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."

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.