The Stepson (12 page)

‘Nothing,' said David. ‘That is, nothing out of the ordinary. She just settled down happily for good and all. Old Sir Jonathan never answered her letter, but he had all her belongings and all her grand dresses packed up and bundled off to her. He wanted to get the place cleared of her altogether, I suppose. A fine lot of dresses they were too.

‘My great-grandmother had a little money of her own, not much, but enough to get along on, and she and Tarras bought a small farm somewhere down in Devon and settled there. They had a couple of sons
during the next few years, and when the news came that old Sir Jonathan was dead, they married. After that another son was born. He was my mother's father.'

‘Was your mother's name Tarras then?' asked Kate, thinking of that photograph in the album which she had refused to allow Ben to show to her.

‘Yes, Rachel Tarras was my mother's name. It was she, of course, who used to tell me the story of my great-grandmother.

‘Well, all those fine dresses were no more use to my great-grandmother, of course. A farmer's wife in a small way could never get herself up in finery like that: so what did she do but cut the dresses up and use the stuff from time to time for trimmings and cushion-covers and suchlike. And besides that, she began to work the scraps into a great patchwork quilt.'

‘Your lovely patchwork quilt?' cried Kate in delighted surprise; for, at the thought that she had seen and touched that precious relic, the story had suddenly lit up into vivid reality for her.

‘Yes, my quilt,' said David. ‘It came to my mother from her father, and now, of course, it's mine. She worked at it little by little in her spare time and it took her over twenty years. She died just before it was finished. My grandfather's wife finished it off a few years after her death. My mother used to show me where the old work left off and the new began.
You can see it at once: the bit of new work isn't nearly so fine as the old.'

‘It was a strange thought to make her finery into a quilt,' said Kate, musing.

‘My mother said it was for a token that she was done with gaiety and idleness, turning the useless finery into a quilt to keep her and her children warm.'

‘I wonder,' said Kate. ‘It might have been that she liked to keep her old grand days in mind and so she worked the remains of them, day by day and little by little, into something belonging to her new life. A quilt will outlast a hundred dresses and so the old finery has been preserved. If it hadn't been for that quilt you would most likely have known nothing of what a fine lady your great-grandmother had been.'

‘Why,' said David, looking at her open-eyed, ‘I never thought of looking at it in that way'; and he remained silent for a long time as if fascinated by the idea.

Kate too fell into a reverie and neither spoke until the gig swung into the soft cart-track and they knew that in a few minutes they would be back at The Grange.

They had pulled up in the yard and Kate had left David to unharness the mare and was crossing the yard to the house-door when Emma came out of the house. Kate saw that her face was flushed and even sulkier than usual. Kate had not seen Emma before starting for Elchester that morning and so, as she
passed her now, she wished her good morning. But Emma passed without a word, without so much as a glance. It was as if she were completely unconscious that Kate was there as she hurried past her, her face closed into a brooding anger.

Then, as Kate entered the house and went down the stone-flagged passage towards the stairs, another strange thing occurred, for she heard Mrs. Jobson's voice issuing, loud and angry, from the parlour. The parlour door was ajar and she could hear every word.

‘Well, I'm not going to stand by and watch it going on, so you needn't think so,' she shouted.

Ben's voice broke in fiercely. ‘Now look here, woman: if you begin talking to me like that, there'll be trouble.'

‘Trouble!' Mrs. Jobson snorted. ‘There's no use you trying to frighten me, Benjamin Humphrey, and you know it. Trouble indeed! It's you that'll be in trouble, not me. Now mark my words, if there's any more of it I shall go, and before I go I shall speak; so you'd better take warning.'

From where she stood – for at the sound of the voices Kate had instinctively stood still – she heard Ben draw in his breath as if his rage were suffocating him, and when he spoke his voice was tense and sibilant.

‘Get out of my sight, woman. Clear out, I tell you.'

Kate heard a sharp blow as if he had struck the table or the sideboard with a stick.

‘O, I'm going out of your sight all right,' came Mrs. Jobson's answer. ‘I've said my say and you've had your warning. Now remember, I keep my word, and you know it.'

Kate had stood absolutely immovable in the passage, shocked and bewildered, not knowing what to do. She had not dared to pass the parlour door to go upstairs to her bedroom, for she felt that she had blundered below the peaceful surface of things into some sinister underground mystery of which she knew, and was supposed to know, nothing. So she stood, one hand planted against the passage wall, her pale face drawn with apprehension, a cold, horrified shame clutching at her heart. Then, realizing suddenly from Mrs. Jobson's last words that she was on the point of coming out into the passage, she tiptoed back towards the yard-door and turned into the kitchen.

At that moment footsteps rang on the stone flags and David came into the house. Kate seized the opportunity to emerge from the kitchen, and Mrs. Jobson, meeting them both coming down the passage, must have supposed that they had both that moment entered the house.

‘There you are!' she said. ‘I'll bring in the dinner at once.'

And a few minutes later they were seated at table
in the parlour and everything was as it always was. And it seemed to Kate, as she sat there watching Ben who was chatting cheerfully as he carved the roast beef, that she had passed, in that five minutes between the yard-door and the stairs, through some nightmare hallucination which had existed for her and her alone.

What could it mean, this sinister mystery upon which she had intruded? And Emma with her angry face rushing across the yard? She, surely, must have some part in the mystery. During the rest of the day the memory of what she had seen and overheard kept striking a grim, discordant note across the tune of her thoughts, and next day too it kept obtruding itself upon her, sinister and startling like the croak of a raven. But she did not now reflect upon it nor try to solve the mystery, for her mind was full of another matter. To-morrow David was going away. At ten o'clock he and Ben would start from The Grange, driving in the gig to Elchester station.

For Kate, the thought of David's going played a sweet, sad refrain to all that was said or thought or done throughout the rest of the day. How they would miss him at The Grange! To herself, though he had turned out so different from her expectation, he had brought what she had so ardently hoped for, an element of warmth, tenderness, youthful gaiety. No one watching her would, perhaps, have seen in her the smallest difference; but within, since his
arrival, all had quietly and secretly changed. All her being had thrilled to subtle and exquisite new life, as different from the old as waking is from sleeping.

And yet Kate found, as she examined and savoured the change, that it was not complete happiness which had come to her; for though there was much happiness in it, there was also a sense of unfulfilment. If only she were older, old enough to be David's mother, so that she could imagine thoroughly that he was her son, or, better still, if only she were actually his mother, then, Kate told herself, her happiness would be perfect. The pleasant brotherly-and-sisterly affection to which, it seemed, they had already attained, was not enough for her starved heart, and her memory went back regretfully to the young boy of her imagination to whom she might have been a mother in all but fact.

After supper that evening they sang together again.

‘It's our last chance,' said David. ‘We shan't have another chance till autumn, and goodness knows what may happen before then.'

He laughed to lighten the effect of what he had said, for he had seen in his stepmother's face how that final phrase he had used had touched something serious and superstitious in her. He had noticed, before that, this seriousness, this undercurrent of something indefinable and strange in his stepmother. It would cross her glance suddenly, a brief, almost
tragic flash, when they were talking or singing together: it lurked in the strange intensity of that brooding gaze with which he sometimes detected her in the act of watching him. It embarrassed David when it appeared, alienating him for a moment from this woman to whom, otherwise, he had taken a great liking. But only for a moment. It never occurred to him to seek for any explanation of it, for he was not given to suspecting a hidden significance in things which he did not understand. And so the embarrassment vanished at once with the cause of it, like the shadow that flies with the flying cloud. He went to the cupboard, therefore, and got out the song-book, and once again they sat together at the table with the book before them, while Ben sat in his arm-chair by the fire, smoking and listening.

They sang through several of their old favourites, and then they sang
Bedlam
, one of the new ones which they had got almost perfect. After that they paused and David began to run through the index, searching for a song whose name he could not quite remember.
‘The Sailor, The Watch,'
he kept murmuring to himself as his finger ran down the titles; and Kate, her sense of his nearness sharpened by the thought of his imminent absence, sat tremulously aware of the young man at her side, of the strong red hand which still retained something of its childish plumpness lying on the book before her, of the pleasant, warm, peaty smell of his homespun coat,
and, as she raised her eyes to glance at his profile without turning her head, of the delicate pencilling of the silky red-gold hair on the fresh pink of his face between temple and eyebrow. She longed to place her hand on his or lay an arm about his shoulders as she leaned beside him over the song-book, for it seemed that affection could not fully ease itself in talking and looking, and her heart cried out for the sweetness and assuagement of touch. But she held back her impulse, fearing that it was too bold and that David might be displeased. Then, suddenly conscious of that loneliness which no faculty of man can ever wholly dispel, she sighed. Why should the heart be everlastingly imprisoned in these impassable walls? Why, in place of the gross and clumsy gift of speech, are we not given a sight that can pierce through words and through flesh to the innermost heart, so that one heart may understand and love another; for to understand perfectly is surely to love? Some such sense of loneliness and separation it was that aroused that sigh in Kate's bosom, and David, hearing it, turned with one of those alert movements which he got from his father.

‘What is it?' he asked, his friendly eyes looking into Kate's face. ‘Are you tired?'

‘No!' she replied. ‘No, not at all! It's nothing. Let us try
Bedlam
again'; and David turned the pages and they sang the first and third verses of the song.

‘Abroad as I was walking
One morning in the spring,
I heard a maid in Bedlam,
So sweetly did she sing;
Her chains she rattled in her hands
And always so sang she:
I love my love because I know he first loved me
.

My love he'll not come near me
To hear the moan I make
,
And neither would he pity me
If my poor heart should break;
But though I've suffered for his sake
,
Contented will I be
,
For I love my love because I know he first loved me.'

‘That's a rare fine song,' said David when they had finished. ‘It's the best of the bunch.'

‘Not better than
O Waly Waly,'
said Kate. Her moment of loneliness had gone. Singing had freed and comforted her and she spoke now with animation in her voice.

‘No; you're right,' replied David. ‘I'd forgotten
O Waly Waly:
that's the best one.' And he began to sing it in his clear, strong voice:

‘The water is wide, I cannot get o'er,
And neither have I wings to fly.
Give me a boat that will carry two,
And both shall row, my love and I.'

He stopped at the end of the verse and old Ben turned in his chair.

‘Bed-time!' he said, and Kate, glancing at the clock, discovered that a whole hour had dropped out of life as easily as a pebble drops into a pond.

When Kate awoke next morning her heart told her that David was going. It was as if the thought had lain embedded there like a sharp thorn, so that to return to consciousness was to return first and foremost to the consciousness of that. Yes, the Easter holiday was over and with it another of those wave-crests of her life had risen and ebbed again, leaving her changed into another creature. She got up and began to dress. What, she wondered, was to be the fate of this new self? Would it be happier or less happy than the old one? And feeling in herself the stir of new sensibilities, a greater awareness of the material and spiritual world through which she moved, she told herself that her life would become happier, for surely there cannot be happiness where there is no awareness. But next moment, as she raised her beautiful bare arms to gather up the fall of black hair that covered her shoulders like a cloak, and having gathered it twisted it into a great coil, it crossed her mind that without awareness there could be no unhappiness either. Was this change in her, then, merely making her capable of sharper suffering? But the sense of vigorous life in her made her brave, and she knew that, even if it had been given her to choose, she would have chosen to grow as she felt herself growing now and to risk whatever that growth might bring upon her.