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.