The Stepson

by Martin Armstrong

  Rachel. At the first thought of her, at the very sound of her name in his mind, Ben Humphrey ceased to be dispassionate. The old Humphrey no longer sat watching the young with the secure detachment of a minute ago: at the name of Rachel they had become one creature, alive and vulnerable. For Rachel had always perplexed him. In spite of his love for her and hers for him, he had always felt in her something held back, some corner of her mind which was closed to him. She had allured and baffled him to the last; and it was that, though he did not know it, nor probably did she, that had held the fickle, hot-blooded fellow’s love for her firm to the end. Humphrey pictured her again as she lay in her coffin in the room above that in which he was now sitting. Wonderful her dark auburn hair had looked against the waxy paleness of her face; more wonderful than ever before. It had looked almost crimson, smouldering like the core of a smothered fire. It had smouldered, too, but more darkly, in the long lashes that fringed the closed convex eyelids and in the thick brows with their lovely upward curl at the extremities, like the spread wing of a bird. And as he looked at her for the last time, the corners of her mouth still held the small secretive smile which had always stood, in his mind, for that ultimate thing in her which excluded him. He had felt, from the day of their first meeting to the day of her death, that she was different from all other women; that she might, suddenly and for some reason known only to herself, vanish and leave him. A strange idea for a plain fellow like himself to have about a woman: and he recalled the curious thing that had happened to him some years before her death when, looking through the parlour window, he had seen her run across the yard and out of the gate that led on to the road. He had felt, sharply and unmistakably, at that instant, that she was running away from him, and he had rushed out of the house and across the yard after her with panic in his heart. He had actually expected, when he got out on to the road, to find her gone, vanished as if the earth had swallowed her. But she stood there with her back to him, shouting down the road to one of the maids whom she had sent on an errand to town, and when she had turned and found his scared face staring at her, she had laughed that lovely reassuring laugh of hers.

  ‘Why, whatever’s the matter?’ she had said.

  Humphrey had stood there, staring at her foolishly. ‘Nothing,’ he had stammered; ‘only I … I wondered where you were going.’

  ‘Going?’ she said. ‘I was running to catch Ellen. I’d forgotten to tell her to get the oatmeal.’ And, as they crossed the yard again, she slipped her arm through his, as if she had half understood what it was that had come over him. A strange, unaccountable occurrence. Humphrey had felt, as they entered the house, that he had been through two minutes of madness, and it was hours and hours, days even, before he felt at home in his old, straightforward self again. Their only child had been born within the first year of their marriage, and now Humphrey pictured her sitting in the large chair in the room upstairs, her beautiful head bent over the child she was suckling, her hair burnished by the firelight. The boy had taken after her rather than him; a beautiful child, his hair and eyes like his mother’s, except that his hair was livelier in tone, as though her smouldering fire had broken through and was beginning to flame. And now that the boy was grown up he still favoured his mother; a handsome boy, and quiet and secretive like her; and, like her, cheerful and clear-minded under the quiet and secretiveness. He hoped that David would take to Kate. O, of course he would, said Humphrey to himself a little anxiously despite his air of confidence when he had spoken of it to those fellows in the market-place that morning: and stirring himself in his chair he looked across to the sideboard for the ink and writing-paper, resolved to write at once to David. He rose a little stiffly from his chair, padded across to the sideboard in his stocking-feet, and brought back the writing-materials to the table. Then, swinging round his arm-chair, he sat down, leaned forward on the table, and prepared to begin his letter.

  But it was no easy matter. The letter still required, he found, a lot of thought, even though it had already occupied his mind a good deal during the last two days; and he sat, staring vacantly in front of him at the opposite wall, while the images of Kate and David, and then of David’s mother, floated through his mind. He found himself in a strange way confusing Kate with Rachel, for unconsciously he had from his first meeting with Kate transferred to her something of the Rachel of his thoughts and memories. He even deluded himself with the belief that they were alike in appearance, his mind groping for a refuge from its self-accusation of unfaithfulness. A sense of oppression in his chest eased itself in a deep sigh, and bending over the notepaper he began to write:

  ‘My Dear Lad,

  ‘I have a piece of news for you which I hope will be good news to you. You see I find it pretty lonely nowadays, you away and your mother dead these three years, and then the house wants a mistress to make things comfortable and take a proper charge of everything. You’ll find it more comfortable yourself, I’ll be bound, when you come home for a holiday, and more still when you have done with Johnson’s and come back here for good. A stepmother can do a lot for a chap, looking after his clothes and so on, to say nothing of making the place more comfortable, and she’s a good, quiet woman, about thirty, her name Kate Patten. We’ve fixed up the wedding for next Thursday week: it will be in her village; Pen-ridge, that is. There’ll be nobody there, only ourselves and four others. If you could have been there, needless to say you’d have been very welcome. You’re always welcome to your old Dad, you know that. The young chestnut foal is coming along fine. She has the makings of a rattling good mare. If she would fetch a high price I might as well sell her when she’s a bit older. But you and I can settle that later on. I’ll be glad to hear from you when you can find time to write, and better pleased still to see you here.’

  Having addressed the envelope and put the letter inside it, Humphrey, his red hands extended on the table before him, fell into a dream. He felt old, melancholy, and soft-hearted. He loved his boy with a curious tenderness, a sense apart from, and, as it seemed to those who knew only the outward man, at variance with the rest of his nature — sharp, bright, and hard-bitten like a flake of polished flint. He loved David for himself, for he and the boy, so different in temperament, were excellent friends. But he loved him too because in him survived something of the colour, the beauty, and the still inscrutable mystery of his dead wife. Then, thinking of Rachel, his thoughts turned again to Kate and his eyes shone. Dark, heavy-browed creature, so unresponsive and so desirable! How little he knew of her yet: of her body, nothing; of her mind, next to nothing. What thrilling discoveries lay before him once again. A subdued, tingling excitement crept through his body and along his limbs. He could feel the quickened pulse of the heart in his breast. Like an epicure surveying the feast he is about to begin, he heaved a sigh of happy anticipation: once more he felt alert, vigorous, and young.

  III

  Kate patten had cleared the table after the midday dinner in the room which served as kitchen and living-room to the little house attached to the school, where she had lived since her father became schoolmaster at Penridge ten years before.

  Her father had gone to the schoolroom to take afternoon school. From the little scullery where she was washing up, Kate could hear from time to time the monotonous sing-song of the children repeating their lessons. The building which included the village school and the schoolmaster’s cottage was a meagre-looking stone structure with a slate roof. The gable, which was its only noticeable feature, resembled a long stupid face which wore an unchanging expression of melancholy surprise. The place looked derelict by the roadside. Unlike most buildings, it had never become a part of its surroundings. It was as if a single empty truck had been abandoned in the remote country; the railway-lines, the engine that drew it, and the train of which it had been a part having vanished. Opposite to it, a small modern church, built through the whim of some wealthy Victorian donor in a cumbrous and bastard attempt at the Byzantine style, mouldered among yews and black ever
green oaks. To the right of the school a row of cottages, each with its little garden in front of it, looked on to the village green which was also the school playground. At right-angles to the cottages, the inn, the post office, and the one village shop bounded its western edge and were separated from it by the road leading to Elchester. On all sides the country was undulating and well-wooded and the road, dropping down from the village into a narrow valley, crossed an old stone bridge over a brown, trout-haunted stream. It was, in fact, a beautiful countryside and even Penridge itself had a certain curious beauty of its own. But Kate hated it, and especially she hated the little school-house in which she had spent the unjoyful years of her youth.

  As she stood washing the dishes and cutlery she thought with aversion of her dry, colourless, unlovable father with his white turn-down collar, his narrow black bow tie, and the black boots which he always polished so carefully. ‘The Schoolmaster must always set a good example,’ was one of his favourite phrases and, when he said it, two vertical straight lines, which his daughter had come to hate, appeared as though carved with a gouge from the corners of his mouth to the sides of his weak, unstable chin. At such times his chin looked like the movable chin of a ventriloquist’s doll. ‘What could have made Mother marry him?’ she thought to herself, recalling the lively, passionate woman who had died when Kate herself was only fifteen; and it seemed to her that, having married him, the only thing for her mother to do was to die — to die or to break away and leave him.

  Having put the plates in the rack, she went to the coal-house and then reappeared in the kitchen with a pail full of coal. She was a handsome, strong woman, largely but not clumsily built. Her heavy black brows met over a well-shaped nose. Her heavy hair was black and abundant: it made the pale duskiness of her face look paler still. Her eyes were especially striking, a greenish grey. In one of them, when she was angry or excited a slight cast appeared which produced a startling hint of a something wild and sinister beneath her habitual quietness, as though some lurking ghost had shown itself for a grim and sudden moment at the window of a beautiful and serene old house. But in her normal moods her eyes were calm, deep, and cold, as now when she entered the kitchen carrying the heavy pail with the ease and thoughtless grace of a beautiful strong animal. As she set the pail down and stooped over it to put coal on the kitchen fire, lifting each piece in her hand and setting it firmly in its appointed place, her bosom showed round and full under her lifted arm. All her movements were slow but assured. There was nothing slack or torpid about them: rather they suggested a potential vehemence. What will happen to her? was the question which she provoked; for something, it seemed, must happen to her. She was a baffling, disturbing creature: her quietude was the quietude not of earth or a stone, but of gunpowder.

  When she had finished making up the fire, she dusted her hands on her apron and, having for the moment nothing to do, sat down sideways on a wooden upright chair and let her eyes move slowly about the room. She was examining the familiar objects which had surrounded her for so long, with a detached curiosity. Knowing that in a few days she would leave them all for ever she could now contemplate undismayed all these unlovely, common things which had surrounded and tortured her for ten years and which now had lost their power over her. She stared at the ugly faded wallpaper whose pattern and drab colours had burned themselves into her mind, and as she stared she sighed and her lips curled into a scornful smile. Then her eyes moved to a print from some old Christmas Number of the eighties, framed in a cork frame, representing a lady in a little bonnet with the strings tied in a bow under her chin, a tight-fitting bodice, and a voluminous skirt with a bustle, stepping out of a carriage and glancing sideways at a little ragged girl who offered her a bunch of flowers. How Kate hated that picture! For years, in her hours of weariness and despair, she had envisaged it hanging there in front of her, a silent, stubborn symbol of the relentless reality of material things. ‘Time goes by,’ it had said to her, ‘and you can alter nothing. Things fade and grow fly-blown, but nothing moves. You can never break through the wall of immovable destiny which encloses you.’ And thinking suddenly that, even when she had escaped from it, the picture would still hang there, preserving like a powerful charm the everlasting staleness of things, she rose from her chair, took it from its nail, and slowly and calmly twisted the old frame to pieces and, taking the fly-specked cardboard picture, snapped it across and then across again and heaped the fragments of cardboard and cork on to the fire. On the wall a square of unfaded wallpaper showed where the picture had hung.

  Kate smiled to herself as she sat down again. That simple, foolish act had strengthened her, helped her to realize that brute circumstance cannot for ever prevail against human desire. ‘In ten days,’ she told herself with a feeling of triumph, ‘I shall be gone. These walls, the school, the church, the village, will never perhaps see me again,’ and she thought that she would be glad never again to speak to her father. She hated him; she admitted it to herself now. It had been nothing but habit and the impossibility of escape which had bound her to him; and she wondered now if after a year or two she would feel again a little tenderness for him, a pity for his loneliness, and drive over perhaps to see him. Then his insufferably precise way of talking came into her mind again, and the exasperating movement of his chin when he pronounced one of his parrot-sayings - ‘A Schoolmaster must always set a good example!’ ‘Work before pleasure, Kate!’ — and her black brows drew together at the thought and the sinister ghost flickered in the grey-green eye; for the old hatred boiled up again, and she told herself that, once away, she would never return.

  Then her thoughts reached back to her one previous glimpse of freedom. That was six years ago. One of the cottages in the row near the school had been empty for some months when, one day as she was returning home, she saw a middle-aged woman come out of the gate, and next day she heard that the cottage had been taken by a young man and his mother. The news meant little to her, for Kate did not concern herself with the villagers, her father considering that as a schoolmaster he belonged to a class superior to that of the village-folk. Kate was at that time twenty-three, and her life had already settled into the uneventful rut in which it still moved. In those days, although she was not happy, she was resigned. It did not then occur to her to question her lot or to dream of revolting against it. It was ordained by Fate that she was to look after her father and she never thought of considering whether she loved him or hated him. Nor, when she began to notice the strong, good-looking young man going in and out of his cottage or striding down the Elchester road with a supple, powerful swing of his shoulders, did it seem to her possible that she would ever so much as speak to him. They moved in different worlds and the fact that they were both strong and healthy and beautiful did not suggest to her conscious mind that they were therefore well fitted for one another.

  But one day her father came in to dinner saying that the boy of the head-gardener at Penridge Hall was absent from school, and next day too the boy was absent.

  ‘I should like you to walk along to the Hall this afternoon, Kate,’ he said, ‘and find out what is keeping the boy away. I am surprised that his parents have not sent word to me. Mr. Markham lives in the lodge at the Windham road entrance. Your quickest way is to go in at the entrance on the Elchester road, and follow the drive right past the front of the Hall to the entrance gates on the Windham side. In that way you will cut off more than a mile. You need not be afraid of passing the Hall as the family is in London.’