The Stepson (11 page)

Meanwhile the gig was skimming, silent except for the quiet clink of the harness, the heavy padding of the mare's hoofs, and the occasional grinding of a pebble under the wheels, over the soft, grassy cart-track, and in a few minutes it swerved out on to the metalled road and the silence was lost in the crisp ring and rattle of hoofs and wheels.

‘You drive a good deal faster than your father,' said Kate. ‘I never knew the mare could go at such a pace.'

David smiled with the amiable tolerance of the young for the old.

‘Dad lets her get into lazy ways,' he said. ‘She can go all right if she's kept up to the mark.' He gave her a little flick with the whip and, answering to it, the mare stepped out, and the hedges streamed past more swiftly and the sweet spring air beat softly against their faces. The briskness of their going and
the vague, pleasantly exciting sense of danger which it awoke in Kate braced her to an exquisite exhilaration.

‘We shall be there well under the hour at this pace,' she said.

‘Three-quarters,' answered David. ‘I never take more.' He nodded his head, smiling. ‘She knows well enough who's driving her,' he said. ‘They're artful things, horses.'

A great tide of sunshine invading the country from the south-east swept towards them from the fields on their flank, and suddenly they were immersed in the flood of it — a flood of soft, translucent fire, permeating the air, the earth, and everything upon the earth with yellow warmth, rousing to more vivid life the grass at the roadside, the budding hedges, the primroses and violets that flowered in the ditches, the sheep and lambs grazing in the emerald pastures, and those two young people speeding towards Elchester in the gaily dancing gig.

Suddenly the sunlight was screened; an intricate network of sun and shadow rippled over them; they were running between thickets of hazel and oak. And as she gazed into the thicket, it seemed to Kate that the ground under the bushes was streaked and patched with a light covering of snow, till, looking more intently, she saw that it was white wood-anemones that covered the thicket-floors, drifting more thickly about the trunks and between the
branching roots of the larger oaks. Here and there the white warmed to pale yellow where the anemones gave place to primroses.

‘Aren't they lovely!' said Kate.

‘Lovely!' David agreed. ‘But I like the cowslips better still. There's something richer about a field of cowslips, and the smell of them, too — like warm honey!'

‘I've seen very few cowslips hereabouts,' said Kate, ‘and there were none at Penridge.'

‘That's only natural,' David replied. ‘This is a primrose country, and in a primrose country you don't get many cowslips. Now at Johnson's, where I am at present, all the fields and hedges and roadsides are full of cowslips, but the primroses are few and far between.'

David's ‘That's only natural!' had chilled Kate a little; it was as if she had displayed a piece of unpardonable ignorance and David was patiently correcting her. For a moment she was back in her school-days, and then the thought of her father came to her.

‘That's a strange thing,' she replied, in the same colourless voice in which she had generally spoken to the Schoolmaster.

‘It's a matter of the soil, you see,' said David, and he flicked the mare with the end of the whip and they shot out into the full sunshine again.

‘I wish you could see that cowslip country,' he
went on, and at once Kate's chill was gone. She was grateful that he should wish her to share his pleasure, and as he described the sheep-farm and the country round it she glanced at him sideways, charmed by his youthful loquacity as if by the singing of a bird. The hill of Elchester, like a great heap of blocks, grey, black, and smouldering red, swung into sight through a screen of bare ash-trees, and soon the sound of the Abbey bells came to them, soft and ethereal, filtered by distance of all hint of metal. A quarter of an hour later they had left the gig at the inn and were making their way on foot down Bargate.

How different was the Elchester of Sunday from the Elchester of market-days. It seemed to Kate, who had never been there except on market-days, that she was visiting it now in a dream. Everything was alien and unreal. Bargate, with all its shops closed, and empty except for two or three couples sedate in their Sunday black, looked like a deep, narrow channel run dry. The place would have seemed dead if it had not been for the noise of the Abbey peal, which leaped and tossed and sparkled like a bright spray in the airy sunlight that enwrapped Elchester hill.

Then, as they turned into the market-place, the full power of the peal burst upon them. The empty square was brimful with the noise - fuller, it seemed, than it was full of people on market-days. All the tones and half-tones of the octave clanged and
crashed in rapid succession, colliding and shocking apart or combining and twining together harmoniously in a tumbling medley of sound. And under it and over it and within it, pervasive and continuous as the air itself, a deep round brazen hum bound the whole turmoil together.

With other church-goers they crossed the square to the south porch, towards which a slow stream of men and women and carefully-dressed children percolated from the four quarters of the town; and as they entered the porch and plunged suddenly from glowing sunshine into darkness, the noise of the bells was muffled as suddenly as the light to a dull, smothered drone drifting among the unseen vaults of choir and transepts.

David led the way, and crossing the transept they turned through the arch of the dark rood-screen, on the top of which towered the organ, and near the screen they took their places.

Kate sat enthralled. She had never suspected that the Abbey, whose dark mass she had casually noticed on market-days closing the western side of the square, was a place so vast and so awe-striking. The huge columns seemed to grow up out of the floor with a visible motion and then sprang out on either side into great arches; the long, many-coloured windows seen wholly or in sections through the grove of columns, hung suspended, it seemed, in the darkness behind them; and in the heights above,
the stone sprayed out, tier above tier, into delicately wrought arches and windows and finally, changing into grey wood, branched into the dark confusion of a roof huge as the heavy wooden skeleton of a great house; and all this towering richness and solemnity dwarfed the sound and stir of the men and women moving on its floor to the thin shuffle of autumn leaves.

By now the peal of bells had stopped, giving place to a single tenor bell which seemed to be hung at an immeasurable height overhead; and soon that ceased also, and from the organ above and behind them a deep, darkly luminous mist of music rose and began to loom and spread till it had filled the great cave of the church.

How restful it was to sit there, dim, motionless, and silent. Where was it, Kate asked herself, that she had found that sense of rest and security before? And raising her eyes to the dark roof, she knew suddenly that it was in the great barn at The Grange. Yes, here in the Abbey as there in the barn was the same feeling of quietude and comforting antiquity. Whatever happened in the world outside, here, she knew, everything would always be the same. Joys and sorrows, wars and dissensions, the generations dying and coming to birth, and the ceaseless flight of time passed by these ancient sanctuaries like winds and rains and the flights of birds, leaving them unchanged, havens of calm and stability in a world of turmoil and flux.

Thoughts and feelings, unuttered and even undefined, passed through Kate's mind as she sat beside David in Elchester Abbey, until the rising of the congregation, like the visible growing-up round her of a dark thicket, brought her to her senses, and she stood up as the organ began to play the opening bars of the first hymn.

David bent his head to her. ‘This is a good one,' he whispered, and at once he began to sing lustily. Kate joined in and they sang together as they had done at The Grange, David taking the bass to her treble. From time to time she glanced at him with a kind of enchanted amusement, for David sang like a man singing not hymns, but jovial songs, letting his voice go free with a confident abandonment that delighted the hearts of those that heard him, so that an old gentleman, whose seat was immediately in front of him, remarked to his wife as they walked home after the service:

‘Believe me, my dear; if the Almighty is half the man I believe Him to be, that young man's singing must have done Him more good than the mumblings of all the rest of us put together.'

Kate, standing beside him and singing with him, felt herself lifted above the earth and the confused and trivial desires and despairs of earthly life, into a oneness with him, a union of soul complete and all-satisfying. The intervals of prayers, lessons, and sermon were for her intervals of rest between these
raptures of singing: their words were lost to her, for she had reached a state where words have been left far behind and the prayers of dissatisfied souls crying to a God apart have lost all meaning and all use.

As they left the Abbey together, her body and soul were warm with contentment and her heart kept telling her over and over again:

‘This thing for once has been mine, surely and irrevocably. Whatever happens now can never take it from me.'

So her heart spoke and her conscious self was content, not trying to understand the meaning of those inner sayings.

It was strange and bewildering to Kate to be rushing in the gig through the sweet April air after the exaltation which had come upon her in the Abbey. She gazed questioningly at the slowly wheeling trees and fields and at the blue motionless hills beyond them, and then she looked sideways at David sitting beside her with the reins and whip in his hands. That look brought her back to earth once more.

She looked at him again, calmly, dispassionately, half ashamed of her curious ecstasy of the past hour. He was, she recognized clearly, an ordinary young man, a young farmer with large red hands, self-contained, pleasant, and, like all young people, a little hard. What, she wondered, had he been feeling while they sang together? And she answered herself, coldly rational as she now was, that he had been wrapped up simply and entirely in his own enjoyment. The divine intimacy which had soothed and thrilled her so profoundly had been experienced by her alone. In fact, she told herself, it was nothing but fancy. Then, recalling the intensity of her emotion, she denied absolutely that it was fancy. It was real, more real than anything she had ever known, and it was almost incredible that, standing beside her, David should not have been aware of it. He turned his head and their eyes met. His gaze was cool and transparent: no ecstatic memories abashed and deepened
it. ‘He knows nothing,' she said to herself, and feeling that she must speak to him she asked:

‘Are you fond of going to church, then?'

‘Well,' replied David, ‘I like the music and the singing. The singing's rare. But the rest isn't much in my line. I never could abide sermons, and as for all this talk of “fading is the world's best pleasure,” and us being miserable sinners and all that, well, it seems all wrong to me.' He turned to Kate with a clear blue glance and it seemed to her that she saw to the bottom of his clean, cool, simple young mind — a mind like a shallow pool, clear of all the dark desires and angers and the lurking intensities that troubled her own.

‘Are
you
a miserable sinner?' he asked, and his question evidently expected an unhesitating denial.

‘Well, I've been miserable before now,' said Kate, ‘but I don't see much reason, I must say, for calling myself a sinner.'

‘Well, I'm not miserable and I'm not a sinner,' answered David, ‘and the world doesn't seem to me at all a wretched place, so I'm not going to say it is, just because it's been put down in a book.' He set his jaw and stared in front of him between the horse's ears.

‘It depends on what you mean by being a sinner, I suppose,' argued Kate. ‘Different people have different ideas.'

‘I should have thought it was fairly plain,' said David. ‘It's sinful to steal and tell lies, isn't it?'

‘Yes, that's sinful, sure enough.'

‘And my great-grandmother was a miserable sinner, no doubt.'

Kate laughed. ‘Your great-grandmother?'

‘Yes. But I don't suppose you've heard about her. She was a grand lady, you know, my great-grandmother — the wife of Sir Jonathan Brand.'

‘And who was he?'

‘A rich gentleman, a baronet, who lived at Down Place, about twenty-five miles from here. There's still a Sir Jonathan Brand there. The eldest sons are always called Jonathan. Well, my great-grandmother married Sir Jonathan Brand when she was young. Twenty-four or twenty-five she was, I believe; and Sir Jonathan was an old man of seventy. He had been a great huntsman in his day, had Sir Jonathan; but in his old age he got the gout, and that, of course, was the end of his hunting. They say his temper was something terrible. However, young Lady Brand was very fond of riding, and she not only hunted, but she used to love to ride about by herself on the Down Place estate.

‘Well, my great-grandfather was the son of a farmer on the estate: he was about my age at the time of the story. Nobody knew, so my mother told me, how he and Lady Brand came to meet; but meet
they did, and one night Lady Brand disappeared from Down Place.

‘They searched the woods and coverts and dragged all the ponds and sent round to all the villages and farms round about to inquire if she had been seen, and then it came out that Farmer Tarras's son had disappeared too. A few months later old Sir Jonathan got a letter from his wife saying that she was living with young Tarras and that she wasn't coming back to Down Place. Now that was a strange thing for a grand lady to do, wasn't it - to run away with a farmer's son?'

‘Very strange,' said Kate, and, as soon as she had said it, it occurred to her that if young Tarras was anything like his great-grandson it wasn't so strange, after all, for a young woman married to a fierce old man to run away with him. ‘And what happened to her after that?' she asked.