The Stepson (16 page)

A few minutes later, just as Mrs. Jobson had put the joint on the table, Ben came into the parlour. He passed the old woman as she went out with the empty tray.

‘Hello!' he said to Kate. ‘What's the matter with Emma? Is she ill?'

‘Ill? No!' replied Kate. She was unprepared for so sudden an opening.

‘I mean, why was it Mrs. J. who brought in the dinner?' he added.

‘Because Emma's going,' said Kate.

‘Going? Where to?'

‘Going for good. Leaving. This afternoon.'

‘Leaving?' Ben's eyes questioned her, blazing. ‘Who says she's leaving?'

‘I say so,' answered Kate.

‘But … but …!' Ben was stuttering with surprise and indignation. ‘I'd like to hear something about this, please, Kate.'

Kate met his angry glance firmly. ‘Are you quite sure you would, Ben?' she asked significantly, and it seemed to him that those grey-green eyes, so calm but for the dangerous ghost that stirred vaguely behind their calmness, were gazing through him. His rising anger gave way to apprehension and then to shame. He could no longer sustain her scrutiny: his eyes glanced aside.

‘While I stay here,' said Kate with quiet determination, ‘I am mistress here. That stands to reason, doesn't it?'

‘Why, of course! Of course!' muttered Ben. He had shrunk for the moment into a foolish chapfallen old man.

‘George will have to take Emma into Elchester this afternoon,' Kate went on, as though the thing was purely a matter of course. ‘The gig must be ready at half-past one.' And a few minutes later, when Mrs. Jobson came in to take out the joint for the kitchen dinner, Kate said to Ben: ‘Hadn't you better send a message to George now, by Mrs. Jobson, about the gig?'

‘Yes, to be sure!' said Ben, shamefaced and obedient, and he turned to Mrs. Jobson. ‘You might tell George, Mrs. J.,' he said, ‘to have the gig ready to go to Elchester at half-past one. Tell him he'll have to drive and he's not to mind about the things I told him to do here this afternoon.'

That was the end of the matter: nothing more was said. Ben by his sudden and complete capitulation had chosen the wisest course, but he had also inevitably proved to Kate that her own suspicions and Emma's hints were no less than the truth. As for Emma, she remained upstairs till the time of her departure, refusing sulkily to come down to dinner. Seeing from her bedroom window that George was harnessing the mare in the yard, she knew that Ben
had acquiesced in her dismissal and that protest would be in vain. Mrs. Jobson went up, when the gig was ready, and helped her to carry down her box and, as she climbed into the gig, put a parcel of meat and bread on the seat beside her.

Three days later Kate was ironing sheets on the kitchen table. She had hung out the week's washing that morning in the hot July sun and it was already almost dry. On the previous day in Elchester she had been fortunate enough to secure a girl to replace Emma, but the girl would not be free for over a week and so Kate and Mrs. Jobson were still doing all the work between them. During these days she had little time for thought, except when, as now, she was engaged in that kind of semi-mechanical work which encourages a flow of half-conscious, half-unconscious meditation. The knowledge she had gained from her quarrel with Emma and the disillusionment which it had caused her had wrought a profound change in her. She had little experience of life, and of men, except for Ben and her father, she knew nothing. Her mind was innocent and she believed implicitly in the innocence of others. Ben's second marriage a few months after his first wife's death, and even his marriage with herself three years after the death of David's mother, had seemed to her innocent heart a kind of infidelity which had provoked from her that cynical comment when Ben had shown her the old photograph-album; but such changefulness, she was ready to admit, betokened no more than a certain lack of deep affection in Ben's nature. She had liked and respected
him: he was kindly and cheerful and, like herself, thorough, energetic, and happy in his work; and even though his love, as she soon discovered, was more a thing of appetite than of the heart, at least marriage made it lawful. But now that she found he was also unfaithful and dishonest, that he had secretly and slyly deceived her with this girl who hated her, her pride was cut to the quick and her innocence horrified. She turned away from him with disgust, for it seemed to her that he had behaved towards her with unforgivable treachery. He had enticed her to The Grange on false pretences and having got her there he had deluded her with the outward semblance of an honest, happy, and respectable life. He had watched her, no doubt with a cynical amusement at her innocence, happily accepting his pretence, while all the time this hideous secret had been festering like some rank fungus at the very heart of their existence.

At the first shock she had felt that she could not live with him a moment longer. But where was she to go? She could not return to the dry, joyless life with her father, to escape from which she had made so great a sacrifice. She would rather die than do that. And how could she leave Mrs. Jobson and the other friendly folk at the farm, and the happy, busy life of which she had become a part? How, above all, she asked herself with a thrill of the heart, could she go away and leave David? No: even though she
hated and despised Ben, she must somehow tolerate him for the sake of all these things which had grown so precious to her.

Mrs. Jobson with her sympathetic motherly eye had read and understood much of Kate's trouble, and gently and carefully she did her best to reconcile her to her disillusionment. ‘Remember, my dear,' she said to Kate during one of their many private talks, ‘that men are strange creatures. Their ways and ideas are different from ours; much more different than you know. There's many men worse than Mr. Humphrey; in fact, except for this one thing in him, there's nothing I know of but good. Remember the good, my dear, and try to forget the bad. When he married you, he did it in good faith; of that I feel certain, because I spoke my mind to him on the subject when he told me he was marrying again. And I spoke to him once again, too, last Easter it was, when I found out that for once he hadn't kept to his resolve. The mistake was, of course, that Emma was kept on here. It was asking for trouble not to send her away when you came. Try and bear with him, my dear, and don't think too much about what's happened. Time and hard work, you'll find, are wonderful healers.'

With the help of talks such as these with her old friend, Kate, after the first shock had spent itself, began to feel that she might be able to achieve some measure of tolerance. If only Ben himself had dared
to speak to her on the subject, to tell her the truth and ask for her forgiveness, even more might have been accomplished. But secrecy and evasion in such matters were too deeply ingrained in his nature: it was no longer in him to make a clean breast of it, and so the breach between them remained unhealed, for his silence kept it open; and although what Mrs. Jobson had believed about his honest intention was no less than the truth, Kate was never fully convinced of it, for Ben alone could have convinced her. Her anger at his unfaithfulness cooled before long, for she had never been in love with him; but she could not forgive him his dishonesty. For her their relation could never again be the same: he had destroyed its finer elements; the generosity had died out of it. All that remained, to her mind, was a kind of business arrangement. She would give him his due and no more; bare justice untempered by mercy. In everything beyond that, she would consider her own feelings before she considered his.

Such meditations, impulsive and undefined, welled up in Kate's resentful heart as she leaned above the kitchen table ironing the sheets. She did not stop to consider what she meant by justice or mercy. Her mind was too simple for such subtleties; it obeyed intuitions, not arguments. It was simple and innocent, but the harsh years of her youth had made it also somewhat hard and resentful. Her nature
had been starved for so long that it grasped at life now with an almost fierce determination which new thwartings might soon drive into recklessness. Who can blame her, for the fault was not hers. The growing plant will burst through walls and pavements if they bar its passage towards light and air, or if it fails it will die in the attempt. Such is nature's law, and the law for human nature is no different.

Kate folded up the last sheet and laid it on the pile of others, and then, lifting the pile in both hands, she carried it upstairs to the linen-closet. When she had stowed it away in its proper place she stood for a while in the doorway of the closet where, on the morning of David's departure, she had stood and heard the gig drive out of the yard; and slowly, like a gradual fire, growing, spreading, enveloping her, there stole over her something of the ecstasy which had possessed her when she had stood there with the feeling of David's kiss still on her cheek and the sense of him thrilling her blood. Again, it seemed to her, he was there; not visibly, this time, but burnt into her senses almost as deeply, — in some ways more deeply, it seemed to her, than material presence can burn. The half-dreaming, half-surprised tilt of his eyebrows, the very curve of his cheek with the glisten of golden down on the ruddy flesh, his large innocent red hands, the very feel of his coat where she had laid her hands on his
shoulders, the very texture and colours of it as her eyes had taken them in, - all these things had become a part of her very self, life of her life. Her lips moved. ‘David!' she whispered to herself; ‘David!', trying over his name as though it were some precious symbol which her baffled soul laboured to understand. In the quiet, friendly attic, full of the cool light of the sky and the homely smell of warm woodwork, it seemed to her that she stood in a secret world of her own, a place apart from the rest of the house and the rest of life. How small, here, and how far away seemed all her pain and disillusionment. What did Ben and his virtues and vices matter beside this all-absorbing love? For her illusions and self-deceptions were gone now and she knew and confessed to herself that she loved David passionately, longed for him as the lover longs for the beloved. She did not ask herself in her new-found rapture what fulfilment such a love could have. No questions disturbed her yet. Her love was sufficient in itself. Under its life-giving rays, like a bird spreading its feathers to the sunlight, her starved heart unfolded itself, and for days she carried her rapturous secret about with her, careless of all else.

But when she had gone down from the attic into the house again, she had at the same time descended once more into her daily world with its own cares and concerns, and she could not long remain oblivious of it. Soon it became real to her again,
claiming her time and attention. Yet even so, its power over her was gone, for she was safe, unassailably safe in the warm security of her love. Not that she could continue much longer free from all questioning. Questions came, questions of expediency and moral questions, raised by her reason. What could be the end of her desire? How would she ever be able, separated as they were, to give herself to David and to have him for her own? Was it not a sinful thing, a thing monstrous and terrible, that a woman should love the son of her own husband? So it would have seemed to her if she had been told of such a case; but now that the case was her own, the question had no meaning for her. The bright radiance of her love was its own supreme and indisputable justification: it blinded her to clabbed arguments of right and wrong, burning them up and consuming them as so much dry rubbish, the dead offscourings of life. As for those other questions, she was content to wait. To have David there at The Grange, to see him and hear him and feel his presence transforming her daily life, would be, she told herself, enough, – oh, richly enough; and if in the end it grew to be not enough, a lifetime lay before them; she could wait. She could wait, she felt now in the faith and strength of her new love, patiently, happily, for years and years.

During these days Kate went about her work in a happy dream. Mrs. Jobson saw the change in her
and wondered at it. It was clear in the steady inward glow of her eyes, in the strength and sureness of her movements, in the things she said and the voice that spoke them, throwing into the most trivial phrase a soft and unaccountable intensity, as though words and voice were no more than the overtones of some full inner music, inaudible and not understood in the world outside.

A few days more and the girl arrived whom Kate had engaged in Elchester, and Kate found herself once again with more leisure on her hands. Her day was no longer one ceaseless activity from morning till night: she had quiet moments once more, an odd hour here and there when, if she wished, she could pause to read or to walk out into the front garden or down the lane to the orchard, or to step into the barn, walking softly for fear she should disturb the silence of its immense age and half afraid to be discovered there for no visible purpose.

In one of such hours on a warm grey afternoon in the front garden, she felt the need of greater solitude and, opening the little gate, she went out and stood on the edge of the steep grass slope looking across the great sweep of fertile plain below. A field away from the foot of the slope, the Eavon between its banks of reeds, flags, and occasional willows, swung a great loop parallel with the base of the slope and then, doubling back on itself, drove its narrowing coils into the receding plain, a great
invading serpent, softly gleaming and pied along its length with grey, black, and silver.

How empty and quiet the country was under the quiet grey of the afternoon. Kate began slowly to descend the slope and soon she was crossing the meadow towards the river-bank. Under all that seeming stillness the river was flowing, ceaselessly and unhurryingly flowing on like blood in the veins of a sleeping body, now curling full and leisurely in some great dark hollow of its bed, now slipping with a clear, soothing loquacity over the pebbles that floored its shallows. Kate followed the river. Its movement and the subdued watery noises that at moments seemed almost to be articulate syllables quietly spoken to a single listener, helped her thoughts. She had not known what it was that she wanted to think about: she had felt only the pressure of varied and unaccustomed emotions which strove to unfold themselves; and now as she walked along the bank they began to unfold, stirring her heart with fluctuating joys and sadnesses as growing seeds stir the soil and the little stones of the earth, twining upwards into consciousness in vagrant trains of thoughts and memories. Her new spring of love had flooded all her mind, sweetening its bitterness and softening its hardness. Her anger and resentment against Ben were changed into sorrow, her old hatred of her father was melted into a pity, by which she seemed, for the first time, to reach some sort
of sympathy and understanding of him. She saw herself now, and all those whom she had loved or hated, as helpless children whose hopes and longings for what seemed to them good and desirable were at the mercy of an inscrutable Will which sometimes withheld all, sometimes granted a little. Though the mere thought of David still had power to plunge her in an all-absorbing happiness, her reason had by now so far returned to her that she could tell herself that the inscrutable Will might deny her all upon which she had almost unconsciously staked her happiness. She thought of her past life, remembering her early beginning of love for young Graham which her father had so summarily crushed. But there, surely, happiness had been within her grasp and it was no alien Will which had opposed it, but simply her own cowardice. If she had dared to brush aside her father's bidding, if she had simply ignored him as she had done years later when she accepted Ben Humphrey, she could have been the mistress of her fate. What, she wondered now, had been his reason for crushing her intimacy with young Graham? He had said that Graham was beneath her, but was that the true reason? Was he not, rather, clinging desperately to a shred of his own threadbare life which threatened to tear itself from his grasp? For though he showed no affection for Kate, she was a part of his life, it was she who made his home for him; and thinking of her father's action
in that light, Kate saw the Schoolmaster not as a hard and cruel parent but as a lonely old man trying to rescue his threatened existence.