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

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.