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."