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."