moreover there was a goal held before his eyes, as it is held before
the eyes of all young English soldiers.

That goal was India.

The Shiny was the Private Soldier's Paradise, the old hands would tell
the young in the canteens at night.

"Things are different there, my boy.  In the Shiny a swoddy's a
gentleman.  Punkah-wallahs to pull the cords in the hot weather, a
tiger curled at your feet to keep the snakes at bay, bearer to clean
your boots, shooting parties, bubbly by the barrel, I don't know what
all."

Because of this jewel that was for ever dangled before his eyes, Ernie
bore a good deal without complaining.

A youth who had enlisted with him, and for much the same reason,
induced his people to buy him out after six months.

Ernie made no such attempt.

"I'm going through with it now," he said.  "Want to see a bit before
I'm done and take em home a tale or two."

After a spell of service in Ireland, at the close of the South African
War, when Ernie was turned twenty, the expected call came.

A draft was going out to join the First Battalion of the Hammer-men at
Jubbulpore, and Ernie went with it.

The cheering transport dropped down the Thames one misty November
afternoon, passing hay-laden barges, timber ships from the Baltic, and
rusty tramps from all over the world.

The smell of the sea, so familiar and so good, thrilled Ernie's
susceptible heart.  It spoke to him of home, of the unforgotten things
of childhood, of his passing youth, of much that was intimate and dear.
He spent most of that first evening on deck, long after dark, in spite
of the drizzle, watching the coast lights.

Once they passed quite close to a light-ship, swinging desolately on
the tide.

"What's that?" he asked a sailor.

"Sovereign Light," the man told him.

Ernie leapt to the name familiar to him from childhood.

How often had he not climbed the hill behind his home of winter
evenings, and waited in the chalk-pit above the larch spinney for that
far-off spark to leap out of the darkness and warm his expectant heart.

He swung about and stared keenly through the gloom at a light winking
at them from the land.

"Then that's the light-house under Beau-nez!" he said, pointing.

"That's it," the man answered.  "And Beachbourne underneath.  All them
lights strung out like a necklace along the coast,--Bexhill, Hastings,
Beachbourne.  It's growing into a great place.  D'you know it?"

Ernie's heart and eyes were full.

"My home's there," he said.  "And my old dad."

He stayed on deck peering through the darkness, till the last light had
disappeared and they had swung round Beau-nez into the Channel and he
could see the Seven Sisters, the gap that marks the mouth of the
Ruther, and the cliffs between Newhaven and Rotting-dean.  Then he went
below and turned in.

Thereafter, his home behind him, he began to taste the new life, the
life of adventure.

He felt the surge of the Atlantic, saw whales spouting in the Bay,
marked off the coast of Portugal a lateen sail which first whispered of
the East; gazed up at the Rock of Gibraltar, noted there caparisoned
Barbs, their head-stalls studded with turquoises to keep the Evil One
away, welcomed the Mediterranean sun, and gazed at the snow-capped
hills of Crete.

In Port Said he landed and saw his first mosque.  He examined it with
interest.

_Very bleak-like_, he wrote home to Mr. Pigott.  _More like a chapel
than a church.  And more like the Quaker Meeting-house in the Moot than
either.  No stained glass or crucifixes or nothing.  I was more at home
there than the Catholics_.

In the Canal he marked the black hair-tents of the travelling Bedouins,
and saw a British Camel Corps trekking slowly across the desert against
the hills beyond.  He sweated in the Red Sea and gazed with awe at the
sultry rocks of Aden, and followed with delight the flying-fish
skimming across the Indian Ocean.

Then one dawn the engines stopped; the ship lay at rest; and in his
nostrils, blown from the land, there was the smell of incense.

"Makes you think of the Queen of Sheba," said Ernie.  "Spices and Tyre
and Sidon and all the rest," and he closed his eyes and saw Mr. Pigott
standing with the pointer before the black-board, addressing his class.

"Not alf," said his unimaginative friend.  "Give me the Pevensey Road o
Sadaday nights.  Fried fish and chips."

They went on deck to find themselves lying in the lovely
island-sprinkled harbour of Bombay; boats with curved bamboo yards and
brown-skinned crews of pirates under the ship's side; and Parsee
money-lenders in shining hats on deck offering to change the money of
those who had any.

Ernie looked across to the land, lifting blue in the wondrous dawn--the
land that was to be his home for the next six years.




CHAPTER XIX

THE REGIMENT

Ernie joined his Battalion in the Central Provinces.  The Forest
Rangers, as famous in the South Country as the Black Watch in the
Highlands, and of far longer pedigree, was first raised from the
iron-ore workers by the Hammer Ponds on the Forest Ridge in the heart
of the then Black Country of England to meet the imminent onslaught of
the Spanish Armada.  In those days the Hammer-men, as they were called
familiarly from the start, watched the coast from the mouth of the Adur
to Rye and Winchelsea; and in the succeeding centuries they left their
bloody mark upon the pages of history, the memories of their
fellow-countrymen, and the bodies of the King's enemies.

The most ancient of English regiments, it carries on its colours more
honours than any but the 60th.  For more than three tumultuous
centuries it has been distinguished even in that British Infantry which
has never yet encountered in war its match or its master.  The splendid
foot-soldiers of Spain broke in Flanders before its thundering
hammer-strokes; in Flanders and elsewhere in later times the legions of
Imperial France surged in vain against its bayonets; and in our own day
the Prussian Guard, as insolent and vain-glorious as the veterans of
Napoleon, has recoiled before the invincible stubbornness of the
peasants of Sussex.

The officers were drawn almost exclusively from two or three of the
oldest public-schools.  Ernie found they were keen soldiers, and
efficient, immensely proud of their regiment, athletic, and
better-mannered than most.  But as a whole they were singularly stupid
men, deliberately blind to the wonders of the country in which they
lived, proud of their blindness, and cultivating their insularity.
There was one shining exception.

When the new draft paraded for inspection, a scarecrow Major wearing
the South African ribands walked slowly up and down the ranks with a
word for each man.  He was very tall, and so lean as to be almost
spectral.  His voice was charming and leisured, reminding Ernie of his
father.  He was friendly too, almost genial.  It was obvious that he
based his authority on his own spiritual qualities and not on the
accident of his position.  There was no rattling of the sabre, no
fire-eating, no attempt to put the fear of God into the hearts of the
recruits.

When he came to Ernie, he asked,

"What name?"

"Caspar, Sir."

The Major looked at the lad from beneath his sun-helmet with sudden
curiosity.

"Are you ..." he began, and pulled himself up short.  "I hope you'll be
happy as a Hammer-man," he said, and passed on.

Later he addressed the draft in a gentle little speech of the kind that
annoyed his brother-officers almost past bearing.

"You have all heard of Death and Glory," he began.  "Well, in this
country there's a certain amount of Death going about, if you care to
look out for it, but very little Glory.  You have also heard no doubt
from your mothers and the missionaries that the black man is your
brother.  It may be so.  But in this country there are no black men and
therefore no brothers.  There are brown men who are your remote
cousins; and they aren't bad fellows if you keep them in their place,
and remember your own.  On Sundays there is church for those who like
it; and the same for those who don't.  For the rest, whether you are
happy or the reverse depends in the main upon your health, and your
health depends in the main on yourselves.  Be careful what you drink,
and don't suck every stick of sugar-cane a native offers you.  Remember
you are Hammer-men and not monkeys.  Most of you are men of Sussex, as
are most of your officers; and we all know that the Sussex man wunt be
druv.  But discipline is discipline and must be maintained.  We don't
hammer each other more than we can help, nor do we hammer the natives
more than is good for them.  We exist to hammer the King's enemies.
And now I wish you all well and hope you'll find the Regiment a real
home."

Major Lewknor's long spidery legs carried him back to the bungalow
where his wife awaited him.

She was a little woman, clearly Semitic, fine as she was strong, with
eyes like jewels and the nose of an Arab.

"My dear," said the Major, "in your young days did you ever hear of one
Hans Caspar?"

"My Jock, did I ever hear of one Napoleon Buonaparte?" mocked his mate.
"What about him?"

"I was at Trinity with his son," replied the Colonel.

"We used to call him Hathri.  A charming fellow, and a brilliant
scholar, but----"

"What about him?" said Mrs. Lewknor, who seemed suddenly on the
defensive.

"His son has just joined us," answered the Major.  "In the ranks."

The lady handled the sugar-tongs thoughtfully.  Her memory travelled
back more than twenty years to a great ball in Grosvenor Square, and
the timid son of the house, a gawky, awkward fellow with a reputation
for shyness and brilliance.  He could not dance, but under the palms in
the conservatory, tête-à-tête, he could talk--as Rachel Solomons had
never heard a man talk yet--of things she had never heard talked about:
of a place called Toynbee Hall somewhere in the East End; of a little
parson named Samuel Barnett; of the group of young University
men--Alfred Milner, Arnold Toynbee, Lewis Nettleship--he and his wife
were gathering about them there with the aim of bridging the gulf
between Disraeli's Two Nations; of the hopes of a redeemed England and
a new world that were rising in the hearts of many.  That young man saw
visions and had made her see them too.  She had cut two dances to
listen to that talk, and when at last an outraged partner had torn her
away and Edward had said in his sensitive stuttering way, his face
shining mysteriously,

"Shall we ever meet again?"

She had answered with astonishing emphasis,

"We must."

But they never did.  Fate swung his scythe; her father died and she had
to abandon her London season.  Edward Caspar went abroad to study at
Leipzig.  And next winter she met her Hammer-man and launched her boat
on the great waters.

But she had never forgotten that mysterious half-hour in which the
trembling young man had knocked at her door, entered her sanctuary; and
she, Rachel the reserved, had permitted him to stay.

At that moment Reality had entered her life--unforgettable and
unforgotten.


India from the first tantalized Ernie.  It was for him a mysterious and
beautiful book, its pages for ever open inviting him to read, yet
keeping its secret inviolate from him; for he could not read himself
and there was no one to read to him.  His officers, capable at their
work, and good fellows enough in the main, Ernie soon discovered to be
illiterate to an almost laughable degree.  They not only knew nothing
outside the limited military field, but they took a marked professional
pride in their ignorance.

Ernie, used to his father's large philosophical outlook on any subject,
his scholarly talk, his learning, was amazed at the intellectual apathy
and crustacean self-complacency, sometimes ludicrous, more often naïf,
occasionally offensive, of those set in authority over him.

Major Lewknor was the solitary exception.  He was the one University
man in the Regiment, and, whether as the result of a more catholic
education or a more original temperament, he always stood slightly
apart from his brother-officers.  When he was a young man they had
mocked at him quietly; now that he was a field officer they stood
somewhat in awe of his ironical spirit.  Some of his more dubious
sayings were handed on religiously from last-joined subaltern to
last-joined subaltern.  The worst of them--his famous--_Patriotism is
the last refuge of every scoundrel_--was happily attributed by the Army
at large to a chap called Johnston who, thank God! was not a Hammer-man
at all, but a Gunner or a Sapper or something like that.  A Sapper
probably.  It was just the sort of thing you would expect a Sapper to
say: for Sappers wore flannel shirts and never washed.

But if the Major was undoubtedly critical of what was obsolete and
theatrical in the Service that he loved, few possessed a deeper
reverence or more intimate understanding of the much that was noble in
it.

"After the really grand ritual of a big ceremonial parade," he would
say, "when you actually do transcend yourself and become one with the
Larger Life, for grown men in an age like ours, to be herded at the
point of the bayonet into a tin-pot temple to hear a gramophone in a
surplice droning out an unintelligible rigmarole every Sunday in the
name of religion--why it is not only redundant, it's a blasphemous
farce that every decent man _must_ kick against."

In spite of his caustic humour the Major's passion for the Regiment, to
which he had given his life, steadfastly refusing all those
staff-appointments for which he was so admirably fitted, was genuine as
it was profound.  Because of it, his much-tried brother officers, who
loved him deeply if they feared him not a little, forgave him all.  And
if he was sadly unorthodox in many respects, as for instance that he
was not a hard and fast Conservative, he was jealously orthodox in
others as in that contempt for politicians which is almost an obsession
amongst the men of his profession, perhaps because to them it falls to
pay the price of the mistakes of their masters at Westminster.

The Major and his wife were in brief distinguished from their kind by
the fact that they were mentally alive, sympathetic, keen, and
knowledgeable.  They had passed most of their lives in the East, and
were of the few of their fellow-countrymen who had made the most of the
opportunities vouchsafed to them.  Indeed it was said in the Regiment
that what the pair didn't know about India was not worth knowing.

Once at a halt on a route-march Ernie saw the Major, standing gaunt and
helmeted in the shade of a banyan tree, take a pace out into the road.

A native, carrying two sealed pitchers slung from the ends of a bamboo,
was padding down the road in the dust between the ranks of the soldiers
who had fallen out.

The Major spoke to him, then turned to Ernie who was standing by.

"See that man, Caspar," he said quietly.  "He's a pilgrim.  He's
tramped all the way from Hardwar, the source of the Ganges, to get holy
water--seven hundred miles.  What about that for faith?"

"Fine, sir," said Ernie, with quiet enthusiasm.

"In the days of Chaucer we used to do the same kind of thing in
England," continued the Major.  "Ever read the 'Canterbury Tales'?"

"Dad's read em to me, sir--in bits like."

The Major moved away.

Close by a group of officers, whose faces clearly showed how profoundly
they disapproved of this conversation, were sprawling in the shade.
_That was the way to lose caste with the men_.  Amongst them was a
last-joined lad, chubby still; the other was Mr. Royal of Ernie's
company.

"What did the Major say he was?" asked the Boy keenly.

"I don't know what the Major said he was," answered Mr. Royal coolly.
"And between ourselves I don't greatly care.  _I_ know what he was.
And if you'll ask me prettily I might impart my information."

"What was he?" asked the Boy.

"He was a coolie," said Mr. Royal.  "India's full of them.  In fact
they're the dominant class."

"I thought he looked something a bit out of the ordinary," said the
snubbed Boy.

"Did you?" retorted Mr. Royal.  "I thought myself he looked as if he
wanted kicking.  And as I've got five years' service to your three
months it may be presumed that I'm right."




CHAPTER XX

ERNIE IN INDIA

The Regiment was wonderfully well run for the men on its social side,
for the Colonel was a bachelor, and much was trusted to Mrs. Lewknor.

She was at Ernie's bedside the day after he had his first attack of
fever.

The little lady, so delicate, yet so strong, stood above the lad whose
mother she might have been with a curious thrill.

He was so like his father, yet so unlike; and he was not only sick of
fever, but dreadfully homesick too.

Mrs. Lewknor knew all about that, and the cure for it.

"Tell me about your people, Caspar," she said, after the ice had been
broken.

The lad unloosed the flood-gates with immense relief.

He talked of Beachbourne, of Rectory Walk with the virginia-creeper on
the wall and the fig-tree at the back; of his mother, of Mr. Pigott,
even of Alf, and all the time of dad and the Downs.

On rising to go, Mrs. Lewknor said that when she came next day she
would read to him.

"What shall I read?" she asked.

"Would you read me Matthew Arnold's _Scholar-Gypsy_?" said the boy.

Mrs. Lewknor looked down at the lad with brilliant eyes.

"Is that your father's favourite?" she asked.

"One of them, 'm.  Wordsworth's the one."

There was only one man in the Regiment who possessed a Matthew Arnold,
but that man happily was Mrs. Lewknor's husband.

Next day, as the little lady read the familiar lines, Ernie lay with
eyes shut, the tears pouring down his face.

"Takes me right back," he said at last as she finished.  "I'm not here
at all.  I'm laying just above the Rabbit-walk over Beech-hangar, with
the gorse-pods snapping in the sun, and the beech-leaves stirring
beneath me, and old dad with his hat over his eyes and his hands behind
his head reciting."

That afternoon Mrs. Lewknor told Mr. Royal, who had dropped in to tea,
that she had been reading Matthew Arnold to a man in his company.

Mr. Royal looked blank.

He had cold, speedwell blue eyes, that seemed all the brighter for his
curly dark hair, a fine skin, rather pale, and an always growing
reputation for hard efficiency.

"Matthew Arnold!" he said.  "And who might Mr. Matthew Arnold be?"

He said it a thought aggressively.  It was clear that not only had he
never heard of Matthew Arnold, but that he would have considered it bad
form to have done so.

"I believe he was a poet who seldom went to church," said the Major in
the chi-chi voice which he could imitate to the life.

"Indeed," said Mr. Royal.  "A poet!--Ah, I'm too busy for that sort of
thing myself."  He said it with a crushing air of finality.

When he had gone, Mrs. Lewknor looked at her husband with deprecatory
eyes.

"My Jock," she said with a little sigh, "tell me!--Is it the
system?--is it the man?--What is it?"

The Major sat upright on a little hard chair.

His eyes twinkled maliciously in his somewhat bony head.  He looked
like a gaunt satyr.

"My dear," he said, "in the British Army you must do as the British
Army does.  And there is one thing which the British Army _Will Not_
tolerate, and that is--a cultivated mind."

"I don't think that's peculiar to the Army," replied Mrs. Lewknor.
"The attitude's characteristic of our race."

Mr. Royal was not in fact popular among his brother officers.  His
superiors complained that his manner was slightly insolent, his juniors
that it was so damn superior.  The men liked him for his efficiency,
and some women admired him--too much it was whispered.

Mrs. Lewknor followed Ernie's military career with quiet interest.  Not
that there was very much to follow: for Ernie, apart from the
cricket-field, had no career.

He did not seek promotion, and was not in fact offered it.  As Mr.
Royal very truly said,--"He can't come it enough to make an N.C.O."
The habit of authority indeed sat ill on his shoulders; but he was
liked by officers and men; and his cricket gave him a place in the
regimental team.

But there was little in Army life to do for Ernie the one thing
essential self demands--encourage growth; and not a little to repress
it.

When the first newness had worn off, Ernie was spiritually unsatisfied
and solitary.

The grosser vices of the men never appealed to him, and the men
themselves were not his sort.  To get away from them he sometimes
wandered far a-field, poking and prying into the temples of the various
sects, and not seldom found himself in the crowded streets of the
native city, a lonely khaki figure in a sun-helmet, regarding the
many-coloured crowd, and asking himself, in the philosophical way he
inherited from his father,

"What's the meaning of it all?"

It was on one of these rambles that the solitary incident of his career
in India occurred to him.

He was standing at the foot of the hill in the native city of Lahore,
watching the traffic in the narrow streets, when he saw a mem-sahib
driving a tum-tum slowly through the heavy ox-traffic.

The syce for some reason had descended, and the lady was alone.

Just then a huge elephant with painted sides came swinging down the
steep street, at the head of a religious procession, singing and
clashing cymbals.

The lady's pony, a dun country-bred, took fright and bolted.

Ernie saw her face, quite calm beneath her solar topee, as she rushed
past him, pulling at the run-away.  It was Mrs. Lewknor.

A few yards down the street the wheels of the tum-tum cannoned into a
sack borne by a small donkey.  The donkey, already tottering beneath
his load, collapsed and lay in the dust unable to rise.

The driver of the donkey, an unsavoury giant, pock-marked, abused the
mem-sahib.  A crowd gathered.  The religious procession was held up,
the elephant swinging his trunk discontentedly and spouting showers of
dust over his flanks.

Ernie didn't like the look of things, for it was common talk in the
lines that the native city was mutinous.

He came up quickly.  The presence of the man in khaki steadied the
crowd and stopped the chatter.

"Best get out of this, 'm," he suggested.  "They look a bit funny."

He took the pony's head and turned him.

"You get up alongside me then," said Mrs. Lewknor.

He obeyed.

The crowd made way.  The pock-marked man began again to beat his
donkey.  The procession resumed its march.

"One up for the Hammer-men!" the little lady laughed, as they emerged
from the gate of the native city.

"Yes, 'm," said Ernie.  "Only one thing.  The native city's out of
bounds for me."

Mrs. Lewknor smiled.

"I'm not one of the Military Police," she said....


That evening she put to her husband a question that had often puzzled
her.

"Why doesn't Caspar get on?" she asked.  "He's got twice the
intelligence of men who go over his head."

"My dear," replied the Major with the sententiousness that grew on him
with the greying years, "intelligence is the last thing we want in the
ranks of the Army.  Intelligence always leads to indiscipline.  The
Army wants in the lower ranks only one thing--what is called
'character.'  And by character it means the quality of the bull who
rammed his head against a brick-wall till he was unconscious and went
at it again when he came round saying--_My head is bloody but unbowed_."


During Ernie's years of service the Battalion moved slowly North,
exchanging the plains of the Central Provinces for the frosty nights
and red sand-hills of the Punjauh.

Major Lewknor became Colonel; and Mr. Royal adjutant.

Ern and the new Colonel were curiously sympathetic; Ern and the
adjutant the reverse.

It may be that the Colonel, unusual himself, and lonely because of it,
recognized a kindred spirit in the man; it may be that he never forgot
that Ern was the son of his old contemporary Hathri Caspar of Trinity;
or perhaps Mrs. Lewknor played an unconscious part in the matter.  It
is certain that on the one occasion Ern was brought before him in the
Orderly Room for a momentary lapse into his old weakness, the Colonel
merely "admonished" the offender.

Captain Royal, a ruthless disciplinarian, was aggrieved.

"He's such a rotten slack soldier, sir," he complained, after the
culprit, congratulating himself upon his escape, had disappeared.

"Isn't he?" said the Colonel, enjoying to the full the irritation of
his subordinate.  "That man'd be no earthly good except on service."

Even at the wicket indeed Ernie was only at his best when he had to
try.  A first-rate natural bat, he would have been left out of the
regimental team for slackness but that, as the Sergeant-Major said,

"Caspar's always there when you want him most."

In fact, Ernie ended his career in the Army with something of a
flourish.

The Regiment was playing the Rifle Brigade at Rawlpindi in the last
round for the Holkar Cup.  Half-way through the second day, when the
Hammer-men were batting, a rot set in.  There were still two hours to
play when the last man went in.

"Who is it?" asked Mrs. Lewknor, keen as a knife.

"Your friend, Caspar, Mrs. Lewknor," answered the senior subaltern, one
Conky Joe, with the beak of a penguin, the eyes of an angel, and the
heart of a laughter-loving boy.  "They're sending him in last for his
sins in the field--which were many and grievous."

"He won't live long against their fast bowler," commented the Boy
gloomily.  "I know Caspar."

"I never like to differ from my superiors," said the Colonel.  "But I'm
not so sure."

"Nor am I," said Mrs. Lewknor defiantly.

The Colonel and his wife proved right.  Ernie batted with astonishing
confidence from the first.  At the end of twenty minutes it was
anybody's game.  Royal, well into his second century, was flogging the
ball all over the ground.  And Ernie's clear voice--"Yes, sir!  No,
sir!  Stay where you are!" gave new heart to the watching Hammer-men.

In the end the two men played out time with consummate ease, and were
carried together off the ground.

"It was like bowling at two rocks," said one of the defeated side.

"Spiteful rocks too!" replied the other.  "Stood up and slashed at you!"

The Colonel went up and shook hands with the victorious batsmen, and
Mrs. Lewknor waved her parasol.

"Well done, Caspar!" she cried.  "Stuck it out!"

A few days later, his time being up, Ernie was detailed for a draft for
home.

The Colonel, on signing his papers, said that he was sorry to be
parting, and meant it.

"Charming fellow!" he said to the Adjutant, when Ern had left the room.

"Yes," answered Captain Royal in his lofty way.  "Too charming.  He'll
never be any good to himself or us either."

"I'm not so sure," replied the Colonel.  "He's the sort that never does
well except when he's got to."

That evening Ern went up to the Colonel's bungalow to say good-bye to
Mrs. Lewknor.

"Where are you going?" asked the little lady.

"Back home, 'm," Ernie answered.  "Old Town, Beachbourne.  There's no
place in the world to touch it."

Mrs. Lewknor smiled at his enthusiasm.

"I know it," she said.  "The Colonel comes from those
parts--Hailsham-way.  Perhaps we shall follow you when we retire."

"Beachbourne!" mused the Colonel, after Ernie had departed.  "Famous
for two things: Mr. Trupp, the surgeon, who by a brilliant operation
saved the other day the life of the man the world could have done best
without, and the Hohenzollern Hotel."

"What's the Hohenzollern Hotel?" asked Mrs. Lewknor.

"My dear," said the Colonel, "Captain Royal will enlighten you in his
more intimate moments."




CHAPTER XXI

THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER

That first return to England after his long absence in the East always
remained one of the land-marks in Ernie's life.  It was a revelation to
him, never completely to pass away.

The time was late April; the weather perfect.  The song of mating birds
rose from dew-drenched brake and bush on every hand; the spring lay
like a dream of gossamer on the hedges and woodlands; the lambs and
quiet cattle filled him with an immense content.  His heart rose up in
joy and thankfulness and humble love.

And his mates, it was clear to him, were experiencing the same
transfiguring emotion.  He was sure of it from the silence that grew on
them as they travelled through the radiant country-side from the port
at which they had landed, their noses glued to the windows of the
troop-train.  Gradually the vision possessed their souls like lovely
music.  The rowdiness, the silly songs, the bad jokes faded away.  An
awe stole over them as of men admitted into the Sanctuary and beholding
there for the first time the beauty of the Holy One unveiled before
them.

Now and then a quiet voice spoke out of the silence.

"Blime!  There's a rabbit!"

"There's an English serving-maid!"

"Ain't it all solid-like?"

That solidity was one of Ernie's abiding impressions too--the massive
character of this Western Civilization to which he was returning.  And
it stood, he was convinced, for something real: for it was based on a
foundation that only the blind and gross could call materialism.

The big-boned porters trundling tinkling milk-cans along the platforms
at a wayside station, the English faces, the square brick buildings,
the substantial coin, confirmed the thought.

"Solid!" he echoed in his father's vein.  "That's the word.  Give me
the West.  Back there it's all a little bit o gilded gimcrack."

Once the train stopped in an embankment lined with primroses and
crowned with woods, a sweet undercurrent of song streaming quietly up
to heaven, like the murmur of innumerable fairy-bees.

Ernie removed his cap; and the unuttered words in his heart, as in
those of his companions, were, "Let us pray!"


A few weeks later he stood on the platform of Victoria, discharged.

Deliberately he chose, to take him home, a train that stopped and
browsed at all the stations with the familiar English names as it made
its fussy way across the Weald through the very heart of Saxondom.

He sat in the corner, the window wide, the breeze upon his face,
without a paper, reading instead the countryside as a man reads in age
a poem beloved in his youth.

One by one he picked up the old land-marks--the spire of Cowfold
Monastery, slender against the West, Ditchling Beacon, Black Cap, and
the Devil's Dyke.

At Ardingly, where the train had stopped, it seemed, for lunch, he got
out.

The Downs were drawing closer now, the blue rampart of them seeming to
gather all this beauty as in a giant basin.

In the woods hard by a woodpecker was tapping.  He saw a cock pheasant
streaming in glorious flight over a broad-backed hedge.  And across the
hollow of the Weald cuckoos everywhere were calling, and flying as they
called.  He closed his eyes and listened.  The Weald seemed to him an
immense bowl of nectar, brimming and beaded.  He was floating in it;
and the tiny bubbles all about him were popping off with a soft
delicious sound--_Cuck-oo!  Cuck-oo!_

Then he came to earth to see the train bundling out of the station with
a callous grin.

It was significant of Ernie's weakness and his strength that he didn't
mind.  Indeed he was glad.

He left the station and plunged like a swimmer into the sea of sound
and colour, opening his chest and breathing it in.  The wealth of green
amazed him.  It filled and fulfilled his heart.  He caught it up in
both hands, as it were, and poured it over his thirsting flesh.
Abundant, yet light as froth, it overflowed all things, hedges, woods
and pastures; splashing with brightest emerald the walls and roofs of
the cottages, russet-timbered and Sussex-tiled.

Here and there in an old garden, set in the green, was a laburnum like
a fountain of gold, a splash of lilac in lovely mourning against the
yews, a chestnut lighted with a myriad spray of bloom.  The pink May
had succeeded the white; and clematis garlanded the hedges.  There was
a wonderful stillness everywhere, and the atmosphere was bright and
hard.  After a dry month the grass was very forward.  The oak-trees
stood up to their knees in hay that was yellow with buttercups, the
wind rustling through it like a tide.  The foliage of the oaks was
still faintly bronzed.  Steadfast, old, and very grim in all this
faerie, they bore themselves as lords of the Forest by right of
conquest and long inheritance.  Ernie nodded greeting at them.  Their
uncompromising air amused him.  They were not his tree: for he was a
hill-man; and the oaks belonged to the Weald, which in its turn clearly
belonged to them.  He did not love them; but he admired and respected
them for their sturdy independence of character, if he laughed a little
at their English self-righteousness and dogmatic air.  They were of
England too in their determination not to show emotion: for they
appeared not to be moving; yet he could see a wind was flowing through
them, while in the shadow of them mares-in-foal were flicking their
tails.

Ernie recognized with joy that he was returning to the country he had
left.

The gang of men he came on at the end of a lane, asphalting a
main-road, the rare car dashing along with a swirling tail of dust
between green hedges, disturbed but little his peace of mind.

He was home again--in Old England--the heart of whose heart was Sussex.

In the train again he sank back in a kind of pleasant trance.  Two
country-men in his carriage were talking in the old ca-a-ing
speech--_So cardingly I saays to herrr_....  Their undulating voices
rocked him to sleep.  He woke to find himself in Lewes, and his eyes
resting on the massif of Mount Caburn.

The train wandered eastwards under the Downs, past Furrel Beacon,
athwart the opening of the Ruther Valley.  The Long Man of Wilmington
stared bleakly at him from the flanks of hills that seemed sometimes
scarred and old and worn, at others rich with the mystery of youth.

The train ran through Polefax, where the line to Romney Marsh turns
off.  Then with a belated effort at sprightliness it hurried through
the sprawling outposts of Beachbourne.

The town had grown greatly, overspreading the foothills towards Ratton
and the woods of the Decoy and skirmishing across the marshes beyond
the gasworks, which, when he left, had marked the uttermost bounds of
civilization.




CHAPTER XXII

OLD TOWN

When Ern got out of the train on to the very platform where Alf, six
years before, had prophesied his return in glory, nothing much happened.

True, the conditions were not quite as Alf had foretold.  Rather the
reverse.  Whereas it was a dapper young clerk who had left Beachbourne,
it was a solid working-man who returned to it; one who by his clothes,
boots, hands, hair, and even walk, testified that he was of those who
bear on their shoulders the burden of our industrial civilization.  And
that perhaps was why the promised brass-band was conspicuous by its
absence, and there were present no fathers of the city expanding ample
paunches preparatory to delivering an address of welcome to the
returning soldier.  Instead there was upon the platform one unkempt
porter, who took his ticket very casually, and when asked by Ern
whether he recognized him, replied with more honesty than tact that he
didn't know but thought not.

"See, I sees so many," he remarked apologetically.

"I'm Ernie Caspar," said Ernie, noting with critical military eye that
the other did not seem to have had his hair cut since last they met.
"I was at the Moot School along o you.  Aaron Huggett, aren't it?"

The porter's face betrayed a flicker of sardonic interest.

"I expagt you'll be Alf Caspar's brother," he said.

"That's it," Ernie answered, a thought sourly.

Back in Beachbourne he was not himself; he was just his younger
brother's brother, it seemed.

Things were not quite as he had expected.  Everywhere was a subtle
change of atmosphere.  Beside the book-stall now stood a sentry-box
with glass doors.  In it a man with something to his ear was talking to
himself.

Ernie felt somehow disconsolate.

Outside the station, in Cornfield Road, he paused and took in the scene.

There was more traffic than of old, and it was swifter.  In the country
from which he came the ox was still the principal motive-power upon the
roads: here clearly horses were becoming out of date.

He asked a policeman when the bus for Old Town ran.

"There she is," said the man, pointing.  "On the bounce!"

Just across the street, under the particular plane-tree the starlings
haunted of evenings, where in the past old Huggett in his bottle-green
coat would wait indefinitely with his mouldy pair of browns, there
stood a gaudy motor-bus, decked on top.  A spruce conductor was pulling
the bell sharply; and a board on which were printed the starting-times
hung from a neighbouring lamp.  It was all very precise, powerful, and
efficient.  Ernie was not sure whether he liked it or not.

But he had little time to think.  This mechanical monster was not the
old gentlemanly horse-bus with its easy tolerance.  It gave no law and
knew no mercy.  It was swift and terrible; and its heart was of the
same stuff as its engines.

He crossed the road and leapt on to the great lurching thing.

Carelessly it bore him along the Old Road to Lewes and then swung away
under the Chestnuts into Water Lane.

Here at least nothing had changed but the vehicle that carried him.  On
his left was Saffrons Croft, just as of old, with its group of splendid
elms and the Downs seen through the screen of them; in front on the
hill, above the roofs of Old Town, the church-tower with its squat
spire, bluff against a background of green.

Two ladies were walking down the hill, a middle-aged and gracious
mother, escorted by a tall daughter.

Ernie's neighbour nudged him confidentially.

"Mrs. Trupp," he said.

Ernie leaned over.  Except for the silver in her hair, his god-mother
had altered little; but he would hardly have recognized in the stately
young woman who walked at her side the flapper who had waved him
good-bye from the nursery-window years before.

His neighbour was conveying to him information about the great surgeon.

"He's our greatest man by far.  Mr. Trupp _of Beachbourne_.  They come
from all parts to him.  He saved the Tsar of Dobrudja--when all the
rest had taken to their prayers."

"Ah," said Ernie, "I think I ave eard of im."

The bus, for all its rushing manners of a parvenu, stopped opposite the
_Star_; but the old beam across the road was gone.

Ernie felt himself aggrieved, and complained to the conductor as he got
down.

"Well, you didn't want your head took off every time, did you?" said
that unsympathetic worthy.

Ernie strolled up Church Street, living his past over again.  Here at
least he found the rich, slow atmosphere he had expected.  There was
the long-backed church standing massive and noble as of old on its
eminence above the Moot; beneath it in the hollow the brown roof of the
Quaker Meeting-house; and on his left the little ironmonger's shop
outside which Alf had seen Mrs. Pigott and her dog Sharkie on the fatal
day they sacked the walnut-tree.

At Billing's Corner he was reassured to find the high flint-wall that
ran at the back of Rectory Walk making its old sharp corner and the
fig-tree peeping over it.  The Rectory, too, still stood in pharisaic
aloofness amid gloomy evergreens.  And out of it was coming the Rector,
walking mincingly just as of yore.

That finikin old man had not changed much at all events, and yet ...
and yet ... as he came closer, Ernie was aware of some subtle spiritual
difference here too.  At first he thought the Rector had grown.  Then
he recognized that the change was in the top-hat and those tall
attenuated legs.  They were clothed in gaiters now, and gave the wearer
just that air of old-world distinction it was his passion to assume.

In fact pseudo-Canon Willcocks had in Ernie's absence become
Archdeacon, to his own ineffable satisfaction and that of his lady.
Now he marched down the middle of the road with his hands behind his
back, in the meditative pose he always hoped passers-by would mistake
for prayer.

Ernie touched his hat; and the Archdeacon with an air of royal
indifference imitated to the life from his hero, the late Emperor of
the French, acknowledged the salute with an "Ah! my friend!" and
titupped delicately upon his way.

Ernie, grinning, turned the corner and stopped short.

He had little notion as to what was before him.

During his absence his mother's letters, it is true, had been very
regular and most curt.  It was indeed astonishing how little she had
contrived to tell him.  His father, on the other hand, had written
seldom but at length, yet never mentioning home-news; while Alf, of
course, had not written at all.

Ernie was therefore in the dark as to the welcome awaiting him.

The Downs at the end of the Walk greeted him; but a row of red-brick
villas on the far side the New Road imposed a barrier between him and
them.  True, they nodded at him friendly over the intruding roofs; but
he was shut out from the great Coombe which of old had gathered the
shadows in the evening and echoed in the spring to the melancholy
insistent cry of lambs.

All around the builder had been busy.

When he left, the windows of Rectory Walk had looked across over rough
fields to the Golf Links and Beech-hangar beyond.  Now detached houses
on the westward side of the road blocked the view.

His own home at least had changed not at all.  The virginia-creeper was
brilliant as ever on its walls; the arabis humming with bees beneath
the study-window.

As he passed through the gate, his mother, who must have been waiting,
opened to him quietly, and held up a warning finger.

She was beautiful still, but showing wear, as must a woman of fifty,
who has never spared herself.  Her hair was now snow-white; her
complexion, as seen in the passage, fine as ever; her eyes the same
startling blue under fierce brows, but the lines about them had an
added kindness.

She led past the study-door into the kitchen, walking a little stiffly,
her bones more apparent than of old.

Ern followed her with a smile, his hand scraping the familiar varnished
paper, his eye catching that of the converted drain-pipe.

She was still clearly a woman of one idea--dad.

Cautiously his mother closed the door of the kitchen behind him.  Then
she turned and put her hands upon his shoulders.

There was something yearning in her gesture as of a puzzled child
asking an explanation.  Ern's quick intuitions told him that since he
had last seen her his mother had lost something and was missing it.
This he noticed and her hands--how worn they were.  Fondly he kissed
them, realizing a little wistfully that his mother now was an old woman.

She smiled at him.

"Let me see you," she said, and her eyes dwelt upon his face.  For the
first time in his life he felt that his mother was depending on him,
and was moved accordingly.

"You're changed," she said at last.  "You're a man now.  But your eyes
are the same."

"How's dad?" he asked.

She withdrew from his arms and turned away.

"He's an old man now, Ernie," she said....  "He's not what he was....
I don't rightly know what to make of him....  He goes to Meeting now."
She was puzzled and pathetic.

"Has he turned Quaker?" asked Ernie.

"He says not."

Just then quiet music sounded from the study.

"Is that dad?" asked Ernie, amazed.

His mother nodded.

"One of them new-fangled machines.  Pianolas, don't they call em?  I
give him one for his birthday."

Ernie listened in awed silence.

"That's Beethoven," he said.  "I'd know it anywhere....  In old days we
used to have to go out for that, me and dad did."

The music ceased.

"Now," said his mother, and opened the kitchen-door.




CHAPTER XXIII

THE CHANGED MAN

Ernie went to the study-door and knocked.

"Come in," said a voice that surprised him by its firmness.

He entered.

His father stood before the fireplace almost as he had left him, save
that he had discarded his dressing-gown for a loose long-tailed
morning-coat of the kind worn by country gentlemen in the eighties.
Physically he had changed very little, spiritually it was clear at the
first glance that he was another man.  The dignity which had
distinguished him at the moment of parting had become his permanent
possession.  Some shining wind of the spirit blowing through his
stagnant streets had purged him thoroughly.  His colour was fresh as a
child's, his eyes steady and hopeful, and there was a note of quiet
exaltation about him, of expectation.

"Boy-lad," he said in deeper tones than of old, as they shook hands.

Ernie looked round like one lost.

The room, too, was as greatly changed as its inmate.  But for a bowl of
crimson roses on the book-shelf it might have been called austere.  The
Persian rug had gone, the writing-table was bare of the familiar
manuscript.  The book-shelves had disappeared to make way for a piano.
The walls were still brown, and from them Lely's Cavalier looked down
with faintly ironical eyes upon his descendants.  It was the only
picture on the walls.

"Where are the books then, dad?" Ernie asked.

"I sent them down to Fowler's," the other answered.  "I've done with
books--all except those."

He pointed to a single row, perhaps a dozen in all, among which Ernie
recognized the blue backs of the Golden Treasury Series, the old
edition of Wordsworth, homely as the poet himself, and a little
brown-paper bound new Testament.

Ernie sat down.  Now he understood that pathetic look in his mother's
eyes.  His father was no longer dependent on her; and she was missing
that dependency as only a woman who has given her life to propping an
invalid can miss it.

"Have you joined the Friends, dad?" he asked earnestly.

The old man shook his head.

"I shall never join another sect.  They're nearest the Truth, it seems
to me--a long way nearest.  But they aren't there yet.  None of us are."

Ernie considered his father, sitting opposite him as of old, and yet
how changed!  In those familiar blue eyes he detected now a dry
twinkle, as of an imp dancing amid autumn leaves.

Suddenly the imp leapt out and tickled him.

Ernie flung back in his chair and laughed.

The old man opposite nodded sympathetically.

Then the door in the hall opened.

Somebody had entered the passage, and was stumbling over the bag Ernie
had left there.

Ernie ceased to laugh; and the imp to twinkle.

"That's your brother," said the old man almost harshly.

Ernie made no move.  In the passage outside Alf was shifting the
bag--with curses.

"Does he live here still?" asked Ernie, low.

"Yes," said his father.  "He's got a garage of his own now.  He's
getting on."

"Shall I go and see him?" asked Ernie.

"There's nothing to see," his father answered in that new dry note of
his.  "But you'd better go and see it perhaps," he added.

Ernie rose reluctantly and went into the passage.  Alf's voice came
from the kitchen, dogmatic and domineering.

"Him or me.  That's flat," he was saying.  "House won't hold us both."

Ernie swaggered into the kitchen.

Alf was standing before the fire, very smart and well-groomed.  He wore
a double-breasted waistcoat, festooned by a watch-chain, from which
hung a bronze cross.  A little man still, with an immense head, his
shoulders appeared broad in their padded coat; but the creases in his
waistcoat betrayed his hollow chest and defective physique, and his
legs were small and almost shrunken in their last year's Sunday
trousers.

Ernie advanced on his brother.

"All right, Alf, old son," he said.  "No need to get yer shirt out.
I'm not a-goin to force myself on no one."

"Al-_fred_, if you please," answered Alf, planted before the fire and
caressing a little waxed moustache, which had come into being during
Ernie's absence.

"Oh, you are igh," laughed Ernie.

"I am Al-_fred_ to me own folk and Mr. Caspar to the rest," answered
Alf, dogged and unbending.

"Come, Alf, shake hands with your brother!" scolded his mother.

Alf, his eyes still averted, extended a surly hand mechanically from
the shoulder.

Ern, white and flashing, took the hand.

"There's for my brother!" he said.  "And there's for Alf!" and tossed
it from him.

Then he went out.

His bag was still in the hall.  He was about to take it up when his
father called him from the study.

"You're going to stop here?" he asked; and Ernie detected a touch of
the old anxiety in his voice, a suggestion of the old tremulousness in
his face and figure.

In all the tuzzles between the two brothers, Alf had over Ern the
incalculable material advantage of the man who is not a gentleman over
the man who is.

"I just got to go down and see Mr. Pigott after a job, dad," Ern
answered soothingly.  "I'll be round again later."

He went out of the house, shutting the door quietly behind him.

Anne Caspar heard it go, and looking out into the passage saw that the
bag had vanished too.

"He's gone," she said.

"Army manners," muttered Alf.

"You've drove him out," continued his mother.

"Ave I?" said Alf, cleaning his nails with a penknife.  "I got my way
to make.  I don't want no angers-on to me....  Comin back on us a
common soldier--not so much as a stripe to his arm, let alone a full
sergeant.  A fair disgrace on the family, I call it."

"All for yourself always," said his mother censoriously.

"Who else'd I be for then?" asked Alf, genuinely indignant.

"You might be for the church," answered Anne grimly.




CHAPTER XXIV

ALF

If Ernie was now the working-man, Alf on his side was very much the
gentleman.

He dressed the part to the best of his ability; and--when he
remembered--even tried to talk it.

But he had not arrived at his present position without a struggle.

When he was through his apprenticeship, he left Hewson & Clarke, and
inducing his mother to lend him a little capital, started a car and
garage of his own in the Chestnuts between Old Town and the station.

At first he did not prosper.  The horse-industry, with a tradition of
tens of thousands of years behind it, would not yield its pride of
place without a struggle.  Competitors were many and fierce.  And just
when he believed that he was finding his feet at last, a big London
Syndicate started the Red Cross Garages throughout Kent and Sussex.

Alf for the first time felt the full weight of capitalism--the
Juggernaut with Mammon at the wheel that crushes beneath its rollers
the bodies and souls of the weak and impotent.

His sense of helplessness embittered him.

His garage was empty; his car in little request; he had few repairs.
Old Town at one end of Beachbourne and Holywell on the foot-hills under
Beau-nez at the other were the quarters of the resident aristocracy
amongst whom it was the convention to avoid "the front" as bad form.
These clung to their sleek pairs and cockaded coachmen just as they
clung to the Church and Joseph Chamberlain and the belief, so often
re-affirmed by Archdeacon Willcocks, that Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was
the one man living who knew how to rule the masses.  _The firm hand,
sir!_

The doctors, on the other hand, were beginning to possess little cars
of their own which they drove themselves or had driven for them; while
the progressive Town Council started motor buses and deprived Alf of
some station-work.  Mr. Pigott, now a radical alderman, was responsible
for this last injustice.

Alf knew it, and in revenge, ceased to attend chapel.

Mr. Pigott, with an unerring eye for the defaulters of his flock,
marked his absence and tackled the lost sheep on the subject.

"You've given up God then!" he said, fierce and frowning.

"There ain't none," answered Alf, as brief and brutal.  "Where there's
no justice, there can't be no God."  His little eyes sparkled
dreadfully.  "Look at young Albert Hewson.  He went through the shops
with me.  Is he as good an engineer as me?--Can he strip an engine same
as me?--Can he turn to the thousandth part of an inch?--Ask the chaps
in the yard.  Yet because he's got all the money, been to Rugby and
Oxford, they make him deputy-chairman of the Red Cross Syndicate at
£1,000 a year straight from the shop, and Managing Director of
Ball-Bearings, Limited, and I don't know what all."

He became a violent Socialist; spent his Sundays attending Labour
demonstrations in the East-end; read Robert Blatchford in the
_Clarion_; and sulked with his mother.

For a moment he even contemplated the abandonment of his ambitions.

When Mr. Pigott, after his second marriage, finally gave up
schoolmastering and became Manager of the Southdown Transport Company,
Alf applied for the position of working foreman.

The application was discussed at a meeting of the Directors.

"He's the chap that made the wage-slave speech to the Engineers at the
Salvation Army Citadel on Labour Day," said one.

"What d'_you_ think, Pigott?" asked another.

"I won't have Alf Caspar in my yard," replied the Manager with
characteristic emphasis.  "I know Alf."

"Then that settles it," said the chairman.

Alf rightly attributed his defeat to his old schoolmaster.

"So you've turned me down, Mr. Pigott," he said, stopping the other in
Church Street a few days later.

Mr. Pigott, like most professing pacifists, was always ready for a
fight.

"I thought you wanted to be a master-man!" he cried.  "And here you're
applying for a job as a wage-slave--to use your own term."

Alf was white, trembling, and sour-faced.

"All I want is a fair chance," he said doggedly.  "And if I don't get
it there'll be trouble."  He came a step closer.  His eyes were down,
and he looked dangerous.  "See here, Mr. Pigott--if you turn on
full-steam same time you seal up the safety-valve, something'll burst.
That's science, that is."

Mr. Pigott was not at all dismayed.

"Now look here!" he said.  "You take a pull, young man.  You're going
altogether too far and too fast.  And I'm speaking not as a magistrate
but as your old school-master."

At the Bowling Green Committee that evening, while the minutes were
being read, he retailed the incident to Mr. Trupp.

"That little ewe-lamb o yours is turning tiger because he can't have it
all his own way," he said.  "Going to upset Society because he's not
King."

Mr. Trupp was amused.

"Arrested development," he said.  "He's an interesting study in
pathology."

"Criminal pathology," muttered Mr. Pigott.

Whether in the interests of Science, or of expediency, next day Mr.
Trupp rolled into Alf's garage, with a blue long-dog, a descendant of
the original _She_, wearing the studded collar of her ancestress, at
his heels.

No man had made a stiffer fight against the new and aggressive
locomotive than the great surgeon.

Pests of the road, he called them, and refused to recognize his friends
when driving them.  He affirmed that they upset his horses and his
patients; made the place stink; and whirled through the country-side
disseminating disease in clouds of dust.  But he was no fool, and
increasingly busy.  A machine that could whisk him over to Lewes in
little more than thirty minutes, and land him at the Metropole in
Brighton in the hour, was not to be scoffed at.

Alf was cleaning his car when Mr. Trupp, greatly muffled in spite of
the heat, strolled into his yard.

"Look here, Alf," growled the great man.  "I'm never going to own one
of those things.  But I've got to use one to get about.  If you like to
do my driving we'll arrange something."

Alf's attitude to life changed in the twinkling of an eye.

He bustled home that evening, a new man.

"All O.K.," he called to his mother.  "I got me first contract."

"What?" she asked sullenly.

"Driving for Mr. Trupp."

She took a saucepan off the fire.

"Then you're a made man," she said; and she did not exaggerate.

The job, or as Alf preferred to call it, the contract, meant honour; it
meant money; it meant--above all--a start.  Mr. Trupp had been for long
the first surgeon in Sussex: since the operation, as daring as
discreet, by which he had preserved the life of a Balkan Tsar to
disgrace a throne, his fame had become world-wide.

That evening, uplifted on a wave of humility and thankfulness, Alf
walked to Mr. Pigott's house and apologized to him.

"I said a lot of silly things, I know," he said.  "There is a God and a
good God too."

Mr. Pigott was sitting with his new wife, who was as much his junior as
the first had been his senior.

She was a young woman, with a mischievous face and bright hair.

"He'll be glad to have you on His side again," she remarked demurely.
"He was missing you."

Mr. Pigott scowled melodramatically at the offender.

She refused to catch his eye, busy with her work.

"Five pound a week isn't a bad God as times go," she went on.

Alf smirked.

"It's seven pound ten," he said, and withdrew.

"Elsie Pigott!" roared her husband, when the outside door had shut.

"Sir!" answered his bride, and added--"Mr. Trupp's taken him on....
Mrs. Trupp's furious...."

Alf, in spite of his access of faith, never returned to chapel.

As he remarked to his mother,

"I got me principles.  And I must stick to em."

"That's it," said his mother.  "Stick to em--until you want to change
em."

Anne Caspar cherished now no illusions about her second son.

She no longer cared for Alf--for he was no longer dependent on her; nor
did she respect him.  But his naïveté, the outrageous sincerity of his
egotism, appealed to a certain grim sense of humour she possessed.




CHAPTER XXV

THE CHURCHMAN

Alf, with all his faults, had at least the supreme virtue of the animal
living in a fiercely competitive world: he never missed a chance.

A year after he began to drive for Mr. Trupp, he had a second car, a
man driving for him, and another on repairing work.

Success sugared his political outlook, just as defeat had soured it.
Like most really hard men, he saved himself in his own eyes by becoming
a thorough-going sentimentalist.  In the course of a year or two, King
and Country had become the objects of his ferocious admiration; while
the masses of his countrymen were to be dealt with as ruthlessly as
expediency and the Vote would allow.

"Traitors, I call em," he confided to his new friend, the Reverend
Spink.  "All for their fat selves all the time.  Never think of you and
me.  They fair give me the hiccoughs."

At the General Election of 1906 he came out fearlessly for God and the
Conservative Party.

The two candidates for West Beachbourne were, as all decent men
admitted, the worst who ever stood for a constituency.  The sitting
member had just received that which he entered Parliament to obtain--a
Baronetcy; and his solitary ambition now was to be defeated.
Unfortunately an aspiring wife had other views to which her spouse had
to give way.

His opponent, on the other hand, had, according to the enemy, recently
emerged "from a home of rest" in order to contest the constituency.

At the preceding Khaki Election the Conservative candidate, who was an
undoubtedly fine whip, had secured the "Triumph of Right," as
Archdeacon Willcocks finely called it, by the simple process of driving
a well-appointed team through the constituency.

"I'll vote for them 'orses," had been the general verdict.

The victor now repeated his tactics.

On polling day, as a reward for his strenuous labours in the good
cause, Alf was given a ride on the top of the coach among the very pick
of England's aristocracy.  In that fair company he meandered from
public-house to public-house all a winter's afternoon, singing with his
hosts hymns and spirituous songs.

In Cornfield Road, opposite the _White Hart_, Mr. Pigott, red and dusty
from the battle, saw him ensconced on that bad eminence among the
crimson faces and flowery hats of the enemy.

"You've changed your coat to some purpose," he bawled.

Alf leaned down.

"Yes, sir," he said quietly.  "I've learned a bit, and I'm not ashamed
to admit it."

The beery riders raised an aggressive cheer.  And the son and heir of
the candidate, snatching the horn from the hand of a footman, blew a
strident blast in the ear of the outraged schoolmaster.

Alf's candidate was returned, to his no small chagrin--one of the few
Tories to survive the democratic deluge of that year.

"Just a remnant of us," as Alf remarked pathetically to the Archdeacon,
"that 'as not bowed the knee to Bile."

Thus earlier in life even than most of us, Alf joined the Big
Battalions of those who, secure themselves, mean to make capital out of
the insecurity of others.

"I'm a high old Tory," he would tell Lady Augusta Willcocks
truculently.  "And I don't care who knows it."

And finding quickly the necessity for, and advantage of, a religious
sanction for a position that was morally untenable, he threw himself
upon the bosom of the Church; and in that comfortable and accommodating
community which opens wide its gates to all who prefer the Path of
Compromise to the Road that leads up Calvary, he found the sustenance
of which he stood in need.

Alf effected the change of religious community with considerable tact.

He began quite simply by touching his hat to the junior curate of the
parish church, when he met him in the street.

The Reverend Spink, who was a man of much the same class as Alf, was
highly gratified and uplifted.

Then Alf took to saying very shyly,

"Good morning, sir," hurrying past in order not to impede by his
unworthy presence the great man's view.

Next he took to dropping in to the Reverend Spink's addresses for "men
only."

Here he made himself conspicuous by his thoughtfulness and the
corrugations in his brow as he imbibed the teachings of his master.

One day he asked, with some confusion and stumblings of speech, a
question so easy that even the curate could answer it.

Alf nodded, well satisfied.

The curate swelled in the spirit.  This catechumen at the least knew
what was what.

Next day Alf, greatly daring, stopped the evangelist in the street.

"Beg pardon, sir," he began diffidently.  "About what you was saying
last night about them Proper Prefaces..."

The curate amplified his explanation.

Alf drank in the milk of the Word, nodding his head.

"Ah, I never thought of that!" he said.

"Look here!" said the curate with sudden warmth.  "If you're interested
in those sort of things..."

The naughty devil who possessed Alf bobbed out and almost undid him.

"What!--Proper Prefaces!" he said, and added hastily--"and the things
appertaining to em!--religion and that."

"That's what I mean," said the curate.  "Come round to my rooms on
Friday.  Some of us meet there once a week.  Jolly fellows.  Come and
smoke a pipe and chat!"

The Reverend Spink was deeply tainted with the hearty bon-camarade
method which the Bishop of Fulham had recently introduced into the
Church to enable it to float on the flowing democratic tide.

After that Alf went often.

The curate, who had made inquiries, found that Alf had once been,
according to report, "a roaring, raving Socialist and atheist!"

"Shockin the things he used to say!" his informant told him.  The
curate, who was all out for sensation, was thrilled.  Here was a catch
indeed!--If he could but bring it off!--What wouldn't the dear Bishop
of Fulham say?

His prayers were answered more swiftly than he had anticipated.

In a month the Reverend Spink had led his penitent to the baptismal
font.

Alf, asked if he would like any of his people to be present at the
ceremony, had shaken his head.

"See where it is, sir, Mother's chapel.  She'll never forgive me--not
but what I'll put up with that if it's right.  And dad's I don't know
what.  I don't know that he knows himself."

The only people Alf invited to attend were Mrs. Trupp and her daughter.
They refused politely.

As Bess said to her mother with the firmness of youth, "We are on
Ernie's side.  Dad may forget, but we don't."

A few weeks later the Reverend Spink went to call on Alf's father.

After he had left, Mrs. Caspar heard strange sounds in the study.  She
went to the door and listened.

Then she opened and peeped in.

Edward Caspar was laughing as she had never seen him laugh in twenty
odd years of married life.  The tears were streaming down his face, his
head was thrown back and his body convulsed.

His wife regarded him with dour sympathy.

"What is it?" she asked hardly.

Her husband wiped his eyes shamefacedly.

"Nothing," he said.  "Only the curate's been converting me."

That evening, as he went to bed, he peered over the banisters, and said
in his grave way to Alf in the kitchen,

"I hope your friend Mr. Spink'll come again."

Alf reported the incident next day to the curate, adding,

"I will say this for dad.  He is broad."

Mr. Trupp heard of his chauffeur's conversion.

"You're church then now, Alf," he said.

"Yes, sir," replied the other with the curious naïveté of blunted
susceptibilities.  "More classier.  See, I'm getting on now."


And Alf did not stop at baptism.

He was thorough in religious as in secular affairs.

Next spring, after a careful preparation by the Reverend Spink, he was
confirmed by the Bishop and afterwards admitted a member of the C.E.M.S.

After the ceremony, the Bishop inquired of the Rector, in the vestry,
who the young man with the immense head might be.

Archdeacon Willcocks always wore a little white imperial in reverent
imitation of his master, Louis Napoleon.  His cult of the Third Emperor
was perhaps the most genuine thing about him, and had endured for fifty
years.  But for a stern no-nonsense father he would have deserted
Cambridge in '70 to fight for a cause already lost.  And he had never
forgiven the scholar at his gate who had told him that his favourite
had painted his face before Sedan.

"What if he did?" he had asked sourly.

"Nothing," Edward Caspar had answered.  "Only it's interesting."

"I don't believe he did."

"Did you never read Zola's _Débâcle_?" asked the other gently.

"Nevah!" cried the Archdeacon, on firm church-ground now.  "I don't
read Zolah!"

"Ah," said Edward.  "Pity..."

The Archdeacon looked like a gentleman, and, to do him justice, tried
hard to live up to his looks.  With this end in view he had married--to
his no small gratification, and that of his mother--the daughter of a
Victorian Earl.  In the days before he became an Archdeacon he
habitually wore a top-hat, slightly battered to signify that the
wearer, while an aristocrat, was not a new one.  A sedulous attendant
on the rich of the parish, he visited the poor by proxy; and yet by the
simple process of taking off his hat with a sweep to every
cottage-woman in the Moot who vouchsafed him a good-morning on his rare
passages through that district, he maintained an easy reputation among
the more conservative of the working-class as a Christian and a
gentleman.

Archdeacon Willcocks was in fact a snob, but he was not a cad; whereas
his junior curate was both.  When, therefore, the Bishop made inquiries
as to Alf, the Archdeacon gave the glory to his subordinate.

"Spink got hold of him," he said.  "He was a dangerous Socialist, I
believe."

The Bishop regarded with approval the chubby young man with the pursed
mouth, wondering whether he should transfer him to the industrial
East-end or the slums of Portslade.

A thorough-going man of the world, like most of his type, he was quite
astute enough to see that the real enemy of the Institution he
represented was the Labour Party; and that the danger from this quarter
was growing, and would continue to grow.

When Alf returned home from the ceremony in the parish-church, his
mother was taking off her bonnet in the kitchen.

She eyed him with sardonic mirth as he entered.

"Feel a change?" she asked.

"What's that?"

"Since he done it."

"Was you there then?" asked Alf.

"I was."

Alf was entirely unabashed.

"I must go with me conscience," he said, "if it was ever so."

"And we all know which way your conscience goes, Alf," his mother
answered.

"Which way's that then?"

"The way the money goes."

Alf was not in the least offended.  Indeed he was rather pleased.  He
stood in his favourite position in the window with his back to his
mother and cleaned his nails with a pen-knife.

"Crucified for conscience' sake," he muttered.  "I dare say I'm not the
first, nor I won't be the last neether."

Alf was confirmed into the church, and persecuted for it by his mother,
a few weeks before his brother's return home.




CHAPTER XXVI

MR. PIGOTT

Ernie, bag in hand, and sore of heart, sauntered along to the end of
Rectory Walk.

There Beech-hangar, swirling in the wind under the shoulder of the
Downs that shut off Beau-nez, called to his wounded spirit.

He walked slowly along the New Road, away from the houses, across the
Golf Links towards this favourite retreat of his boyhood where of old,
when in trouble with his mother, he would retire.

There on the slope amid the beech-trees, the Links billowing away
before him to the woods that ambushed the Duke's Lodge, he lay down.
The smooth stems rose about him like columns in the choir of a church.
The wind strayed amid a sea of sun-lit leaves.  The cool, the comfort,
the bright graciousness of these comrades of his youth soothed and
satisfied him.  He studied them with kind eyes.  The harsh male quality
of the oak was not theirs.  They could not stand the buffeting of Time
as did the fierce old warriors of the Weald; but they could sustain the
spirit in the hour of need.  They were for him the women among trees.

Ernie lay with his eyes shut, and his hands behind his head, listening
to the wind flowing through the tree-tops.  The murmur of flies, the
under-song of birds, the moving stillness, the secret stir of life,
filled him to overflowing.

Alf had made him feel an isolated atom, the sport of incredibly cruel
devils.  Now he knew that he was part of an immense and harmonious
whole.  The sense of dislocation, exile and disease passed away.  His
mind was an open cistern into which a myriad healing streams were
pouring from an unknown source.

Who was Alf to disturb his peace of mind?  Alf, the puny, the
pretentious, who was not really alive at all.  There was something
greater in the world than Alf, and that something was on his side.  He
was sure of it.

He sat up and laughed.

Then above the murmur of insects and birds the louder hum of Man and
his machinery, setting the world to rights, stole in upon his mind.

Two groundmen were mowing the green just under the Hangar.

It was time to be moving.


He sauntered back along the New Road, eyeing the spruce villas on the
northern side, where of old allotment gardens had been.

At the corner of Church Street he asked a policeman where Mr. Pigott
lived now.

The man pointed down the Lewes Road, now fringed with houses.

The old schoolmaster had, it seemed, left Huntsman's Lodge at the foot
of the Downs, and moved in nearer to his work when he became Manager of
the South Downs Transport Co.

Ernie rambled down the dusty hill, the Downs upon his left, picking up
familiar objects as he went--the Moot Farm standing up like an elm-girt
island from the sea of arable, the long low backs of the Duke's
piggeries, the path that wound across the plough and led over the hill
to far Aldwoldston in the Ruther Valley.

A young woman with provocative eyes and brightly burnished hair came to
the door at his knock and scanned him friendly.

"Is Mr. Pigott in?" Ernie asked.

"He's at his office."

"Could I see Mrs. Pigott then?"

She eyed him merrily.

"You are seeing her," she said; and added, enjoying his embarrassment,
"I'm number two.  My predecessor sleeps at the back."  She tossed her
bright head in the direction of the cemetery on Rodmill seen through
the open back-door.

Ernie blushed and fumbled.

"I'm Ernie Caspar, Miss--I would say Ma'am."

The young woman regarded him with swift and sympathetic interest.

"Oh, I know _you_," she said.  "You used to write from India....  So
Mr. Pigott never mentioned _me_!  I'll just speak to him when he comes
in."

She saw the bag in his hand, and her mouth became firm.

"Been to see your people?"

"Just looked in on dad, 'm."

She eyed him sharply.

"And your brother?"

Ern said nothing.

"Well then, you leave your bag here, and step across the Moot to the
office.  _Southdown Transport Co._, back of the _Star_ by the Quaker
Meeting-house.  You'll sleep the night here."

Ernie crossed the brickfields, passed his old school where the children
were singing the evening hymn, under the church upon the Kneb, through
what the old inhabitants still called Ox-steddle Bottom, where once his
father had pointed out to him the remains of Roman byres.

The office was in Borough Lane.

Mrs. Pigott had warned her husband by telephone.

Ernie therefore was shown into the inner sanctum at once.

Mr. Pigott, grizzled now, but with the old almost aggressive air of
integrity, summed his erstwhile pupil up with the eyes of the
appraising schoolmaster.

"It's the old Ernie.  I see that," he grunted.  "So Alf's been playing
it up already.  You needn't tell me.  He's a masterpiece, that young
man.  Even _she_ admits that."  He paused and began again, confidential
and communicative like one naughty boy whispering to another.  "What
d'ye think of her?  She's church--more shame to her.  But I forgive
her.  I forgive her a lot.  You have to when you're married to em--as
you'll find some day.  And what I don't forgive I pass by.  For
why?--If I didn't she'd sauce me."  He suddenly became aware that he
was being indiscreet, even undignified, and broke off gruffly--"Well,
what did they teach you in the Army?"

Ernie laughed.

"It's not so bad as they make out, sir.  I like the old Regiment well
enough."

"They tell me," said Mr. Pigott solemnly, "that in South Africa none of
the unpopular officers came home--_and they weren't shot by the Boers_!"

"It depends on the Regiment, I expect," replied Ernie.  "There's not
much of that in the Hammer-men.  Our officers were mostly all right.
More gentlemen than most, from what I could see of it.  They were
sports, and they tried to be just.  Of course there wasn't none of em
like dad--only the Colonel.  Hadn't the education.  But some of these
snotty little jumped-ups like what they had in the Welsh Liverpools
that lay alongside us in Pindi ... Why I wouldn't salute em if I met em
in the lines."

Mr. Pigott listened to this audacious statement with the hostile
interest of the radical.

"A rotten system," he said.  "Built on make-believe and lies."

"It fairly rots some of em," Ernie admitted.  "Gives em more power nor
what they can carry.  But in the hands of the right men it don't work
so bad.  All depends on that."

Then Mr. Pigott asked him what he proposed to do.

"That's what I come to you about, sir."

"Of course your brother won't help!"

"No, sir; nor I wouldn't ask him," flashed Ernie.

"And I don't blame you," answered Mr. Pigott.  "Alf's too busy taking
the Mass and walking in processions to help his brother....  Now I'll
tell you what to do.  You go up and see Mr. Trupp.  He can do anything
he likes now he's disembowelled Royalty.  And if he can't help you, I
must; though I haven't got a vacant job in the yard just now.  You're
to sleep at my place, _she_ says."

He followed Ernie to the door.

"What d'you make of your father?" he asked mysteriously.

"I don't rightly understand him, sir," Ernie answered.

"Don't you?" said Mr. Pigott.  "I do."  He dropped his voice.  "He's
waiting the Second Coming, I'm sure of it."

When Ernie presented himself at the Manor, Mr. Trupp was out.  Ernie
thought Mrs. Trupp would see him.  The smart maid thought not.  Ernie,
however, proved right.

Mrs. Trupp was sitting in the long drawing-room, with her daughter, and
greeted him with pleasure.

"Ernie!" cried Mrs. Trupp.  "This is a sight for sair e'en.  What a man
you've become!"

"Was Alfred decent to you?" blurted Bess.

Mrs. Trupp shot a warning glance at her impetuous daughter.

"And have you seen the new Mrs. Pigott?" she asked.

"She's top-hole," cried Bess.  "He never stops talking about her.
Really after that other old thing always sitting on his head----"

Then Mr. Trupp entered, smiling, and cocking his face to sum up his
visitor through his pince-nez.

"You needn't introduce yourself, Ernie," he growled.  "You've taken no
harm, I see."

Later the two men retired to the consulting-room to talk business.

"Would you care for a temporary job at the Hohenzollern?" asked Mr.
Trupp; "the German Hotel on the Crumbles.  It was building in your
time.  They want a lift-man, I know."

"Anything, sir," answered Ernie with easy enthusiasm.

Mr. Trupp rang up the Hotel and arranged the matter there and then.

"It will do as a stop-gap, anyway," he said, "until we can fix you up
in a permanent job.  You don't want to be knocking about at home,
twiddling your thumbs."

"That I don't, sir!" laughed Ernie a thought ironically, and returned
to Deep-dene to tell his luck.

Mr. Pigott glanced at his wife.

"The Hohenzollern," he said gruffly.  "Well, give it a try."

Next day Mr. Pigott met the Doctor in the street.

"Well," he said, "what d'you think of your soldier?"

"Done him no harm anyway," replied Mr. Trupp, quite impenitent.

"I don't know," retorted the other.  "He left here a gentleman: he
comes back a labourer--fit to work a lift."

"None the worse for that," said Mr. Trupp.  "Mr. Wyndham's been telling
us we want fewer clerks and more working-men.  There's no satisfying
you radicals."

"Better than a jumped-up jackanapes in black leggings and a pilot coat,
I will admit," answered the other.  "Yes, you've got a lot to answer
for, Mr. Trupp.  First you send him off to the army; and directly
that's finished you pack him off to the Hohenzollern Hotel."

"Might be worse places," muttered Mr. Trupp.

Mr. Pigott held up a hand in horror.

"Doctor!" he cried, "I tell you what it is.  Ever since you saved that
Tsar you've been a changed man."

"I don't know about that," said Mr. Trupp.  "I only know that Tsars
forget to pay their Doctor's bills."

"I'm glad to hear it," answered Mr. Pigott.  "_Very_ glad," with
emphasis.  "A lesson to you to leave the insides of Royalty to emselves
in future."




BOOK IV

RUTH BOAM



CHAPTER XXVII

THE HOHENZOLLERN HOTEL

The Hohenzollern Hotel was both physically and spiritually remote from
all the other hotels in Beachbourne.

The respectable Grand, facing the Wish, the ponderous Talbot opposite
the band-stand, the perky Hydropathic perched on the rise of the hill,
the Dudley by the pier, the Cecil, the Bentinck, and all the other
hotels with aristocratic names and a middle-class clientele, were at
the West-end of the town, interspersed among boarding-houses the whole
length of the sea-front from the pier to Beau-nez.

The Hohenzollern stood aloof at the East-end on the edge of the
Crumbles, as the Levels here were called.

An immense, modern caravanserai of pretentious neogothic style, it had
been dumped down on the shore beyond the long-deserted Redoubt of
Napoleonic times.

In front of it was the sea.  On its flank, beyond the Fishing Station,
stretched the marshes.  Behind it, at a respectful distance, crouching
in the dust, the mass of mean houses and crowded streets that
constituted the East-end.

On these the Hohenzollern, aloof and lordly in its railed-off pleasure
grounds, turned an unheeding back.  It was unaware of their presence;
or rather recognized them only to patronize.

It was a drab area, unfrequented by the fashionable and redolent of the
atmosphere of cheap lodging-houses.

The parade ceased at the Redoubt, and ended for promenaders at the pier.

Beyond Splash Point nobody who was anybody ever thought it decent to
penetrate.  The band-stand, the winter gardens, the brick walls were at
the West-end, reaching out towards Beau-nez.

And the Hohenzollern was not only inaccessible, it was self-contained
and meant to be.

It possessed its own fine band, its own smooth lawns, its own strip of
fore-shore with bathing rafts moored off it and bathing tents on the
beach, its own tiny jetty for pleasure boats.

The hotel was German-owned and German-inspired; but it was not the
centre of an extensive spy-system as certain of the patriots of East
Sussex maintained.

The men and women who launched it as a business proposition were not
mad.  They were just cosmopolitan financiers who knew a good deal about
the human heart on its shady side, and proposed to make money out of
their knowledge.

In Beachbourne it was always spoken of as the German Hotel, and its
character was well known and probably exaggerated.

The town, called by spiteful rivals on the South Coast Churchy
Beachbourne, by reason of the number and variety of its sacred
edifices, was shocked and delighted.

Started in the late nineties, the original title of the Hotel was of
course the Empire; and its first chairman, Baron Blumenthal, a
prominent member of the Primrose League.  Then came the slump in
British Imperialism after the Boer War.  With the advent of a Radical
Government it became correct for desperate patriots to affirm with
immense emphasis in private, and with less emphasis on public platforms
that they would sooner see the country governed by the German Emperor,
who was at least a gentleman, than by Lloyd George--that little Welsh
attorney.

At the height of this patriotic rally the German Emperor came himself
to England; and Beachbourne was thrilled to hear the great and good man
was to stop at the Empire Hotel to be under Mr. Trupp.

The Hotel incontinently changed its name to commemorate an event which
in fact never took place.  Shortly afterwards, however, a Balkan
Tsar--also a Hohenzollern--happily did come, and was subjected by Mr.
Trupp to the operation prepared for the head of his family.

But if the Hotel changed its name, its reputation remained the same and
even grew.  In Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Buda-Pesth, men talked of it;
and even in India native princes whispered _risqué_ stories about it to
their Prime Ministers at the Council Table.

Wherever men spoke of it, they mentioned with smiles its two
characteristic traits--the Third Floor and the Head Porter.

The Hohenzollern Hotel, indeed, had two sides, like many a better
institution, and deliberately cultivated both.

The Third Floor represented one; and Salvation Joe the other.

There were respectable men and women who stayed regularly at the Hotel
on the Crumbles, and denied quite honestly and not without heat all
knowledge of the Third Floor and what it stood for.  It was a
convention at the Hohenzollern that nobody stopping there ever
recognized anybody else.  You went down to Beachbourne from town with
the man who always occupied the chair next you at the club; you sat by
his side in the station-bus that bore you to the portals of the Hotel;
and then--you parted till Monday morning when you met once more on the
platform at the station.  Therefore the most staid and admirable of
citizens often retired there to be undisturbed.  Ministers and their
secretaries during a busy Session, homely young couples on their
honeymoons, even Bishops and clergymen in retreat.  And for these the
Hotel had its undoubted advantages.  Eastwards the Levels stretched
away for miles haunted by none but birds.  The fore-shore was private,
the sea itself secluded.  There were no trippers, and, what mattered
more, none of the usual Society week-enders.  The former spread
themselves between the Redoubt and the pier, the latter from the pier
to Beau-nez.

It was for those who sought for quiet at the Hotel that the Head Porter
existed.  He was known far and wide as Salvation Joe, and always wore
the red jersey of his kind by request of the Management; though unkind
rumour affirmed that he had forfeited the right to his distinguishing
habit.

On Sundays, after lunch, the second dining-room was cleared, and
Salvation Joe, all glorious in scarlet apparel, held a meeting for the
staff.  Visitors would be welcomed, a notice in the hall announced,
though as Joe often said with the splendid smile he was alleged to have
copied from a recent Archbishop,

"It's only just among ourselves, sir.  We call it our 'appy 'our.  We
just like to meet together the once a week--them and me and the Master."

That pleased the Bishops, who went back to the Athenæum and talked
about it over their coffee; it delighted the occupants of the Third
Floor, especially on wet Sundays; and, to judge from the attendance, it
appeared to be very popular with the staff, who, warmed by the rays
from Joe's benevolent eye, sang with enthusiasm _Tell me the old, old
story_ and the like.

Moreover it was noticed by the curious that when the men were asked by
sceptical visitors whether they _really_ enjoyed it, the invariable
answer given in the same sort of voice with the same sort of smile was,

"We calls it our 'appy 'our, miss."

Salvation Joe was not perhaps more of a humbug than most of us: that is
to say, he humbugged himself just as much as he humbugged others.  At
one time he had quite certainly found religion; and if with the advent
of middle age he lost it, it is by no means sure that he was aware of
his loss.

Certainly he was invaluable to the Management as a counterpoise; and
they paid him accordingly.  Salvation Joe never took tips.  That
impressed every one, especially the Third Floor.  Through this
idiosyncrasy Joe indeed acquired a European reputation.  On Monday
mornings he stood in the great marbled hall, under a tall palm, among
bustling porters and stacks of luggage, a majestic presence, refusing
with a martyr's smile the coin that corrupts.  His real name was Joseph
Collett; and in the boot-room in the basement he was known irreverently
as J.C.

The staff attended the service because it paid; and they had to live.

There was only one man who never went; and that man was Ernie.

Joe met him in the passage one day, after he had been at the Hotel a
month or more, and stopped him.

"I suppose you haven't got a soul to save then, Caspar?" he began, his
great chest rising and falling beneath the flaming jersey.

Ernie grinned sheepishly.

"Well, Mr. Collett, as to that, I guess I've got the same as most."

"But you're too proud to save it," continued the other in a voice like
battalions on the march.  He laid a frank and friendly hand on Ernie's
shoulder.  "Come and confess your Redeemer, my lad!" he called.  "Come
to the foot of the Cross!  Throw the burden of your sins on Him!  He'll
carry em--next Sunday--two o'clock--second dining-room--sharp."

Ernie never went.

It was not that he wished to stand or fall by a principle: Ernie had no
hankerings for a martyr's crown.  It may have been that he inherited
from his father a fine reserve in matters spiritual and that somewhere
in the deeps of him there was an invincible repugnance to the methods
of the seducer, or merely that he was one of the simple of earth--far
too honest to see the path of expediency and follow it.

The other men saw and winked.  They did not admire Ernie for refusing
to bow the knee, nor was there anything to admire.

"Bloody mug," was all their comment.




CHAPTER XXVIII

THE THIRD FLOOR

But if Ernie was simple, he was not blind.  When he was not on the
lift, he acted as Boots for the Third Floor; and no man could work
there without seeing what he saw.

Mr. Pigott, once meeting his old pupil in Church Street, asked him how
he liked his job.

"Not so bad, sir," Ernie answered without enthusiasm.  "Some I likes;
and some I dislikes; and most I don't mind."

The work indeed, in the slack seasons at all events, was by no means
hard, the wages moderate; the tips many, and sometimes extravagant.

Ernie was the only man on the staff who frequented the Third Floor.  No
waiters ever came there.  All the waiting that was done--and there was
plenty--was done by the maids.

Most of these were foreign; and the few who were not had adopted
foreign names.  They were pretty and pert; and they called
Ernie--"Ernie Boots."  It was the common gossip that the Manageress
chose them herself--"with care," the knowing added with a wink.

Madame, as she was familiarly known, was in fact a Bavarian, who must
have been beautiful in her day, with an immense bust that concealed a
most kind heart, and piles of fair hair, obviously her own, that she
amassed in pyramids on the top of her head.  There was generally a
cigarette between her lips, and she used a lorgnette lavishly.  She was
in fact an efficient woman of the world, saved from the dreadful vices
of the efficient by a genuinely benignant nature.  And she avowed
openly that it was her mission in life to give people what they
wanted--propriety to the proper, and pleasure to the pleasure-seeking.

Ernie had been at the hotel nearly a year when there came to the Third
Floor a maid who seemed strangely out of her element.

He noted her advent at once with surprise and a sense of shame.  Amid
her saucy colleagues she seemed a lily of the valley blowing stately
amid artificial flowers.  A big young woman and beautiful, she held
herself apart, moving among the others, apparently unconscious of them,
and ignorant of the meretricious atmosphere, as a Madonna walking
through the ballet of a music-hall revue.

Her presence filled him with acute personal discomfort.  He did not
like the tone of the Third Floor, but he accepted it as he accepted
everything with the easy tolerance that was his weakness.  This
majestic young woman with her aloof and noble air, her accusing
innocence, her damning purity, filled him with shame and pity--shame
for himself and his weak-kneed benevolence, pity for those others whom
she with her unconscious dignity made appear so small and vulgar.

Her name was Ruth, so much Ernie knew, and she was English too, though
she scarcely looked it: for she was very dark, her hair black as a
horse's mane, with a skin that had a peculiar ruddy warmth, and the
large brown eyes full of splendid darkness and mellow lights, that are
so rare and therefore so noticeable when found among the
working-classes that fringe the North Sea.  Her brows, black as her
hair and broadly splashed, almost met; but there was nothing of
ferocity about her.

Her natural habit, Ernie saw, was that of a great and mysteriously
growing tree, its roots deep in the red earth; its massive foliage
drinking of the goodness of sunshine and wind and rain; but now there
was about her a note of restraint, even of stress.  The easy flow of
her nature was being dammed.  She seemed out of place and dumbly aware
of it, like a creature of the wilderness in a strange environment.  The
profound and quiet joyousness of woman, maturing to ripe perfection,
which should have been hers to an unusual degree, was not.

Ernie was desperately shy of her.

He would peep at her as she passed him on her swift way; she never
looked at him.

He seldom saw her speak to the other maids.  Yet it was clear to him
that this isolation was unnatural to her, and that she was made for
quiet intercourse and noble mirth.  Unlike the other maids she was
always busy.  She never romped, gossiped, or flirted.

One evening Ernie saw a fat-necked Jew in a sleeping suit, his mouth
stuffed with a cigar, his eyes hot and bibulous, standing in the door
of his bedroom.

The dark beauty came by.

The Jew chirped at her.

"Pretty tartie!" he called in his luscious voice.  "Come inside then.
I've got something to show you."

The girl passed on, unheeding.

The Jew followed her with moist eyes that glistened.

A fair chamber-maid emerging from another room winked at Ernie.

"She's white," she said, and jerked her head in the direction of the
disappearing girl.

The chamber-maid was a little cockney from Clapham who had taken to
herself the name of Céleste.

"None the worse for that, I dare say," said Ernie with unusual acrimony.

Céleste flirted on her way.

"Tra-la-la!--ta-ta-ta!" she taunted with a little mocking flutter of
her fingers.  "I suppose you're white too, Ernie Boots."

"No," grinned Ernie.  "I'm grey."

"Baa-baa, black sheep!" mocked the naughty one.  "I'd be one or the
other.  Grey's a silly sort of tint."

Then the Jew's sodden voice came wheezing down the corridor.

"Here, kid!--You'll do.  You're not a bloody iceberg, are you?"

Céleste shook her carefully-coiffed head.

"I'm engaged, Soly.  So sorry!--Go back to bed, there's a dear old
thing!"

Ernie woke that night in the belief that Ruth was bending over him.

"Ruth!" he answered quietly.  "Is that you?"  But there was no reply.

Next morning he took the plunge.

"Good morning, Miss," he said as she passed him.

The other's curiously impassive face flashed into life.

"Good morning, Mr. Boots," she answered in a deep and humming voice
like the sound of wings.

She said the words quite simply, and he saw she was not chaffing.  She
honestly believed Boots to be his name.

Céleste, dusting in an adjoining room, looked through an open door.

"She's an innocent," she said discontentedly.  "She knows nothing.
Ought to go back to her mother.  Madame's got no business to put her
here."

Ernie went on his way, that deep voice still thrilling in his ears.

Thereafter he sought and found chances of serving the girl.

One day he came on her tugging a heavy basket of washing along the
passage.  It was clear that she had been too proud to ask another maid
for help, preferring to trust her own magnificent physique to
accomplish the task alone.

"Let me, Miss," he said.

"You take yon end," she answered.  "I'll take this.  Then atween us
like."

"Ah," said Ernie, gathering courage.  "I see what it is.  You think
you're the only strong one."  Deliberately and without an effort he
swung the basket on to his shoulder and bore it jauntily to its
destination.

Then he slid it down and faced the girl.

"Now then!" he cried.

She dropped her eyelids, and he saw the length and curl of her lashes.

"You are strong," she said, with a dainty irony he found as delightful
as it was surprising.  "I allow you'll be purty nigh half as strong as
I be."

He pointed an accusing finger at her.

"You're Sussex!" he cried, falling into the old broad speech in his
turn.  "I'd knaw ye anywheres."

Her whole face gladdened slowly as she heard the familiar accent.

"Never!" she said, still faintly ironical, and added more sedately.  "I
was bred and born in Sussex, and never been outside it."

"And never mean to be," chaffed Ernie.  "That's your style.  I knaw ye."

"I was borrn in the Brooks at Aldwoldston," she continued, pronouncing
the word Auston.  "Along under the church by the White Bridge across
Parson's Tye.  Dad was Squire Caryll's keeper till he was ate up with
the rheumatism."  Her speech broadened even as she spoke, deliberately,
he thought, to meet his own.

He followed suit.

The pair began to ca-a-a away at each other like a couple of old rooks
in an elm in May.

"What might be your name then?"

"Ruth Boam, I believe."

Ernie nodded sagaciously.

"'Twould be surely.  Boam or Burgess or Ticehurst or Woolgar.
Something with a bit o Saxon in it, as dad says."  He added hopefully:
"I'm Sussex too.  I was dragged up in Old Town agin the Rectory there,"
jerking his head.  "Cerdainly I was."

She regarded him mischievously.

"I knew you was no'hun of a foreigner then," she told him.

Ernie feigned surprise.

"How did you knaw that then?"

She chuckled like a cuckoo.

"Hap I aren't the only one," she answered.

Then she was gone; and it struck him suddenly that this grave and
stately damsel had been chaffing him.

Ernie stood a moment amazed.  Then he nodded his head.

Suddenly he seemed to have crossed a border-line into a new country.
Behind him was the stale old past, with its failures, its
purposelessness, its dreary hag-tracks; before him was adventure, the
New world--and what?

He wasn't sure.  But there it was beckoning him and he should follow,
true child of Romance that he was.

And it was time he moved on.

He had been a year now at the Hotel and was, as always, tending to grow
slack.

Salvation Joe was watching him, waiting his chance, and Ernie knew it.

Now a change stole over him.  A nucleus, small at first, but always
growing, round which the dissipated forces of his spirit could rally,
had been forming in his heart, unknown to him, ever since Ruth's advent
to the Third Floor.  He was becoming firm of purpose, gathering
himself, making good.  His eyes, his face, his gait, testified to the
change.

Mr. Trupp, the observant, remarked on it to Mr. Pigott.

"He's growing," he said.

"The right way, let's hope," answered the other.  "That place you sent
him to is a queer kind of forcing house."

"He wants forcing," said Mr. Trupp.  "We all do."

"Bah!" growled Mr. Pigott.  "You and your Lash."




CHAPTER XXIX

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS

Once a week Ernie had a half-day off, which he invariably spent in the
same way.

He took the bus from the Redoubt up to Old Town, went home, and coaxed
his father out for a walk to Beech-hangar or the Downs above the
chalk-pit.  Then back to tea, and a long and quiet smoke in the study.

In this matter he always had a faint resistance to overcome, part real,
part simulated: his father's excuse for not going being the curious one
that he was too busy.

"You forget that I'm a man of action now," he would say, the imp
dancing remotely in his blue eyes.  "I've an official position."

It was true too in a sense.  Edward Caspar, during Ernie's absence in
India, had been appointed a visitor to the workhouse at the back of
Rectory Walk.  And there in that cess-pool of our civilization, into
which filtered drop by drop the sewage of all our defective social
processes, amid the derelicts of the vast ocean of Empire, prostitutes
sickening to death, the idiot offspring of incestuous intercourse, the
half-witted mother who had fallen a prey to the prowling male, the
decent girl who had succumbed to her own affections, the young man
broken in the industrial arena, the middle-aged who were not wanted,
the old for whom there was no place beside the fire at home, amid all
those of every age and class whom Society was too cruel to kill, and
not capable as yet of stimulating to life, Edward Caspar wandered
vaguely like a cloud, full of sunshine, blessing alike and blessed.

In his old-fashioned roomy tail-coat of a country gentleman, always
fresh, his beautiful linen, that showed Anne Caspar's care, his blue
tie of an artist running loosely through a gold ring, he became a
familiar figure in the wards of the Bastille, with his beard, his
spectacles, his morning air, radiating a mild warmth of love and pity.

Almost daily he might be seen, sitting at the bedside of some broken
boy picked up off the roads to be patched up and flung again under the
wheels of the Juggernaut car of modern Industrialism that had crushed
him, or listening to the tale of some ancient in corduroys--not seldom
according to his own account the scion of an illustrious but ruined
house--who had laboured on the land for sixty years, to be cast alive
into the cess-pool when he had been broken in the service of his
country.

All the inmates of the Bastille, from the unwanted babies in the
nursery, to the grannies and daddies propped up like dreadful dolls in
bed in the wards of the Infirmary, liked the visits of this shambling
man who said so little and looked so much.

The Lady Augusta Willcocks, a fierce and efficient Guardian, tramping
the wards in short skirts, broad-toed boots, and cropped woolly white
hair, cross-questioned the Master as to what Mr. Caspar said to the
inmates.

The Master, a kind man, something of a mystic himself, answered:

"He don't seem to say much.  Mostly he listens."

"Oh, that's all right," said the lady with relief.  "Only we don't want
a lot of nonsense talked in here."

"Seems to soothe em," continued the Master.  "Afore now when I've had
them violent in the casuals' cells I've sent for him.  They call him
the Prophet."

The Master smiled to himself as the masterful lady tramped on her way.

He had noticed that Edward Caspar invariably left the ward when the
Reverend Spink entered to hold Divine Service; and that if the
Archdeacon marched through the wards like a conqueror amid the dreadful
human debris of a battle-field the visitor, sitting quietly at the
bedside of some cast-away, never seemed to see him.


In spite of the pressure of affairs, Ernie rarely failed to lure his
father out into the sunshine on the hill.

Once, as they sat together by the roadside in Beech-hangar, Ernie
propounded a solemn question.

"Dad."

"Well."

"Didn't you once say there was a Spanish strain in the real old Sussex
peasant stock?"

The father eyed his son obliquely.

"So they say," he answered.  "A Spanish galleon in the days of the
Armada wrecked in Ruther Haven.  That's the story.  And I'm inclined to
think there's something in it.  Any way there's more foreign blood in
the genuine peasantry of Sussex and Kent than in all the rest of
England.  Propinquity to the Continent, you see.  All the refugees came
here first--Dutchmen in the days of Alva; Huguenots after the
Revocation; Royalists during the Terror; and smugglers of all sorts all
the time from the days of Cæsar."

That evening, as Anne Caspar brushed her hair in the bedroom before
going to bed, she heard her husband in the little dressing-room talking
to himself as his manner was.

She stayed the sweeping motion of her hand and listened.

"I met Mr. Pigott in Church Street this evening," she called.  "He
stopped me and said, 'What's come to Ernie?'"

There was a silence; then the voice from next door answered,

"She's dark.  That's all I know."




CHAPTER XXX

REALITY

A few days after his conversation with his father, Ernie took a
telegram up to the Third Floor in the afternoon, and was about to
descend when he heard a bedroom bell ring violently for the maid on
duty.

There was no maid visible.

He went along the corridor.  At the end of it was a passage-landing
with a window looking over the sea.

On the window-sill Ruth was sitting in the sun, perched as a woman
riding, her work beside her.

She did not see him, and for a moment he watched her fascinated: the
lines of her figure, almost majestic for so young a woman; the dignity
of her face; the lovely curve of her neck and shoulders; the warmth of
her colouring.  Her thimbled finger flashed to and fro; and the sun
caught her hair, simply massed beneath her cap, and revealing in its
blackness just a note of tan.

Every now and then, as the sea thumped and hissed and poured on the
fore-shore, she looked up.

There was for once a wonderful content upon her face, the look that
Ernie had often sought and never found there before.  The strain had
vanished.  This girl possessed her soul in love and peace for the
moment at least.

Ernie was reluctant to disturb her, for she gave him the impression of
one who prays.

"The bell's going, Ruth," he said at last gently.

She put down her work and dismounted from the sill in that swift
business-like way of hers.  There was a rhythm about her every movement
that satisfied the deepest need of Ernie's soul.

"What number?" she asked.

"Seventy-seven."

Her face clouded.

It was the sodden Jew, clamant once more.

"I'll go," said Ernie.

It was no job of his, but go he did.  And he was glad he had, for Soly
surpassed himself.

"You!" stertorously.  "What good are you to me?  Send that Spanish
gypsy here!  She's the one I want.  I like 'em brown."

Just outside the door Ernie met Céleste.

"He wants you, Miss," he said, and admired the readiness of his lie.

Then he walked thoughtfully back to Ruth, who had resumed her work.

"It's all right," he said shyly.

She lifted her face to him slowly, almost stealthily.

Then there flashed a lovely light into her eyes.

"Thank-you, Mr. Boots," she said.

He advanced a step on her.

"That ain't my name."

She hid again in her work.

"What is then?" she asked.

"Ernie," he said.  "Call me that."

He was curiously peremptory, almost imperious.

She did not answer him--threading her needle deliberately against the
light.

Suddenly doors flung wide, and his whole being leapt forth as from a
furnace, caught her up, and rapt her in a living flame of love.

She seemed to feel it beating about her, devouring her, and stirred as
a tired bird stirs in its nest at night after a long flight.

Ernie was trembling till it seemed to him that his heels rat-a-tatting
on the floor must betray him.

Then he went on his way.

The transfiguring experience that comes perhaps once in a life-time to
the pure in heart had come to him in full flood.  A new life was his,
sweeping away old land-marks, and bearing him he knew not whither.  He
drifted with that mighty tide, content to be borne along.  He had been
alive for twenty-five years, yet dead.  Now he rose from the tomb, at
this his astounding Ascension-tide.  In a second he had been rapt up
from the earth, had suffered miraculous conversion, and would never
again see life as he had once seen it.

It was curious, wonderful, and above all it revolutionized old values.

The men and women he met in the passage looked different, especially
the women.

They were coarse, commonplace.

Céleste passed him with a quip.

What she said he didn't know, but he thought how opaque and material
she was in such a spiritual world; and what a pity it was; and how
sorry he was for her.

Madame stopped him and gave him orders.  He heard and carried them out.

But all the while this new spirit was at work on its own business in
the deeps of him.  His intellect, a mere cockle-shell afloat on an
Ocean of Mind, dealt with the superficial mechanism of life.

_He_ was elsewhere.  For the first time Ernie became aware of a Double
Life going on within him, of Two Minds, related, yet apart, each
pursuing its own ends.

He entered the room in the basement where the men cleaned the knives,
blacked the boots and ate their hurried meals.  It was cool, almost
cavernous.  He was amazed that he had never before seen beauty in this
bleak room, the beauty of the woods for which he longed.

He sat down and was glad.

About him were men of all nationalities, some in aprons, some in their
shirt-sleeves, some snatching a desultory snack, chattering or silent.

Ernie, aware of them, yet deep in himself, was conscious of two
impressions: These men were monkeys--and knew it; and they were Sons of
God--and as yet unconscious of it.

One of the men, a sallow Austrian with a stringy moustache, who went by
the name of Don John among his mates, put down the _Arbeiter Zeitung_
which he had been reading, watched Ernie awhile sardonically, and then
made a jeering remark to a neighbour, who replied.

Ernie caught the words "Third Floor."

Instantly he emerged from his deeps, his intellect alert, paramount,
and defensive.

Don John continued caressingly, his cheek bulging with cheese, and a
clasp-knife in his hand.

"Pluddy mug!" he jeered.  "Thinks they're for him.  They're for de
toffs on de top--not for _you_!  You're unter-tog.  Nozzing for
unter-tog in this world only de crumbs that _don't_ fall from de rich
man's table.  De girls are for de Chairman Jews.  They can buy em.  Can
you?--Nice English girls are cheap."




CHAPTER XXXI

THE RIDE ON THE BUS

The Thursday following his great experience, Ernie went as usual to the
Redoubt which was the terminus of the bus that ran to Billing's Corner.

He was early; and there was as yet only one passenger on the roof, a
young woman simply dressed in black, her bare throat girt about with
yellow amber, and wearing a felt hat of terra-cotta colour.

She was sitting on the front seat.

The large and graceful indolence of her pose gave him pause.

He stayed on the last step, regarding her.

Then she turned her face sea-wards and he saw her profile.

Another moment and he stood above her.

"Ruth," he said.

She looked up at him.

"O, it's you, Ernie!" she answered quite simply, and without a thought
of coquetry.

His heart moved within him.

"That's a little better!" he muttered, and proceeded to sit down beside
her.

She made room for him, friendly and entirely unconscious.

They began to talk, and once she glanced at him from under her hat with
tranquil eyes that seemed to pour their soft light into his.

He held them with his own.

The two streams met and mingled in mysterious communion that thrilled
him till he trembled faintly.

He was the first to turn away.

"You look just all right," he said.

She was a changed girl.  The restraint had left her.  A new life danced
within her.  She was quivering with it, almost communicative.

"I feel it," she answered joyously.  "I'm off till ten.  I'm going away
back home to Dad and Mother.  I most in general doos o Sadadays if I
gets off."

She was broadening her speech again, as though to throw off the
corrupting town, and draw near once more to the country which had bred
her.

He heard her with delight; and answered her easily and in kind.

"Auston, aren't it?" he asked.

She eyed him slyly, taking his humour, and nodded.

"You got it," she said.  "I just take bus to Billing's Corner; and then
'Lewes coach drops me at Turnpike short o B'rick.  Then 'dis but little
better'n a mile to traipse down the valley.  I was borrun in the River
House in the Brooks along o the White Bridge under the church.  And
where I was borrun there my folks do still live.  Pretty well beknown
in them paarts my folks be, I rack'n."  She was almost chattering now.
And as her tongue resumed with joy the habit of babyhood a ripple of
deep mirth swam over her face, and spoke of profound inward content.

She became shy and confidential.  "Just under the eaves outside the
room where I was borrun there's a martin's nest.  And in the dark o
summer nights they wake and gurgle to emselves.  That'll be the little
uns snugglin agin their mother's breast and thinkin how cosy.  I do
just adore to listen to em.  Kind o company like."  She gurgled in her
turn, and then looked away abashed and blushing at the flow of her
confidences.

"That's where you was borrun, was it?" mocked Ernie.  "No, it warn't
then.  You was borrun in de corrun one morrun all forlorrun.  How do I
know it?  Cos you're same as I be.  You're a country chap."

It was clear that she enjoyed his chaff.

"That's a sure thing, you may depend," she answered in that humming
voice of hers that seemed to resound long after she had finished
speaking.  "It's bred in my blood.  See dad's dad and his dad afoor him
dey were ox-herds in the home-farm in Ruther Valley.  Dad went along o
the long-horns on the hill too when he was a lad.  There's few teams
left now except only Mr. Gorringe's at Exeat.  When dad's dad was a lad
it was pretty near ox-teams allwheres in Sussex--on the hill and on the
Levels.  Then it come horrses; and prazendly it'll be machines.  The
world moves faster nor it used to did one time o day, I expagd.  Ya-as.
Cerdainly it doos."

The bus ran along the Esplanade to the pier, the sea shining on their
left.  Then it swung down Cornfield Road, stopped at the Station, and
took the Old Road for Lewes.  As it lurched under the Chestnuts into
Water Lane, the Downs were seen across Saffrons Croft through a screen
of elms.

"There they be!" cried Ernie, hailing them.  "What d'you think of them
now?"

"Eh, but they're like mother and father to you, if you've been bred to
em," answered Ruth.  "I just couldn't a-bear to be parted from them
nohows.  They're Sussex--them and the sea.  Sussex by the sea, my Miss
Caryll used to call it."

They travelled up the hill; and the girl feasted her eyes on the green
of Saffrons Croft.

"I allow the brown-birds holloa in them old ellums, dawn and dusk," she
murmured, talking more to herself than to her companion.  "That's what
I misses by the sea more'n all--the song o birds.  There's no loo like
for em--only the anonymous bushes.  Reck'n that's where it is.  They
like the loo'th, doos birds.  But times I see a old jack-yearn flappin
along over the Levels like he'd all the time before him.  And the
wheat-ears come from acrarst the sea and show the white of their tails
that carmical about Cuckoo-fair.  Hap it'll be their first
landing-place.  They must be tired.  But there's not nigh the numbers
there was one time o day.  When dad was a lad there was I dunna many
all along the Downs from Rottingdean to Friston."

The bus stopped, as always, at the _Star_.

Ernie, who felt the spirit of the show-man strong within him, pointed
out the Manor-house with a certain proprietary air.

"That's where Mr. Trupp lives," he explained.  "They come from all over
the world to see him.  He's our doctor.  Has been this thirty year.
Dad was one of the first in Old Town to have him.  Give him his start,
as you might say."

"He's a nice gentleman surely," said Ruth.

"Do you know him then?" asked Ernie, a thought jealously.

"I've knaw'd him all my life," answered the other.  "He attends the
Squire and family.  He looked after my Miss Caryll till she died; and
then me when I took bad after her death.  Eh, but he was a kind
gentleman."

"He brought me into the world," said Ernie with an air of finality, the
desire to swagger still strong upon him.  "He took the inside out of
the Tsar of Dobrudja and he brought me into the world.  That's what Mr.
Trupp done."

She turned a deep brown eye on him.

"He done well," she said quietly.

Then they both laughed.

At Billing's Corner he helped her off the bus and on to the four-horse
char-a-banc waiting outside the _Billing Arms_.

"Last char-a-banc home," said Ernie authoritatively.  "Half after nine
or so.  I'll look out."

He stood beneath her in the dust.

With her jet-black hair, her colouring of a ripe peach, and those soft
swarthy eyes that streamed down upon him, she perched above him,
stately, mocking, mysterious.

He could not make her out.  She was at once so simple and so elusive in
her royal way.  She teased, startled, and exalted him; she calmed and
maddened him.

"Thank you, Mr. Caspar," came the quiet voice from on high.

"Call me, Ernie," he ordered, this strange passion to domineer still
overmastering him.

She gazed at him with those quiet ironical eyes of hers.

Then the char-a-banc moved on.




CHAPTER XXXII

ON THE HILL

That afternoon Ernie and his father sauntered up to the chalk-pit, and
lay on the green hill-side above it in the sun.

Ernie plucked the bents and chewed them.

"Dad," he began at last.

"Yes."

"What is love?"

Once years ago at a dance in Grosvenor Square, Edward Caspar had
himself for a moment floated out on to the ocean of an immense and
wonderful new life.  Thereafter he had been captured, as such
easy-going dreamy creatures are, by one of the fiercer sex.  He
respected his wife, admired her beauty, owed her much, and was aware of
it; but for all her strength of character Anne had found herself from
the start of her married relations with her husband in that position of
secret moral inferiority which is even to-day, perhaps as the result of
an age-long inheritance of tradition, the accustomed doom of the woman
who has taken the initiative in matters of sex.  Moreover as the years
went by the doom grew always more oppressive, and her husband more
remote....

Edward answered his son,

"A door opens," he said slowly.  "And you see."

"What d'you see?" persisted the young man.

His father made a curious undulating motion with his hand.

  "_The Infinite that lends
  A Yonder to all ends,_"

he said after a pause, and gestured across the Weald stretched beneath
them.

"I can see it," he mused, "and hear it.  So can you.  It's a Tide--like
the wind in willow leaves.  It's silvery and it rustles.  It's
there--and here--and everywhere.  The scientists call it ether.  So it
is--from their point of view.  If you approach it from the other
side--our side--it's what you said.  It goes like so--like a billow."
With fine long-fingered hand he resumed that curious rhythmic motion of
his.  "I once heard somebody compare Humanity to an Undulating Wave.
So it is, because it's the highest expression of _That_.  It made us,
and is us.  All that about the Everlasting Arms which Mr. Pigott, and
the Archdeacon, and your Salvation Joe talk about, it's all
true--literally true.  Only they put it crudely; and for most of them
it's an opinion and not a fact of experience--that a man can prove for
himself at any moment."  He paused.  "Love is Recognition--often
instantaneous.  It is the I-within recognizes the Me-without."

He was sitting up now, bare-headed.  A lovely colour flushed his frail
complexion.  To Ernie, watching his scant hair, he seemed wonderfully
innocent and pure: a child talking with the wisdom of an old man.

Then his father spoke again with an emphasis that was almost startling.

"It's the profound simplicity of life that baffles us," he said.  "It's
too simple for us to understand.  Our brains aren't big enough--as
yet."  He was becoming strangely excited.  Ernie thought he understood
now the source of that exalted look of his father's.  "But we shall
some day.  Already there has been One Man who did.  Think of it!  We
crucified Him for it of course.  We had to.  He was climbing too far
a-head: so we plucked him back to earth.  You mustn't go too far ahead
of the Herd.  They won't stand it.  But He knew: He trusted It: He
could float in It--like that kittiwake, ascending into heaven,
descending into hell, at will."

He lay back on the turf, exhausted, his hat over his eyes, his hands on
the turf beside him.

"Ernie."

"Yes, dad."

"Have you felt the Tide?"

"I think so."

The old man put his hand upon his son's.

"Let it come, Boy-lad," he said.  "Trust it to do the work.  All our
mistakes are due to the same thing."

"What's that?" asked Ernie.

"Trying to interfere," answered the other.  "Follow!--that's our human
part."


That evening, after supper, before he left, Ernie asked his mother
shyly for some roses.  She took him out into the front-garden, tiny as
it was trim, and gave him of her best.

Afterwards, as he walked away, she stood at the little gate and watched
him, a beautiful look in her eyes.  Then she wiped her shoes very
carefully, and turned into the house.

The study-door was open, and she peeped in.

Her husband was sitting as always in the bow, looking out towards the
trees stirring in the Rectory garden.

Anne stared at him.

"Has he said anything to you?" she asked at last in the voice that grew
always more grumbling and ungracious with the years.

"Not yet," her husband answered.

"Well, it's about time," Anne grumbled.  "Only I wish I'd had the
choosing of her."

"Ernie'll choose all right," Edward answered in the peculiar crisp way
he sometimes now adopted.  "You needn't worry about him."

Whether there was a faint emphasis on the pronoun or not, Anne answered
with asperity,

"And you needn't worry about Alf for that matter.  He's far too set on
himself to find room for a wife."


Ernie was at Billing's Corner half an hour before the Lewes char-a-banc
was due, hanging about at the top of the rise, looking along the white
road that runs past Moot Farm under the long swell of the escorting
hills.

It was a perfect evening of late May.  The sun had already sunk in
darkened majesty against the West when the familiar cloud of dust
betokened the approach of the four-horse team.

Ruth was sitting on the box beside the driver.  Ernie recognized her
from afar by the splotch of colour made by her hat, and was filled with
an almost overpowering content.

The horses sprang the rise at a canter, the conductor blowing a
flourish on his horn.  The girl's hand was to her hat, and her head
bowed to the wind.  The char-a-banc drew up with a swagger in the open
space before the _Billing Arms_.

She was smiling down at him.

Ernie lifted his cap: it was a trick he had from his father.  No one
had ever paid the girl that common courtesy before, and she beamed upon
him.

The other passengers were descending by the steps.

Ernie advanced lordly.

"This way!" he ordered, and laid his roses on the driver's foot-board.
"Don't wait for them!  Put your foot on the wheel!  Give over your
hand!  Now your left foot here!"

For the first time in his life he felt masterful.  Powers in him, of
which he had possessed no previous knowledge, were thrusting through
the ice of the customary.

Ruth obeyed.

She slipped her foot into his hand.  It was slight, not small, yet
beautifully compact.

"It's dusty," she warned him.

"No, it ain't," he answered, still in his high mood.

He gripped it firmly.  Her cool hand was in his.

Then she trusted her whole weight to him.

He felt his strength tried and answering to the test; and rejoiced in
it.  So did she.

For a moment he balanced her, lifted her even, let her feel the power
of his manhood.  Then he lowered her swiftly.

It was well, even gracefully done.

Neither spoke; Ernie took his roses from the feet of the driver, who
looked down with approval.

"Go on!" he said sturdily.  "That's the way!"

The motor-bus that was to take them back to the hotel was turning in
the open space before the public-house.

Without a word they climbed on to the top.

The bus dropped down Church Street, past the long-backed church with
its square tower standing on the grave-strewn mound solemn in the
growing dusk.

Ernie placed his roses in Ruth's lap.

Her eyes were shining, her voice soft.

"For me?" she asked in her deep thrilling voice.

For a second he laid his hand on hers.

"Oh, they are beauties!" She buried her face in them.  "My Miss Caryll
learned me the names of a tidy few o them when we was in the
Dower-house afoor she come to Beachbourne," she said.

A motor-car stood at Mr. Trupp's door as the bus reached the _Star_.

The two talked quietly of the famous surgeon, their heads together.

The chauffeur got down from the Doctor's car and crossed slowly towards
the bus.

He was small and wore black gaiters that glittered in the lamp-light
like a wet slug.

He stood beneath them in the road, and then gave a low whistle.

Ernie looked down.

Alf was leering up at him.




CHAPTER XXXIII

UNDER THE STARS

The bus rolled on, past Saffrons Croft, the stars now twittering in the
branches of the elms.

"Who was that?" asked Ruth.

"My brother," answered Ernie, a thought surlily.

"He doesn't favour you," said Ruth after a pause.

"No," answered Ernie.  "He's a master-man now, Alf is.  Got his own
garage and men working for him and all.  He drives for Mr. Trupp."

At the pier, at Ernie's suggestion, they got down.  It was dark now;
the sea moon-silvered and still.

They walked along, rubbing elbows.  Ernie broke the silence, to ask a
question that had long haunted him.

"Ruth," he said, "however did you come into service at the
Hohenzollern?"

Both of them had unconsciously resumed the accent of the town as they
returned to the town.

Ruth told him simply and without reserve.

She had been maid to Squire Caryll's sister at the Dowerhouse in
Aldwoldston.  Her mistress had been taken ill, and Mr. Trupp had
ordered her to Beachbourne.

"We was going to the Grand," Ruth told him.  "But it was full.  So
cardingly we went to the Hohenzollern till the Grand could have us.
And once there we stayed there two years--till she died.  See Mr. Trupp
likes the Hotel for his patients.  There's the lawns straight onto the
sea; and the Invalids' Corner by the anonymous hedge he got Madame to
build."

Madame had throughout been kind, so kind--first to her mistress and
then to her; for after Miss Caryll's death Ruth had broken down from
over-strain.  The Manageress and Mr. Trupp had pulled her through.
Then when she came round, Madame, who was clearly fond of the girl, had
kept her on as personal maid, "cosseting me," said Ruth with a little
laugh, "like a bottle-lamb."  At Easter, when the crush came, and Ruth
was quite recovered, Madame had asked her to go to the Third Floor to
help, saying she would take her back if the girl didn't like it.

"I went tempory to oblige Madame," Ruth explained.  "I'd do a lot for
her.  She's been that kind."

Ruth had been there some weeks now, too lazy or too shy to take the
step that would involve another change.

"I don't ardly like to see you there, Ruth," said Ernie gently.  "I
don't really."

She lifted her face to him in the darkness.

"Where?"

"The Third Floor."

Ruth turned her face to him.  Her wall was down.  She was talking
intimately almost as a woman to a woman she trusts.

"I don't hardly myself," she said in the musing voice of the disturbed.
"The gentlemen are that funny.  Seem scarcely respectable, some of em.
And the couples too.  Might not be married the way they go on.  London,
I suppose."

He glanced at her covertly.

She met his eyes--so frank, so fearless.

What a man of the world Ernie felt beside this white ewe-lamb straying
far from the fold in the hollow of its native coombe!

They were skirting now the fosse of the Redoubt.

Before them on the shore rose the great Hotel, like a brilliantly
lighted mausoleum, blocking out a square patch of stars.

They made towards it.

"Ruth," said Ernie quietly, "if I was you I'd get Madame to change you.
Second Floor's more your sort.  More steadified.  There's a Bishop
there now and his wife and three-four daughters or so.  Go to bed at
ten, and get up at seven.  I can hear em all a-snorin in chorus like so
many hoggets in a stye when I take the lift down last turn at night."

"Hap I will," said Ruth thoughtfully.  "Madame'd take me back herself,
only she's got a German maid now, and I wouldn't do anything to put
Madame out for worlds."

A struggle was taking place in Ernie's heart.  If Ruth left the Third
Floor for the Second he would still see her sometimes.  If she left the
Hotel altogether he might lose her.

"Ruth," he said at last.  "I sometimes wonder why you stay on there at
all."

She glanced at him mischievously.

"Shall I tell you?" she asked, her voice deeper than ever.

"Yes."

"It's the bathin.  I just do adore the swimmin.  Madame arranges it
nice for the maids.  And the season's coming on.  We start next week if
this weather holds.  When the season's over I shall cut my stick--if so
be Madame wasn't to want me for her own maid again."

She chuckled at her own cunning.

They came to the servants' gate.

Ernie stopped.

"Good-bye, Ruth," he said.  "I'll say good-night."

She looked up at him surprised.

"Aren't you comin then?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.  "But I'm just a-goin to finish my fag first."

She gave him a delicious look.

Innocent as she was, she understood his consideration and thanked him
for it mutely.

She gave him her hand.  He took it, shook it, and held it awhile, as
though weighing it.  It was firm and very capable.

Swiftly he lifted it to his lips and kissed it.

She made no protest, looking at him with kind eyes that knew no thought
of coquetry.

Then she vanished with her flowers.

He gave her five minutes, and then followed her.

Ruth had been detained in the basement, and was vanishing up the
back-stairs as he entered, her roses in her hand.

Don John, the Austrian, with his dingy face and greasy moustache,
winked at Ernie as he passed.

"Peach," he whispered.  "Don't you wish you ad the pickin of her?"




BOOK V

CAPTAIN ROYAL



CHAPTER XXXIV

HIS ARRIVAL

Ruth was as good as her word.

Next day she went to see Madame, and asked to be moved from the Third
Floor.

Madame, the majestic, standing before the fire, dressed like a
fashion-plate, put down her cigarette and looked at the young woman
standing before her, slightly abashed, and uncertain how her request
would be received.

She was genuinely fond of the girl, and had sent her to the Third Floor
at some personal sacrifice because she wished her to have chances she
would not get elsewhere.

Now she showed herself kind, if by no means understanding.  She thought
Ruth foolish and hinted as much.  With foreign girls she could talk so
much more plainly than with these wooden Englishwomen who understood so
little.  It was because Ruth was English, yet looked foreign, and
showed a certain swift comprehension rare in her race, that Madame had
taken to her at first.

However, she assented to the girl's request as always with a good
grace, if reluctantly.

"Very well, Ruth," she said.  "You are one of ze quiet ones, I see.
Zey are too gay on ze Third Floor.  I zought zey might be.  It was only
an egsperiment.  One of ze maids on ze Second Floor is going next week.
I vill move you zen.  But you vill not get ze tips, you know.  Bishops
don't pay."

"Thank you, Ma'am," said Ruth, and left the room.


Two evenings later the Hohenzollern Express, as the non-stop train from
Victoria to Beachbourne was called, brought an unusual number of
visitors to the Hotel.

The palm-lined hall was packed with forlorn travellers, wandering about
trying to find themselves; the clerks in the office were besieged; the
porters run off their legs.

Ernie was on the lift that evening.  He stood in the corridor,
listening to the hubbub in the hall, and waiting for the first rush of
visitors who had arranged themselves and appropriated keys, when he saw
a man emerge from Madame's private sitting-room at the end of the
passage.

Then he came marching resolutely down the corridor, absorbed, swift,
direct, with eyes neither to right nor left, wearing a Burberry, and
the short tooth-brush moustache that was still the rage in the British
Army; a young man of a type so familiar to Ernie that he smiled on
recognizing it.

The traveller entered the passenger-lift with a curt,

"Third Floor!"

It was Captain Royal.

Ernie had just been long enough away from the Regiment to see
everything connected with it through the roseate mists of
sentimentality.

He pulled the cord and the lift ascended.

"Beg pardon, sir," he said shyly.  "Might you remember me?"

Royal turned his slate-blue eyes on the other, and extended a sudden
hand.

"What!  Caspar, the cricketer!" he cried with the gay nonchalance
peculiar to him.  "Rather!--that stand against the Rifle Brigade at
Pindi?  Yes.  What!  Got a job you like?  What!"

"Pretty fair, sir," answered Ernie.  "Home on long leave, sir?"

"Yes, six months.  I'm going to work for the Staff College."

"All well with the Regiment when you left, sir?"

"Yes, thanks.  All merry and bright.  We won the Polo Cup.  Mr.
Ffloukes--you remember him in D Company--got himself mauled by a bear
in the hills.  Silly young feller.  Quite unnecessary, I thought....
The Colonel's retired and come home.  Living somewhere in these parts,
I believe."

The lift stopped at the Third Floor.

Ernie carried the Captain's suit-case to his room.

"I'll bring your heavy luggage myself, sir," he said, for he had quite
taken the other under his wing.

As he left the room he met Ruth.

Ernie beckoned her mysteriously.

"That's my old skipper," he whispered.  "You look after him now.  He's
just all right."

Ruth regarded him with amused eyes.

"Why, you're quite excited," she said.

"Ah," answered Ernie.  "We're Hammer-men, him and me.  That's enough.
_Quite_ enough."  He disappeared down the shaft with a knowing and
consequential air, hushing her with lordly hand.

The Captain rang for his hot water.

Ruth took it him.

He turned round as she entered and flashed his eyes at her curiously.

"Will you help me unpack?" he said quietly.  "I haven't brought a man."

She knelt beside the suit-case, while he stood at the chest of drawers.

She handed him his clothes, and he arranged them orderly and with an
unerring precision that appealed to her methodical mind.

His clothes were beautiful too: so fine, so fresh, so like himself,
Ruth thought.  She handled the silken shirts, when his back was turned,
and stroked the flimsy vests.

Once he turned swiftly to find her pressing some diaphanous under-wear
against her cheek.

He laughed; and she blushed.

"That's from Cashmere," he said.  "Pleasant to the touch--what?"

"It's beautiful," answered Ruth.

When Ernie entered with the heavy luggage, Ruth was kneeling at the
suit-case, the Captain standing over her.

Ernie's somewhat artificial enthusiasm suddenly melted away.

He wasn't very pleased.

The Captain had brought a quantity of luggage too, and clearly meant to
make a prolonged stay.




CHAPTER XXXV

HIS ORIGIN

Captain Royal was the son of his father; but very few people knew
anything about that father.  And those few knew little more than that
he had made money in business in the North.

The business in fact was that of an unregistered dentist at Blackpool.

Albert Ryle was a curious little fellow.  He lived more like a machine
than it was possible to conceive a human being could live.  He was so
regular as to be almost automatic: he had no virtues, and his vices
were vigorously suppressed.  Early in life he planned out his career
according to Programme, and he stuck to it with methodical precision
throughout.  During his working life, happily for him, there were no
such seismic disturbances, utterly beyond his control, as have
completely upset the Programme of like automaton men in our own day.

Nor did the unexpected and catastrophic in the way of illness or sudden
love ever overwhelm him.

He did not marry: that was part of the Programme.  He did not enjoy
himself.  He lived meanly; but his practice grew and grew, especially
among the well-to-do artisans.  The middle and upper class he left in
the main to the qualified practitioners.

He was extraordinarily efficient, thorough, and precise in his work; he
was daring too.  He would administer gas himself, and happily had no
accidents.  He spent nothing on himself, and studied the stock-markets
with the same meticulous care which he gave to the human mouth.

On his fiftieth birthday he totted up his capital account and found he
had made £25,000--just six months ahead of scheduled time.

His end had been attained.  The first part of the Programme had now
been accomplished.

Next day--or as near as it was possible--he sold his practice, took
down his brass-plate, said good-bye to no one, for he knew no one
except in the way of business; and for the first time in his life
crossed the Trent, never to recross it.

Albert Ryle never looked back: he moved forward steady as a caterpillar
on the trail.

In the North he left behind him everything but the accent which, to his
own no small grief, and the unending anguish of his wife, he carried to
the grave, and the money he had made in gloomy Lancashire.

He bought a villa in Croydon, modified his name under expert advice,
and in the sun of the South country began to live.

Mr. Royal of Deepdene had made money in business in the North.  Now he
was going to spend it in the South.

Here began the second part of the Programme.

He married a middle-class woman, who had been a companion, and
possessed some not very well-founded pretensions to family.

He entered the Church, ignoring formal admission by baptism, and took
an active part in the life of the Town.

Capable and tireless, he became in time a Town Councillor, and, better
still, a Justice of the Peace for Surrey.  His grand ambition, never to
be fulfilled in this world, was to be a Deputy Lieutenant of the county
of his adoption.

There was one child of the marriage, who was christened at his wife's
request, and with his full approval, Hildebrand.

The boy was sent to a first-rate preparatory school, where, being an
aggressive youngster, he more than held his own.

Mr. Albert Royal was determined that his son should go to one of "our
ancient public schools."

When he broached the subject, the headmaster of the preparatory school
was in a dilemma.

Mr. Royal was an admirable parent from the commercial point of view.
He paid the fees and never made a fuss; but there was no getting away
from Mr. Royal's accent.

Mr. Wortley, an Etonian himself, didn't somehow think Eton was quite
the school for Hildebrand.  Too damp.  There wasn't much chance of a
boy getting into Winchester unless his father had been there before
him.  Had Mr. Royal been at Winchester?--Ah, bad luck.  Then
Rugby?--But Mr. Royal wouldn't send his son to a North country school.
Mr. Royal's home was in the South; and so was his heart.  What about
Harrow?--Mr. Wortley's face brightened.  Harrow was the very thing.  He
could see Hildebrand at Harrow in his mind's eye.

Later when his partner came into the study, after Mr. Royal's
departure, Mr. Wortley announced the news with a little grin.

"Arrow for Ildebrand," he said.

"And quite good enough too," replied the other, who was also an
Etonian, with a little snort.


To Harrow, then, Hildebrand went.

And just at the appropriate moment Mr. Royal Senior died.

That was not part of the Programme, but it was consummately tactful.

"My father didn't do much.  He was a magistrate in Surrey," sounded so
much better than the reality incarnate, rough and red and rather
harsh--with the Blackpool accent.

Mr. Royal's opportune death was, in fact, an immense relief to his
suffering wife and perhaps to young Hildebrand, who was beginning to
know what was what in the world in which he proposed to live and move
and have his being.

His school career was a great success.  Many admired, not a few envied,
nobody liked him; but as a master said--"He likes himself enough to
make up for that."

An extremely good-looking boy, full of self-confidence, he was an
unusually fine athlete, played racquets for the school, and notched a
century against Eton at Lords in a style that made men talk of F. S.
Jackson at his best.

His mother was presentable and dressed extremely well.

Young Royal had no objection to being seen about with her, and even
invited her down to Speech-day and introduced her to his friends at
Lords.  It was not to be wondered at that when she died she left the
whole of the £25,000 to her only-born.

Hildebrand bore this second bereavement with characteristic fortitude.
He was just at the age when the possession of money was rare as it was
useful.

He passed high into Sandhurst, and became an Under-Officer.  His record
there as an athlete, his bit of money, and the use he made of it,
enabled him to secure a commission in the coveted Hammer-men.  He
joined the Regiment with a considerable and deserved reputation, which
he more than maintained.

He was not popular with his brother-officers, who said quietly among
themselves that he was not a Sahib; while Conky Joe went so far as to
assert that he was not even a "white man"; but he was an asset to the
Regiment and accepted as such.

Now he had come home on six months' leave with two objects in view.  He
meant to work for the Staff College--and there were few more ambitious
men; and he meant to enjoy himself.

When he returned to England, there was no question where he would
settle down.

He knew all about the Hohenzollern, and indeed would boast to his few
intimates--and he was fond of boasting--that Madame was an old friend
of his, and that he had paid his first visit to the Third Floor when
still at Harrow.

Beachbourne indeed suited him very well.  It possessed a first-rate
crammer; if he wanted Society there was the Club at the West-end, full
always of Service men retired or on leave; and he could get as much
golf and cricket as he liked.

A terrific worker, he would have no distractions: for he knew very few
people socially.  There would be no country-house invitations for him;
nor did he court them.  When he had passed through the Staff College
and settled down in London for a spell at the War Office he knew very
well that doors, now shut to him, would open.  There was no hurry about
that.  He didn't mean to marry yet: he meant to enjoy himself.

In a word, Captain Royal was an adventurer of a kind by no means
uncommon in our day.  A Tory in his opinions and his prejudices he
lacked the one thing that can make a Tory admirable, and that is
Tradition.

When Colonel Lewknor once defined him as "A first-rate officer and a
first-class cad," Conky Joe, the kindest of men but a first-rate hater,
who had never quite got over the bias imbibed in the atmosphere of the
"greatest of all schools," replied with scorn, rare scorn,

"Well, what d'you expect of Harrow?"




CHAPTER XXXVI

THE CAPTAIN BEGINS HIS SIEGE

The morning after Captain Royal's advent, Ernie, going his round of the
Third Floor, dropping boots at various doors, stopped outside No. 72.

The door was open; and Ruth stood at the window looking sea-wards.

It was early yet, scarcely seven, but clearly the Captain was already
up and out.  Ernie stood in the door, admiring the lines of the girl's
big young figure, the curve of her neck and shoulders and the glossy
black of her hair.  He made a little whistling sound.

Ruth turned, saw who it was, and beckoned to him.

The window looked out over the lawns and foreshore on to the sea, brisk
and broken in the sun.

The tide was brimming, and swinging in, green-hued, white-tipped, and
splashed with shadows.

The bathing-raft was wobbling in the short chop.  There were no bobbing
heads about it now.  It was too early in the season, too early in the
morning, and the sea was too rough.  But a figure, white in the sun,
balanced on the unsteady raft, then shot arrow-wise into the sea.

Another moment and a black head bounced up out of the water.  Then
there was the flash of an arm, rising and falling swiftly, as the
swimmer strode away for the horizon.

"Straight out to sea!" cried Ernie.  "That's the Captain!--Buffet em!"

"I wish I was a man," mused Ruth.  "Go in like that--just as you are."

She took up her duster, and resumed her work.  The bed was already made.

"You're early at it," said Ernie, glancing round.

"Yes," answered Ruth.  "I'm to do his room every morning while he's in
the water.  He's going to work up here after breakfast."

"Hot stuff!" said Ernie, trying to work up enthusiasm.  "He'll command
the old Battalion one day, the skipper will.  Good old Hammer-men!"

Half an hour later the Captain was back.  His hair still wet, was crisp
still and very dark; while the brine crusted his handsome face.  He had
run up the stairs, three at a stride, too impetuous to await the lift.
In flannels, a sweater with a broad collar, and white shoes, he looked
cool and clean and strenuous as the water from which he just emerged.
At the top of the stairs he met the shabby porter with his collarless
shirt, his scrubby hair, and rough hands.

Ruth, coming down the corridor, marked the meeting of the two men.

"Mornin," said the Captain, brief as his own moustache.

"Morning, sir," grinned Ernie, rolling by, full of self-consciousness.

An hour later, he saw Ruth coming out of 72 with a tray.

Ernie stopped.

"Havin breakfast in his own room?" he asked.

"Yes," said Ruth quietly.

The monosyllable seemed to knock at Ernie's heart.

He hesitated a moment.

"I'm sorry you're leaving the Third Floor, Ruth," he said.  "For me own
sake like."

"Thank you," answered Ruth.

He noticed she was strangely curt.


A week later Madame sent for the girl.

"Ruth, are you still in any hurry to change your Floor?" she asked.

The girl looked down, colouring faintly.

"Think it over, vill you?" said Madame.  "There is no hurry."

"Thank you, Ma'am," said Ruth, quivering.

She returned to her work.  A bell was ringing.  It was 72.

Ruth went.

The Captain was manicuring his nails at the window.  He looked up as
she entered.

"Shut the door!" he said.

She obeyed.

"Come here!" he ordered.

She went.

He looked at her, in his blue eyes a laughing sternness.

"What's this?" he asked.

"What, sir?"

"I hear you're thinking of deserting."

She stood before him, her bosom rising and falling.

"Ruth," he said gravely, "you've got to make a home for me while I'm
here.  I'm a pore lone orphan--no mother, or sister, or friends.
You've got to mend me and mind me, as my old nurse used to say.  D'you
see?  I look to you."

"Very well, sir," answered Ruth.


Whatever else Ruth might feel about Captain Royal, there was no doubt
that she admired him.  And to do the man justice, there was not a
little to admire.  In any company, except the best, he shone.  And on
the Third Floor, in that meretricious atmosphere of fat-necked Jews,
dubious foreigners, and degenerate Englishmen, Royal with his strenuous
ways of the public-school boy, his athletic figure, and keen walk stood
out like a sword among gamps in an umbrella-stand.

He lived too with the deliberate speed of the man who knows his goal
and means to get there.

There was no need to call him.  He was up every morning at 6.15, and
into the sea, rain or fine, rough or smooth, at 6.30.  At 7 he was back
again in his room, stripped, and doing physical exercises.  At 8 Ruth
brought his breakfast; and by 9 he had settled to his morning's work.
After lunch he golfed; then to his crammer; and in the evening he
relaxed over a billiard-table or in the card-room.

Sometimes he went off for the night to Town.

On the first of these occasions Ernie carried his bag to the taxi with
a joy for which he himself could not account.

"What!--are you off, sir?" he asked gaily.  "I thought we was going to
keep you all your leave."

"Only for the week-end," answered the other, with his little hard
laugh.  "See me back on Monday."

Ernie's heart fell.

He went upstairs, saw Ruth, and feigned surprise.

"What, still here, Ruth?"

"Yes," the girl answered in her quiet way.  "I shan't move now till the
Captain's gone."

She said it quite simply.  She was too great, too spiritual, to be
provocative: Ernie knew that.

He stopped full.  There was a sea of fire lifting his chest and
lighting his eye.

"Ruth," he said.

She saw his emotion, and stayed with the courtesy natural to her.

"Will you walk out with me?"

She met his eyes with the courage, dark, flashing, and kind, he loved
so much.

"I couldn't do that, Ernie," she said so gently that he loved her all
the more.

"Why not then?"

"I'm afraid."

"What of?"

"Afraid you might ask me more'n what I can give."

"I'll run the risk!" cried Ernie.  "I'm ready!"

She shook her head.

He took her hand.

"I'm a good man, Ruth," he said with the almost divine simplicity of
the class to which he now belonged.

She overwhelmed him with tenderness.

"O, I know you are, Ernie!" she said in her purring voice of a
wood-pigeon at evening.  "But I'm not thinking of settling--not yet."

The love-passage relieved Ernie immensely.  He would face defeat, face
Captain Royal, face the future with confidence now.

Thereafter for some time he went about his work whistling, so that Don
John, the Austrian, winked at his mates behind his back, and said,

"He thinks she's for him!  No fool like an English fool!"

When he came back from his week-end away, Captain Royal went straight
to Madame's private sitting-room, which was at the end of the Third
Floor.  As he came out and passed along the corridor he saw Ruth
sitting on the window-sill in the passage, where Ernie had suddenly
known himself in love with her.

He stopped.  There was a bundle of mending beside her, and among it he
recognized his own pyjamas.

Royal knew there was a sitting-room for the maids, called by the
habitués of the Third Floor, "the Nunnery," and wondered.

That evening, when she came to put out his evening clothes, he said to
her,

"You don't care about using the maids' sitting-room, Ruth?"

She did not answer.

"The other girls aren't your sort? too rowdy--what?"

Again she fell back on characteristic silence.

Each of the bed-rooms on the Third Floor had a dressing-room attached.

"Well, you know my hours," he continued.  "You use my dressing-room to
work in whenever you like.  I never use it myself; and I know you've a
lot to do for me."

Ruth thanked him; and after that in the afternoons, when he was out,
and in the evenings, when he was at dinner, she would sit in his
dressing-room and work.

One evening, as she sat beside the window, her dark head bent over her
work, she was aware that he was standing over her.

He had come in on her very quietly from behind, not through his
bed-room but through the door of the dressing-room that opened into the
corridor.

She rose to go, gathering her work.

He put his hand upon her shoulder, and pressed her gently back into the
chair.  She trembled beneath his touch.

"No," he said.  "Don't go.  I like to have you there."

She glanced swiftly at the door behind her.

"That's all right," he laughed.  "It's shut."  Then he moved into the
bed-room.

"I'm not going to close the door," he said, "because I like to see you
there when I look up from my work."

She lifted her eyes to his, full of confidence and affection.  He was
not a man; he was a God--and to be treated as such: he could do no
wrong.

He smiled at her friendly from his chair.

"I'm going to read Jomini," he said.  "Ever hear of Jomini, Ruth?--nice
name, isn't it?  Joe-mine-eye."

After that Captain Royal was less regular in his attendance at the
billiard-room after dinner.

He read in his bed-room; Ruth worked in the dressing-room; sometimes
the door between the two rooms was open; and sometimes they talked.

One evening Ernie, descending from a higher floor in the lift, marked
Céleste listening at the dressing-room door.  She saw him, winked, and
tripped away.

"It's a caise!" she whispered, making a hollow of her hand.  "A
h'iceberg's hot stuff once it begins to go."




CHAPTER XXXVII

HE DRIVES A SAP

One morning, after Captain Royal had been at the Hotel two months,
Ernie missed the familiar soft thud of his feet as he came up the
stairs three at a time after his bathe.

Ernie looked at his watch.

It was half-past seven; and the Captain was regular as the seasons.  He
wondered what was up.  The strange dis-ease which possessed him,
whenever his thoughts turned to Royal, was on him strong.

Then Ruth came out of the Captain's room.  Her face, always grave, was
graver than usual.  The note of restraint Ernie had marked in it of
late, whenever he met her, had given place to one of anxiety.

"What's up?" he asked.

"He's not getting up," she answered.  "He's not well.  Looks to me like
the hot-chills."

The sick man heard the voices outside.

"Caspar!" he called.

"Sir."

Ernie entered.  Captain Royal lay in bed, a touch of colour in his
cheeks, his skin dry, his hair bristling, his eyes suffused.

"I've got a touch of fever," he said.  "And my head's stupid.  You
don't remember the prescription they used to give us in India.  Quinine
and--what?"

Ernie was far too vague to be of any help, and was testily dismissed.
He left the sick-room.  The Captain's helplessness roused the woman in
him and disarmed the jealous male.

"It's nothing much," he told Ruth.  "Only a go of malaria.  He used to
get it in India.  Don't you worry."

Later in the morning Madame visited the sick man, and summed him up
with those fine shrewd eyes of hers that let so little escape them.

The Captain was clearly running a temperature.

Madame put her plump be-ringed hand on his lean one, and then rang.

Ruth came.

"Have you a thermometer, Ruth?"

Ruth had--a legacy from Miss Caryll's days.  In a moment she
re-appeared with it, washed it, and put it into the Captain's mouth.
Then she plucked it out, and took it to the window.  It marked 102.

"What is it?" asked the sick man.

"It's a little up," answered Ruth, shaking the thermometer down.

"What is it?" repeated the other.

Ruth had not nursed Miss Caryll for two years in vain.

"It's a shade over normal," she said.  "Hap it'll be a bit higher this
evening."

Outside she told Madame.

"I shall send for Mr. Trupp," that lady said, and telephoned at once.

The great man came, grumbling and grousing.  What did he--who loved to
describe his surgery as carpentry, and himself as a mechanic--know of
Indian fevers?

Madame took him herself to the Captain's room.  Ruth brought a jug of
hot water.

"You must just stop in bed till it's burned itself out," said the
Doctor, wiping his hands and coughing.

The sick man cursed.

"You won't want a nurse," said Madame.  "Ruth'll do everything you
want."

Mr. Trupp looked up and for the first time noticed the girl by the
wash-stand.  He seemed put out and glanced at Madame.

"I didn't know you were on this floor, Ruth," he said, and added to the
Captain--"Ruth nursed a patient of mine for two years in this very
Hotel, didn't you, Ruth?  She can take a temperature, feel a pulse, and
keep a chart with the best of em, and you'll be all right in a day or
two."

Ruth, who loved Mr. Trupp, as she loved no one else on earth, blushed
and smiled.

"That's settled then," said the Captain from his bed.

Outside in the corridor Mr. Trupp, busy winding his comforter about his
neck, saw Ernie and shook hands with him.

"Well, Ernie," he said gruffly.  "I forgot you were here.  How _you_
getting on?"

"Nicely, thank you, sir," answered Ernie, forgetful for the moment of
all his trouble.  "Nothing much amiss with the Captain, I hope, sir?"

"D'you know him?" asked Mr. Trupp.

"Why, sir!" cried Ernie, aggrieved.  "He was our adjutant.  And a fine
officer too.  Mr. George'll tell you all about him, though they was in
different Battalions.  He's well be-known all over India because of his
cricket."

"O, he's a Hammer-man too, is he?" said Mr. Trupp, interested.  "Quite
a collection of you here.  D'you know Colonel Lewknor?"

"Know him, sir!" cried Ernie.  "The Colonel!--The best officer and
nicest gentleman we had.  Is he down here?"

"Yes, he's taking a house in Holywell, I believe....  Take my bag down
to the car, will you?--You'll find Alf outside.  I must just wait and
speak to the Manageress."

Ernie willingly obeyed.

Outside was the familiar chocolate-coloured car; and a little way off
was Alf standing in the grass exchanging confidences with some one in
the boothole in the basement.

He saw Ernie and broke off his conversation at once to come lurching
towards his brother, licking his lips, and on his colourless face the
familiar leer.

"Say, Ern!" he began confidentially.

Ernie, paying no heed, opened the door of the car, and put the bag
inside.

"That was a pretty pick-up you got hold of top of the bus that time,"
Alf continued quietly.

Ern faced his brother.

"What's this then?" he asked, rather white.

"That tart top o the bus that night."

Ernie was breathing deep as he shut the door of the car elaborately.

"I thought you was a churchman then," he said.  "Took the sacraments,
marched in processions and carried the bag, from what I hear of it."

Alf looked round warily.  Then he came boring in upon the other, as
though determined to penetrate his secret.

"What if I do!" he said.  "'Taint Sunday to-day, is it?--'Taint Sunday
_all_ the time."

Some one buried in the boot-hole laughed.

"What's that got to do with it?" Ernie asked.  "D'you keep a dirty
tongue all the week, and put on a clean one o Sunday with yer change o
clothes?"

"Who was she?" persisted Alf, his eyes like the waters of a canal at
night glittering in the murk of some desolate industrial quarter.

Ernie folded his arms.  He said nothing; but the lightning flickered
about his face.

"I know who she was then," continued Alf, his great head weaving from
side to side.  "She was one of the totties from the Third Floor--where
you work."  He thrust his head forward, and his eyes were cruel.
"_D'you_ think she's for you?--Earning twenty-two a week, aren't
you?--and what the German Jews toss you.  Why, I doubt if she'd fall to
ME--and I'm a master-man."

Jeering laughter from the bowels of the earth punctuated his words.

Just then Mr. Trupp came through the great swing-doors.  He stopped for
a word with the hall-porter.

"You settled down here, Ernie?" he asked.

"Pretty fair, sir, thank you," Ernie answered without enthusiasm.

Mr. Trupp entered the car.  He seemed perturbed.

"Well, if you want to make a change at any time, let me know," he said.
"I only suggested this as a make-shift for you, till we could fix you
up in something better, you know."

The Doctor drove home in surly mood.

It was not till the evening that his wife arrived at the root of the
trouble.

"You remember Miss Caryll's maid?" he said.

"Ruth Boam?" cried Mrs. Trupp.  "That charming girl who used to bring
us over strawberries from the Dower-house at Aldwoldston."

Mr. Trupp stirred his coffee.

"She's on the Third Floor at the Hohenzollern."

Mrs. Trupp put down her work.

"Temporarily," continued the other, "But she oughtn't to be there at
all, a good girl like that.  I told Madame as much."

"I should think you did!" cried Mrs. Trupp, flashing out like a sword
from a scabbard.  "It's a crime!"

"Madame's not a criminal," replied her husband quietly.  "She's kind.
But she's one of the people who carries her kindness altogether too
far."




CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE SERPENT

Ernie, who was never very fond of work, had on the Captain's arrival
stored his trunks in the dressing-room to save himself the trouble of
carting them up to the box-room in the roof.

Now it occurred to him that if a nurse was called in to attend the sick
man there might be trouble about the trunks.

On the morning after Mr. Trupp's visit he determined, therefore, to
move them before he was found out.

Very early he opened the dressing-room door and blundered in.

A girl with bare arms was standing before the looking-glass, dressing
her dark hair; and the bed had been slept in.

"O, beg pardon, Miss," said Ernie, genuinely abashed.

The girl smiled and held up a hushing finger.

"I didn't know, Miss," continued Ernie, still caught in his own
confusion.

"Why d'you call me Miss?" asked Ruth calmly.

Ernie laughed lamely.

"Did I?" he said.  "I don't know."  He found relief in bustle.  "I was
just a-goin to shift some o them trunks."

"Thank you kindly," answered Ruth.  "It'd make more room like."

Ernie set to work.

"How's the Captain?" he asked.

"Middlin or'nary," Ruth replied.  "He didn't sleep unaccountable well."

"You look a bit tired yourself, Ruth," said Ernie.

"I was up to him time or two in the night," the girl answered.  "I
shall go off this afternoon.  Madame's very kind."

Ernie went out, swallowing his misery as best he could.


The fever took its normal course.  The Captain needed very little
attention.  Ruth gave him his medicine, tidied his bed, took his
temperature, and saw to his food.

He lay in a fog, amused with her, angry with himself.

"You're top-hole at this job, Ruth," he would say.

On the third night, in the small hours, he rang.  The bell was on a
chair at Ruth's side.  She rose at once.  The dressing-gown in which
she wrapped herself was a flimsy affair, and showed the lines of her
large young body.  The light beside the Captain's bed was switched on.

"Ruth," he said, "I'm better.  I've broken out in a muck-sweat.  I'm
dripping.  Get me some fresh pyjamas and a towel."

His face was shining with perspiration, his hair dark.

She went to a drawer.

"Bring me a towel," he said.  "And give me a rub down."

She obeyed and clothed him in his new pyjamas.

He lay back, dry and contented.

The dawn was breaking.  She lit the spirit-lamp and crouched beside it,
graceful and brooding, her nightdress spread on the floor about her
like a train of snow.

"I'll chill you a drop o milk," she said in her deep voice, with the
coo of comfort in it.  "It comes over cold towards dawn."

He drank readily and seemed refreshed.

"That's better," he said.

Ruth watched him with kind eyes.

"Now you'll sleep, I reck'n," she said.

"Ruth," he answered, "come here."

She came.

He took her hand and kissed it.

"That's all," he said.  "Thank you.  Good-night."

She went back to the dressing-room and closed the door behind her.
Then she went to the window.

The tide was low, the sea still dark, and on the horizon of it a bank
of saffron, from which in time the sun would appear.

On the far edge of the sands, pearl-hued and desolate, the waves
stirred faintly.  All else was stillness and immensity.  Not a soul,
not a ship, not a movement.

The sweep, the nakedness, the inexorable passivity of earth and sky and
sea, man-forsaken and forlorn, seemed for once to affect the girl with
fear.  She retired hastily to her bed and sought the shelter of sleep.




CHAPTER XXXIX

THE LASH AGAIN

In a week the Captain was in the sea again, and living the same
fiercely strenuous life he had done before his attack.

Ernie congratulated him upon his recovery with a cheerfulness he by no
means felt.

A question haunted him.

Was Ruth still sleeping in the dressing-room? ...

Could the girl be so indiscreet? ...

Nothing could have been easier for him than to answer the question for
himself by peeping.  But he would not do it, for the hotel-porter was a
gentleman.

The question that troubled him was, however, soon to answer itself.

One afternoon, when Ruth was out to Ernie's knowledge, he was surprised
to hear in the dressing-room the familiar voices of Céleste and another
maid, hushed and whispering.

"She keeps the key her side," one was saying.

"What's it matter who keeps the key?" the other answered.  "That's only
a bluff."

The door was slightly ajar.

"He don't seem to have give her nothing," said the one at the
dressing-table discontentedly.

"Only cash.  Cash is the thing.  Then you can get what you like for
yourself."

"Here's her Bible and pray-book!  _Look!_--Ain't she just the little
limit?--and that close with it too."

"It's always the same.  It's the dark uns are the deep uns."

"Don't you dare to chip her then," warned the other.  "She's Madame's
own ducky-darlin-doodle-day."

Ernie opened the door.

The two girls turned in a scared flutter.

"There!--It's only old Ernie Boots!" cried Céleste relieved.  "He don't
count, Ernie don't.--But you give me the palpitations though."

Ernie held the door wide.

"You've no business in here," he said sternly.

"No one has--only the Captain, old cock," retorted Céleste flippantly.

The two girls flirted away with high noses and a rustle of silken
underwear.

Ernie looked round the little room with the eyes of a furtive
watch-dog.  He had no business there; and being there he ought to make
it his duty to see nothing.  But he did see; and what he saw was that
the bed was not in use.

Thrown carelessly upon it was a regimental blazer, obviously awaiting
repair, and a pair of socks in like case.  Beside them was a work-bag.
He moved the blazer and saw beneath it a silver cigarette-case.  Then
in the grate he saw the burnt end of a cigarette.

With beating heart, but unruffled air, he went out.

The two mocking-birds were perched on a window-sill at the end of the
corridor.

"Pore old Ernie boy!" they cried in chorus.  "Did he think she was for
him?" ...

The story trickled down to the boot-room in the basement, which was a
kind of cess-pool into which all the moral filth in the Hotel poured
and finally accumulated.

Don John openly mocked Ernie.

"Here's Caspar!--Thought he'd have a chance against the toff!"

Ernie flashed round on him.

"Stow it!" he ordered.

The Austrian was afraid.

"Soldier! soldier!" he croaked, hiding his fear behind hideous
laughter, and reported his enemy to Salvation Joe.

That worthy, swollen and stiff with righteousness as the Jehovah of the
Israelites, and glad of his chance, tackled Ernie on the subject.

"What's this then?" he said, stopping the other.

"What, sir?" asked Ernie.

"Fighting in the boot-hole," answered Jehovah in his voice of thunder,
subdued and distant.

"I don't know nothing of it," said Ernie, honestly taken aback.

Jehovah, the majestic, in his flaming jersey, could sneer.

"Ah, don't you, my lad?" he said.  "Well, I do.  Let's have no more of
it."

The two men went on their way: Salvation Joe to the Manager's office to
make his report.

"Always the same with these old soldiers," he said.  "It's up with
their fists at the first onset.  No reasonableness in em.  Can't keep
em off of it."

"Better keep him anyway till the end of the season," said the Manager.
"We don't want a change now."

"No, sir.  I don't want a change any time," said the head-porter, on
the defensive.  "But order is order.  That's all I says."


The pressure of necessity was indeed squeezing the softness out of
Ernie.

Enemies thronged his path.  He was becoming wary and watchful.  Of old,
when in the course of life he had come up against hostility and
obstruction, he had met it either by evasion or the non-resistance so
fatally easy to a man of his temperament.  It was different now.  His
enemies were leagued together to rob him of something dearer than
himself.  Therefore he would stand: therefore he would fight.

There grew upon him a dignity, a restraint, above all a sternness that
men and women alike remarked and respected.

Céleste ceased to mock him; Don John kept his distance; and the Captain
was on his guard.

Ernie was sure of it: for Royal was nothing of a diplomatist when
dealing with an enemy whom he despised.

Ruth, too, avoided Ernie now.

He noticed it, and did not attempt to approach her.

The two were drawing away, and yet, Ernie sometimes thought, coming
closer--for all the girl's grave reserve.

He at least was climbing heights where he had never been before.

Up there in the eternal snows it was lonely but bracing.  He was
putting on an armour of ice.  Clothed thus, knew that nothing could
hurt him.  He could bear all things, conquer all men.

Once at that time Mr. Pigott met him in Old Town.

"Ern," he said, eyeing the other curiously, "I've got a job for you in
my yard, if you like it.  What about it?"

"No, sir," answered Ernie, almost aggressively.  "I'm going to stick
where I am."

"No offence anyway," growled the other, striding huffily on his way....
"I might have been insulting him instead of trying to help him," the
aggrieved man reported to Mr. Trupp later.

"Yes," said the Doctor.  "He's under the Lash again.  I see that.  And
he's growing because of it.  Men do--if they are men.  If they aren't
they just break."

"You and your Lash," grumbled the other.  "There are other stimulants
in the world."

Mr. Trupp pursed his lips.

"Perhaps," he grinned.  "But none so effective."


His father, too, noticed the change in his elder son.

Once as they were sitting together, above the chalk-pit, on one of
Ern's afternoons off, after a long silence, he said,

"How goes it, Boy-lad?"

"What, dad?"

"The affair."

Ernie looked away, teasing the bent between his teeth.

"None too well, dad."

The old man laid a hand on his.

"Wade out into it!" he said.  "Trust the stream!  It'll carry you--if
you'll let it."

Ernie's mother too, curiously sure in some of her intuitions, felt his
trouble, was aware of his new-found courage, and came to him.

It had always been so with her from his childhood.

Whenever he put out his strength she rallied to him in full force.
When in weakness he fell away she left him.  It was as though all her
woman's power of buttressing had been given to the father, so that
there was nothing left to satisfy the demands of her seeking elder son.

That evening she gave him roses from her little garden before he went,
and watched him round the corner.

Then she retreated indoors, and standing thin-shouldered in the door of
the study, shot at the long loose figure by the fire one of her
customary crude remarks.

"He's hanging on the Cross," she said.

Edward Caspar stared into the grate.

"He'll rise again," he answered.




CHAPTER XL

CLASH OF MALES

Ernie, carrying his roses, mounted the bus.

Opposite the _Star_, he marked a gaunt figure, standing on the steps of
the Manor-house.  There was something of the kindly vulture about the
figure's pose that was strangely familiar.  Ernie leapt to sudden life.
It was the Colonel--without his sun-helmet.  Ernie was off the bus in a
moment, and sidling shyly up to the object of his worship.

The Colonel, waiting on the steps, watched the antics of the
approaching devotee with satirical indifference.

"Contemplating assault or adoration?" he asked mildly.  Then he
stooped, extending a skinny claw.

"What, Caspar!" he called, his cadaverous face lighting up.

"That's me, sir," grinned Ernie, wagging his tail with furious
enthusiasm.

Just then a chocolate-bodied car drove up, and Ernie was aware of Alf
looking at him.  The door of the car opened; and Captain Royal stepped
out.

"Ah, Colonel!" he cried in his brisk hearty voice.

The Colonel laid a finger on the other's sleeve.

"You remember Caspar, Royal?" he said.

"I do," replied Royal briefly.  "Coming in, sir?" as Mr. Trupp's door
opened at last.

Ernie turned down the hill, burning his white flare.  The Captain's
brutal insolence had gone home.

The Colonel reported the incident to his wife that evening.

"I could have struck the swine!" he said with unusual ferocity.  "Conky
Joe was right.  He never was a white man.  A piebald from birth, that
feller."

Mrs. Lewknor churned the incident in her mind.  It was a slur on the
Regiment, and therefore a capital offence.

"What a cad!" she said.  "Our dear Caspar too!  Royal's the only
officer in the Regiment would behave like that.  Where's he stopping?"

"My dear, where would Royal stop?" said the Colonel.  "The
Hohenzollern--Third Floor--where Caspar's working."

He nodded his big head discreetly.

"How do you know?" asked Mrs. Lewknor, eyeing him.

"Trupp told me," replied the Colonel.


Ernie returned to the Hotel with his roses.

Later that evening he went to the door of the dressing-room of 72 and
knocked quietly.

There was no answer.  He entered and laid the roses on the table.

As he did so the door between the two rooms opened, and Ruth stood in
it, watching him with hostile eyes.

In the room behind her Ernie could see the Captain in his
smoking-jacket before the fire with a cigarette between his lips.  Then
the Captain saw him too.  His easy expression changed in a flash; and
he acted as always without a moment's hesitation.

He strode towards the open door between the two rooms, brushing Ruth
almost rudely aside.

"Now no more of it!" he said with brutal savagery.  "I've had enough!"

There was no light in the dressing-room but that which came through the
uncurtained window from the moonlit sea, and the beam from the bed-room.

In the dimness the eyes of the two men clashed.

For a second the habit of discipline, of inferiority, of bowing to the
other's artificially imposed authority, overwhelmed Ernie and he
wavered.  Then strength came to him like a tidal wave: he steadied and
stood his ground.

In the eyes of his enemy he recognized in a flash the Eternal Brute,
domineering, all-devouring, ruthless in the greed of its unbridled
egotism, whose familiar features had been stamped indelibly, from the
beginnings of Time, upon the retentive tablets of his race-memory.

Ernie was face to face with something in which he had never entirely
believed--the Ogre of whom the Socialists spoke: Capitalism incarnate,
stripped of its Church-trimmings, the Monster remorseless and obscene,
to whom the Children of Men were but as the grass of the fields that
went to feed the unquenchable fires in its sagging belly.

Quite suddenly the veil had been drawn aside, the roseate mists of
sentimentality dispersed; and he beheld Human Nature, naked and
terrible--the Animal who called himself Man--an Animal inspired beyond
belief by the Devil of Lust and Cruelty, glowering out at him now from
the ambush of a face created after the likeness of the Son of God.

He said slowly, more to himself than to his enemy:

"My Christ!" and left the room.


In the basement, Don John, bare-necked as a bird of prey, his cheek
bulging with cheese, sat in a dingy apron and expounded his philosophy
to a little group of disciples as tired and dirty as himself.

"Take advantage!--Of course dey take advantage!  So would I, so would
you--if we was in their shoes.  Dey would be just pluddy fools not to.
Dere is only so much in de world.  Dey take what dey can get; and the
veak to the vall.  Shentlemen and Christians!  Dere is no such tings.
Tell the tale to mugs!--Dere is just Man and Woman, both worms,
wriggled up out of the mud.  Man wants Woman; and Woman wants it
cushie.  So de rich man buys her.  Can you compete against him?--Is
your body sleek with food and wine and lying in bed?--Is your spirit
nourished on books and music and plays?--Can you fill her eye with your
fatness, and clothe her body in furs, and adorn her hair with jewels,
and fill her lap with gold?--No; de rich man buys what he wants, and he
wants de best all de time.  For you and me what is left over when he
haf finished.  Dat is so all de way through--women, wine, horses, what
you vill.  Touch your hat and say--Tank you, sair.  Vair much obliged.
It is always de same."  He wagged a yellow fore-finger.  "Dere is only
two tings Ruling Class leaves to you and me."  He cackled horribly.
"One is Work"--he pronounced it vurk--"and de udder is War."




CHAPTER XLI

THE DECOY POND

After the battle between the two men, Ruth retired into the fortress
from which Ernie had lured her before the Captain's arrival.

The old restraint was on her, and hostility was now added.

She barely noticed him when they met, and he, wary for once and wise,
made no advances to her.

But hope was quickening in his heart, for September was on them now,
and the leave-season was drawing to an end.

One afternoon Céleste flitted past him like a wagtail.

"Cheer, Ernie-boy," she mocked.  "He's going away."

"Who is?"

"Captain, my Captain."

"When?"

"At once."  She halted.  "But--he's taking her away with him."

Ernie turned grey.

"Who told you?"

"One of the girls.  They take it in turns to sit in the dressing-room
of evenings to hear the latest.  It's like an aviary, they say.
_Coo-bird! coo! now me! now you!  You was good to me when I was ill,
Ruth,_ he says last night.  _Now I am going to give you a treat.  I'm
going to take you to Paree for the week-end on my way back to India._"

Ernie came closer.  He looked ugly.

"If I catch any of you girls in there----"

"Baa-a-a!" mocked the naughty one.  "Who was caught in there himself?"

Ernie was now extraordinarily alert and vivid.  The old sleepy
benevolence had vanished: he was listening at last to that voice which
none of us can afford to neglect, the voice which says at all times, to
all men in all places--

_Beware!_

Salvation Joe took a professional and proprietory interest in the
change, which for some obscure reason he attributed to his own direct
intervention in heavenly places.

"What is it then?" he asked.  "Has HE found you at last?"

Ernie, who as he gathered strength, gained also in flippancy, replied:

"There was ninety-and-nine, you mean.  That lay.  No, sir, He ain't
found me.  I've found IT though."

"Well, then, come round to the 'appy 'our on Sunday next and tell us
all about it," growled the great man.  "There's none so 'umble and
lowly but we can learn from them, as I often says."

He tramped on his reverberating way....

That night, as Ernie was on lift-duty, the telephone bell rang in the
passage.  He went.

"Who's that?" he asked.

"Mr. Caspar from the Garage, Old Town," came the answer.  "Could I
speak to Captain Royal?"

The Captain had given orders that when he was in his room of evenings
after dinner, he was not to be disturbed.

"He's engaged," answered Ernie.  "Could I give him a message?"

For a moment there was a pause.  Then the voice began again.

"Who'm I speaking to?"

"One of the porters, sir," Ernie answered.

There was no need for him to disguise his voice: for the telephone was
out of repair, and speech muffled and uncertain accordingly.

"Well, will you take down this message and see it gets to him to-night.
_The car will be at the Decoy Park, East Gate, to-morrow afternoon at
2.30._"

Ernie wrote the message down, and repeated it.

"Very good, sir," he said briskly.

"Thank ye," answered Alf, and rang off.

Later, when Captain Royal came down to the smoking-room for a last
cigarette before bed, Ernie took him the message.

The Captain, who had brought the art of insolence to his inferiors to a
height that only a certain type of officer, sheltered by Military Law,
attains, took the note without a word, glanced at it, and tossed it
into the fire.

Ernie retired with burning heart.

The conjunction of Captain Royal and Alf seemed to him sinister.  But
he had his armour on now, his lance in rest.  His brain was working
with a swiftness and precision that astonished him.  He was ready for
whatever might come....

The old Decoy was a survival of the remote days when Beachbourne was a
fishing-village, famous only for the duck-shooting on the Levels hard
by.  When Ernie was a lad the Decoy Pond, in its rough ambush of trees
and thick undergrowth, was still the haunt of duck and snipe, and his
favourite hunting-ground in the bird-nesting season.  During Ernie's
absence in India the Corporation had acquired it, and made of the
tangled wilderness, formerly the home of fox and snipe and the shy
creatures of the jungle, a fair pleasure-ground for their conquerors.
Green lawns now ran down amid forest-trees and clumps of flowering
shrubs to a shining ornamental water on which floated stately swans,
while moor-hen scudded here and there, and flotillas of foreign ducks
paddled about islands gorgeous with crimson willow.  A broad road ran
from gate to gate; and in the woods of summer evenings young men now
chased rarer game than ducks.

It was at the Eastern Gate of this resort that Alf was to meet the
Captain with a car.

Ernie would meet them there too.  On that he was determined.

It was not his afternoon off, but he arranged to change with a mate.

A light railway ran from the East-end of the Town along the edge of the
Levels to join the main line at the wayside station known as the Decoy
Park between Beachbourne and Polefax.

Ernie took the two o'clock train, and, ensconced in a third-class
smoker, watched.  Very soon the Captain came swinging along the
platform, a light burberry over his arm, athletic, resolute, and quite
the English gentleman, his coloured tie striking a charming note of
gaiety in his otherwise fresh but sober costume.

Ernie watched him critically.  In externals the Captain was the typical
representative of a Service in which men move, like Wordsworth's cloud,
all together or not at all.

For the skilled observer, indeed, the history of the British Army
during the last seventy years is to be read in the evolution of the
moustaches of its officers.  At the moment now recorded the flowing
_beau-sabreur_ moustache which dominated the Service from Balaclava to
Paardeberg had long gone out; while the tuft moustache which
commemorated for the British Army the advent of the Great War had not
yet come in.  The tooth-brush or touch-me-not or crawling-caterpillar
moustache, brief, severe, and bristling, which had held its own against
all comers since South Africa, was still the rage; and gave the wearer
that suggestion of something between a hog-maned horse-in-training and
a rough-haired terrier on the look-out for a row with a rat which was
the fashionable pose for the British officer in the years between the
two Wars.

To be quite _comme-il-faut_ Royal should have had trailing at his heels
a little bustling terrier, rather like himself, harsh in manner, but
virile, aggressive and keen.

But Captain Royal did not like dogs.

Ernie, chewing a fag in a corner, as he watched his enemy march by,
remembered that; remembered too and suddenly that it had been common
talk in the lines that Royal was not popular among his
brother-officers--"not class enough" the whisper went.  Ernie, who had
wondered then, understood that now.

At the Decoy Park the Captain got out.

Ernie saw him off the platform, and well started down the road to the
Decoy Woods before he followed.

A chilly wind blew from across the Levels.

The Captain marched along towards the Park, the tail of his burberry
floating out, his green hat with the feather in it cocked to meet the
breeze, the shapely curves of his legs exposed by the wind.

Just outside the Park he looked sharply behind him, but saw only a
shabby figure slouching casually along some two hundred yards away.

Once inside the Park Ernie left the road and, walking swiftly among the
trees at the wayside, drew closer.

Here in the woods peacocks strutted, and close by was an aviary in
which parrots chuckled, golden pheasants preened themselves, and birds
with gay plumage fluttered.

On the rustic bridge across the ornamental water the Captain paused and
looked about him.  Nominally he was observing the swans; really he was
looking to see if he was being watched.

Ernie, alert in every inch of him, recognized the ruse; and drew the
correct deduction that his enemy had been at this game before.

He waited in the shadow of the trees.

The Captain, satisfied, made now for the East Gate.  Outside it a car
was waiting.  Ern recognized that chocolate body; and he recognized too
that little figure in the shining black gaiters who stood beside it,
and touched his hat with a furtive grin.

The two men exchanged a brief word.  Alf opened the door of the car,
produced something, and held it out.  Ernie saw that it was a lady's
fur coat.

Then Captain Royal climbed into the car, and Alf put the hood up.

Ernie approached.

Just inside the East Gate was a little wooden chalet, where teas were
served.

In this Ernie took cover.

A crowded motor-bus from Beachbourne drove up.

On the front seat was a girl in a terra-cotta-coloured felt hat.

She got down and walked towards the car.

Ernie watched, quivering.

There was only one woman in the world who walked with that direct and
compelling grace.

It was clear to him that the girl was happy--lyrically so--and shy.
The flow and rhythm of her every motion betrayed it abundantly.

Alf touched his hat as she approached, and opened the door.

The Captain did not descend.  He was waiting inside--the spider in the
background lurking to pounce upon the fly, a spider who shot forth
sudden grey tentacles to enfold his prey.  Ruth, clasped by the
tentacles, was sucked out of sight.

Ernie was overwhelmed with a sudden desire to leap out into the road
and cry:

"_Don't!_"

He sweated and trembled.

Then the door of the car slammed.  Ruth was fast inside; and Alf,
wonderfully brisk, had hopped into his seat, and was fingering the
levers.

Then the car stole forward swiftly, secretly, like a cat upon the stalk.

It passed through the gate, would cross the Park, strike the Lewes road
at Ratton on the way to--Lewes--Brighton--where?...

Ern was standing up now, forgetful of concealment.  As the car swept
by, Alf saw him and made a mocking downward motion with his hand, as of
one pressing to earth an enemy struggling to his feet.

Ern was aware of it, of the look on Alf's face, of the two in the car.

They did not see him.  The Captain was bending over Ruth, buttoning the
fur coat round her throat.

Just then there rang through the silence a dreadful cry as of evil
triumphant.

A peacock in the wood had screamed.




CHAPTER XLII

THE CAPTAIN'S FLIGHT

That night Ernie was on late lift-duty.

He was just about to lock the lift when the missing Captain came
striding across the empty hall with a peremptory finger raised.

"You're late, sir," said Ernie, unlocking grudgingly.

"Third Floor," the other answered, curt as a blow.

When the lift stopped, Ernie went along the corridor to deliver a note
to Madame in her room.

"Thank-you, Caspar," she said.  "Good-night."

She had always felt a kindness for this soft-spoken son of the people,
and the fact that he was reported to be of gentle birth had interested
her.

As he was going back to the lift he met Ruth, still in her hat, coming
along the corridor, bearing a tray.

She had the merry, mischievous air of a girl just back from a Sunday
school treat, and still brimming with the laughter of primroses and
April woods.  His heart leapt up in joy and thankfulness as he beheld
her.

She gave him the old gay look of affectionate intimacy, which she had
withheld from him for weeks past.

"Good-night, Ernie," she said as she passed him, in a voice so low that
but for its deep ringing quality he might almost have missed it.

He half hesitated.

"Good-night, Ruth," he answered, and as he disappeared down the shaft
of the lift saw her, glowing with health and happiness, enter the
Captain's room with her tray.


He locked the lift.

In the hall the Manager was shutting his desk in the office.  He saw
Ernie and called:

"Has Captain Royal come in?"

"Yes, sir."

"There's a telegram for him somewhere."

He hunted about and at last found it.

"Take it up to him now, will you?" he said, "It's been waiting since
three."

Ernie toiled up the stairs, and knocked at the door of 72.

There was no answer.

He opened it slightly.

The light was on, and he entered.  The room was empty.  He stood a
moment, quivering.  Then voices from the dressing-room came to him
quietly and at intervals.

He stood still, with head down, listening.

The Captain was speaking softly, insistently.

Ruth was dumb.  Ernie thought she was crying.

Then he heard her voice, panting and very low,

"A-done, sir, do!"

In a moment Ernie was in eruption.

He flung against the door and tore rabidly at the handle.  There was no
answer from within.  Ernie brought his fist down upon a panel with a
left-handed punch that seemed to shake the Hotel.

"Telegram, sir!" he called in stentorian tones, threw the flimsy
envelope on to the bed, and was gone.


Next morning the Captain was up early.

Ernie met him coming back from the bath-room, a towel over his arm.

Royal did not meet the eyes of his enemy.

"Have a taxi at the door at 6.45," he ordered.

"Yes, sir," answered Ernie.

A few minutes before that hour the Captain rang for the lift.  Ernie
found him waiting on the landing with his suitcase and took him down.

In the hall Royal, with averted shoulder, thrust a sovereign towards
him.

"Here!"

Ernie flared white, and swept the outstretched hand aside with a
gesture that was almost a blow.

"Never!" he cried.

For the second time the two men's eyes met and clashed; and in a flash
Ernie knew that he had conquered.  The Captain had run up the sullen
flag of spiritual catastrophe.

Then he turned away and marched rapidly across the hall.

Ernie went straight back to 72.  The room showed every sign of a hasty
departure.  The floor was littered; the drawers open and still half
full of clothes.  Under the dressing-table were boots and shoes, on it
a pair of hair-brushes, a case of studs, and the lesser paraphernalia
of a man's toilet.  It was clear that the late occupant had stuffed a
few things into his suit-case and bolted.

The dressing-room door was shut.

Ernie went to it and listened.

There was no sound within.

"Ruth," he called gently, and opened.  She was lying across the bed in
her simple print-gown as though she had been felled.

It was clear that she had entered the room and been faced
with--emptiness.

Her eyes were shut, and her face swam pale as the moon and still in the
black circle of her hair.  One foot had lost its shoe, and dangled
black-stockinged and pathetic over the bed.  In her hand, listlessly
held, was a piece of crumpled paper--as it might have been her
death-warrant.

She did not seem to breathe.

At first Ernie thought that she was dead, so wan she was, so quiet, so
unaware.  He did not mind very much, because he had died too; and they
were together still, and closer than they had ever been.

Quietly he knelt beside her.

"Ruth," he said, and kissed the hand that lay limp at her side.

She stirred beneath his touch.

"It's all right, Ruth," he whispered.

She opened her eyes.  They lay like pools of beauty, dark in her white
face, and fringed with black.  They spoke to him in the silence,
appealing to him.  They drew him, they undid him, they purged him by
their suffering of all sin, lifting him into a white heaven, where was
no stain of earth, no discord, no breaking despair.

He smiled at her through his tears.

"It's all right, Ruth," he repeated.

She laid her hand on his in loveliest trust.

"Goo away, Ernie," she sighed.  "I just ca'a'n't a-bear it," and her
eyelids closed again.

He rose to his feet.

The window was open, and the bit of crumpled paper she had been holding
in her hand was tossing about the floor.

He picked it up unconsciously and went out.

It was not till some time later that he glanced at it casually before
throwing it away and saw it was a ten-pound note.




CHAPTER XLIII

THE EBB-TIDE

Three days later Ernie met in the hall of the Hotel a man he had known
and disliked in the Regiment in India.

The two shook hands, Ernie grinning feebly.  He was not so keen about
the Regiment as he had been a few months before.

"What you doin here then, Mooney?" he asked.

"I've come for Captain Royal's heavy baggage," the other answered.
"Say, which was his room?"

"I'll show you," said Ernie, and took him up.

Ruth helped in the packing.

Ernie, who came and went throughout the morning, was amazed at her.

Her heart was being eaten away; and yet she might have been packing for
a stranger, so calm was she, so methodical and self-oblivious.

Once, when Ernie looked in, he saw her kneeling by the window, her back
to the door, her arms deep in a half-empty trunk.

Mooney winked at him and nodded over his shoulder.

Ernie, standing in the door, met him with the face of a hostile stone.

"Can I help?" he asked.

"No, thank-you," Ruth answered.  "We're nearly through."

By noon the task was finished, and the baggage downstairs piled at the
back-door.

Mooney and Don John lunched together in the basement.  Ernie, passing,
saw them, and heard his own name mentioned.  Don John was telling a
story.  Mooney, following Ernie with his eyes, was unpleasantly amused.

Later Ernie helped to put the luggage on a cab.  He volunteered for the
work and did it gladly.  As the cab moved off, his heart seemed to lift
and lighten.  The burden he had carried for so many months was being
borne away on the top of that oppressed and heavy-laden vehicle.  Then
his eye caught Mooney's.  The man, smart almost as his master, was
sitting back in the cab, his eyes half shut, and his lips slightly
parted.  Between them protruded the tip of his tongue.

Mooney was mocking him.


A few days later Ernie missed Ruth from the Third Floor.

He asked Céleste where she had gone.

"Gone to the Second Floor," the girl answered.  "She's waiting on a
missionary.  Makes a nice change after the Captain."

Ernie was glad, yet sorry.

He saw little of the girl thereafter; and she avoided him.

But he still possessed the ten-pound note she had cast away on the
morning of Captain Royal's departure, and was worried as to what he
should do with it.

He could not send it to her, for she would know the sender.  He could
not give it her, for it was the price of--what?

And there was no one whom he could consult.  His dad in such matters
was a child; his mother would be unsympathetic; Mr. Pigott would be too
simple to understand.

Then one autumn afternoon, as he was walking home across Saffrons Croft
through rustling gold-drifts beneath the elms, he met Mrs. Trupp coming
down the hill silvery-haired, gracious, and smiling in upon his gloom.

"Well, dreamer," she said.  "Not hard to know whose son you are!"

Ernie looked up, and made one of those lightning resolutions of his.

"Beg pardon, 'm," he said.  "Could I come and see you this evening?"

"You could, Ernie," answered the other.  "And about time too!"

That evening, when the blinds were drawn, and the lamps lit, Ernie
found himself alone with his godmother in the long-windowed
drawing-room, telling his story.

Mrs. Trupp, whom cruelty, in its manifold forms, could rouse to a
white-hot anger that surprised those who did not know her, listened
quivering and with downward eyes.

"What was the man's name?" she asked at last.

"Captain Royal," Ernie answered without hesitation.

She nodded.

The Captain had called at the Manor-house once or twice during his
stay, and his easy attentions to her Bess had disquieted her for the
moment; for she had disliked him from the first.  But Bess, sound in
her intuitions, as she was strong in her antipathies, had proved well
able to care for herself.

"She's a good girl," said Ernie, still rapt in his story.  "Too good
for this world."

"You won't tell me her name?" asked Mrs. Trupp.

Ernie shook his head doggedly, twisting the ten-pound note between his
knees.  It was his father's son who refused to speak.

"Of course," she went on slowly, "your friend has not been wise, Ernie.
The world would say she'd brought her troubles on her own head."

Ernie, well aware of the truth, looked at the note, and changed the
subject clumsily.

"What are I to do with this?" he asked.

Mrs. Trupp had no doubts on that score.

"The proper thing to do is to return it to Captain Royal," she said.

Ernie was quite gentleman enough to understand.

"What'll be his address, I wonder?" he asked.

Mrs. Trupp went to the telephone, rang up Colonel Lewknor, and made her
inquiry.

"Army and Navy Club, Piccadilly, will find him," replied the Colonel.

Mrs. Trupp went to her writing-table, addressed and stamped an
envelope, and put the note inside.

"Register that, please, Ernie," she said....

That evening, as she handed her husband his coffee, she remarked to him
casually:

"William, who looked after Captain Royal when he was ill?"

Mr. Trupp shot two words at her.

"Ruth Boam."

Mrs. Trupp put down her sugar-tongs, quivering.

"What about her?" grunted Mr. Trupp.

"Nothing," said the lady.  She added after a pause with apparent
irrelevance--"Did she like you?"

"I don't know," replied Mr. Trupp shortly.  "All I know is that girl
ought never to have been on the Third Floor.  I told Madame as much."


The next time Mrs. Lewknor came to call, Mrs. Trupp told her the whole
story, as Ernie had told it her; but, like him, concealing the woman's
name.

Her suppressed indignation made her almost terrible.

Mrs. Lewknor listened doggedly, looking at her toes.

She had her own views about Captain Royal, but he was in the Regiment,
and the Regiment was her god, to whom she owed unquestioning allegiance.

"There's no reason to suppose it was more than a stupid flirtation,"
she said lamely.

"It was a _crime_ on his part!" cried Mrs. Trupp with a vehemence that
astounded her visitor.  "A man in his position, and a girl in hers!"

That evening Mrs. Lewknor rehearsed the tale to her husband.

"Swine-man!" said the Colonel.  "Just like him.  And that man going
about the country calling himself a Hammerman!  Makes you sick."




CHAPTER XLIV

ERNIE LEAVES THE HOTEL

The winter came and began to go.

In February the celandine peeped in the beech-woods in the coombe, and
the Lords and Ladies began to unfurl their leaves, while in the little
garden in Rectory Walk daffodils made a brave show.

All through the dark months Ernie had only caught an occasional glimpse
of Ruth.  Now he lost sight of her entirely.

One afternoon Céleste stopped him on the Third Floor.

She looked at him curiously, with a touch of gauche diffidence he had
never marked in her before.

"Was you very fond of her then, Ernie?" she asked quietly.

"Who?" he inquired, surprised.

"Ruth."

Ernie stared at her.

"What's happened?"

"She's gone."

"When?"

"Some time since.  Afore Christmas."

He saw that Céleste, the kindest of creatures, was genuinely moved.
She turned her back, and moved to the window, biting her handkerchief
to restrain her tears.

"Of course she'd no business here at all," she sobbed.  "She was an
innocent.  She didn't know nothing.  If she'd mixed with us girls we
could anyway have learned her enough to keep her out of trouble.  But
she was that proud.  Kept herself to herself."

Ernie devoured her with dark eyes.

"Where's she gone?" he asked.

"London, I expect," Céleste answered.  "They always do."

The flighty little creature dried her eyes and spread her wings in the
sun once more.  "Poor old Ern!" she cried.  "But there's better fish in
the sea than ever came out of it, as the sayin is....  I'm not aimin at
meself, mind!" she added coquettishly.

Ernie, if he heard her badinage, ignored it.  As always, where his
heart was concerned, he struck instantly and without fear.

He walked along the corridor and knocked at Madame's door.

She was, as usual, smoking.

"What is it, Caspar?" she asked kindly.

Ernie came to the point with almost brutal directness.

"Ruth Boam, 'm."

Madame studied her rings.

"She has left--while I was gone away," she said after a pause.  "I am
sorry.  She was nice gurl."

Madame had only just returned from her annual visit to the sister-hotel
at Brussels.

"Could you tell me where she's gone, 'm?"

Quite suddenly her large fair face wrought.  She rose out of the cloud
of her own smoke, and just as Céleste had done a few minutes before,
went to the window and looked out.  Her great shoulders heaved.

"I don't know," she said.  "She has not gone home to Aldwoldston.  I
haf written."  Then with an astonishing display of emotion:

"That man!" she cried.  "I will never haf that man in my Hotels any
mores."

Ernie retired, seeking and dissatisfied.

The news of his search soon spread.

In the boot-room next day, when the men were at their "Elevens," Don
John met him with a jeer as he entered.

"Don't he know then?" mocked the Austrian.

"Know what?" asked Ernie.

"Where she's gone?"

Ernie put down his bread and cheese.

"Where has she gone, then?"

"Queen Charlotte's, Marylebone."

"What's Queen Charlotte's?" asked Ernie, the simple.

A rumble of cruel laughter went round the room.

"Layin-in hospital," said Don John, "for English gurls the Chairman
Jews have sported with."

Ernie rose.  Very deliberately he took off his apron.

"Shut the door, will you?" he said in a curious white calm.  "Thank
you, Bill.  Now take his knife from him, some of you.  You know these
bloody aliens."

A silence had fallen on all.

"What's it all about?" tittered Don John, trying to brave it out.

"Arf a mo," said Ernie, rolling up his sleeves leisurely, "and then
I'll show you.  Now chuck him out into the ring.  I thank you, Bert."

In the Hotel the feeling between the aliens and the Englishmen ran
high; and the latter obeyed Ernie's injunction with a will all the more
because the fame of Ernie's left-handed punch had reached the Hotel
from Old Town long since.

Don John didn't like it, and he liked it less when Ernie began on him
in all seriousness.

One of the foreigners slipped out.

Two minutes later Salvation Joe, magnificent in his red jersey,
shouldered into the room.

"What's all this then?" he growled in his voice of a drum-major.
"Thought you was a Christian, Caspar?"

Don John was spitting blood over the sink.

Ernie stood in the middle of the floor, his head a little forward,
ignoring the head-porter, his fists still milling the air with a
rhythmic purposefulness that was almost dreadful.

"Yes, I'm a Christian all right," he replied in musing voice.  "It is
more blesseder to give than to receive.  I've give your friend a
middlin bunt, and there's more where the same come from.  He's only got
to arst for it."

Salvation Joe marched away to report to the Manager.

"And went on after I'd spoken," he said.  "Saucy with it too."

Christmas was over; Easter some weeks away; things were very slack.

The Manager was a thick young German with wavy black hair parted in the
middle.  He now sent for Ernie.

"You can go at the end of your month," he said.  "I'm sick of it."

"You ain't the only one," retorted Ernie.  "I'll go now."

"Then you'll go without your wages," replied the Manager.

Ernie went upstairs to his dormitory, dressed, gathered his few
belongings, and came downstairs deliberately and with dignity.

He felt exalted.

Salvation Joe met him with a sardonic smile.

"What, reelly goin?" he asked.

Ernie experienced quite suddenly an immeasurable superiority to the
head-porter.

"I am, Mr. Conklin."

"Without your wages?"

"I'll leave them to you, Mr. Conklin," said Ernie quietly.  "They're
the wages of sin.  This place is a brothel.  And your Christ is my
Devil."

Leisurely, with a certain joy in his heart, and his bundle in his hand,
he crossed the road to the Redoubt and climbed the motor-bus for Old
Town.

As he did so the memory of a like journey with a companion at his side
was strong upon him.

Somehow he had a feeling that Ruth would be on the top, awaiting him.

Standing on the steps he peeped warily.

She was not there; and his heart, that had been soaring, crashed to
earth.

Then he climbed up into the bleak unsympathetic sky.  All around him
were benches empty, ugly, comfortless.  And looking back, he was aware
of Salvation Joe standing with arms folded across his scarlet paunch,
eructating on the steps of the Hotel.




BOOK VI

THE QUEST



CHAPTER XLV

OLD MUS BOAM

Ernie was not adventurous except where his heart was concerned.

He had the homing tendency of the affectionate nature.

When he left the Hohenzollern Hotel in Sea-gate he made straight as a
bird for Old Town.  But he did not go to Rectory Walk.  He was out of
work now, at the slack season of the year, too.  He knew very well what
his brother Alf's attitude towards him would be, and was by no means
certain of his mother's: for she, too, worshipped success and
efficiency in all men but the one dependent on her.

Therefore he went to an old school-fellow of his, married now, and
established in the Moot at the back of the _Star_, and made
arrangements to lodge with him.

His immediate future was secure, for he still had a pound or two in
hand.  And long ago he had adopted the outlook on life of the class
which had absorbed him--an outlook natural to them, because inevitable,
and acquired by him--the outlook that sees To-day but shuts its eyes to
save itself from To-morrow.

Old Town is small and has long ears.  It was soon known that Ernie
Caspar was "out," and the cause of his dismissal was discussed by all
and hinted at by not a few.

Alf, sitting behind his wheel at Mr. Trupp's door, was one of the first
to note his brother hanging about the street-corner.

He reported the fact to his mother.

"He's back on us," he said briefly.

"Who is?"

"Ernie."  He laughed bitterly as he chewed his cigarette.  "Lost his
job again and turned corner-boy.  Takes his stand opposite the _Star_
so everybody may know he's my brother."

Mrs. Caspar banged the pans upon the range.

"Why's he lost his job?" violently.

Alf lifted his hand to his mouth.

His mother eyed him, and Alf felt criticism in her stare.

"I see Joe Conklin, the head-porter at the Hotel," he said.  "They give
him one or two chances.  But it was all no good.  Never is with that
sort."

Anne Caspar looked at him sharply.

"Are you tellin the tale, Alfred?"

Her son looked up fiercely.

"Why ain't he come home then?--Answer that."

"He did come home Saturday same as usual to take dad a walk."

"That's his cunning--to bluff you he wasn't out," jeered Alf.  "He's
lodging in Borough Lane.  Has been ten days past.  Mrs. Ticehurt told
the Reverend Spink.  If he done nothing he ain't ashamed of, why not
come home?"

To do her justice, Anne Caspar was convinced against her will; but
subsequent cogitation caused her to accept Alfred's story as true.

She felt that Ernie had deceived her.  Why had he not told her that he
was out when he came as usual on Saturday for his dad?

Yet in reality the answer was very simple.  It was that Ernie chose to
keep his troubles to himself.

Thereafter mother and son, by tacit consent, avoided each other in the
steep streets of Old Town; and when Ernie called next Saturday he found
the kitchen-door locked against him.

He was not surprised, nor indeed greatly grieved.  His heart was high
and very steady as he turned into his father's study.  The winter had
tried the old man, who was no longer now able to take the hill as
formerly.  Instead the pair dawdled along to Beech-hangar; and there,
sitting among the tree-roots, under the fine web of winter beech-twigs,
Ernie told his father the essential fact about his love.

"I've lost her, dad," he said in his simple way.

The old man's blue eyes, that seemed to brighten as his body dulled,
shone on him mysteriously.

"Feel for her," he said, reaching out his hands like a blind man.
"You'll find her."  He added after a pause.  "I don't think she's far."

Ernie chewed a grass-blade.

"I shall find her," he said with quiet confidence, "because my heart
ain't fell down--and won't."

The old man was still blind and feeling.

"Spin," he said.  "Then pounce."

Ernie nodded.

"That's it, and sooner or later my fly'll fall into the web."

"It must," said the other, "if you keep on spinning till you cover the
uttermost parts of heaven and earth."


His father's words, as always, made a deep impression on Ernie's
suggestible mind.

Ruth was not far: dad had said so; and dad knew.

Next day was Sunday.  He determined to walk over the hill to
Aldwoldston to see what he could find.

True, Madame at the Hotel had told him that the girl had not gone home;
but did Madame know?

He started early, passed Moot Farm, where the turkey-cocks, stately and
with spreading tails, played that they were peacocks, and disdained him
for a vulgar fellow in spite of old acquaintance.

It was February, and the beeches in the coombe at the back of Ratton
Hall had not yet begun to warm and colour with the rising sap.  The
feel of the turf beneath his feet, the glimpse of shrouded waters
beyond the Seven Sisters, uplifted and inspired him as of old.

He could conquer; he could find.

Descending the long slope into Cuckmere, he crossed the road at the
racing-stables, took the hill again, and marched along, his head in the
sky, and a song on his lips, to greet that of the lark pouring down on
him from the unbroken dimness of the heavens.

It was still early as he dropped down the bare bleak flank of
Wind-hover, scrawled upon with gorse; and came over the cultivated
foot-hills into the valley, bright with brooks and the narrow Ruther
that winds like a silver slug down the green-way towards the sea.

He crossed the stream by a white hand-bridge, passed along an upraised
path under an avenue of willows, across the open field called Parson's
Tye; up the narrow chapel-lane between back-gardens and high walls,
into Aldwoldston High Street, curling narrow as a defile between
crowding houses, yellow-washed, brown-timbered, amber-tiled.

Conspicuous by its air of age and dignity stood out the _Lamb_, swarthy
as the smugglers who once haunted it; a mass of black timber won,
perhaps, from high-beaked galleons in Elizabethan days, with small
projecting upper windows through the leaded panes of which eyes watched
the street of old, while ears strained for the clatter of the hoofs of
tub-laden pack-horses hard-driven from the Haven in the darks.  A roof
of Horsham slats bowed it to earth; while a huge red ship's
figure-head, scarred and hideous as an ogre, propped with its dreadful
bulk the corner of the street as it had done for the hundred and fifty
years since the vessel of which it was the guardian and the god had
been lured to destruction against the ghastly wall of the Seven
Sisters.  And the carvings, quaint and coloured, on the centre-board
reminded Ernie that his father, when once of old their rambles had
taken them thus far, had told him that the inn had been in days gone by
a sanctuary under the jurisdiction of the Abbot of Battle and the next
house of call after the _Star_ at Beachbourne for pilgrims on their way
from Pevensey to visit the shrine and relics of holy St.
Richard-de-la-Wych at Chichester.

Just beyond the _Lamb_ in the little market-square, filled almost by a
solitary chestnut-tree, stood the Cross.

Around it, their backs against the brick pediment, gathered the village
worthies as they and their fathers had gathered at that hour, under
those skies, amid those hills, on Sabbath mornings for centuries
innumerable.  Standing round the four sides of it, men all, in Sunday
negligé and easy attitudes, buttressing the Cross, they smoked and
chewed and spat and ruminated.  On the fringe of the centre-piece were
groups of youths and boys, silent as their elders and as absorbed,
whose age and worth did not yet entitle them to a place among the
buttresses.  No women or girls joined the sacred circle.  These stood
in the doors of their houses round the square, or sat on their
doorsteps, or peeped through the low latticed windows of the
_Smugglers' House_ at their masters expectorating round the Cross.

But for a little white terrier, curled on the pediment at his owner's
back, who bit his flank with furious zeal, Ernie could have believed
that here was a group of rustic statuary set up appropriately to embody
the spirit of the place.

A twinkle lurking in his eyes, he asked the most ancient of the
buttresses the way to Mr. Boam's cottage.

Very slowly the group stirred to life with grunts, groans, and a
shuffling of feet.

Then the ancient one removed his pipe, and, after a preliminary
exercise, spoke.

"Old Mus Boam, t' chapel-maaster," he said.  "Down River Lane yarnder.
Frogs' Hall in t' Brooks.  I expagt yo'll find he a-settin on his
bricks.  Most generally doos o Sunday.  For why?  Ca'an't get no
furderer dese day, I rack'n.  Ate up with rheumatiz, he am.  Ca'an't
goo to Chapel.  So Chapel has to goo to he!--he!--he!----"  A jest
clearly almost as old as the toothless one who made it.

Ernie dropped down River Lane into the valley again.  Just behind the
willows at the foot of the lane stood a yellow-washed cottage, with a
high-pitched roof like a truncated spire.

Sheltering the door from the sea-winds was a fine bay-tree, and in
front of the house a little space of bricks on which sat an old man
looking out across the stream towards Wind-hover's bare dun flank, pale
in the wintry sun.

He, too, seemed pale and wintry, sitting there, one big hand on his
ash-stick: a beautiful old fellow, very tall and sparse, his ruffled
beard curling stubbornly up from beneath his chin towards the long
shaven upper lip that added severity to his natural dignity.

There was no question where Ruth got her stature or her bearing from,
if her colouring was all her own.

Ernie felt awkward in the presence of the still old man, but he
introduced himself shyly as one who had been in service with Ruth at
the Hotel.

Mus Boam eyed him keenly, kindly, but with obvious reserve.

"She'll ha left there now, I expagd," he said briefly, and
called--"Mother!"

A woman came to the door.  She was big, too, with the warm skin of her
daughter, and the same distinguished foreign air.  Her hair was
snow-white, her eye-brows black, her eyes and colouring of the South.
Surely she was descended from some Spanish adventurer who had made of
Ruther Haven a base for raids up the valley into the Weald.  But
England, it was clear, and Sussex in particular, had impressed their
staid and ponderous selves upon the riotous foreign blood to the
exclusion of all else.  A gypsy queen, the mother of Madonnas, bred
among the Baptists and saturated with their faith, there was about her
the same atmosphere of large and quiet strength that characterized her
man.  And Ernie could well understand that the pair had taught chapel,
as Ruth had once told him, for thirty years in the building at the back.

Mrs. Boam stood in the door and looked at the visitor.

He noticed at once about her the same cloud of reserve that he had
remarked in her husband.

She was clearly too well-bred to show hostility, but equally clearly
she was exercising restraint.

"She'll ha gone into service," she said in deep and humming voice, like
an echo of her daughter's, but somewhat dulled and flat with wear.

"In Beachbourne?" asked Ernie.

"Of course we doosn't see her as often as we used when she was at the
Hotel.  D'idn't to be expected, surely," said the mother parrying.

"And it bein winter and all," continued the old man, taking up the
tale.  "No coaches at this time o year.  And dis a tidy traipse over
the hill for a maid."  He turned the conversation.  "You'll ha walked,
Mr., to judge from yer boots." ...

Ernie trudged home over the greasy hills with certain clear impressions
in his mind.

The old folk were anxious: they did not know where Ruth was: and they
would not talk.

Was she writing?

Was she still in Beachbourne?




CHAPTER XLVI

ERNIE TURNS PHILOSOPHER

Ernie was now steadily ablaze.  His heart was set; his purpose
resolved; there was no faltering in his faith.  The armour in which his
spirit was cased revealed no fissures under strain.  He was amazed at
his own strength, and at the illimitable resources on which he could
draw at will.

People who saw him at this time, swept by the March winds, haggard and
pinched at the _Star_ corner, wondered at the flame of determination
burning in his face.

"He seems always waiting for some one," said Elsie Pigott, who, like
many another woman, was haunted by his wistful eyes at night.

"Perhaps he is," answered Mrs. Trupp.

It was the slackest season of the year--between Christmas and Easter;
and there was no work obtainable.  Building was held up by the frosts;
visitors were sporadic; and in the East-end a strike of engineers in
the great railway shops had dislocated trade.

Elsie Pigott pleaded with her husband for her favourite; but for once
she could not tease or taunt the Manager of the Southdown Transport
Company in acquiescence with her wishes.

"No," he said, sturdily, "if he wants my help he must come and ask for
it.  Last time I offered him a job he snubbed me brutally.  I've got my
self-respect same as others."

That evening she came to his door.

"Please, sir," she said, dropping a curtsey, "Mr. Ernest Caspar!--will
you see him?"

He scowled at her over his _Christian Commonwealth_.

"You've done this," he said.

"No, sir," demurely bobbing.  "He came."

"Show him in."

Ernie entered, shining and unshorn, a tatterdemalion with the face of a
saint.

The old schoolmaster thought how like his father he was growing: the
same untidy garden of flesh, the same spirit at work behind the weeds.

"Well," he said, laying down his paper, "I don't see much of you at
chapel these days."

Ernie smiled.

"I'm in chapel all the time, sir," he said.  "That's what I come about.
I wanted you to know."  He sat down suddenly.  "You know what you used
to tell me about prayer when I was a nipper.  _Ask, and it shall be
given you_, and that."  He leaned forward.  "That's true--every word of
it.  You can have what you want for the askin--if you'll wait.  Now I
want something; and I shall get it in time, because I'll be faithful."

Mr. Pigott looked into the rapt eager eyes of the scare-crow opposite
him.

For some reason he felt humiliated, even afraid; and, man-like, he
concealed his qualms behind an added gruffness.

"Your father's been talking to you," he said.

"Ah," said Ernie.  "But I been talking to myself, too.  No one else
can't teach you, only yourself."  He began to expound his philosophy
with tapping finger in the half-hushed voice of the priest revealing
the mysteries of life and death to the neophyte.  "See there's two
minds in Man," he began.  "There's the Big Mind and the Little One.
The Big Mind's like a Great Dream--it's beautiful, like clouds, but it
can't do much by itself: the Little Mind's like a tintack, sharp and to
the point.  Now Alf's got the one kind of Mind, and me and Dad the
other.  This here Little Mind helps you to get on: it thinks it's on
its own, being conceited.  But the Big Mind behind does the real work."
His eyes burned.  He spoke with a solemnity, a conviction that was
overwhelming.

Mr. Pigott was awed in spite of himself.

"The Little Mind's clever like Alf.  And the Big Mind's wise like your
father.  That's it, is it?" he said lamely.

Ernie nodded.

"And what about Mr. Trupp?" the other inquired.

"Ah," said Ernie, with enthusiasm, "he's a great man, Mr. Trupp is.  He
lives by both Minds--as a full man should.  He don't neglect neether.
They're meant to work together.  Ye see the Little Mind should be like
a lantern for the Big Mind to work with--like a miner's lamp in the pit
like.  It's got no real life of its own--only what the miner chooses to
give it.  Most folks neglect one or the other.  Dad and me neglect the
Little Mind--so we don't do much; but we aren't afraid of nothin.  Alf,
now, he neglects the Big; so he's in fear of his life always, and good
cause why, too.  For he lives by the Little Mind.  And sooner or later
the Little Mind'll go out snuff.  And then where'll Alf be?"

Elsie Pigott, in an apron, stood in the door.

"We're discussing prayer," her husband informed her.

"Indeed," said the lady.  "And now you'll discuss a plate of beef.  At
least Ernie will."

The starveling rose.

"No, thank you, 'm," he said.

"Aren't you hungry then?" asked the young woman.

"Not as I'm aware of," laughed Ernie.

"Nonsense," the other answered, "you can live by the Spirit, but not on
it."  And she took him firmly by the arm and led him into the kitchen.

Her guest established, she returned to her husband.

"Have you found him a job, Samuel Pigott?" she asked.

"I have not, Elsie Pigott.  Nor has he asked me for one."

"Mr. Pigott," his wife retorted, "if you were not twenty years my
senior I should call you the beast you undoubtedly are."

All the same, when his wife had gone to bed that night, Mr. Pigott rang
up the Hohenzollern Hotel and asked the Manager why Ernie had been
dismissed.

"Got fighting drunk," replied the Manager.  "He'd been warned before."

After that Mr. Pigott set his face like a flint.

"It's now or never," he admitted to Mr. Trupp, and added reluctantly,
"There may be something in your Big Stick sometimes, after all."




CHAPTER XLVII

ALF TRIES TO HELP

Ernie was now in a bad way materially.

He became seedy and slipshod, with hollow eyes, and clothes that hung
loosely upon his diminishing frame.

Alf resented his presence and appearance as a personal injury.

"Does it to spite me, it's my belief," he told his mother furiously.
"Always at the _Star_ corner lookin like a scare-crow and askin for
pity.  A fair disgrace on the family.  Of course all the folks want to
know why I don't help him.  What's the good of helping him?  He's the
sort the more you help the less he'll help himself.  Help him downhill,
as Reverend Spink says."

The thing became a scandal locally, and Anne Caspar shared something of
the feeling of her younger son.

If Ern must starve, why do it at her door?

Happily her husband was, as always, blind to what was going on beneath
his nose; and so long as he was not disturbed Anne could stifle any
pangs of conscience that might trouble her.

Alf, on the other hand, had no pangs to stifle: for to the hardness of
the egoist he added the mercilessness of the degenerate.  His mental
attitude towards the weak was that of the lower animals towards the
wounded of their kind.  He wanted them out of the way.  Indeed, but for
his ever-present sense of the Man in Blue at the corner of the street
he would have dealt with Ernie, dragging a broken wing, as the maimed
rook is dealt with by its mates.

He eased himself, however, and took characteristic revenge on his
brother for the spiritual wrongs that the needy can inflict upon the
prosperous by direct action.

At a meeting of the Church of England Men's Society in Old Town, he
asked in laboured words and with obvious emotion for the prayers of
those present for "a dear one who had gone astrye"; squeezing his eyes
and contorting his features in a fashion that led certain ladies of the
congregation of St. Michael to whisper among themselves that Mr. Caspar
was a very earnest young man.

Even in the C.E.M.S. Alf had few friends and some enemies; and Ernie
heard from one of these--whom a sense of duty had compelled to
speak--what had passed at the meeting in the Church-room.

Ernie accordingly stopped his brother in the street next day.  He
looked white and dangerous.  Alf knew that look and halted.  His heart,
too, brought up with a jolt, and then began to patter furiously.

"What's all this, then?" began Ernie, breathing heavily through his
nose.

"What's what?"

"At the Men's Society last night.  Can't do nothing to help your
brother...."

Alf held up a deprecatory hand.

"You don't know what you're talkin about, Ernest," he said solemnly.
"I'm doin more for you nor what you know."

Ernie came closer.  There was in his eyes a surprising flash and
glitter as of steel suddenly unsheathed; and he was kneading his hands.
Ern's "punch" had been famous in certain circles in Old Town long
before he went into the Army.

Now Alf had a spot upon his soul.  He, too, possessed a weakness of a
sort that Civilization in its kindest mood covers except in times of
extraordinary and brutal stress.

"I know _just_ what you're doing for me, Alf," said Ernie quietly.
"Let's have no more of it, see, or I'll bloody well bash you!"

There was no question that Ernie meant what he said.  Easy-going though
he was, all his life he had been subject to these sudden eruptions
which flooded the sunny and somnolent landscape with white-hot lava; as
his brother knew to his cost of old.

Alf put his hand up as though he had been already bashed.

"Ow!" he gasped, "Ow!" and passed on swiftly.

That evening he went, as was very proper, to see and consult his
spiritual director.


The origin of the Reverend Spink was known to few.  He was in reality
the son of a Nonconformist grocer in the North, and had been educated
with a view to the ministry.  His mother had been a governess, a fact
of which her son at the outset of his career was perhaps unduly proud;
though later in life, when referring to it, he would say with quite
unnecessary ferocity, "And I'm not ashamed of it, eether."

After his father's death the superior attraction of what his mother
truly called "the church of the gentry" seduced him from his old-time
allegiance.  With the aid of the local Bishop he was sent to a
Theological College, and shortly received what he was fond of naming in
militarist moments, "a commission" in the Established Church.

He did not like his brother-curates to have been public-schoolmen, and,
when asked, would say that he himself had been educated privately.  The
Archdeacon, who was not jealous of him, spoke of him to those of his
staff he considered on his own social level as "dear brother Spink."
On the rare occasions when the Lady Augusta Willcocks asked him to
supper, he oiled his hair before the great event and prayed fervently
for guidance at his bed-side.

He was a small man, plump and rather puffy, who wore pince-nez, was
spruce in his person, and walked about in a brisk, rather bustling way,
as though he could not afford to lose a minute if all the souls waiting
for him to save them were to be gathered in.

He and Alf were of much the same class if of somewhat different
calibre.  It was, indeed, from a close observation and imitation of the
facial activities of the Reverend Spink at devotion that Alf had been
enabled to win the benedictions of the virgins of St. Michael's.

Alf now called on his friend and pitched his tale.

"Past ope," he said lugubriously.  "I'm sorry to say it of any man, let
alone me own blood brother.  But it's my true belief all the same."

"To man, my dear friend," said the Reverend Spink, rising heavenward on
his toes with a splendid smile, "much is impossible.  Not so to Go-urd."

Alf looked into the fire very religiously.  Then he nodded his head and
said after an impressive pause,

"I believe you, sir."  He lifted his face with a frankness the curate
thought beautiful.  "Of course I ain't told you all I know about our
Ern," he said.  "After all, he _is_ me own brother.  And, as I often
says, blood is thickerer nor what water is."

It was some months later that Alf swaggered into his mother's kitchen
late one night.

The knowing look upon his face was mingled with one of obvious relief.

He sat down before the fire and smiled secretively.  Once he sighed,
and then chuckled till his mother's attention was attracted.

"What is it?" she asked.

Alf nodded his great head.

"Ah," he said.  "He'll be easier now, you'll see.  That's all.  _She's_
left."

His mother, who was stirring something in a saucepan, looked up.

"Who's left?"

"Her Ern got into trouble with."

Anne Caspar ceased to stir.

"What's that?" she asked sharply.

Alf smirked as he stared into the fire.

"One of the flash-girls from the Hotel.  I see her off to-day for Mr.
Trupp."

Anne Caspar was breathing deep.

"Was Mr. Trupp seeing to her?"

"That's it," said Alf.  "Sea View.  You know."

Yes, Anne Caspar knew all about Sea View.

"Was that why Ernie left the Hotel?" she asked at last, white as a
sword.

"Ah," said Alf, significantly.  "It was one why, I reck'n."

Anne Caspar was not critical nor logical nor even just.

Next Saturday, when Ern called to take his father out, his mother met
him with terrible hostility.

"She won't come on you now," she said with a white sneer.  "You needn't
worry no more."

Ernie was taken aback.

"Who won't come on me?" he asked.

"That girl you got into trouble."

Ern turned ghastly.  His mother's eyes held his face with cruel
tenacity, although she was trembling.

"She's gone away to London," Anne continued,--"with her child."

Ernie threw back his head with a little hoary smile.

"Ah," he said, "Alf," and went out slowly.

His mother's voice pursued him, dreadful in its caressing cruelty.

"I shan't tell dad," she said.

It was not often Ernie drew his sword.  Now he knew no mercy.

"You can," he retorted.  "He won't believe you."




CHAPTER XLVIII

TWO MEETINGS

After thirty years of following the wagon, Colonel Lewknor and his wife
had returned home from India on a pittance of a pension.

There was a grandson now, and that grandson had to be sent to Eton like
his father and his grandfather before him.  Mrs. Lewknor was determined
upon that.  But the grandson's father was only a Captain in the Indian
Army; ways and means had to be found; and openings are not many in
modern life for a retired couple on the wrong side of fifty.

Then the Colonel's health became uncertain, and he was sent down to
Trupp of Beachbourne.

While there Mrs. Lewknor caught influenza, and Mr. Trupp attended both.

A delightful intimacy sprang up between the three.  The Colonel's
sardonic humour and detached outlook upon life appealed to the great
surgeon almost as much as did Mrs. Lewknor's experience and width of
view to his wife.

Mr. Trupp attended his patients once a day for a fortnight.

When he paid his last visit, Mrs. Lewknor thanked him and asked him for
his account.

"I'll see," answered Mr. Trupp.  "What are you going to do when you
leave here?"

"Go back to London and look out for a job, I suppose."

Mr. Trupp shook his head.

"The Colonel mustn't go back to London," he said.  "Why not stay here
and find your job here?"

He expounded his pet plan, cherished faithfully for years, of an
Open-Air Hostel for his tuberculous patients.

"There's a site available in Coombe-in-the-Cliff," he said, "just at
the back.  Build a Home.  I'll fill it for you.  You'll make a lot of
money."

Mrs. Lewknor was thrilled at the project.  It was at least a great
adventure; and, coming of the lion-hearted race that conquered Canaan,
she had no fears.

The Colonel, it is true, was more tempered in his enthusiasm, but then,
as he was fond of saying,

"I haven't the courage of a louse.  No man has."

And he was content to stand aside, as often before, and watch his
wife's audacities with admiration not untinged with irony.

She took a tiny house in Holywell for herself and her husband, set out
to raise money with which to buy the site in Coombe-in-the-Cliff, and
sat down in earnest to work out the scheme in co-operation with the
inspirer of it.

Her visits to Old Town to consult Mr. Trupp were almost daily.  In fine
weather she would walk across the Golf Links; and when the turf was
like a soaped sponge she would go round by the road through
Beech-hangar.

Here one bitter April afternoon she marked a tall bowed old man walking
dreamily under the beech-trees, the light falling through the fine
net-work of twigs on his uplifted face.  His hands were behind him, and
he wore an old-fashioned roomy tail-coat.

Mrs. Lewknor's swift feminine eyes took him in at a glance.

He was a gentleman; he lived out of the world; and there was somebody
at home who cared for him: for it was clear that he was not the kind of
man who would care for himself.

As she drew near, she glanced away, and yet confirmed her impression
with that trick of the well-bred woman who somehow sees without looking.

Then, as she passed him, a wave of recognition overwhelmed her, and she
stopped suddenly.

"Mr. Edward Caspar!" she cried.

He, too, had half turned.

"I was wondering if you'd remember me," he rumbled, beaming kindly down
on the little lady through gold-rimmed spectacles.  "You still walk as
if you were dancing."

"Who am I?" she asked.

"I don't know," he answered.  "Thirty years ago you were Rachel
Solomons."

The profound spiritual affinity which had made itself felt in that
unforgettable moment under the palms in Grosvenor Square long ago
manifested itself instantly.

Time was not.  Only two spirits were, who recognized the familiar beat
of each other's wings in the dark spaces of Eternity.

She regarded him affectionately.

"How's it gone?" she asked.

"Not so bad, I suppose," he mused.  "Better than I expected, if worse
than I hoped.  I'm dreaming still instead of doing."

"Any big things in your life?"

"One."

"A woman?" fearlessly.

"No.  My son.  And he was taken from me--for ever, I thought at the
time.  And after that I made the Discovery."

The little lady nodded.

"It's worth making," she said.

"Yes," replied the old man with the sudden leaping enthusiasm she
remembered so well of old, and the same spreading flush, "and you don't
make it till you've lost everything.  That's the condition."

He had turned and was rambling along at her side, as if he had belonged
to her for the thirty years in which they had not met.

They walked together thus down the New Road, along Rectory Walk, and
turned into Church Street.

Anne Caspar from the bedroom-window saw them pass and wondered.

They were not talking: Anne was glad of that.  Her Ned was ambling
along, apparently unaware of the little lady, strong as she was fine,
walking at his side.

The pair turned down the hill at Billing's Corner.

It was afternoon, and the street was almost empty save for a shabby man
walking up the hill towards them from the _Star_.

They did not see him, absorbed more in themselves than in each other;
but he saw them and stepped into the porch of the parish-church as
though to avoid them.

Just opposite the porch Edward Caspar came to himself and said good-bye
with grunts.

Mrs. Lewknor looked after his heavy figure toiling laboriously up the
hill.

Then her eyes caught the eyes peeping at her from the porch--eyes that
possessed the same wistful quality as those of the man who had just
left her side: eyes somehow familiar that were smiling at her.

"Why, Caspar!" she cried, and crossed the road.

The man left the beam against which he was leaning, and came towards
her suddenly.  There was a curious wan smile upon his face.  He
lurched, held out his hand like a child for help, and fell his length
in the road.

A man from the iron-monger's shop opposite came out.

"He's out of work," he said.  "He's half-starved.  There's a lot the
same.  Funny world."

Mrs. Lewknor was horrified.

"Take him into the porch," she cried, "out of the road.  He'll be run
over here."

"No, not into the church!" came an authoritative voice.  "I know the
man.  The church is a sacred edifice."

It was the Archdeacon.  He bent his somewhat dandiacal figure
elaborately, put his nose close to Ernie's lips, and sniffed
deliberately.

"No, sir, it's not that," said the iron-monger shortly.  "It's food he
wants."

"Ah," said the Archdeacon, rising in gaitered majesty, his painful duty
done.  "I'm glad to heah it."

Mrs. Lewknor was trembling with fury.

Ernie, on his back in the mud, stirred and opened his eyes.

He saw wavering faces all about him.

"Guess I'm all right now," he said.

"Give him air!" ordered the Archdeacon magnificently.  "Ayah, I say!"
and he made a sweeping gesture with his arm to brush away the crowd who
were not there.

"He's had plenty of air," retorted Mrs. Lewknor with the curt brutality
that distinguished her on rare occasions.  "What he wants is something
more solid than he gets from the pulpit."

The Archdeacon eyed her _de-haut-en-bas_.  From his undergraduate days
he had believed implicitly in the power of his eye to master and
demoralize his enemies and those of his Church, and the Lady Augusta
Willcocks had loyally fostered his belief.

Now, however, his antagonist refused to be demoralized.

He saw that she was a lady, suspected that she might be "somebody," and
with that fine flair for the things of this world which characterize
the successful of his profession, he retired on gaitered legs with a
somewhat theatrical dignity.

Ernie was helped to his feet.

A car, coming slowly down the hill, ground to a halt.

Mr. Trupp leaned out and took in the scene.

"Ernie, get up alongside your brother, will you?" he said.  "Mrs.
Lewknor!"

The car rolled on its way with its two new occupants.

"He don't want me," muttered Mr. Trupp in his companion's ear.  "He
wants my cook."

Mrs. Lewknor, still seething, recorded the incident.

"The Church is the limit," she snapped.  "I could have pushed that man
over in the mud."

"Yes," said Mr. Trupp soothingly.  "But you mustn't take the Church too
seriously.  The right way to look on it is as rather a bad joke."


That evening, after his coffee, Mr. Trupp laid down his evening paper
and stared long into the fire as his manner was.

His wife and daughter waited for the word that was slowly brewing.

It came in time.

"Men grow when they've got to," he announced at last with humorous
sententiousness.

"They can't grow much without food," said Bess with warmth.  The
incident of the afternoon had stirred her generous young soul to the
deeps.  "It's monstrous!"

"It is," her father agreed.  "And it's all because Civilization has
thrown up a class that's above the Discipline it imposes upon others."

Mrs. Trupp eyed her husband sternly.

"William Trupp!" she said, "I believe you're a Socialist."

"My dear," he answered, "I've been told that before."

"Bess and I don't want to hear your viewy views," continued the lady.
"We want to talk about flesh-and-blood Ernie and how to help him."

"Hear! hear!" said Bess.

"My dears," replied the annoying man, "it's just Ernie I'm talking
about.  He's growing again.  My old friend Necessity's at work on him
once more."




CHAPTER XLIX

ALF MARKS TIME

The scene outside the parish-church in Old Town, when Mrs. Lewknor
challenged the Archdeacon, marked the turn in Ernie's material fortunes.

The Reverend Spink handed on his version of the affair to Mr. Pigott at
the Relief Committee that evening.

"He was laying on his face in the road _dead_ drunk opposite the
church-door when his brother picked him up," he reported, round-eyed
and spectacled.  "His poor, _poor_ people!"

"Ah," said Mr. Pigott, "was he?--I know where you got that story from."

The curate tried to be rude in his turn, but he was not so good at it
as the more experienced man.

"Such a place to choose!" he continued, turning to Colonel Lewknor.
"Opposite the church-door!  Just like him!"

"Such a place, indeed!" echoed the Colonel, quiet and courteous.
"What's the good of lying down to die of starvation at the door of the
_Church_ of all places?  Will she open to you?"

Mr. Pigott disliked the Reverend Spink almost as much as he disliked
the curate's protégé.  Next day the contrary man sent for Ernie and
offered him a job as lorry-man in the Transport Company.

"I know you and you know me," he said in his most aggressive manner.
"So it's no good telling a pack o lies to each other that I can see.
Start at twenty-three a week, with chances of a rise if you keep at it
steady.  Begin Monday....  And it's your last chance, mind!"

Ernie ignored the insults and leapt at the offer.

The Southdown Transport Company ran motor-lorries between Newhaven and
Beachbourne, carrying seaborne coal and other merchandise from the
harbour on the Ouse to the town under Beau-nez.

Ernie liked the work.

It kept him out of doors, under the sky, and in touch with the
old-world elemental things he loved.  The breath and bustle of the
harbour at Newhaven; the long ride on the motor-lorry through the
hill-country at all seasons of the year; even the pleasant acrid smell
of the coal and coke in the lorry and on his overalls was pleasant and
satisfying to him.

He worked steadily, paid his debts, and for the first time in his life
began gradually to save money.

That autumn his father asked him if he wouldn't return home to live.

"Alfred's left us," said the old man.

"Has he?" asked Ernie surprised.  "Where's he gone then?"

"He's gone to live above his garage," replied the other.  "Something's
happening to Alfred," he added.  "I don't know what."

Alf, in fact, was changing; and Mr. Trupp was watching the evolution of
his chauffeur with a detached scientific interest that his wife defined
as inhuman.

And that evolution was proceeding apace.  Alf was living alone above
his garage; he had introduced a girl into his office; and he was no
longer getting on.

Mr. Trupp noted the last as far the most significant symptom of the
three.

Alf had climbed in his career to a certain point, and there he stuck
fast.  His business neither went ahead nor back.  He was still doing
well and saving money.  The wonder was that he was not doing better.

But the reason was clear enough to the penetrating eye of the old
surgeon, to whom his chauffeur was an absorbing study in mental
pathology: Alf was no more a man of one idea; his energies were no
longer concentrated solely on getting on to the exclusion of all else.
The emotional side of him, battered down from infancy, was revenging
itself at last.  Desperately it was seeking an outlet, no matter how
perverted: certainly it would find one.

"He's suffering from life-long repression," the Doctor told his wife.
"Now he's got to find a safety-valve."

In his own mind Mr. Trupp had no doubt as to the form the safety-valve
would take.


About that time Mrs. Trupp, meeting Mr. Pigott in the Moot, asked him
how his new hand was getting on.

"Working steady as Old Time," replied the other with satisfaction.

"I like the look upon his face," Mrs. Trupp remarked.  "He's always
expecting."

"Yes," replied the old school-master, "expecting angels--like his
father."

"Perhaps he'll find them," smiled Mrs. Trupp.

That evening, as it chanced, she met her godson under the elms in
Saffrons Croft, and stopped him.

It was May now.  The hope illuminating air and sky and every living
thing was reflected in Ernie's face.  Indeed the young man looked
inspired.

The two regarded each other affectionately.

"Ernie," said the lady, colouring faintly.

"Yes, 'm."

"Are you still thinking of that girl you told me about?"

The other's face glowed like the moon.

"I never hardly think of nothing else, 'm."

"I knew you were," answered Mrs. Trupp.  She added with a sudden lovely
smile: "You'll find her--if you're faithful."

"That's what dad keeps on, 'm," Ernie answered.  "And I know I shall
too.  See, I keep all the while a-drawin her to me."  He made the
motion of one hauling on a line.  "She can't escape me--not nohows."

He turned on her the earnest eyes of the evangelist, and began to wag
an impressive finger in the way she loved.

"See, you can draw down what you want--_only you must want it with all
your heart_.  'Taint no good without that.  Alf, now, he draws down
money.  For why?--that's what he wants.  Now I want something else."

The lady regarded him with wise shrewd interest.

This New Thought, as the foolish called it, how old it was, how
universal, how deeply embedded in the primitive consciousness of the
common man!  Ernie, to be sure, did not read Edward Carpenter nor the
works of any of that school; but instinct and experience had led him to
knock at the same door.

"And if Alf wanted something different, too?" she asked.

Ernie shook a sceptical head.

"He wouldn't--not really.  That ain't Alf.  Money's what Alf wants and
what he gets by consequence.  He's only for himself, Alf is.  If he
went out a'ter anything else he'd only go half-hearted like, therefore
he wouldn't get it.  He'd be a house divided against hissalf.  So he'd
fall."


The two brothers now rarely met and never spoke.

Just sometimes Ernie in his grimy overall, sitting with arms crossed
and sooty face upon a load of coal in the jolting lorry, would be
passed by Alf at the wheel of his thirty horse-power car, stealing by
without an effort or a sound, swift as the wind, silent as the tide.

On these occasions Ernie, perched aloft on his load, would detect the
smirk on his brother's face, and knew that Alf was feeling his own
superiority and hoping that Ernie felt it too.

In those days Ernie learned to know the corner of England in the
triangle between Lewes, the Seven Sisters, and Beau-nez as he had never
known it before.  And the closer grew his intimacy the greater became
his love.

The quiet, the strength, the noble rounded comeliness of the hills
reminded him of the woman he sought.  True, she disturbed him, present
or absent; while they, in act or retrospect, comforted.  But their full
round breasts, rising clean and clear before him, stubble-crowned,
green, purple, or golden against the blue, gave him a sense of earth
rooted in the immensity of spirit and washed by the winds of heaven as
did nothing else he knew but the woman he had lost.

"Wish I were a poet," he sometimes said to his father.  "To put it all
down what I feel, so others could see it too."

"Perhaps you are," his father replied.

And certainly if to be a poet is to love the familiar objects of the
road, a poet Ernie was: for he loved them all--Lewes with its narrow
streets, its steep hill to which you cling like a fly on a pane and
look across to Mount Caburn for help; the old _Pelham Arms_, its
walnut-tree at the back, the _Fox_, the _Barley Mow_, the _Newmarket_
on the Brighton road; the hills running down in glorious nakedness to
the highway, the tanned harvesters sitting among their sheaves; peeps
of the blue Weald islanded with woods; and always accompanying him the
long wall of the Downs, gloomy or gleaming, here smooth as the flanks
of a race-horse, there scarred, grim, weather-worn and pocked, in
winter dazzling white beneath the blue, ruddy in autumn sunsets,
emerald in April days; and all the year gathering the shadows at
evening in the Northward coombes to spill them over the expectant Weald
like purple wine when the door of night had closed upon the sun.

The lorries to and from Newhaven always took their way through the
valley of the Ruther.  Once or twice in that winter, as they bumped
down High'nd Over from Sea-foord into Aldwoldston at evening, Ernie was
surprised to find the chocolate-bodied car lying apparently derelict in
the roadway at the steep entrance to the village; and wondered if the
surviving Miss Caryll who still lived in the Dowerhouse at the foot of
the hill was ill.

And again one evening in the spring, as he jolted through the
village-street, past the great chestnut lit with a thousand tapers in
the market-square, he was aware of a man on a motor-bicycle pelting
past him up the hill.  The man wore motor-goggles; but there was no
mistaking Alf, bowed over his handles, flashing past the _Lamb_, down
the hill, and out of sight.

What was Alf doing at that hour of the evening on the road to Sea-foord?



BOOK VII

THE OUTCAST



CHAPTER L

THE CRUMBLES

Nature's punishments of her erring children are slow as they are sure.

If the inexorable Dame cannot forget, neither can she hurry.

Therefore the shock of realization that the wages of sin are death--as
our fathers used to put it; or that weakness brings its own reward--as
we should more prosaically say; because it comes gradually to the human
consciousness, is mercifully numbed.

It was some time before Ruth faced the fact that she was in the toils,
and that there was no escaping.  When at length the dreadful dream had
become a reality, and she was forced to acknowledge to herself the life
she bore within her, it seemed to her for a moment that the worst was
passed.

On the morrow of the night on which the hidden voice refused longer to
be hushed, she went away by herself on to the Crumbles: that
bird-haunted waste of stagnant pools and tussocky shingles which
stretches along the edge of the Bay to Pevensey.  There at least she
would be sure of being alone save for a rare creature of the
Wilderness, snipe or wild duck, hare or slow-winged heron.  Half a mile
from the great Hotel, rising sepulchre-wise from the surrounding
desolation, her back to the town, and her face to the sea, she sat down
on the lonely beach and girdled her knees with her arms.

It was a dull November afternoon.

The remorseless sea crawled like a serpent out of the gloom, curled an
ugly lip at her as it reared to stare, then softly falling to the
ground, scudded towards her with a hideous little hiss, to suck her
down, the victim of its lust.

The dumb sky offered her no help.  There was neither song nor sun.  And
back in the West, amassed under significant gloom, lay the great camp
of men, hostile now to her and hers, to which she must yet return.

Sitting thus by the scolding sea, her chin on her knees, she looked the
situation in the sombre eyes.

It was terrible enough.

She had to pay the price every mothering woman must pay--disfigurement,
pain, dependency, long-drawn physical disease, and, at the end of all,
torment and possibly death: and in her case, added to the price Nature
asks of those women who obey her laws, there was the penalty Man
demands of those who violate his.

For her, and such as her, there is in Society, as at present organized,
but one sure way of escape: and that way Ruth was too near to Nature,
too healthy in mind and body, to contemplate save for a passing moment.

Her eyes travelled down her young figure, shapely yet.

"All right, my darling," she cooed.  "You shan't suffer--not if it were
ever so."

Her face was to the future.  At whatever cost, she would be true to the
trust imposed on her unsought.

Indeed, so sane was she and strong, that but for the old couple in the
little yellow-washed cottage in the valley of the Ruther, who had
taught Bible-class there for thirty years, she believed her fear would
have been blotted out by the hope her baby, pushing through the crust
of her terror like a crocus through the chill wintry earth into
February sunshine, brought her.

For she recognized with a sob of bitterness that these brooding months,
when her child, thrusting with tiny hands and inarticulate cries, was
opening for her the Door of Escape into the Open Country that lies for
each one of us outside the Prison that is Self, would have been the
most beautiful in her life, if Humanity had blessed her for the
sufferings she was enduring on its behalf, if Society had supported and
pitied her when she had fallen into the trap that it had laid.

As things were, she was an outlaw, who would be stoned alike by men and
women when it was discovered that an innocent indiscretion, prompted by
a noble natural impulse, had flung her into the miry pit.

She turned and looked across the flats at her back to the great camp of
men, crouching for their prey.

The Downs behind seemed to circle it as with a wall of dulled steel,
making escape impossible; while over in the West was a murky glow as of
damped-down furnaces, waiting to open their doors and pour down molten
gloom on the City of the Plain.

Ruth rose up swiftly and returned to the Hotel.

Better even its unsympathetic walls than the naked desolation of the
waste.

There, however, was no one to whom she could turn.  Ernie was out of
the question, while Madame had retired, as always at this season of the
year, to the sister-hotel at Brussels.

Indeed in all Beachbourne with its hundred thousand inhabitants, its
temples and tabernacles at every street corner, its innumerable
white-collared priests and ministers, its sacrament-taking women, and
reform-talking men, was there one soul to whom she could look in her
distress?

Ruth prayed as she had never prayed before.  Alone in the darkness on
her knees, redeeming herself and mankind by her tears, she asked that
the punishment for the mother's sin might not fall upon the child.

"On my head, O Lord, not hers," was the cry of her anguished heart.

Light came to her darkness.

There was one man in Beachbourne in whom she had detected, so she
believed, the spirit of Love.

That man was Mr. Trupp, who had attended her Miss Caryll till she died.

Taking her courage in her hands one dark January evening, when she
realized that her time at the Hotel was short, she stood on the steps
of the Manor-house and rang.

"Why, you're quite a stranger, Ruth!" said the smiling maid.

"Could I see Mr. Trupp?" asked the girl.

"That I'm sure you can."

She was shown into the long consulting-room, and sat down, trembling,
her eyes upon her knees.

She was staking her all upon a throw.

Mr. Trupp came in.

The young woman dressed in black, simply as a lady, rose.

"Who is it?" asked the surgeon, peering over his pince-nez.

"Ruth Boam, sir," the other answered.  "Miss Caryll."

Mr. Trupp glanced at her.  Then he put his hand upon her shoulder, and
she knew that she was safe.

"Sit down," he said gently.

This large young creature, who had something of his own Bess about her,
went straight to his heart in her trouble.

"Ruth," he said gravely.  "May I send Mrs. Trupp to you?"

Ruth sobbed and nodded.

Very slowly Mr. Trupp climbed the stairs to his wife's room.


It was some time before Mrs. Trupp joined the girl.

The room was dark, save for one shaded lamp.

The lady came in quietly, dressed for the evening in a damson-coloured
tea-gown that showed off her gracious beauty and silver hair.  Her face
was wan and wistful, her bearing noble and full of tender dignity.

The black figure on the chair did not move.

The elder woman took her seat beside the younger and laid her hand upon
the girl's.

"Ruth," she said at last, in a still voice with a quiver running
through it.  "I know more than you think.  You loved him, didn't you?"

The broken girl nodded; then shook her head.

"It's not that," she said.  "It's not him.  It's my baby.  I couldn't
abear she should be born in the Workhouse along of them."

To Mrs. Trupp the Workhouse system had been a nightmare ever since, as
a young girl, she had first realized its existence and become dimly
aware of the part it played in our imperial scheme.  She believed that
the institution which had its local seat in the old Cavalry Barracks at
the back of Rectory Walk was no worse than others of its kind up and
down the country.  Sometimes she visited its wards and nurseries with
her old friend, Edward Caspar, and came away sick at heart and
oppressed of spirit.  More often, sitting in her garden, she listened
to his quietly told stories of what he always called "our Cess-pool."

Mrs. Trupp stroked Ruth's hand.

"It shan't," she said, with the fierceness that sometimes surprised her
friends.  "You must trust us.  Mr. Trupp'll see you through.  But you
must leave the Hotel at once.  I'm going to send you to a house of mine
in Sea-gate--now.  I shall telephone for the car."

And half an hour later Ruth was sitting in the chocolate-bodied car
that once before had carried her into the perilous Unknown.




CHAPTER LI

EVELYN TRUPP

Evelyn Moray had been brought up in the Church; and, like most
Englishwomen of her class and generation, she had as a girl looked to
the Church to enable her to realize her ideals.

In her young days she and her neighbour of later life, Edward Caspar,
had been of the little group of West-end people who had been drawn East
by the couple who were making St. Jude's, Whitechapel, the home of real
religion for more than the dwellers in the East-end.  She would
sometimes give a violin solo at the famous Worship Hour in the church
off Commercial Street; while Edward Caspar would on rare occasions read
Browning or Wordsworth there.  The memory of those early days of
dawning hopes served as a never-present bond between the pair when in
later years chance caused them to pass their lives side by side in the
little town on the hill under Beau-nez.  And the religious development
of each had followed much the same lines.

They had watched the fingers of love light a candle in the darkness of
the late seventies and the early eighties, and ...

"The candle went out," Edward Caspar would say.  "Candles always do in
the Church of England."

"Yet the light grows," his companion would answer.

"Assuredly," Edward would agree.  "Everywhere but in the Churches."

Evelyn Moray's disillusionment had begun even before her marriage.  For
all her innocence she brought a singularly shrewd judgment to bear on
the affairs of men.  And if as she came to understand the truth, she
suffered at first the pangs of betrayed love, she was too brave a
spirit not to face the situation in its entirety.  The noble words of
the Order of Baptism--_manfully to fight under His banner against sin,
the world, and the Devil_--applied, she found, to a Church the
outstanding characteristic of which was that it never fought at all.
When she was bogged in a quagmire of doubt and despair, fearful of the
new, more than dissatisfied by the old, Mr. Trupp had come into her
life.  His sane judgment, his wide experience, and broad philosophy,
landed her once more on _terra firma_.  In a time before the great
Exodus from the Temples of Orthodoxy had assumed the proportions that
we know to-day, she had left their gloomy portals to seek elsewhere
that simple and direct service of mankind her spirit needed for its
fulfilment.

Her father's death left her something of an heiress.

Forthwith she started a maternity home in a quiet street in Sea-gate
for young women of the middle-class who had fallen victims of a Society
which failed to protect them, to give them opportunity, to supply their
honest needs.

The conditions of entry to the home were strict; and Mrs. Trupp never
wilfully departed from them.  Sometimes, it is true, she was taken in;
often she was disappointed; but she persevered with the tenacity that
is the inevitable outcome of continuous prayer.

She ran her home very quietly; and Mr. Trupp was, of course, her
medical officer.  But the Church, jealous of all trespassing within
what it believed to be its own demesne, heard and objected.

"Making sin easy," said Lady Augusta Willcocks, who wore short hair and
cultivated the downright manner which she believed to be characteristic
of the English aristocracy.

She cherished a secret antipathy for "the doctor's wife," as in her
more bitter moments she would describe her neighbour.

Lady Augusta was indeed of the world of Victoria and Disraeli, opulent,
pushing, loud; Mrs. Trupp of an older, finer, more deliberate age.
There was between the temper and tradition of the two ladies a gulf no
convention could bridge.  Lady Augusta felt and resented the fact.

Archdeacon Willcocks, on the other hand, reacted to the same stimulus
in a different way.  For him the fact that Mrs. Trupp was a Moray of
Pole was paramount.  And so--when Mr. Trupp had become famous--he
hushed up his wife and schemed to run Mrs. Trupp's home in connection
with the Diocesan Magdalen League.

But Mrs. Trupp was not to be cajoled.  She had her own way of doing
things, and meant to stick to it.

"I think perhaps we'd better go on working for the same end in our
rather different ways," she told the Archdeacon with that disarming
courtesy of hers.

"Am I to understand that our way is not the Christian way?" asked the
Archdeacon, smiling and satirical according to his wont, as he swayed
his long thin body to and fro, serpent-wise.

"It may be," replied the lady, faintly ironical in her turn.  "It's not
quite mine."

"Pity," said the Archdeacon, mounting his favourite high horse with the
little toss of his head, carefully cultivated, which so impressed the
shop-keepers of Old Town.  "I had hoped that you remained of the Faith,
even if you have seen good to desert your Church."

The lady looked at him with eyes that were a little wistful, a little
whimsical.

"I'm afraid we're mutually disappointed," she answered quietly.




CHAPTER LII

THE RETURN OF THE OUTCAST

It was in Mrs. Trupp's home, in a back-water of the East-end, that
Ruth's child was born.

The babe was beautiful, but over the mother a shadow lay.

"It's her people," Mr. Trupp told his wife.  "She hasn't broken it to
them yet."

"I know," Mrs. Trupp answered.  "I must talk to her about it."

Ruth, curled in her bed, giving satisfaction to the babe in the hollow
of her arm, showed every sign of distress when the other broached the
topic.

"Will you trust me to tell them?" asked the lady gently.  Ruth raised
her fine eyes, brimming with gratitude to the elder woman's face.


Mrs. Trupp went.

Before she started on her pilgrimage of love she passed an hour in the
parish-church, which was her favourite resort in all the crises of her
life.

There the Archdeacon came on her, to his surprise.

"I'm glad to see you here, Mrs. Trupp," he said with slight inevitable
patronage.

"I'm often here," she answered, smiling.

"Ah," said the Archdeacon.  "I've missed you."

She could not tell him that this was because she avoided the church
when he and his fellow-priests were ministering there.

"I love the atmosphere," she said.

"Thank-you.  It is nice, I think," he answered with a little bow;
taking to himself, with childish ingenuousness, the credit for the
conditions that six centuries of prayer and worship had created.

An hour later Mrs. Trupp was face to face with Ruth's mother in the
kitchen of Frogs' Hall.

Hard by, the church-bell tolled for evening service.  Through the open
window came the noise of homing rooks drifting up the valley from the
Haven; and under the hedge on the far side the Brooks a cow bellowed.

It was Mrs. Boam who began.

"I allow you've come to tell me about our Ruth," she said at last.

"Have you heard anything?" asked Mrs. Trupp.

The other shook her head.

"We'd be the last to hear," she said.  "That's sure.  But I knaw
there's been something.  It's seven month since she's been anigh us.
That's not our maid--our Ruth: so good and kind and considerate for her
dad and me as she's always been."

"There has been something," answered Mrs. Trupp, and told her tale....

The mother listened in silence, the tears streaming down her face, her
hands upon her lap.

When the story was finished, she rose.

"Thank you kindly, 'm," she said.  "If you'll excuse me I'll tell dad.
He's in the back."

She went out, a big unwieldy woman, walking with the unconscious
majesty of grief, and was absent some time.

Mrs. Trupp sat in the kitchen with a somnolent rust-coloured cat, and
listened to the willows rustling by the stream and the voices of
children playing by the bridge.

Once she went to the window and looked across the cattle-dotted Brooks
to the long low foothill that raises a back like a bow, green now with
young corn, against the bleak shaven flanks of old Wind-hover.

Then Reuben Boam entered, erect as a soldier, and with the face of a
puritan and prophet.

Mrs. Trupp wondered, as she often had of late years, why the men of her
own class never attained the dignity of the great amongst the simple
poor.

She rose humiliated, conscious of her own spiritual inferiority; and
took his rough paw between her two delicate hands.

"Won't you sit down, Boam?" she suggested, quite modern enough to
realize what a topsy-turvy world it was in which she should have to
make such a request to an old man in his own home.

His long bare upper lip trembled and nibbled as he spoke.

"She's a good maid," he said huskily--"our Ruth.  The Mistus says it
were a gentleman.  It's hard for a working girl to stand up agen a
gentleman that's set on despoilin her.  But in my day gentlemen were
gentlemen and kept emselves accardin.  They tell me it's different now.
Accounts for the bit o bitterness, hap."  The great hand lying in hers
twitched.  "She must come back home soon so ever she can move.  There's
not much.  But we'll make out somehow.  Rebecca must goo to her.
She'll need her mother now.  They was always very close--mother and
daughter."

The old woman entered, tying her bonnet-strings beneath her chin.

"Yes, I'll take carrier's cart to Ratton.  Then I can walk to the Decoy
and take train to the East-end."

"Won't you come with me?" said Mrs. Trupp.  "I've got the car in the
Tye." ...

She dropped her companion at the door of the house in Sea-gate, and
herself took a tram home.  When Mrs. Boam emerged from the house an
hour later a car was still at the door.

The old lady looked about her, a little bustled.

"Could you tell me the way to the tram?" she asked the chauffeur.

He touched his hat and smiled.

If Alf had a soft spot in his heart, it was for old women.

"This is your tram, ma," he said, and helped her in.


A fortnight later the same car stood at the same door, when Ruth
emerged, her baby in her arms.

It was dusk, and she did not see the chauffeur, who leaned out towards
her.

"Would you come up in front alongside me?" he said.  "I put your box
inside."

Ruth obeyed.

They drove through the gathering shadows in the sweet-scented June
evening, past Ratton and Polefax, all along the foot of the Downs, the
Wilmington Giant with his great staff gleaming wan and ogre-like on the
hillside, and at the Turn-pike, just where the spire of B'rick church
is seen pricking out of trees, turned for the gap and ran down the
valley towards the Haven.

A sea-wind with a sparkle in it blowing up the Brooks seemed to meet
the softer breezes of the Weald and penetrate them.  A young moon hung
over the sharp crest of Wind-hover.

Ruth, her baby in her arms, picked up familiar objects as they swung
by: the long-backed barn on the left, the little red pillar-box on the
wall, and occasionally the glimmer of a light in one of the homesteads
among trees across the stream.  On her right, unhedged cornlands swept
away in a rustling sea towards the foot of the Downs which made a
bulwark of darkness against the firmament; while on the near rise a row
of stacks, like immense bee-hives, stood sentinel under the stars.

The car slid down a hill and up again.  The valley lay naked alongside
them now, cattle moving darkly in the moonlight and the tower of the
church upon the hill black against the night in front.

The chauffeur took out his clutch.  The car was running so noiselessly
that Ruth could hear the ghostly stir and murmur of the willows that
line the river-bank and cover the feet of the village with a green
girdle.

"You don't remember me then?" said the man beside her.

They were the first words he had spoken.

Ruth glanced at the face beside her own, smooth and smiling in the
moon, and clutched her baby to her so fiercely that it gave a little
cry.

"Ah," said Alf, "I thought you would then."

The impression he had made seemed to please and satisfy him.  He put
his engine into gear, and was soon running through the village-street.

At the foot of the hill, where a group of mighty elms on a high bank
guard the seaward entrance to the village, he turned sharply to the
left under a row of pollarded poplars, and bumped over Parson's Tye
quiet in the moonlight, the church four-square among its trees upon the
mound on the right.

Then he drew up by the stile leading into the Brooks.

Ruth descended swiftly, and her babe lying like a snowdrift in her
arms, disappeared in the darkness through the stile.

Alf waited beside his car, watching the river like a snake crawling and
curling away in gleams of sudden silver under stark trees into the
night.

A few minutes later the bulk of a big woman in a white apron appeared
at the stile.

"Could you take the box in?" said a gentle voice.  "Dad's crippled."

Alf swaggered.

"Very well.  This once.  To oblige."

The job accomplished, he looked round the little plain kitchen with a
proprietary air.

"Nice little place," he said.

"Would you take a cup of tea?" asked Mrs. Boam.

Ruth had disappeared.

"No'w, thank you," said Alf in his cockiest manner.  "I dare say you'll
see me round here again next time I'm this way."




CHAPTER LIII

THE FIND

It was rather more than a year later.

Ernie, in grimy overall strapped over his waistcoat, and grey shirt
without a tie, was climbing the lower slopes of High-'nd-Over from
Sea-foord in an empty lorry.

Beneath him lay the Haven, buttressed by a gleam of white cliff, the
Old River blue-winding to the sea at Exeat, and the New laid like a
sword-blade across the curves of the Old.

The lorry bumped over the crest of the hill, austere and bare even in
the sunshine, the sea broad-shining at its back, and dropped down out
of the brilliant bleakness into the best wooded of the river-valleys
that pierce the South Downs.

It was Saturday evening early in July.

There had been a fierce and prolonged drought.  In the Brooks all along
the banks of the slug-like stream the hay had already been carried fine
in quality and light in weight.  On the sun-burnt foothills a belated
farmer was working overtime to carry the last load before Sunday.  The
long blue wain proceeded in lurches across the hill-side to the
guttural exhortations of the wagoner, all about it a little busy knot
of men and women raking and pitching.

Ernie sat with his back to the hill, his arms folded, looking across
the valley to the tiny hamlets clustered round a spire, the huge black
barns and clumps of wood beyond the stream, and the deep hedges running
caterpillar-wise up the flank of the opposing Down.

The air was still keen and sparkling, yet full of scents rising from
the fields that looked save in the Brooks brown for once and parched
instead of fresh and green as of wont after being shorn of their crop.

Ernie enjoyed those scents.  There was nothing like them in the East,
he remembered.  Was there indeed anywhere outside of England?

The lorry ran past the Dower-house in its rich old garden, the
grey-shingled spire of the church opening to view at the back of the
village across Parson's Tye.

They rattled under the elms at the foot of the hill and up the steep
street, where the same brown spaniel lay always in the same place
asking to be run over.

A jumble of houses pressed in upon them.  Sudden dormer-windows peeped
from unexpected roofs.  Chimney-stacks would have tumbled on them but
for the brilliant creeper that bound their old bricks together.  While
in odd corners behind the high brick path tall hollyhocks bowed as they
passed.

The High Street was fuller than usual.  Labourers slouched along it,
tired and contented.  A wain, with a pole at each corner pointing to
heaven, the carter with patched corduroys and long whip plodding at the
head of his team, was carrying a party of haymakers home.  Under the
great chestnut in the market-square a group of dusty horses stood, the
sweat drying on them.  Wages had been paid--the best wages of the year
too: for all had worked overtime; Sunday was ahead of man and woman and
beast alike; the most strenuous weeks of the year were over, and the
most quiet to come.

The lorry ran swiftly down the hill, out of the village.

At the spot where a lane runs off to Littlington, it swerved suddenly
to the right.  Ernie, sitting on the rail, swayed over the side to look.

They were passing a girl, walking soberly along, her back to the
village.  Clearly she had just come from the fields, for she wore an
orange-coloured turban wisped about her black hair, a long loose
earth-coloured gabardine, stained with toil, and short enough to
disclose the heavy boots of the agricultural worker.

She was a big young woman, broad of shoulder, large of limb, who walked
in spite of her heavy foot-wear with an easy rhythm that caused Ernie's
heart to leap.

The lorry flashed by.

The girl did not look up, marching steadfastly forward, careless of the
passing vehicle; but Ernie caught a glimpse of her profile.

In a moment he was on his feet.

The lorry was travelling fast.  Ernie tapped at the partition which
divided the body of the car from the driver, and peered through the
glass.

The man at the wheel heard, but shook a grim head.  He did not mean to
stop.  Home and beer and the week-end rest lay before him.

Ernie, far too impetuous to think, did not hesitate.

He jumped at the road, fleeting swiftly away beneath him.

It rose up like a careering wave and struck him viciously.

Whether he fell on his feet, his hands and knees, or his back, he never
afterwards knew.

That he was shocked into unconsciousness is clear, and that his body
continued its ordinary functions unconcerned and guided he knew not by
what mysterious power.

He woke, as it were, still jarred from shock, and aching throughout
him, to find himself steadily tramping along a road.

The objective world surged in on him.  He put up his hand to ward off
the huge green seas that came lolloping along to overwhelm him.

Riding the charging billows were a host of immense black ogres,
dreadful in their impassivity, and with blind eyes, who yet had seen
him and were set on his destruction.

Then he resumed himself.  The billows were the hills; the careering
ogres the row of bee-hive stacks dumped peacefully on the rise upon his
right.

He could not have been unconscious many minutes, for the sun still hung
on the crest of the hill much where he had seen it last; but he was
walking along the road on which he had fallen and must so have walked
during his unconsciousness, seeing that he was now perhaps a quarter of
a mile from the spot where he had jumped, and proceeding in the
opposite direction to that in which the lorry had been travelling.  His
face was towards the sea and the village through which he had recently
passed, his back to the Weald.

On his left was a wood, darkened by firs.  A dusty motor-bicycle lay up
against the bank.

Ernie was aware of the machine, as one is aware of something in a book.
It was not real to him: he was not real to himself.  Indeed he was
conscious of one thing only: that some power was guiding him and
bidding him keep quiet.

He did not attempt to take control.  His brain, except as a mirror
which reflected passing objects, was passive; and he was content that
this should be so.

Dimly he wondered if he was dead.  Then he realized that the question
had no interest for him, and he retired once more into the No Man's
Land of the hypnoidal state.

A villager was approaching.

He saw the man marching towards him as on the screen of a cinema.

The man said good evening.

Ernie answered, and found himself listening with interest to his own
voice.  It sounded so loud and alien.

He was a puppet in a play, watching his own performance--actor and
audience in one.

Except for a certain diffused physical discomfort on the remote
circumference of his being, he was not happy or unhappy.  He was a
headache, and that was all he was.  But he was a headache which could
walk and if necessary talk.

Then, still obeying his unseen guide, he turned off the dusty road into
the wood upon his left that stretched across the Brooks down towards
the stream.

On the fringe of the wood he was bidden to stay....

The river ran in front of him a few yards away.  On the other bank,
immediately opposite him, was a clump of willows.  There too was a big
young woman in a tan overall.

She was sitting on the tow-path, her back against a tree, her arms
bound about her knees, her feet in heavy boots pressed close together
in an attitude expressing doggedness.  She was bare-headed; and her
orange turban lay at her feet.  Ernie marked her gypsy colouring, red
and gold, and the yellow necklace that bound her throat.  The sullen
expression of her face was enhanced by the gleam of teeth which her
lips, drawn back almost to a snarl, revealed.

Here surely was a tigress, trapped and resentful.

Above her stood a little man in the shining black gaiters and great
goggles of a chauffeur.

He was talking and smiling.  The young woman sat beneath him, her tense
arms binding her knees, her eyes down.

But this was not the usual drama when the Serpent and the Woman meet.
Here the Serpent was taunting Eve, not tempting her.  So much her face
betrayed.

Ernie watched the picture-play with absorbed interest.  A great while
ago he had known both actor and actress intimately, and still took an
impersonal interest in them and their doings.

Then the little man's voice came to him across the stream, sharp and
strident.  He had a peculiar swaggering motion of the head and
shoulders as he spoke, truculent yet furtive, that Ernie knew well; and
all the time his eyes were wandering uneasily about the Brooks,
searching for enemies.

"You'll ask me to marry you next!" he sneered.  "_ME marry YOU!_"

The young woman rose, ominous and passionate.  She stood in her
tan-coloured gabardine, like some noble barbarian at bay, a creature of
the earth and elements, yet conquering them.

She seemed to tower above the little man, and in her hand was the
orange turban like a sling that swung heavily to and fro.

Ernie watched the scene with fascinated eyes, and, most of all, that
bright slow-swinging thing that sagged so dreadfully.

The little man watched its pendulum-like action too.  He did not seem
to like the curious slow swing of it, or the look upon the face of the
swinger, for he withdrew a pace or two.

"Any more of it," said the girl, her voice deep and vibrating, "and
I'll tell Mr. Trupp."

The name struck Ernie's subconsciousness with the disturbing effect of
a pebble dropped into a still pool.  Ripples spread over the torpid
surface of his mind, rousing it in ever-growing circles to life.  The
view was dissolving with extraordinary speed.  It remained the same and
yet was entirely changed.  The play was becoming real....

The little man was now walking swiftly away along the tow-path.
Suddenly he turned and came back a pace or two, his hand out.

The woman had not stirred.  She stood bare-headed on the river-bank,
one foot on a twisted root, one knee bent.

"Give me back my letter," said the man.  "And I'll let it go at that."

She met him squarely.

"That I wun't then!"

The little man hesitated and then turned about.


Ernie came to himself with a pop, as a man comes to the surface after
long submersion in the deeps.




CHAPTER LIV

THE BROOKS

Ruth was standing on the bank opposite him, but she had turned her back
upon him and the river.

He saw the heave of her shoulders, and the motion of her head, and knew
that she was weeping.

In a second he had flung himself into the water and was wading towards
her.

She turned at the sound of his surging, expecting fresh enemies, and
prepared for them.

He stood in mid-stream, a picturesque and dishevelled figure, grimy
with coal-dust, collarless, touzle-headed, his greasy overall braced
above his waistcoat.

"Ruth!" he called uncertainly.

She stood on the bank among the willows and looked down on him.

He ducked his face in the stream, and washed away the coal-dust.

"Now d'ye know me?" he grinned.

Her face glowed.

"I knew you without that, Ernie," she answered, her voice deep and
humming, as of old, like an inspired silver-top.

He surged towards her with wide arms amid the water-weeds.

She stretched out a strong hand to help him up.

He took it, and kissed the fine fingers.

In another moment he was standing at her side.

"O, Ernie!" she said, and passed her hand across her forehead.  "Seems
like you was sent."

He gathered her in his arms.  Her eyes were closed; her face, wan now
beneath the warm colouring, tilted back.  He marked the perfect round,
full and very large, of her sheathed pupils.  Then in her ear he
whispered,

"Ruth, will you marry me?"

She shook her head, the tears welling from under closed lids.  Then she
withdrew quietly from his arms.

"I couldn't do that, Ernie," she said.

He absorbed her with his eyes.  Her gabardine, smocked at the breast,
shewed the noble lines of her bosom, fuller and firmer than of old.  It
was open at the neck and revealed the amber necklace bound about a
throat that was round and massive as a pillar, and touched to olive by
the sun.

Alf was walking away towards the bridge which threw a red-brick span
across the stream some hundreds of yards distant.  Cows moved in the
meadow.  One came towards him along the tow-path, lowing in the dusk.

Alf stopped and watched it.  He did not like cows: he did not like
animals.  "Machines are my line," he would say.  "More sense in em."
The cow, unaware of the disturbance she was causing in the other's
breast, mooned forward.  That was enough for Alf.  On his right was a
plank-bridge carelessly flung across the stream.  Alf did not like
plank-bridges either, but he preferred them to cows.  And placed as he
now was between the Devil and the Deep Sea, he chose the Deep Sea
without a moment's hesitation, because he knew that here at least the
Sea was fairly shallow.

He crossed the plank-bridge--on his hands and knees.  The pair under
the willow watched in silence with an awed curiosity.

"He's frit," murmured Ruth, the light and laughter peeping through her
clouds.

"He's always frit, Alf is," Ernie answered out of the experience of
thirty years.

"Alfs always is," commented Ruth.

Alf, the astounding, the perils of land and sea behind him, now rose
from his humiliating position, and well knowing he had been watched,
waved with the stupid bravado that is a form of self-defence towards
the willow clump.

Then he disappeared into the wood.  In another moment the swift
thud-thud-thud of a motor-bike starting up was heard.

Ruth listened.

"He ain't coming back," said Ern comfortably.

"Ah," Ruth answered, unconvinced.  "You don't know him.  You don't know
Alfs."  She put out her hand towards him in that brave and gracious way
of hers.  "I'm glad you come though, Ern," she said.

Ernie's eyes filled with tears, as he caught her fingers.

"There!" he said.  "He couldn't hurt you.  He ain't no account, Alf
ain't."

She answered soberly.

"No, he couldn't hurt _me_--not my body leastways.  But I was like to
ha killed _him_."

A little breeze stirred the willows.  The turban on the ground flapped
and fluttered like a winged bird.  Then it opened suddenly and
discovered a jagged flint, wrapped in its folds.  Ruth took it out and
tossed it into the stream.

"It aren't pretty, I knaw," she said.  "But life is life; and Alfs are
Alfs; and you never knaw."

He escorted her across the Brooks to the road, moving leisurely behind
her in the dusk, his shoulder mumbling hers.

On the bridge she said good-bye.

He was outraged.

"I'm going home with you!" he cried.

"I'd liefer not, if you please, Ernie," she said, gently insistent.
"Not through the village, Sadaday night and all."

"Very well," he answered reluctantly.  "To-morrow then.  A bit afoor
cock-crow."




BOOK VIII

TREASURE TROVE



CHAPTER LV

THE POOL

Ernie was up and away early next morning.

It was Sunday; and there was nobody about except the few hurrying to
early service in the parish-church.

Amongst these he noted Alf turning into the porch.

At Billing's Corner he met the Archdeacon, who passed him with
disapproving eye, and the sour remark,

"You're off early, Caspar."

"Yes, sir," brightly.  "I'm away over the hill."

"Ah," smirked the Archdeacon, "there are better ways of passing the
Sabbath, I believe."

"Yes, sir," answered Ernie.  "You'll find Alf awaitin you inside.  He's
doin it for us both."

The Archdeacon had never quite made up his mind whether Ernie was
ingenuous or impertinent or both.  But then he had never made up his
mind about Ernie's father, though he had disliked his impalpable
neighbour and feared him secretly for thirty years.


Ernie now turned into Rectory Walk, and paused outside No. 60.

The habits of the inmates he knew to a minute, and had timed himself
accordingly.

His mother would be in the kitchen, preparing breakfast in her blue
wrapper, while his father would be dressing.

Standing in the tiny square of garden among the tall tobacco plants, he
tossed a cautious pebble through the upper window which was open.

"Dad!" he called, low.

The old man, spectacled, but collarless, in all the purity of a clean
Sunday shirt, thrust out a touzled head.

"Found her," whispered Ernie.

His father nodded down benevolently.  Then there sparkled in his eyes
that remote and frosty twinkle which was the outward and visible sign
of the change that had been wrought in him.

"And finding's keeping," he said.


In the glorious morning Ernie took the hill, marching through the gorse
to the song of larks.  On the one hand the Weald lay spread beneath him
like a green lagoon, dimming to blue; and on the other the great waters
rose up to meet and mingle with the greater sky.

It was still early when he dropped down kestrel-haunted Wind-hover,
over the corn-covered foothills, into the Brooks.

A white hand-bridge on red girders crossed the stream just under the
mound on which stood the short-backed cathedral church with its
thick-set tower, half-hidden by ash and sycamore.

On the bridge Ernie paused and looked across towards the village lying
in the morning sunlight, a tumble of russet roofs hugger-mugger among
gardens on the hill, the old brown tiles crudely patched here and there
with raw red ones; beyond the roofs the bare Downs; and at the foot of
the hill, just across the green, tiny Frogs' Hall with the honeysuckle
about the door, and Mus Boam sitting as always on his bricks,
spectacles on nose, and Book spread on his knees.

Then Ernie was aware of a movement in the water underneath him and
glanced down.  Just beside the bridge a willow leaned over the stream.

Here in a pool, sheltered by bridge and tree, a young woman stood, her
skirts kilted, and the water to her knees.

She wore the same orange scarf as on the previous evening, and the same
earth-coloured gabardine; but her arms were bare; and in them was a
naked babe.

Standing amid water-weeds, the stream glancing in the sunshine about
her, and the lights and shadows dappling her face as the willow above
her stirred, she dipped the child and cooed, and dipped and cooed
again, while the babe kicked and flung its arms and laughed.

Beyond the stream heifers, black and red and white, moved leisurely in
the flat green water-meadow or flicked their tails in the shadow of the
straggling hedge that divided the Brooks from the long foot-hill, of
the form and colour of a rainbow, which curved against the background
of smooth Windhover.

Ernie, on the bridge, himself unseen, watched the young woman, with
contented eyes.

Happy in her motherhood, Ruth had clearly forgotten for the moment her
troubles and her tragedy.

Quietly Ernie moved off the bridge and took his stand beside the willow
on the bank.

Ruth saw him now, smiled a casual greeting, and continued her labours.

Suffering, it was clear, had crushed all self-consciousness out of her.
She knew no shyness, no false shame; performing her natural functions
simple as a creature of the Wilderness.

Then she came wading towards him, her baby wet and slippery in her
arms.  The sun had burnt her a rich olive hue, deepening the red in her
cheek, touching her throat to gold.  With her orange turban crowning
her swarthy hair she looked a gypsy Juno.

More massive than of old, matured in face and figure, she was a woman
now and not a girl: one who had fought and suffered and endured, and
bore on her body the stigmata of her ordeal.  There was no laughter in
her, and no trace of coquetry.  Almost austere, nobly indifferent, she
was facing life without fear and with little hope.

Ernie was shy and self-conscious as she was the reverse.

"You don't go to the Lock then?" he said stupidly.

"Nay," Ruth answered.  "The Lock's for the lads.  This'n's for baby and
me.  More loo like."

"She seems to favour it," said Ernie.

"Aye, she's unaccountable fond of the water, same as her mother."  Her
speech had taken once again the tone of her village environment.

The young mother sat down on the bank, and turning the child face down,
began to stroke her back with strong caressing rhythmical sweep.

Ernie, watching, was amazed at the skill and easy masterfulness of her
motions.

"Who learned you that?" he asked.

"Seems to coom like," she answered.  "I doos it most days in general."

"She likes that," said Ernie wisely, watching the squirming rogue.

"Doosn't do her no harm anyways," answered the mother.

She put the little naked thing to sprawl and crawl and scramble on the
grass beside her.

"Sun and wind and water," she said.  "Give a child them three; and she
wun't need for no'hun else--only food.  That's what Mr. Trupp says.
And I reck'n he says right."

Standing up, the water still covering her feet, she dropped her skirt.

He gave her his hand to help her on to the bank.

"The sun's burnt you," he remarked.

"Aye," she answered.  "I been in the hay these three weeks past.  We've
carried all now, only Pook's Pasture."

Her humming voice soothed and satisfied him as of old.  He listened to
it as to a familiar song heard again after many years.  He did not
catch the words of the song, nor care to.  It was the air and its
associations that held his heart.  Then he woke from his dream to find
the woman at his side saying:

"I shall wait over harvest.  I promised Mr. Gander that.  See I work
good as a man.  Better'n some, hap," with a gleam of the old Ruth and a
little backward toss of the head.  "Then I shall goo."

Ernie roused swiftly.

"Where'll you goo then?"

"Back to service."

Ernie was staggered.

"And what about her?" nodding at the baby gurgling and squirming in the
grass.

Ruth answered nothing, but her face stiffened.

He felt in her the fierce and formidable power he had felt on the
previous evening beside the stream.

Here was not the Ruth he had known.  Nature had roused in the mother
forces, beautiful but terrible, of which the maid had not been
conscious.

She stood with high head, like a roused stag, looking across the
water-meadows to the foothills.

Then her chest began to heave.

"There's not enough," she said deeply.  "I been home more'n a twal
month now.  Dad's got the pension, and there's what the Squire allows
him and the cottage; and I doos the milkin at the Barton and earns well
at whiles in the hay and harvest.  But 'taren't enough.  We can't make
out--not the four of us and a growin child.  I must just goo back to
service.  I made the mistake, and I must pay--not them."

Ernie came closer.

"No, you won't," he said masterfully.  "You'll marry me."

She shook her head, swallowing her tears.  Then she laid her hand upon
his arm.

"Thank-you, Ernie," she said.  "I just can't do that."

"Why not then?" fiercely.

"Ern," she panted, "if I married any I'd marry you.  But I'll marry
no'hun now."

She sat down under the willow and began to dress her babe.

Ern stood above her, dogged and determined.

"Say! why can't you marry me then?" he persisted.

As though in answer she dandled the child.  Then she lifted her face to
his, and in her eyes there was the flash and challenge of a love so
fierce that Ernie felt himself suddenly afraid.

"I doosn't regret it," she said.  "Never!--I'd goo through it all again
for her sake and glad.  She's worth it--every dimple of her!"  And she
laid her lips upon the child's with a passion that was almost terrible.

"You done no wrong, whoever did," mumbled Ernie, awed still by this
eruption of reality.  "'Twarn't no fault o yours--or hers for the
matter of that."

Ruth rose and tossed her baby over her shoulder with an easy careless
motion that frightened Ernie as much as it thrilled him.  The child
lying now face down, and doubled like a sack, sucked her thumb and
regarded him with the blue eyes of her father.

Together they walked across the field towards the yellow-daubed cottage
with the steep brown roof and mass of honeysuckle over the door,
standing with its back to the tumbled houses on the hill behind.

"Mind, Ruth.  I won't take no," insisted Ernie.  "You need protection.
A young woman like you do."

"Never!" said Ruth.

Ernie, unconscious of his companion's irony, ploughed on his ox-like
way.

"You don't know what men are," he continued.

Her brown eyes flashed, and then dwelt on him with wistful humour.

"I should," she said.  "This last two year and all," she added with
solemn bitterness.  "I knaw now why girls go down.  They makes one
mistake, then the Alfs get em.  And when the Alfs get em they're done.
They're like stoats, Alfs are; and we're the rabbits.  Hunt you down,
jump on you, and then suck the blood out of your brain.  Often I've
seen em at it in the hawth."

"Alf!" cried Ernie, his blood a maelstrom within him.

He tried to halt, but she marched on.

"What's he been doin to you?" hoarsely pursuing.

She answered painfully.

"You knaw yesterday?"

"Yes."

There was a harsh, almost cruel note in his voice.

She turned on him, anger and laughter battling in her eyes.  Then she
saw a look upon his face, dark, sullen, and suffering, such as she had
never seen there before.

"I done no wrong, Ern," she said.  "No need to be that savage wi me."

He became quiet; and she resumed.

"He's been goin on at me a year now--tryin to get me."

"Does he want to marry you?"

Ruth drew back her upper lip till the teeth gleamed white.  She looked
splendidly scornful.

"Marry me!" she sneered.  "That isn't Alf.  He wants me--for his sport.
Alfs don't marry--not the likes o' me anyways.  That ties em down.
They want the pleasure, but they won't pay the price."

They had reached Frogs' Hall, mounted the high step, and entered.

Ruth put the child to bed, and then rejoined Ernie in the kitchen.

"Tell the rest," said Ernie.  He was white and dogged.

Again she gave him battle with her eyes; and again marked the look upon
his face and relented.

"Last week he wrote.  Asked me to meet him in the willow-clump by the
Lock at sun-down.  I thought best goo and have it out with him.  It's
been goin on over a year now."

"Wasn't you afraid?" asked Ernie in awe and admiration.

"Afraid of him?" she scoffed, and stripped her arm that was smooth as
marble, thick as a cable, and sinuous as a snake.  "I can load against
the men in the hay.  You ask Mus Gander.  And I knaw Alf." ...

An envelope was in her hand.

"Here's the latter."

She gave it him.

It was undated, and typewritten, and torn, but on the top there was
still left enough of the heading to be decipherable--_Caspar's Garage,
Saffrons Croft, Beachbourne_.

The letter contained an assignation, an indecent suggestion, and a
threat; and it was signed _Little Cock Robin_.

A small fire spluttered in the grate.

Ernie flung the letter on to it, and held it down in the flame with
vicious heel.

Ruth was on her knees in a moment, trying to rescue the charred
fragments.

"Eh, but you shouldn't ha done that, Ernie!" she cried.

"Why not then?" flashed the other.  "Hell's filth, flame's food."

Ruth rose, her attempt at salvage having failed.

"Ah," she said, "you're simple.  You doosn't knaw men.  You think
they're all same as you.  I've learned other.  There's a kind of man
who when he's got the sway over you there's only one way with him."

"And what's that?"

"Get the sway over him."

He looked at her sternly and with devouring eyes.

"Has Alf got the sway over you?"

She was stirred and tumultuous, the chords of her being swept by a
mighty wind.

"He thinks he has," she panted.  "That's one why I'm gooin into
service--to get away."

"You could never leave the child!" cried Ernie.

"It's just her I'm thinking of."

He came closer.

"I claim her!" he cried passionately.  "I've a right to her--and to her
mother too."

She smiled at him wistfully.

"Ah, you think you're strong!"

"Aye, I'm strong enough when I like.  Trouble with me is I don't often
like."

She shook her head; but he felt the resistance dying out of her.

"Goo away now, Ernie!" she pleaded, choking.  "Don't tempt a poor girl!
There's a dear lad!"

"I'll goo away if you'll think it over."

"I'll think it over--if you'll goo away."

She threw up her head.

Beneath her eyelids the tears welled down.

He drew her to him: his lips were close to hers; his eyes on hers.

Gently she disengaged.

"Nay, lad, you mustn't," she said.  "I must just reap where I've sown,
as the old Book says, and make amends as best I can.  No need to drag
down all I love along o me."  She added on that new note which thrilled
him so strangely, "Not as I regrets my child.  Never!"




CHAPTER LVI

FROGS' HALL

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

"I shall tell him where she is now."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other drank his coffee and licked his lips.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ernie bent over the cradle.

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

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

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

Ernie came to her.

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

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

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

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

He took her hands in his, and kissed them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER LVII

THE SURPRISE

A few evenings later, he dropped off the lorry in the market-square,
determined to pay Ruth a surprise visit two hours before his time, and
walk home over Wind-hover afterwards.

He ran down River Lane at the back of the slaughter-house, grinning to
himself.  At the bottom of the lane a group of young willows bending
plume-like over the wall at the corner ambushed him from Frogs' Hall.
Covered thus he approached the cottage on tip-toe with the grins, the
conspicuous elbow-work and elaborate stealth of the happy conspirator.

Ruth would have put the babe to bed.  He would surprise her alone.

Frogs' Hall stood on a bank a foot or two above the Brooks to lift it
over the winter floods and high leap-tides.  Two windows only, one
above the other, looked out over the river.  Ernie peeped from his
ambush.  The lower window was open; and a voice came through it.

The voice was not that of Ruth, nor of her father or mother, but it was
strangely familiar.

"You don't want me," it was urging.  "Very well.  So be it.  And I
don't want to do you no harm.  Why should I?--I shan't tell no one what
I know.  Only you must give me back that letter in exchange.  Fair is
fair.  See, we've both made mistakes, you and me.  That's the short of
it.  But there's no reason any one should know if you'll only be
sensible."

Ernie heard Ruth's answer, low and passionate.

"I wun't give it you then!--I'll hold it over you.  Then I'll know I
got you safe.  Show it your Church friends and Mrs. Trupp and all."

Alf laughed harshly.

"Think it over, my lass," he said.  "I'll call again in a day or two.
I can twist your tail, and I will if you want."

He came out of the low-browed door, his eyes down, a thwarted look upon
his face.  It was not till he had descended the steps into the Brooks
that he was aware of the man standing against the bunch of willows on
his left.

He turned about with a grunt and made off in the direction of Parson's
Tye.

A few yards away he turned again and came back swiftly, his eyes down,
and face troubled.

"Say, Ernie!" he began.

Ernie, under the tossing willow-plumes, awaited him coldly.

Alf seemed to feel that he had run up against the wall of the other's
hostility.  He stopped short, turned abruptly once more, and bustled
away, jerking a handful of words over his shoulder.

"All right," he said.  "Have it your own way.  Only don't blame me.
That's all.  But there is a law in the land."

Ernie stood with folded arms, and watched his brother across the Tye
and out of sight.

Then thoughtfully he mounted the steps of the cottage, knocked at the
door, and entered the kitchen.

Ruth sat by the fire, staring into it, on her face that formidable look
of an animal driven to bay he had before remarked.

He stood in the door and watched her.

"Ruth," he said at last.

Her profile was to him, her hands bound about her knees.  She did not
stir, but she was aware of his presence.

"He ain't got nothing against you, Alf ain't?" Ernie continued.

His face was wrung, his voice thick and unnatural.

Ruth rose slowly; slowly she came to him, and put both hands on his
shoulders.

She lifted her face, and it was blind and quivering.

"O, Ernie!" she cried.  "It was him drove me that day."

Ernie smiled, in his relief his hands clasping her elbows, his eyes
dwelling on her twittering lids.

"I knaw'd that then," he answered broadly.

She opened her eyes on him swiftly, and stared aghast.

"Did you?" she panted.  "How?"

"I saw ye."

She huddled closer to him, and laid her head upon his shoulder as
though to hide her face.

"Where did you see me?" she whispered.

"At the Decoy.  East Gate.  That afternoon."

Suddenly she drooped, and seemed to hang about him.  He put his arms
about her; otherwise she would surely have fallen.

He sank into a chair; and it was some while before she gathered herself
and rose.

One hand on the mantel-piece, she stood gazing into the fire, panting.

"Alf's the only one as knows who he was--only you and Madame," she said
at last.  "And you're safe."  She lifted her eyes to his and continued
appealingly.  "He done me wrong, Ernie.  But he's her father all said.
And I wouldn't for worlds any harm come to him through me.  He was mine
one time o day, tany rate.  And I must protect him, best I can."

"He can protect himself, I reck'n," said Ernie bitterly.  "Don't ardly
need you to see to him, I reck'n."

She looked up swiftly.

"It'd wreck his career if it was known.  They'd bowl him out of the
Army surely."

"Who told you that?" asked Ernie.

For a fraction of a second she hesitated.

"He did," she said: and instantly saw her mistake.

Ernie rose, slow and white.

"Does he write then still?"

She felt the storms beating about her, and her bosom heaved.

"Only that once," she answered at length and lamely.

Ernie came pressing in on her with ruthless determination.

"May I see the letter?"

She flashed up at him with astonishing ferocity.

"No," and added heavily--"It's burnt."

She was clearly fencing with him; clearly not telling all the truth.
He did not blame her.  But he felt that helplessness, that irritation,
of the male whose bull-headed rush is baffled by the woman's weapon,
imponderable as air, elusive as twilight, soft and blinding as a fog;
the weapons she has wrought in self-defence upon the anvil of her
necessities through the immemorial ages of her evolution.

"He asked you to burn it, I suppose?" said Ernie bitterly.

Her bosom heaved.  She did not answer him.

"Ah," continued Ernie remorselessly.  "He knew you.  Took advantage to
the end."

Ernie was troubled for the moment by the incident, but the emotion it
aroused in him was pity rather than anger.

Ruth had deceived him, he was sure.  He did not believe that Royal had
written her a letter.  So skilled an adventurer, so expert a cad, would
be little likely to commit himself on paper in such a matter.  That
ten-pound note had wound up the incident for him.

But the shifts to which a girl in Ruth's position must inevitably be
driven seemed to him excusable, even in this case, admirable.  Royal
had betrayed and deserted her; and she repaid his treachery by a
steadfastness beyond words.

With the capacity of true love, he made beauty out of an obvious
blemish.

Here was a woman indeed!--Here was a lover!

Quietly he persevered.




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.




CHAPTER LIX

ALF TRIES TO SAVE A SOUL

Of course there was trouble: Alf saw to that.

It was very seldom he came to Rectory Walk now; but he did come one
evening after the news was common property in Old Town.

He marched straight into the kitchen, kicked a chair into its place
before the fire, and sat down without a word to his mother.  It was
dusk in there, but Anne could see that he was terribly moved.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Nothin," Alf answered.  "Only my cart's broke."

The mother waited for more, grimly amused.

"He's done it this time," Alf continued at last.

"Who has?"

"Old Ern."

The epithet of affection roused Anne to swift suspicion.

"What's he done then?"

Alf chewed the end of a cigarette.

"Don't ask me," he said.  "Talk o the town!--I could 'ide me ead with
shyme."  He looked up suddenly and stared his mother blankly in the
face.

"Little better nor a common you know."

"Common what?" asked his mother harshly.

Alf, like many another sinner, had a genuine and almost child-like
belief in his mother's innocence and lack of knowledge of those
processes of nature with which she might be assumed to be familiar.  He
raised a deprecatory hand as though to brush her irritably aside.

"You wouldn't understand if I was to tell you," he groaned, screwing up
his little yellow face as he did when wrestling in prayer for sinners.
"Nor I wouldn't wish you to.  My heart's fair broke.  That's enough for
you."  He buried his face in his hands.  "He's been a bad brother to
me, very bad.  Couldn't well ha been worse.  Anybody could tell you
that.  But blood is blood, and blood is thicker nor what water is, as
I'm finding now to my cost."

Anne Caspar came closer.

"Is he goin to marry her?" she asked.

"Ah," said Alf.  "And that ain't all.  Not by no means--nor the lesser
'alf of it eether."

His mother was still fiercely cold.

"Is she the one he got into trouble?"

Alf evaded her swiftly.

"It ain't his child though."

"What?" she snarled.  "Is there a brat?"

She turned on the gas.

The tears were rolling down Alf's cheeks as he nodded assent.

"Me own blood-brother and all!" was what he said.  "I can't look folks
in the face, I can't."

Just then the study-door opened and shut again.

Ernie came out into the darkened passage.

The kitchen-door was wide.

Through it the two brothers stared at each other, Ernie standing in the
dusk, Alf sitting in the gas-light.

Then Ernie spoke.

"Tellin the tale, Alf?" he said with quiet irony.  Alf waved his
brother away.

"You've broke my eart," he said, "and your mother's.  Not as you care,
not you!"

"If that's all I've broke I ain't done much 'arm, old son," came the
still voice out of the dusk; and the outer door shut.


His wife was the one creature in the world to whom Edward Caspar was
consistently hard; and her husband the only one to whom Anne was
unfailingly considerate.

In her inmost consciousness she knew the reason of her husband's
attitude, and bowed to it as to an inexorable ordinance of Nature.
Throughout her married life she had paid the penalty of the woman who
has taken the lead in matters of sex.  Fierce though she was, there
were few more old-fashioned than Anne Caspar, and from the start she
had seemed to recognize and be resigned to the justice of her fate.

That night as the couple went to bed, Edward said from the
dressing-room with a touch of tenderness he rarely showed his wife:

"Mother, Ern's going to be married."

"You needn't tell me," said Anne harshly.  "There's a bastard.  Did he
tell you that?"

It was seldom that Anne allowed herself to indulge in coarseness when
addressing her husband.

He gave his familiar little click of disgust, and shut the door between
the two rooms.

That night he did not join her but slept, if he slept at all, on the
camp-bed in the dressing-room.


Next day, Anne Caspar went round to interview Mrs. Trupp.

The years had brought the two women no nearer, rather the reverse
indeed.

Mrs. Trupp was soaring always into heaven: Mrs. Caspar chained to her
prison-cell on earth.

"She's a good woman," said Mrs. Trupp of Ruth, with stubborn
gentleness.  "I don't know a better."

"But she's had a illegitimate child.  It's sin!  It's wickedness!"

"I know she's made a mistake," replied the other in her even voice.
"But it's not for you and me to judge her.  You and I were able to
marry the men we loved.  If we hadn't been...."

"I should have stood up!" harshly.

"You can't say," said Mrs. Trupp, calm as the other was ferocious.
"You don't know.  We've never been tested."  Then the devil entered
into her as it does sometimes into the holiest of women, a naughty
devil, very mischievous, who loathed Pharisaism and loved to persecute
it....  "_Besides, should we have been right to stand up?_"

Anne Caspar gasped.

The lady wetted her cotton delicately, and threaded her needle against
the dying light.

"It's a nice point," she added in her charming voice.

Anne tramped home, meeting Mr. Pigott on the hill.  He stopped to speak
to her, but she trudged on surlily.

"The world's gone mad," she said.  "It's time it come to an end.  It's
a bad un."

Mr. Pigott went on to the Manor-house to put his question.

"Is she all right?" he asked--"This girl of Ernie's."

"Right as rain," answered Mrs. Trupp.  "But she's had a _rotten_ time."


There was no doubt that Alf was deeply stirred by this new happening in
his brother's life.

The whole of him resented it with the fury of a baffled sea.

Ern was about to possess a beautiful woman Alf had desired, and Ern was
Alf's brother.  That deep-seated sense of competition and ineradicable
jealousy that exists between members of a family--as profound and
disruptive a force as any to be found in human consciousness, dating
back as it does to the fierce struggles of nursery days--was at work
within him.

As always in moments of conflict, he had recourse to his spiritual
director.

The Reverend Spink was a sleek little man, solid in body if not in
mind, and full of rather shoddy enthusiasms.

"Poor old Ernie!" said Alf.  "He's been a bad brother to me.  I will
say that for him.  But I wouldn't wish my worst friend to come to
_that_."

"But you must save him from himself!" cried the curate.  "Go out into
the highways and hedges and _drag them in!_--that's the command.  Fling
out the life-line!" and he flung out a plump little arm clothed in best
broadcloth to show how it was done.

Alf nodded solemnly.

"Yes," he said.  "I'll save him--if he is to be saved."  He rose up
grandly, loving himself.  "Cover me with hinsults; crucify me 'ands and
feet; strike me in the face like as not.  But I'll face it all.  No
cross, no crown, as the s'yin is."

He went out on his errand of mercy.

In a few moments he was round at the rooms of the lost sheep.

Ernie was at home.

"You know I wish you well, Ernest, don't you?" he began painfully.

The other had not risen.

"I know all about that," he answered enigmatically.

Alf drew a little nearer and dropped his voice, looking about him.

"You can't marry her, Ern," he whispered.

Ern was quite unmoved.

"Can't I?" he said.  "And why not then?"

"_Because you can't!_" Alf almost screamed.

Ernie was still amused.

"I mustn't have her because you can't," he said.  "That's the short of
it."

Alf cackled horribly.

"Me!--Want her?--I like that."

"I know you did then!"

"Likely!" sneered Alf, his pride swift to arms.  "Likely she'd ha took
you and said no to me."  He pressed closer, his face mottled.  "_Do_
you know what I'm worth as I stand here in me shoes?  I got £3,000
saved away in the Bank, and makin all the time.  If I liked I could
retire on meself--at 28--and be a gentleman.  That's what I am!  That's
what I done!  That's Alf Caspar!  And you tell me she'd ha took up with
a dirty coal-porter at 23s. 6d. a week when she could have had _Me_!"

Ernie flared up.

He leapt to his feet.

"Out of it!" he ordered.  "What the bloody l's my marriage got to do
with you?"

Alf tumbled down the wooden stairs with such a furious clatter as to
bring the landlady to the kitchen-door.

Later that evening he reported his brother's saying to the Reverend
Spink.

"Swore something fearful!" he said.  "I couldn't tell you what he _did_
say.  I couldn't reelly.  Couldn't defile me lips with the words.
That's the Army, I suppose.  Pick up a lot of dirt there, some of em."

The Reverend Spink, who boasted a moustache he believed to be military,
rocked judicially to and fro before the fire.  Since he had been
ordained a Minister of the Established Church, and had lived in touch
with the Archdeacon and Lady Augusta Willcocks, he felt very profoundly
that the maintenance of the aristocratic and imperial tradition had
been entrusted to his special keeping.

"Had I not been called to a Higher Service," he said, enunciating his
words with the meticulous care of one to whom correct pronunciation has
always been a difficulty, "I should have gone into the Army, meself."
He added--"An officer, of course."

"Of course," repeated Alf, "as is only befitting a gentleman of your
rank and stytion in life.  No, I got nothing against the Army.  Armies
must be, as I tell them, and Navies too--if you're an Island.  Only all
I say is--_Leave it to others_, I says.  You don't want your own family
mixed up with _that_."


But Alf was not done yet.

He went over to Aldwoldston and tried to see Ruth.

She refused, and reported him to Mrs. Trupp, who spoke very seriously
to her husband.

"William," she said, "you'll have to sack that man."

He shook his head, grimly amused.

"Can't be done," he replied.  "Too interesting a study and too good a
chauffeur," but he spoke to Alf all the same.

"You must let that girl be," he said gruffly.  "Ern's got her; and he's
going to keep her."

"Ah," said Alf, swaggering.  "I know what I know, and what no one else
don't know, only me; and I don't like it."

"Brothers never do," retorted Mr. Trupp.  "Especially if they wanted
the girl themselves."

"Ah, 'taint that," said Alf, sour and white.  "I shan't marry off the
streets, whatever else.  No, sir.  He's not been a good brother to
me--nobody can't throw that up against him.  But that's no reason why
when I see him askin' for trouble I shouldn't try to save him.  Me own
blood brother and all."

Mr. Trupp got into the car.

"I'll tell you what," he muttered.  "You're a true churchman, Alf, if
you're nothing else.  I will say that for you."




CHAPTER LX

THE END OF A CHAPTER

The char-a-banc, called by courtesy a coach, which was bound for what
is known locally as "the long drive," waited at Billing's Corner for
any Old Town passengers.

It had started from Holywell, and Colonel and Mrs. Lewknor sat beside
the driver.

A ramshackle old gentleman came rambling furtively across the road.

The coachman nudged the Colonel.

"That's old Mr. Caspar," he whispered.  He had for learning the
profound respect of the illiterate.  "They say he knows so much he
don't know all he do know.  Talks Hebrew in his sleep, they say."

The Colonel answered musingly.

"Is that Caspar?" and thought how little this old man had changed from
the young man who forty years before had shambled just thus about the
courts of Trinity.

The old gentleman, who had the air of being pursued, climbed to his
place at the back of the char-a-banc.

Mrs. Lewknor turned.  She knew that for some reason Fear had laid hold
once more of her Man of Faith.

"Ah, Mr. Caspar!" she called in her gay voice.  "I thought it was
you!--I forget if you've ever met my husband."

"I knew your boy in India, Mr. Caspar," said the Colonel in his
delightful manner.  "He was one of the best cricketers in the regiment."

The friendly voices and kind eyes appeared to soothe the old man.

"He's going to be married to-morrow," he panted.  "I'm just going over
to Aldwoldston to see the lady."

In the village the char-a-banc drew up under the great chestnut-tree by
the market-cross; while the passengers descended for tea in the
black-and-white-timbered _Lamb_.

Mr. Caspar, too, got down.  Mrs. Lewknor heard him ask the way to
Frogs' Hall, and saw him lumber off in that flurried way of his as if
pursued.

She followed him into River Lane.

He heard her and turned with eyes aghast behind his gold-rimmed
spectacles.

She met him with swiftest sympathy.

"May I come with you, Mr. Caspar?" she asked.

He seemed relieved.

"Yes," he panted, and started off down the steep lane, between the high
flint-walls embedded in nettles, at a shuffling trot regardless of the
little lady following at his heels.

In the silence she gave him of her strength.

In the Brooks he paused and mooned helplessly across at the river and
the hills squandered in the sunshine beyond and the cattle who mooned
back.

"This is it," said Mrs. Lewknor in her cool confident voice.  "This
yellow-washed one, the man said."

"Yes," grunted Edward, once again relieved, and trotted off to the
little cottage on the bank beside the willows.

He went up the steps and knocked.

Mrs. Lewknor loitered down to the stream.

Ruth opened.  Her visitor glanced at her through dim spectacles; and
strength came to him.

"Are you Ruth?" he asked.

The young woman's face lit up.

"Yes, sir," she said.  "And I know who you are.  I been hopin you might
happen along.  Come you in and sit down."

The old man mopped his neck.

"I mustn't," he said in tones that meant "I daren't," and continued
hurriedly, "I should be getting back.  I'm expected home.  But I had to
come and wish you well."  He touched her arm tremulously.  "Bless you,
my dear!--He's a good lad, only weak."  He lowered his voice.  "Keep
him on the curb a bit," he whispered hurriedly.  "But not too much.
That's where his mother made her mistake.  Drove him away from her."

Mrs. Lewknor, standing by a willow on the river-bank, saw the old man
turn.

Slowly she walked across the field to the cottage.

The young woman in the door watched her with uncertain eyes that seemed
to leap towards her and then retreat and leap again.

"Is that....  That aren't Ern's mother?" she asked.

The lady paused, her fine eyes dwelling on a distant roof.

"No," said Mr. Caspar.  "That's a friend."

Mrs. Lewknor, who had the love of her race for beautiful things,
allowed her eyes to rest on the noble creature in the door.

"I know your Ernie though," she said charmingly.  "He's a very old
friend of mine."

The two women exchanged friendly glances and a few words.

Then Edward Caspar and his companion moved off into Parson's Tye.

The church stood four-square on the mound above them, the red tiles of
the roof peeping through the trees.

"Shall we go in?" said Mrs. Lewknor.

"Let's," replied the other.

They sat together side by side in the aisle, amid the haunting memories
of centuries.

When they emerged the Man of Fear had given place once more to the
Child of Faith.


It was a very small party that started next day from Old Town for the
wedding.

Besides Mr. and Mrs. Trupp there were in the chocolate-bodied car Mr.
and Mrs. Pigott.

The great surgeon was at his surliest.

Mrs. Pigott noted it at once, and of course must take advantage.

"Do you like weddings, Mr. Trupp?" she asked brightly.

"Call it a wedding!" growled the other.  "I call it a funeral.  It's
the end of a good man.  He'll go to pieces now he's got all he wants.
No: if you want to get the most out of a man, keep him asking.  Once
he's sated he's done....  What does Mrs. Pigott say?"

Mrs. Pigott said:

"Bob the cherry near his lips, but don't let him gobble it."  The young
woman gave a bird-like toss of her head and threw a teasing glance at
her husband.  "Bob the cherry.  That's it."

When the car swung off the road at the foot of the village into
Parson's Tye, Mr. Trupp was in more sober mood.

As the other three crossed the green to the church, he lingered behind.

"Comin in then, Alf?" he asked.

The chauffeur shook his head.

"I know's too much, sir," he said firmly.  "No good won't come of
evil--as ever I heard tell."

Mr. Trupp rolled away, coughing.

"Alf turned moralist!" he muttered.

The pair were to be married in church.  For Ruth herself was "church"
in the sense the working-class understand that word.  Miss Caryll had
taken considerable pains to effect her conversion, while her people,
with the quiet tolerance of their kind, had made no objection.

Ruth herself had been profoundly indifferent, and underwent the change
mainly to oblige.  But while she rarely attended divine service
herself, and was neither interested in the religious community to which
she belonged nor affected by it, on the vital occasions of her life she
expected it to do its duty by her---to marry her, bury her, baptize and
confirm her children; and she would have been astonished and aggrieved
had it refused her the rites which were in her judgment her due.

The great church with its hollow-timbered roof like the bottom of an
upturned ship, its bell-ropes looped and hanging from the central tower
above the transept, is called by some the Cathedral of the Downs.

It was quiet now as a forest at evening, and empty save for Mr. and
Mrs. Boam, straight-backed in black, Ruth sitting subdued between her
father and mother, little Alice on her Granny's lap, and Ernie alone in
the pew upon the right.

There was about the little gathering something of the solemnity of the
hills which hemmed them round.

Mrs. Trupp, walking in the stillness up the aisle, was aware of it as
she took her place at Ernie's side.

Then in the silence the singing voice of a little child floated out
like a silver bubble of sound.

"Daddy," it said.

Ruth shot at the man across the aisle a sudden lovely look of affection
and intimate confidence; and one soul at least, kneeling there in the
sunshine, felt that the word sealed the covenant between this wayfaring
couple, still only starting on their pilgrimage, as no offices of any
priest could do.



THE END




Doubleday, Page & Co. hope to publish _One Woman: being the sequel to
Two Men_, next spring.




  THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
  GARDEN CITY, N.Y.











End of Project Gutenberg's Two Men: A Romance of Sussex, by Alfred Ollivant