The Stepson (13 page)

And then from these meditations, which passed through her mind not as reasonings but as intuitions, not as deliberate thought but as felt emotions, she dropped back upon the clear fact that David was going; in less than four hours he would already be gone; and thinking of his absence she felt already the emptiness of the house, the farm, and the long expanse of days and nights. Yes, she thought with a sigh, his going would make a great change; and standing there before the looking-glass with her arms bending and twining like white snakes about her head, she lamented David's absence, while in the little room upstairs he stood barefooted in exactly the same attitude as she, stretching himself, having just tumbled out of bed. Next moment she had reminded herself that he was still with them, but the thought of saying good-bye and of his going suffused the comforting idea of his presence with a tinge of tragedy. To have him there at the point of departure was as bad as to have him already gone. Then, as she went methodically about her dressing, her mind, as it so often did, changed its colour and she became clearheaded and practical. Why, she asked herself now, had she been making a tragedy out of an ordinary occurrence? This new stepson had come for a holiday and now he was going away again until his time was up, in the autumn, and he returned home for good. And because he cheered them up at The Grange and because she herself had taken a great
liking to him, she was sorry now that he was going. That was all it amounted to. And setting it thus practically before herself she was able to throw off those dark unhealthy mists in which she had allowed herself to be involved and to come out into the sanity of early morning. ‘I'm a fool,' this practical Kate thought to herself. ‘I make mountains out of molehills. Why can't I be ordinary and sensible like the horses, cows and dogs; or like David himself, clear as water in a pail.'

But at breakfast, with David sitting opposite her, it was difficult to remain practical and to prevent herself from fixing him with her brooding gaze, drinking in the sight of him during these last precious moments so that the picture of him should remain when he was gone. And it seemed to her, as she looked at him, that her sight this morning had the keenness of a magnifying-glass. Small details generally unnoticed, the little straight dent between his lower lip and chin, the small sparkle of golden down on his cheeks, the flying outward curve of eyebrows and eyelids which gave him his surprised look, a faint blue stripe in the grey of his coat-all these things showed with a miraculous clearness and became in her mind the typical characteristics of him. ‘If I can remember that curve of his eyelid,' she thought, ‘I shall remember him.'

David and Ben talked gaily of his going and his return, and Kate talked as gaily as they did; but all
the while she felt the hidden thorn stabbing her heart. When breakfast was over she had an almost uncontrollable longing to follow him about, wandering at his heels from room to room, out of the house and into the house, like a dog sadly following its master; but she restrained herself and went about her work, although abstractedly, listening and watching always for his comings and goings, and when she heard him go upstairs she went up too and turned into her bedroom.

From there she heard him pause on the upper stair, and then he came down to the landing near her bedroom door and called to Mrs. Jobson over the banisters.

‘I say, Mrs. J.!' And when the old woman answered from below and came out of the kitchen, he asked her: ‘What about those stockings of mine?'

‘Here they are!' Mrs. Jobson's voice replied. ‘I've darned them all. If you've any more in the same state you'd better send them. I never saw such holes.'

Kate stood eavesdropping in her bedroom, stabbed with jealousy to know that he should have turned to Mrs. Jobson as a matter of course and not to her, when he wanted anything done for him. Unless it was that Mrs. Jobson of her own accord had gone over all his clothes herself: and, thinking that, she blamed herself for not remembering to do so directly he had arrived. Then the old woman's steps were heard on
the stairs and David must have leaned over the banisters and taken the stockings from her, for Kate heard him thank her and then his steps passed her door and went upstairs to his own room and Mrs. Jobson's descended the stairs again and were lost in the passage below.

Kate stood idle in the middle of her room, trying and trying to find an excuse for going up to David's. Then, as if coming to a decision, she went anxiously out into the passage and to the foot of the upper flight of stairs.

‘David!' she called.

‘Yes?' His voice came loud and resonant from the echoing storey above.

‘I was wondering,' she said, ‘how you were off for shirts.'

‘Well ..!' He hesitated and his feet crossed the floor, and Kate climbed the stairs to his room.

‘Because,' she said as she went in, finding the door open, ‘I shall be making some for your father and I could quite well make some for you.'

‘Well,' he said, ‘if it's not troubling you too much … I was going to buy some new ones, as it happens.'

‘Then don't,' she said. ‘I'll make you some and welcome. Could you let me have an old one as a pattern?'

‘That'll be very kind of you,' he said, turning his friendly gaze upon her as he handed her one of the
shirts he was about to pack. ‘This one's shrunk a bit, of course. I could do with a good deal more room.'

‘Yes, I'll allow for that,' said Kate, and she went away, carrying off the shirt, consoled and happy.

But as the moment for parting drew near, she felt suddenly shy, as she had felt at the moment of meeting; and catching sight, as she crossed the yard, of George wheeling the gig out of the cartshed, she hurried indoors and took refuge in the parlour. Then, shy of being found idle there by Emma or Mrs. Jobson, she went upstairs again to her own room. She did not know what it was that she was afraid of. Not, surely, that she would do anything foolish when she bade David good-bye, or that she would be unable to control herself. No, it was not that. It was a shrinking from the necessary falsity of their farewell, the cold, formal handshake which would leave her with the chilling sense that their warm friendship had shrivelled back to the awkward beginnings of acquaintanceship. And it was also that she felt a kind of shame at having to bid him good-bye in the presence of others, as if she had been going to say her prayers before an audience. Their farewell was a matter private to themselves, not a thing to be shared with all the rest. These were the reasons or some of the reasons that drove her from the parlour to her bedroom, and then from her bedroom to the linen-closet up in the roof, next to David's room; for it occurred to her that if she were
discovered busy in the linen-closet, her absence at the moment of David's departure would be attributed to nothing more than ignorance of the hour.

And yet, by hiding herself away there, she realized, she ran the risk of not saying good-bye to David at all. And then she saw that this would be a test of his liking for her. When he missed her at the door and found that she was neither in the kitchen nor in the parlour, would he give it up and go, leaving a message for her perhaps, or would he search the house till he found her? So she stood, hoping desperately that he would never go without bidding her good-bye, and then assuring herself with something like terror that, if she hid herself away there, she would certainly go down to find that they had long since driven away. They would hunt the downstairs rooms for her, call for her, and then Ben, growing impatient, would shout from the yard: ‘Come along! Come along! We can't miss the train. I'll say goodbye for you, David, when I get back.'

So she stood, surrounded by the shelves in the little closet, bewildered and desperate, in the clutch of troubles of which she did not understand the meaning. And then, through the small closet-window which was open and looked on to the yard, came the sound of the mare's hoofs on the cobblestones.

Kate stood with clasped hands, stricken at the sound. She began to tremble violently as if seized by
a sudden ague; her teeth began to chatter so that she had to clench them tightly; she felt cold as if all the life had dried out of her. Reaching out a hand she took hold of one of the shelves to steady herself. Then Ben's voice called her name from the yard. She stood breathless. He called a second time, and then, after what seemed a long silence, she heard steps on the lower stairs.

‘Kate! Kate!' It was David's voice calling her. He had never called her Kate before, being shy of using her Christian name. She heard his steps pause at her bedroom door and then come on towards the upper flight of stairs. Her heart began to beat so fast that she was almost suffocated. At the foot of the stairs he called again:

‘Kate! Are you there?'

‘Here!' she answered. ‘I'm up here.'

David came running upstairs. ‘I say,' he said, ‘I'm off. I've been looking for you all over.'

‘Already?' said Kate, coming out of the closet on to the little landing. ‘What time is it?' And uttering these dissimulations, her voice sounded to her dull and foolish.

‘It's after ten,' he said, stamping on to the landing. ‘Good-bye!'

He held out his hand to her, but Kate, looking at him under her level brows, suddenly, almost without thinking, put her hands on his shoulders and drew him down.

‘Surely you can give your stepmother a kiss,' she said, speaking lightly as though the thing were a trifle.

David laughed. ‘Well, I don't see why not,' he said, and he kissed her on the cheek, a big, wet kiss like a child's. ‘Good-bye!'

He turned away and began to run downstairs.

‘See you in the autumn,' she called after him.

‘Yes. And you'd better be learning some more songs in the meantime!'

He was gone. She heard him run along the passage and then down the lower stairs. Next moment the sound of wheels and the mare's hoofs came up from the yard, ringing and rattling on the cobblestones. Then they ceased abruptly and a great silence like a suddenly bursting rainstorm rushed upon the house.

Kate still stood on the landing. She had not moved. She stood as if in a trance, her grey-green eyes fixed intensely upon the invisible, her whole being penetrated with bliss. All was well with her now. She had been healed suddenly, at a touch, of the trouble which had tormented her, and as she came to herself the story of the sick woman who had touched the hem of Christ's raiment woke in her mind. ‘This, then,' she thought to herself, ‘is what she must have felt, standing suddenly upright and
feeling health, like a golden fire, flow over her body from head to heels.'

Turning to shut the door of the linen-closet, she went down smiling and with a firm step into the empty house.

Yes, the house was empty as Kate walked downstairs: far-off sounds from the kitchen served only to make its emptiness the more perceptible. But it did not trouble Kate, for it seemed to her that there was in this emptiness a mysterious beauty, as if it were filled with a serene, invisible spirit which permeated the whole hollow place like a golden mist. From the window at the end of the upper passage a great stretch of sunshine lay on the passage floor as if someone had unrolled a long shining crocus-coloured carpet barred with grey. The window was open, and as Kate passed it a gentle gust of scented spring air flowed into the house. Luminous yellow and luminous grey pied and partitioned the spaces of room and passage; cool airs and warm airs stirred along the corridors and were mixed like streams of different colours meeting and mixing in a pool; the smell of young green leaves and the faint mingled perfumes of flowers travelled along the soft draughts that circulated through the house, and in the elms beyond the farmyard a thrush was singing.

Kate went down to the ground floor, meeting Mrs. Jobson outside the door of the parlour.

‘Well,' said the old woman, ‘he's gone, and the house will be strange without him.'

‘It will indeed,' Kate answered, and her heart sank at the thought. But for a moment only, for next
minute it seemed to her meaningless to say that he was gone, for she felt vaguely that presence or absence did not depend on the going and coming of the material body, but upon some other indefinable and unknown condition; for she felt very clearly that David was still present to her.

She went out into the yard, feeling that for a little while yet she must do no work; and crossing the yard and going out by the gate she turned down that green lane which she had discovered soon after her coming to live at The Grange, and reached the gate in the high holly-hedge behind which lay the orchard. A mounded luxuriance of white tinged with pink met her eyes, a turmoil like the swirling turmoil of a snowstorm caught into a marvellous warm stillness. She opened the gate and went in, hardly daring to breathe for fear the drawing of a breath should dissolve the miraculous vision; and walking straight ahead through the thick green grass, she made her way, stooping sometimes to avoid a low-hanging flowery bough, to the centre of the orchard, feeling that she must penetrate, like a bee in a flower, to the very heart of all that loveliness.

When she had reached what she judged to be the centre, she stood still and looked about her. All round her were boughs laden with blossom, boughs leaping upwards, boughs drooping downwards as if overloaded with the weight of blossom, an intricate network of boughs, and here and there through the
flowery thicket small ragged patches of deep blue sky. She drew one of the branches towards her to examine the blossom closely. It was a pear-tree. Each snow-white petal was separate from its neighbour, making a skeleton cup whose centre was speckled with pink or black stamens. When she let the branch go, a brief flurry of petals fluttered over her to the ground. Then she turned to a bough of apple-blossom whose curved pale-pink cups, varied by the deep pink of the buds and the backs of the already opened petals, were crowded together into little bunches, each bunch disposed along the bough on a mat of grey green leaves; and, as she gazed into these flowers, she remembered that other flower into which she had gazed in the conservatory at Penridge Hall seven years ago, a mysterious scarlet flower with a purple heart. ‘But this blossom is the more beautiful,' she said to herself, feeling that it was somehow purer and more natural. The conservatory had been close, suffocating, almost alarming; but this place was a fresh, open, sunny fairyland. She had never seen or imagined such an exuberance of bloom. She stooped and placed both palms on the grass, thinking to lie down under the boughs if it was not too wet; but the grass was soaking, it must have rained in the night, and looking down at her shoes she saw that they were bright with water. She stood upright again and laid her wet hands on her face, feeling the delicious coldness of the rain tingle on her cheeks, and
she stooped to wet her hands in the grass again and lay them on her cheeks and forehead and eyes. A wind came from the south, waking a dry, thorny rustle in the holly-hedge, and then the boughs above Kate began to hiss gently and a delicate, flickering snow of petals showered about her, settling on her hair, her shoulders, and her bosom. She held out both her hands, and into one of them fell three petals, two of pear-blossom and one of apple-blossom, and she bent her head over her open palm to examine them more closely. ‘The flesh of the flowers !' she thought, catching sight at the same moment of the white and blue-veined flesh of her own arm above the wrist. The flesh of the petals too was full of little veins that branched into a tiny network, and she saw that the substance of their flesh was like a delicate, half-translucent silk full of tiny sparkling globes like bubbles of water. ‘The pear-blossom is too pale, like funeral flowers,' she said, and then she remembered that she too was pale and impassive to outward view. Yes, she herself was like the pear-blossom. But the apple-blossom was warm and blushing and alive, ‘like David,' she said, thinking of his ruddy face and hands and the sense of warm, self-absorbed life which he always brought with him. And as she began to thread her way among the trees towards the gate she hummed to herself one of the new songs they had practised together.