The Stepson (2 page)

The big man Reed nodded gravely. ‘There's one of 'em up at his place now who'll have to knuckle
under when the new Mrs. H. comes along, I'm thinking.'

‘Indeed? What, one of the maids?'

Bob Reed wagged a big hand as if to obliterate something. ‘I name no names,' he said, and they saw that the Squire was coming towards them. Next moment he joined the group.

‘Good day, good day!' he said. ‘Lovely weather!'

His keen blue eyes were lively in his clean-shaven red face, the skin of which shone as though tightly stretched. The mouth was well-shaped but narrow-lipped. When the lips parted they revealed a fine white set of false teeth. It was a face capable of dignity and humour, lust and sudden anger. You were aware always that those blue eyes and the hot cheeks and straight mouth might narrow into a sudden ferocity or gleam with a hard lustfulness. The hair about his ears and behind, between his hat and his collar, was white. He was of medium height; strong but spare of body.

‘Well, Squire,' said Reed, ‘I hear we've got to congratulate you.'

The old man thrust his hands into his pockets and drew in his breath.

‘Thank you, thank you!' he said. ‘Well, the fact is, a single life don't suit me. It's not natural. Besides, the house wants a mistress.'

‘And is the happy day fixed?' asked James Robson.

‘Aye. Thursday after next. You don't want to wait too long, you know, at my time of life. Yes, it's to be Thursday after next, over in her village. It's going to be a quiet affair. I shall bring her home to The Grange the same morning.'

‘What does the lad think of it?'

‘David?' The old man gave a short laugh. ‘He doesn't know yet. But he'll be pleased enough: he'll take to her right enough, no fear. Besides, he'll find the place more comfortable now when he comes home. A stepmother can do a lot for a lad, you know; even when he's grown up. But what about a bite of food? I'm hungry.'

‘A courting man is a hungry man; that's a fact,' pronounced Bob Reed. ‘However, hungry or not, it's time for dinner.' He turned to the others. ‘Are you coming along?'

‘Come along!' said Ben Humphrey, starting off without waiting for their answers. ‘All drinks are on me to-day!' And the rest of them moved off unhurryingly in his wake towards Bargate and the ordinary at the ‘Ring of Bells.'

The ordinary began at midday and when the Squire and his friends entered, all was humming. Servants carrying piles of plates, dishes of meat and vegetables, glasses and jugs and bottles, hurried up and down the stone-flagged passage between the kitchen and the dining-room. From the kitchen came the rattle of pots and pans and oven doors, and from
the dining-room a great buzz of talk above which rose peremptory voices demanding food or drink. The whole place was thick with the appetizing savour of roast meat.

The friends trooped slowly into the low-ceilinged dining-room and stood nodding to acquaintances and scanning the long rows of seated figures for vacant places. A stout bald-headed fellow, holding a potato speared on the end of a fork, called to them from the far end of the room, and soon they had settled themselves beside him in a little group of vacant places at the end of one of the long tables. Plates loaded with meat and vegetables were set before them.

‘Now what is it to be?' shouted Ben Humphrey. ‘Beer, whisky, or champagne? What about a couple of bottles of champagne?'

‘No! No!' answered the group in chorus.

‘It's not worth the money, man,' said Bob Reed. ‘Whisky for me, if you please. Champagne's no drink for a plain man. Lemon-juice and bottled hiccoughs, that's what it is.'

‘What about the rest of you?' Humphrey glanced from one to the other.

Everybody plumped for whisky. ‘You can't go wrong with whisky,' they said.

‘Then whisky let it be!' said Humphrey, and he began to look about for the pot-boy. ‘George!' he shouted. ‘George!'

George, a broken-down fellow with the face of a hunted rabbit, shambled up to the table. His feet were four sizes too big for him.

‘Two bottles of Johnny Walker, George; as quick as you like!'

George, pelted by other orders, hurried away to the bar. Before long, he returned, two bottles in one hand and a tray loaded with full glasses and pots in the other. He set down the bottles beside Humphrey and shuffled off to distribute the other drinks. Ben Humphrey glanced at the bottles beside him. Suddenly his mouth narrowed: his whole face grew thin. He turned – a sudden, fierce movement – and watched George. The moment he had set down the last glass he called to him. ‘Come here, you!'

George approached timidly. Humphrey fixed him with a searing gaze.

‘Take those bottles away and get what I ordered.'

George stared helplessly.

‘Why can't you listen, man? Johnny Walker, I said. Not this muck.'

Yet, by the time George returned with the right bottles Humphrey was serene again. ‘That's right, my lad, that's right!' he said; and later, when he rose from the table, he gave George a shilling.

On the wide hearth of the large, low parlour of The Grange Farm a pile of wood blazed, hissing and crackling, a comfortable sight on a cold evening of early November. Ben Humphrey had finished his supper. He had taken off his leggings and boots and his coat and sat in his shirt-sleeves and his stocking-feet, stretching his legs towards the pleasant warmth of the fire. His face was lacquered crimson by the firelight. On the table, within reach of his arm-chair, stood a glass of whisky and water. He was thinking, or rather, he was dreaming, for he was a spectator rather than the director of the workings of his mind which, stirred by his new love, had begun to seethe and ferment quietly with vague emotions and old half-forgotten memories. The thought of this grave young woman, Kate Patten, so unresponsive but so desirable, who was so soon to become his, roused in him memories of his other women — his two dead wives, and the women, still alive or now dead, whom secretly he had known. He had married his first wife when he was twenty-four. ‘A bonny lass!' he thought to himself; yet when he tried to picture to himself how she had looked, he found that he had forgotten. ‘If she were to come into the room now,' he wondered, ‘should I know her?' And, recalling vaguely the first delightful months of their life together, he remembered that by the time she had borne him
three children he had lost all interest in her. Not that they had quarrelled. She was a practical, efficient woman and managed the house and dairy admirably. But management seemed to absorb all her being: it was as if she had shaken off all emotions with her girlhood, and he, for whom sexual temperance was a thing against nature, had begun to hang about the petticoats of the young woman at a village inn seven miles away. Old Humphrey shook his head and grinned, thinking of their meetings behind the wood-stack in the yard or at the back of the stables. A lively wench, and no mistake. A year or two later she had married a man from Widburn way, and once, after her marriage, when Humphrey rode past her new home, he had seen her gathering currants in the garden, and catching sight of him she had shouted to him and waved her hand to him as bold as brass. Well, no harm was done: his wife had known nothing of that business, nor of any of the others except that unfortunate affair of Lily Bond. She had heard of that all right - everybody had heard of it - and what a dressing-down she had given him. Old Humphrey clicked his tongue ruefully at the very thought of it. But, once she had spoken her mind, she had let the thing be; forgotten it. A good, sensible woman. He had been sorry when she died just after they had celebrated their silver wedding. What years ago! It was like looking back on another life. The Ben Humphrey he saw moving through those old experiences
was another man: the old Ben Humphrey, sitting now in his chair over the fire, watched him with an almost dispassionate curiosity. And the children: nice little things: he had been fond of them. It was nearly sixteen years since the two boys had gone to Canada. He never heard from them now, but he still heard every Christmas from Rosie, his youngest, who had married an Irishman and now lived, happy and prosperous, in Ulster. She had married before the death of her mother, so there had been no one to run the house while he remained a widower. Still, that had only been for a few months. Eight months: and then he had married Rachel.

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.'