CHAPTER LI

EVELYN TRUPP

Evelyn Moray had been brought up in the Church; and, like most Englishwomen of her class and generation, she had as a girl looked to the Church to enable her to realize her ideals.

In her young days she and her neighbour of later life, Edward Caspar, had been of the little group of West-end people who had been drawn East by the couple who were making St. Jude's, Whitechapel, the home of real religion for more than the dwellers in the East-end. She would sometimes give a violin solo at the famous Worship Hour in the church off Commercial Street; while Edward Caspar would on rare occasions read Browning or Wordsworth there. The memory of those early days of dawning hopes served as a never-present bond between the pair when in later years chance caused them to pass their lives side by side in the little town on the hill under Beau-nez. And the religious development of each had followed much the same lines.

They had watched the fingers of love light a candle in the darkness of the late seventies and the early eighties, and ...

"The candle went out," Edward Caspar would say. "Candles always do in the Church of England."

"Yet the light grows," his companion would answer.

"Assuredly," Edward would agree. "Everywhere but in the Churches."

Evelyn Moray's disillusionment had begun even before her marriage. For all her innocence she brought a singularly shrewd judgment to bear on the affairs of men. And if as she came to understand the truth, she suffered at first the pangs of betrayed love, she was too brave a spirit not to face the situation in its entirety. The noble words of the Order of Baptism--_manfully to fight under His banner against sin, the world, and the Devil_--applied, she found, to a Church the outstanding characteristic of which was that it never fought at all. When she was bogged in a quagmire of doubt and despair, fearful of the new, more than dissatisfied by the old, Mr. Trupp had come into her life. His sane judgment, his wide experience, and broad philosophy, landed her once more on _terra firma_. In a time before the great Exodus from the Temples of Orthodoxy had assumed the proportions that we know to-day, she had left their gloomy portals to seek elsewhere that simple and direct service of mankind her spirit needed for its fulfilment.

Her father's death left her something of an heiress.

Forthwith she started a maternity home in a quiet street in Sea-gate for young women of the middle-class who had fallen victims of a Society which failed to protect them, to give them opportunity, to supply their honest needs.

The conditions of entry to the home were strict; and Mrs. Trupp never wilfully departed from them. Sometimes, it is true, she was taken in; often she was disappointed; but she persevered with the tenacity that is the inevitable outcome of continuous prayer.

She ran her home very quietly; and Mr. Trupp was, of course, her medical officer. But the Church, jealous of all trespassing within what it believed to be its own demesne, heard and objected.

"Making sin easy," said Lady Augusta Willcocks, who wore short hair and cultivated the downright manner which she believed to be characteristic of the English aristocracy.

She cherished a secret antipathy for "the doctor's wife," as in her more bitter moments she would describe her neighbour.

Lady Augusta was indeed of the world of Victoria and Disraeli, opulent, pushing, loud; Mrs. Trupp of an older, finer, more deliberate age. There was between the temper and tradition of the two ladies a gulf no convention could bridge. Lady Augusta felt and resented the fact.

Archdeacon Willcocks, on the other hand, reacted to the same stimulus in a different way. For him the fact that Mrs. Trupp was a Moray of Pole was paramount. And so--when Mr. Trupp had become famous--he hushed up his wife and schemed to run Mrs. Trupp's home in connection with the Diocesan Magdalen League.

But Mrs. Trupp was not to be cajoled. She had her own way of doing things, and meant to stick to it.

"I think perhaps we'd better go on working for the same end in our rather different ways," she told the Archdeacon with that disarming courtesy of hers.

"Am I to understand that our way is not the Christian way?" asked the Archdeacon, smiling and satirical according to his wont, as he swayed his long thin body to and fro, serpent-wise.

"It may be," replied the lady, faintly ironical in her turn. "It's not quite mine."

"Pity," said the Archdeacon, mounting his favourite high horse with the little toss of his head, carefully cultivated, which so impressed the shop-keepers of Old Town. "I had hoped that you remained of the Faith, even if you have seen good to desert your Church."

The lady looked at him with eyes that were a little wistful, a little whimsical.

"I'm afraid we're mutually disappointed," she answered quietly.