The Stepson

by Martin Armstrong

  The only member of the community who seemed to be unfriendly was Emma, the sulky-faced girl who helped Mrs. Jobson. Emma seemed to be determined to ignore Kate. She would never, when she could avoid it, speak to her; and when she was obliged to speak, she did so shortly, sulkily, and with a closed, unsmiling face. Kate had tried, during the first few days, to win Emma out of her sulkiness, but finding her friendly attempts repulsed she had withdrawn into herself and when she spoke to Emma now her words, though civil, were brief and cold, and her eyes cold and unflinching under the darkly gathered brows. Emma’s dislike troubled and annoyed her more than she knew. It was as if Emma were resolved to exclude her, as far as she could, from the new life into which she was settling so happily. At first she had felt shy and diffident in her new position, but soon courage came to her and she began to take pleasure in her new dignity and her sense of power as mistress of this large, busy community. And so, as time went on, from feeling merely pained she grew to feel resentful and to consider Emma’s studied unfriendliness as an impertinence. But one dissonant note was, after all, not a very great matter.

  In her new happiness, Kate was changing. Her nature grew warmer and began slowly to unfold. Her pale, dark-browed face was no longer cold and sombre; its quietness now was the quietness of serenity, its coldness often warmed to a subtly changing expressiveness, and a variety and music came into her voice which were never there before. Happiness had come to her in time, stirring her to life before the life had withered within her, and now, like woods and gardens under a mild March weather, her winter was blossoming into spring.

  She herself knew it: she was aware not only of the daily delight of waking to rediscover her happiness, but of little thrills of rapture which flashed through her at unexpected moments, intimate lightnings that fluttered her heart for no known cause; and, feeling them, she smiled to herself and then blushed for smiling. Each morning when she did her hair before the looking-glass it was a marvellously changed face whose eyes met hers, and her heart beat with a secret pleasure in her new beauty.

  For Ben Humphrey, too, this November had brought a new happiness. He loved Kate deeply: all his vagrant affections and desires had once more come to rest in her. In her his life had resolved itself into unity again. Whenever in the long hours of work his mind turned for a moment from what he was busy with, he realized again with a glow of delight that Kate awaited him in the house. The zest of work was crowned now with that richer zest of the beautiful young woman who had become his. It delighted him to entice her by degrees out of her reserve, to watch her nature unfold in the warmer atmosphere of the life into which he had brought her. He kept reminding her that she was free now to follow her own devices.

  ‘Come to me, mind, whenever you want money,’ he told her. ‘You can have all the money you want within reason. And there’s no need for you to do any work, remember. Just please yourself. Don’t forget you’re mistress here.’

  And it would certainly have pleased the old man best if Kate had consented to become an idle, luxurious creature, a thing apart from the farm and sacred to him alone, for he loved to treat her as something to be petted and pampered and did not see that this was the one thing in their intercourse that alienated and embarrassed her. Her dignity and restraint recoiled from the old man’s childish endearments, and Ben, finding himself thwarted, would redouble his efforts, ignorant that he was only increasing the gulf between them. Happily, such moods were only occasional. In his customary state, alert, kindly, and cheerful, Kate found old Ben a delightful companion: his natural cheeriness thawed her coldness and reserve and in his company she became cheerful and animated also. Her affection for him was real; strong enough, indeed, to make it possible for her to tolerate his love.

  Little by little, both indoors and out of doors, Kate became familiar with the farm. Ben had encouraged her to pry into every hole and corner.

  ‘Get to know the place, my dear,’ he said to her. ‘The more you know it, the better you’ll like it’; and Kate, feeling that she was a stranger and an intruder, had opened doors and peeped into cupboards, and sometimes Mrs. Jobson, when she had a moment to spare, would assist Kate in these researches, showing her the store-room or taking her into the linen-closet and displaying the table-linen, bed-linen, and towels, all neatly disposed upon their appointed shelves with sprigs of lavender between their folds.

  ‘But how beautifully it’s kept,’ said Kate admiringly, and Mrs. Jobson’s heart warmed towards her, for it was she who kept it.

  Out of doors she examined hen-houses, strange-smelling and white with droppings, where she peeped into the rows of boxes, finding a large pinkish brown egg in one, a white one in another, or a sham one made of shining white pottery, to encourage the hens to lay; and sometimes, too, a great buff or black hen filling the whole box in which it crouched, which glared at Kate with a fierce hectic eye and growled if she ventured too near.

  When she went into the stables and cow-byres, the munching beasts turned their great heads and stared at her with solemn, benevolent eyes. Sometimes, going from stall to stall with George the hind, or Peter the boy whom she had happened to meet as she went about the farm, she would hear from them the names of the different horses and cows and learn gradually to recognize them when she met them in the fields or on the roads.

  Once, leaving the farmyard and turning down a green lane, she came upon a gate in a high holly-hedge, and stopping to lean over it she saw that she was looking into an orchard, a beautiful half-wild and half-formal place where old twisted fruit-trees stood in rows. The trees were leafless now, but as she moved away she resolved that she would return in the spring when all the trees would be white with blossom.

  But the thing that delighted Kate above everything else was the huge barn whose long thatched roof had been one of the first things that met her eye as she drove after her wedding into the farm. To enter through the great double doors and close them behind her was like entering a church, for, once inside, it seemed to her that she had left the world of every day behind her and stepped suddenly into an ancient, peaceful silent world filled with mild twilight and soft darknesses. Screens of sunlight cast from the slit between the almost closed doors or from a gap in the planking of the barn’s wooden sides partitioned the darkness as if with luminous and impalpable walls, and here and there small, keen sunshafts shot from holes in the roof, where the birds had burrowed through the thatch, and stretched ropes of shining gold from roof to floor, lighting into vague visibility an intricate structure of grey beams and timbers high overhead. Ben had told her that this barn was reputed to be four hundred years old, and it seemed to Kate, as she stood enclosed in its soft twilight and hushed quietude, that its antiquity was an actual presence, lulling the mind and soothing the heart into a blessed tranquillity. Here, it seemed to her, she would always find peace and consolation whenever she felt the need of them.

  Another of her earliest and pleasantest discoveries came one day when she ventured to unbolt the door which gave upon the front of the house. This door stood open in the height of summer to let a draught through the house, but at other times it was not used and was always kept bolted. Kate, feeling guilty and inquisitive, drew the stiff bolts, glancing timidly over her shoulder as she did so, and when at last she had got the door to open she went out and closed it behind her. A square plot of grass lay before her, fenced by a low stone wall and divided into two equal halves by a flagged walk which ran straight from the doorstep to a green gate. One or two aged and contorted fruit-trees rose out of the grass, and in a small round bed on each side of the walk stood a rose-bush. On one of them a belated pink rose was still blooming. Kate stood entranced, gazing down at it: then stooping over it she smelt it. A delicious fragrance surprised her sense; it seemed to her for a moment that summer was already come. She could hardly tear herself away from the bush, stooping and inhaling its sweetness again and again; but at last she continued her way to the gate, opened it, and went out. The field on the edge of which she s
tood dropped in a single steep slope to the flat meadows on either side of the wandering Eavon, from whose grassy banks rose here and there a posturing willow. From there the land ran on, field after field of plough and pasture, into the blue horizon, and throughout its length were strewn shining rags and strips of the winding river, diminishing in the distance to mere flecks in the vague foreshortening of green and brown. For awhile Kate stood and gazed into the distance: then, recalling herself from the wide expanse to the spot on which she stood, she returned into the little front-garden. The old house-front, a patchwork of sober stone and mildly twinkling glass, regarded her benevolently, and Kate noticed that a great twisted pear-tree sprawled its flattened boughs over all the right half of the house-front, running horizontally along the base of each window and springing up vertically on either side of it. A leafless rose over-arched the door and climbed to the upper window, and about the window on the left of the door a Pyrus opened its arms. Before many months it would be bright with the scarlet rosettes of its first bloom. Kate paused again, glancing once more about her as if to print upon her mind all she had seen; then, turning on her heel, she went back into the house.

  The upper part of a large cupboard in the sitting-room was fitted with shelves and the shelves were filled with books, and Kate, looking through them, had found novels by Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, some bound volumes of The Leisure Hour, and a huge illustrated Bible. One evening, after some rummaging with a candle, Ben brought out of it an old-fashioned photograph-album in a thick, panelled leather cover. When supper was over and the scowling Emma had cleared the table, they sat at the table looking through the album. The first photographs dated back fifty or sixty years. In Kate’s eyes they were extraordinarily ridiculous.

  ‘That’s the old people on their silver-wedding day,’ said Ben; and Kate saw a stout woman, seated, wearing a bulging, tight-fitting bodice with a long row of buttons descending from the throat to the waist. She wore a huge cameo brooch wedged in under her chin. Her skirt consisted of row under row of flounces. By her side stood a pot-bellied man with a large watch-chain and a face, clean-shaven except for the mutton-chop whiskers, which seemed to be a conglomeration of shining bosses like a plateful of apples.

  ‘He was a tough ‘un, was the old man,’ said Ben. ‘Yes, it was as well to keep on the right side of him. But he was a good farmer; a very good farmer for his times. It was him I got my temper from.’

  Kate raised her head and examined Ben with a smile. ‘Have you got a temper?’ she said.

  ‘Ask Mrs. Jobson,’ said Ben; ‘ask George; ask anyone about the farm.’

  ‘Well,’ said Kate, ‘so have I.’

  Their eyes met, half challenging, half humorous, and they laughed. Then they turned their attention once more to the album.

  ‘That’s me and my first.’ Ben pointed at the next portrait.

  ‘You, with that moustache? Well, I never.’

  ‘Yes, I was twenty-seven then. She died getting on for twenty years ago. When you were …?’

  ‘Nine.’

  ‘Nine. A little bit of a thing of nine. It seems strange, doesn’t it?’

  Kate stared at the photograph and her brows contracted. ‘And you married again … how soon after?’ she asked.

  Humphrey hesitated. ‘Getting on for a year,’ he said sheepishly. ‘The next one’s picture is over the page.’

  He was going to turn the page when Kate laid her hand on it.

  ‘Don’t show me her,’ she said with quiet intensity.

  Ben looked at her, surprised. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I ask you not to.’ Her colour had risen suddenly and she spoke coldly and abruptly. Ben, on the point of speaking, checked himself, looking at her face for a moment searchingly.

  Then coldly and abruptly she asked: ‘How long did you say it was since she died?’

  ‘Rachel? Three years and a bit,’ said Ben. ‘Three years last August.’

  She turned her head and her eyes scanned him. His eyes dropped shamefaced before that calm, searching gaze.

  ‘And when I go,’ she said, ‘how long will you wait, I wonder?’

  ‘Wait? What do you mean?’ Ben’s lips had narrowed and he spoke shortly.

  ‘Wait before marrying a fourth.’

  ‘You shouldn’t say such things,’ he said. ‘You’re young. You don’t understand. Besides, when you go, I shall have been dead and buried for years.’

  ‘How do you know?’ she answered. ‘No one can say where any of us will be from one week to another.’

  ‘Well, it’s natural, at least,’ said Ben quietly, ‘to suppose that I’ll go first. I’m an old man, my girl, If I lived ten years longer it would be a very good age. I’ve no right to expect more.’

  Her eyes were still upon him and her hand on the album, and suddenly a profound compassion for the old man came over her. Her grim mood was gone; her heart melted.

  ‘Don’t mind what I say, Ben,’ she said to him, smiling. ‘I’m a little queer at times, you know.’

  Ben laid his hand affectionately on hers. ‘Take up your hand,’ he said, ‘and I’ll show you the lad.’

  ‘What lad?’

  ‘The boy. David. You’d like to see him, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kate. ‘Yes, show me David’; and Ben turned two pages and laid his finger on the portrait of a very small boy standing as if at attention with one hand on one of those sundials which are to be found only in photographers’ studios.

  ‘He’d be about seven at that time,’ said Ben.

  A comical little dormouse of a boy he seemed to Kate, much the same as several of the smaller boys who went to Penridge school. She gazed more closely at the small face and for the first time it occurred to her that this boy was her stepson. A little thrill of tenderness stirred in her.

  ‘Here he is again,’ said Ben, watching her anxiously. ‘He’s older here. This was taken about five years ago.’

  He paused. Kate with her dark, brooding brows was studying the photograph intently. The old man waited for her to speak, but Kate continued to gaze in silence, as if lost in a dream. He laid a hand on her arm.

  ‘What do you think of him?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s a pretty boy,’ she said in a soft, restrained, eager voice. ‘Is it like what he is now?’

  Ben inspected the portrait critically. ‘Yes,’ he said judicially with his head on one side. ‘Yes, it’s like him all right, though he’s grown into a young man now, of course.’

  Kate looked up from her inspection. ‘What colour is his hair?’ she asked.

  ‘Reddish,’ said Ben. ‘A kind of red gold, you know. Like his Mother’s was, only brighter.’ He studied the portrait again. ‘He’s a fine lad,’ he said warmly. ‘The best of the bunch.’ He turned with one of his alert movements to Kate. ‘Do you like him?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Kate, ‘I do.’

  ‘I knew you would.’ The old man was as reassured and happy as if the two had actually met.

  VI

  Christmas had come and gone and the new year was now some weeks old. The keen frosts of January, which froze the water in the horse-trough to a solid block of crystal and hung the low eaves of the barn with a glassy fringe of icicles, had yielded to a rainy February.

  Kate sat by the parlour window: an open book lay in her lap. It was raining, and at intervals showers of drops were driven against the panes till every pane flowed like a sheet of rapidly melting ice. Somewhere out in the yard water dripped from a leaking gutter with a continuous wet pit-pit-patting. The clank of a pail and then the hard ring of a poker knocking against the iron bars of the grate came from the kitchen, and, from outside, the sound of horses’ hoofs. Peter, the boy, his red face shining with wet and water dripping from the peak of his cap, led the two bays past the window. Their great heads nodded across the panes; the rain-soaked necks gleamed like bronze.

  Kate’s eyes wandered round the parlour, delaying for a moment on each detail - the brass candlestick
s on the mantelshelf, the huge arch of the beam over the great open hearth, and the other beams that pressed down from the ceiling upon the low room. It was a friendly room, and it had a pleasant smell made up of many smells — scents of old timber, burning logs, a hint of paraffin and the suggestion of some vague aromatic spice. It was a room in which it was not easy to feel lonely, for there was about it a sense of calm, pervasive life, as if the spirits of all the serene countryfolk who had once lived and moved in it still filled it with their comfortable presence.

  And yet Kate did not feel happy as she sat there surveying the old place. A small, tight chord of sadness vibrated from time to time in her breast. It seemed to her unnatural to be sitting there while the endless business of the farm moved forward on its quiet, unceasing way. She herself was the only idle creature in the place. What time could it be? The clock that hung near the door said five minutes to ten. How strange that she should not have known the time. At Penridge the routine of her day was so allotted that she could always tell, by whatever she happened to be doing, what time it was. But when you sit idle, time stands still, or rather life stands still and time moves on and leaves life behind. All at The Grange, except Kate, had their appointed activities, which kept them busy, kept them alive. She alone was being left behind. During all the weeks since she had come to The Grange she had been dropping further and further out of touch with life. She had become as strange to herself as she was strange to the folk among whom she lived; for they, who were all bound together in the fellowship of work, felt that she was different from them. How far, after all, was this new life from what she had so fondly hoped. And yet, had she not promised herself, as the greatest happiness that her new life would bring to her, that she would drudge no more but enjoy to the full the leisure which was hers to enjoy? Could it be that this long-desired leisure was in truth mere emptiness; that when you stopped working, you stopped living? But work in itself was no satisfaction: she had proved that severely enough, working for a father she had never loved. It would have been different if someone she loved had been dependent on her work. Here at The Grange no one depended on her, for, she reflected, everything had moved quietly and smoothly, as it was moving now, long before Ben had so much as thought of her. Then it came into her mind that one day perhaps she would have children. That, of course, would alter everything; and for the first time Kate began to hope ardently that she would have a child. Then her thoughts turned to David, this boy whom she had never seen. In a way, she told herself, David was her son: she was in the place of a mother to him. And she began to think how pleasant it would be when he came back to live at The Grange; and, feeling a sudden desire to picture him again more clearly, she put aside the book that lay on her lap, rose from her seat and crossed the room to the cupboard, determined to get out the album and examine his photograph again.