CHAPTER L

THE CRUMBLES

Nature's punishments of her erring children are slow as they are sure.

If the inexorable Dame cannot forget, neither can she hurry.

Therefore the shock of realization that the wages of sin are death--as our fathers used to put it; or that weakness brings its own reward--as we should more prosaically say; because it comes gradually to the human consciousness, is mercifully numbed.

It was some time before Ruth faced the fact that she was in the toils, and that there was no escaping. When at length the dreadful dream had become a reality, and she was forced to acknowledge to herself the life she bore within her, it seemed to her for a moment that the worst was passed.

On the morrow of the night on which the hidden voice refused longer to be hushed, she went away by herself on to the Crumbles: that bird-haunted waste of stagnant pools and tussocky shingles which stretches along the edge of the Bay to Pevensey. There at least she would be sure of being alone save for a rare creature of the Wilderness, snipe or wild duck, hare or slow-winged heron. Half a mile from the great Hotel, rising sepulchre-wise from the surrounding desolation, her back to the town, and her face to the sea, she sat down on the lonely beach and girdled her knees with her arms.

It was a dull November afternoon.

The remorseless sea crawled like a serpent out of the gloom, curled an ugly lip at her as it reared to stare, then softly falling to the ground, scudded towards her with a hideous little hiss, to suck her down, the victim of its lust.

The dumb sky offered her no help. There was neither song nor sun. And back in the West, amassed under significant gloom, lay the great camp of men, hostile now to her and hers, to which she must yet return.

Sitting thus by the scolding sea, her chin on her knees, she looked the situation in the sombre eyes.

It was terrible enough.

She had to pay the price every mothering woman must pay--disfigurement, pain, dependency, long-drawn physical disease, and, at the end of all, torment and possibly death: and in her case, added to the price Nature asks of those women who obey her laws, there was the penalty Man demands of those who violate his.

For her, and such as her, there is in Society, as at present organized, but one sure way of escape: and that way Ruth was too near to Nature, too healthy in mind and body, to contemplate save for a passing moment.

Her eyes travelled down her young figure, shapely yet.

"All right, my darling," she cooed. "You shan't suffer--not if it were ever so."

Her face was to the future. At whatever cost, she would be true to the trust imposed on her unsought.

Indeed, so sane was she and strong, that but for the old couple in the little yellow-washed cottage in the valley of the Ruther, who had taught Bible-class there for thirty years, she believed her fear would have been blotted out by the hope her baby, pushing through the crust of her terror like a crocus through the chill wintry earth into February sunshine, brought her.

For she recognized with a sob of bitterness that these brooding months, when her child, thrusting with tiny hands and inarticulate cries, was opening for her the Door of Escape into the Open Country that lies for each one of us outside the Prison that is Self, would have been the most beautiful in her life, if Humanity had blessed her for the sufferings she was enduring on its behalf, if Society had supported and pitied her when she had fallen into the trap that it had laid.

As things were, she was an outlaw, who would be stoned alike by men and women when it was discovered that an innocent indiscretion, prompted by a noble natural impulse, had flung her into the miry pit.

She turned and looked across the flats at her back to the great camp of men, crouching for their prey.

The Downs behind seemed to circle it as with a wall of dulled steel, making escape impossible; while over in the West was a murky glow as of damped-down furnaces, waiting to open their doors and pour down molten gloom on the City of the Plain.

Ruth rose up swiftly and returned to the Hotel.

Better even its unsympathetic walls than the naked desolation of the waste.

There, however, was no one to whom she could turn. Ernie was out of the question, while Madame had retired, as always at this season of the year, to the sister-hotel at Brussels.

Indeed in all Beachbourne with its hundred thousand inhabitants, its temples and tabernacles at every street corner, its innumerable white-collared priests and ministers, its sacrament-taking women, and reform-talking men, was there one soul to whom she could look in her distress?

Ruth prayed as she had never prayed before. Alone in the darkness on her knees, redeeming herself and mankind by her tears, she asked that the punishment for the mother's sin might not fall upon the child.

"On my head, O Lord, not hers," was the cry of her anguished heart.

Light came to her darkness.

There was one man in Beachbourne in whom she had detected, so she believed, the spirit of Love.

That man was Mr. Trupp, who had attended her Miss Caryll till she died.

Taking her courage in her hands one dark January evening, when she realized that her time at the Hotel was short, she stood on the steps of the Manor-house and rang.

"Why, you're quite a stranger, Ruth!" said the smiling maid.

"Could I see Mr. Trupp?" asked the girl.

"That I'm sure you can."

She was shown into the long consulting-room, and sat down, trembling, her eyes upon her knees.

She was staking her all upon a throw.

Mr. Trupp came in.

The young woman dressed in black, simply as a lady, rose.

"Who is it?" asked the surgeon, peering over his pince-nez.

"Ruth Boam, sir," the other answered. "Miss Caryll."

Mr. Trupp glanced at her. Then he put his hand upon her shoulder, and she knew that she was safe.

"Sit down," he said gently.

This large young creature, who had something of his own Bess about her, went straight to his heart in her trouble.

"Ruth," he said gravely. "May I send Mrs. Trupp to you?"

Ruth sobbed and nodded.

Very slowly Mr. Trupp climbed the stairs to his wife's room.

It was some time before Mrs. Trupp joined the girl.

The room was dark, save for one shaded lamp.

The lady came in quietly, dressed for the evening in a damson-coloured tea-gown that showed off her gracious beauty and silver hair. Her face was wan and wistful, her bearing noble and full of tender dignity.

The black figure on the chair did not move.

The elder woman took her seat beside the younger and laid her hand upon the girl's.

"Ruth," she said at last, in a still voice with a quiver running through it. "I know more than you think. You loved him, didn't you?"

The broken girl nodded; then shook her head.

"It's not that," she said. "It's not him. It's my baby. I couldn't abear she should be born in the Workhouse along of them."

To Mrs. Trupp the Workhouse system had been a nightmare ever since, as a young girl, she had first realized its existence and become dimly aware of the part it played in our imperial scheme. She believed that the institution which had its local seat in the old Cavalry Barracks at the back of Rectory Walk was no worse than others of its kind up and down the country. Sometimes she visited its wards and nurseries with her old friend, Edward Caspar, and came away sick at heart and oppressed of spirit. More often, sitting in her garden, she listened to his quietly told stories of what he always called "our Cess-pool."

Mrs. Trupp stroked Ruth's hand.

"It shan't," she said, with the fierceness that sometimes surprised her friends. "You must trust us. Mr. Trupp'll see you through. But you must leave the Hotel at once. I'm going to send you to a house of mine in Sea-gate--now. I shall telephone for the car."

And half an hour later Ruth was sitting in the chocolate-bodied car that once before had carried her into the perilous Unknown.