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Two Men: A Romance of Sussex
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Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #57640.
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Beau-nez
Old Beau-Nez shouldered out into the sea, immense, immovable, as when the North-men, tossing off him in their long-boats, had first named him a thousand years before.
Like a lion asleep athwart the doors of light, his head massive upon his paws, his flanks smooth as marble, he rested.
The sea broke petulantly and in vain against the boulders that strewed his feet. He lay squandered in the sunshine that filled the hollows in his back and declared the lines of his ribs gaunt beneath the pelt.
Overhead larks poured down rivulets of song from the brimming bowl of heaven. The long-drawn swish of the sea, a sonorous under-current that came and went in rhythmical monotone, rose from the foot of the cliff to meet the silvery rain of sound and mingle with it in deep and mysterious harmony.
It was May. The sides of the coombes were covered with cloth of gold: for the gorse was in glory, and filled the air with heavy fragrance; while the turf, sweet with thyme, was bejewelled with a myriad variety of tiny flowers.
In earth and sea and sky there was a universal murmuring content, as though after labour, enduring for æons, the Mother of Time had at last brought forth her Son and, as she nursed him, crooned her thankfulness.
Out of the West, along the back of the Downs, dipping and dancing to the curve of the land like the wake of a ship over a billowy sea, a rough road swept up to the head, passing a dew-pond, the old race-course still fenced in, and a farm amid stacks at the head of a long valley that curled away towards a lighthouse pricking up white against the blue on the summit of the cliff in the eye of the misty morning sun.
The name of the lighthouse was Bel- or Baal-tout, reminding men by its title of the god their fathers worshipped on high places here and elsewhere throughout the world with human sacrifices--the god of the Philistine of every age and country, and not least our own.
On Beau-nez itself a tall flagstaff overtopped a little cluster of white coast-guard stations, outside which a tethered goat grazed.
Beside the flagstaff stood a man, watching a tan-sailed Thames barge leisurely flapping across the shining floor of water beneath.
He too was massive: a big man with swarthy eyes set in a pale face, very sure of himself. So much you could tell by the carriage of his head, and the way he stood on his feet. He was not used to opposition, it was clear, and would not brook it; while the coat with the astrakhan collar he was wearing added to his air of consequence.
Behind him in the road stood the dingy fly and moth-eaten horse that had brought him up the hill.
The big man turned his back on the sun and walked slowly to the top of the steep coombe which overlooked the town that lay beneath him like a fairy city in the mists along the foam-lined edge of the bay, reaching out over the Levels to the East, and flinging its red-coated skirmishers up the lower slopes of the Downs.
"How the town grows!" mused the big man.
A brown excrescence on the smooth turf of the coombe beneath him caught his eye. At first he mistook it for a badger's earth; then he saw that it was a man lying on his back. The man's hands were behind his head, and his soft hat over his eyes; but he was not sleeping. One lank leg was crossed over a crooked knee, and the dangling foot kicked restlessly to and fro.
That foot was sandalled.
The man in the astrakhan coat slowly descended towards the recumbent figure. His eyes were ironical, his expression almost grim.
For a moment he stood looking down upon the unconscious dreamer whose pale brown hair peeped from beneath a hat of a shape more familiar in the Quartier Latin than on English shores.
Then he prodded the other in the side with his toe.
The young fellow roused with a start and blinked up into the big man's face.
"Hullo, f--father," he cried with a slight stutter, and rose in perturbation: a ramshackle young fellow, taller even than his father, but entirely lacking the other's girth and authoritative presence. A soft beard framed his long face, and he was wearing the low flannel collar that in the seventies was the height of bad form.
"Just like you, Ned," said the elder with a grimness that was not entirely unkind.
The son bent and brushed his knees unnecessarily. His face twitched, but he did not attempt to answer.
"Your mother's very ill," said the big man casually. He took a letter from his pocket and thrust it towards his son.
The young man read it and handed it back.
"Is she h--happy?" he asked, his face moved and moving.
"She's away all the time--like her son," the other answered; and added more mildly--"She doesn't know any one now--not even the latest parson." He turned and climbed the hill again.
On the summit by the flagstaff he paused and looked round deliberately.
"Might build an hotel here," he said thoughtfully. "Should pay."
Mr. Trupp
When in the late seventies young Mr. Trupp, abandoning the use of Lister's spray, but with meticulous antiseptic precautions derived from the great man at University Hospital, performed the operation of variotomy on the daughter of Sir Hector Moray, and she lived, his friends called it a miracle, his enemies a lucky fluke.
All were agreed that it had never been done before, and the more foolish added that it would never be done again.
Sir Hector was a well-known soldier; and the operation made the growing reputation of the man who performed it.
William Trupp was registrar at the Whitechapel at the time, and a certainty for the next staff appointment. When, therefore, while the columns of the Lancet were still hot with the controversy that raged round the famous case, the young man told Sir Audrey Rivers, whose house-surgeon he had been, that he meant to leave London and migrate to the country, the great orthopædist had said in his grim way to this his favourite pupil:
"If you do, I'll never send you a patient."
Even in his young days Mr. Trupp was remarkable for the gruff geniality which characterized him to the end.
"Very well, sir," he said with that shrewd smile of his. "I must go all the same."
Next day Sir Audrey read that his understudy was engaged to Evelyn, only daughter of Sir Hector Moray of Pole.
Evelyn Moray came of warrior ancestry; and her father, known on the North-West Frontier as Mohmund Moray, was not the least distinguished of his line. The family had won their title as Imperialists, not on the platform, but by generations of laborious service in the uttermost marches of the Empire. The Morays were in fact one of those rare families of working aristocrats, which through all the insincerities of Victorian times remained true to the old knightly ideal of service as the only test of leadership.
Evelyn then had been brought up in a spacious atmosphere of high endeavour and chivalrous gaiety remote indeed from the dull and narrow circumstance of her lover's origin. Profoundly aware of it, the young man was determined that his lady should not suffer as the result of her choice.
Moreover he loved the sea; he loved sport; and, not least, he was something of a natural philosopher. That is to say, he cherished secret dreams as to the part his profession was to play in that gradual Ascent of Man which Darwin had recently revealed to the young men of William Trupp's generation. Moreover he held certain theories as to the practice of his profession, which he could never work out in Harley Street. It was his hope to devote his life to a campaign against that enemy of the human race--the tubercle bacillus. And to the realization of his plans the sea and open spaces were necessary.
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