The Stepson (24 page)

‘David, what's been happening?' he asked sternly.

David stood with clouded brows and downcast eyes. ‘Don't ask me, Dad,' he said. ‘It's no fault of mine.' He went to the door and opened it.

The old man turned. ‘David,' he ordered authoritatively, ‘come here!'

David paused with his hand on the door-handle. ‘I can tell you nothing, Dad,' he said, and went out; and Ben, after staring for a moment with a cold fire in his eyes at the closed door, went over towards the huddled figure of Kate.

But just as he reached her she rose hurriedly from the chair, brushed past him with a glance of mingled terror and hatred, and fled from the parlour, leaving him standing there baffled and alone.

Mrs. Jobson, waddling downstairs on her way to the kitchen, was astonished to see Kate come suddenly out of the parlour and rush past her up the stairs without word or glance. Even in that brief glimpse she had noticed the tragedy and pallor of the face that passed her. For a moment she paused on the stairs, undecided; then she turned round and began to reascend the stairs. Having reached the top she made straight for Kate's room.

The door was shut. She knocked and, receiving no reply, went in. The room was empty and so was the room next to it. Mrs. Jobson went on to the end of the passage and began to climb the little staircase to the attics. Not a sound was to be heard except the blustering of wind against the skylight above the stairhead and the creaking of the boards as the old woman slowly climbed the steep stair. Looking up, she saw that the door of the linen-closet was shut, but just before she reached the landing it opened and Kate looked stealthily out. ‘Who's that?' she asked sharply.

Mrs. Jobson paused on the top step but one. ‘It's me, my dear,' she said. ‘Mayn't I come?'

Kate's gaze, haunted by the tragic ghost which troubled it when she was agitated, enveloped the old woman who stood waiting before her. ‘Not yet, Mrs.
Jobson,' she begged. ‘Leave me alone for a bit. I
must
be alone.'

She withdrew her head and closed the door. There was no doubt about her craving for solitude, and Mrs. Jobson with a heavy heart turned and went down again, resolved to return later. Her footsteps padded along the passage and died away on the lower staircase.

When all was silent once more, the linen-closet door opened again and Kate came out. Hurriedly and silently she crept downstairs, stole along the passage, and into her bedroom. There with feverish movements she put on her hat and coat. Footsteps crossed the cobblestones of the yard below. She glanced cautiously out of the window, and seeing Ben crossing from the house door to the gate, she heaved a sigh of relief. There would only be Mrs. Jobson to elude now. Carefully she opened the bedroom door and creeping down the passage she stood to listen at the stairhead. Everything was silent. Not a sound from the parlour or from the passage to the kitchen. Kate tiptoed downstairs. She dared not go out by the kitchen and yard, but turning to the right she stole to the front door, unlocked and unbolted it with tremulous care, and in another moment she had closed it behind her and was out in the little front garden.

Where was David now? she wondered. Was he saddling his horse in the shed, or had he already
started for Green Lane? With her life crumbling about her, her mind was fixed upon one thing — to know for certain why David went so often to Green Lane. When she had fled from the parlour her one impulse had been to escape from Ben, but having done so and having stood for a while in the quiet refuge of the linen-closet, her thoughts had fled back to David, and she remembered that he was going that afternoon to Green Lane. Instantly she resolved to go there, too. There was a short cut across the fields: if she took it she would be there in three-quarters of an hour, perhaps before David himself who, since he would ride, would have to go a longer way round.

She hurried now down the paved garden path to the gate. Dead and mouldering leaves covered the grass, but on one of the rose-trees a pink rose bloomed yet, despite the damps and chills of a stormy November. But roses meant nothing to Kate now, and she opened the gate and went out and, glancing anxiously behind her, made her way by a track which avoided the sheds and outhouses of the farm to where the field-path began. …

Half an hour later, old Mrs. Jobson, toiling upstairs again with a tray on which were a cup of tea and some bread and butter, found the linen-closet empty….

Kate hurried on over fields and stiles. She saw nothing but the path before her feet which was sufficiently stony and rough to require her attention.
The smoke-grey distance, the rain-sodden fields on each side of her, the trees and hedges hung only with a few withered leaves that flickered in the cold air, were things far beyond her narrowed field of consciousness. Her mind was empty of everything but the numbing pain which possessed it, and she had no thoughts. All her being, like the simple being of an animal, was concentrated on the one thing before her, and she held to it instinctively as to the one reason and motive force of her life.

In the spring and summer foot-passengers were to be met from time to time on this path, but at this late season it was deserted and all the fields that bordered it were empty. Nothing stirred but the rooks, whirled like black rags in the wind, and sometimes the sharp rustling of some small animal or bird in the leaf-drifts that filled the ditches and hedge-bottoms. She had become a body whose sole use in life was to be a receptacle for pain, and it was with no hope, but simply from a craving for certainty and rest, that she hurried, the only moving thing, across field after empty field till the red roofs of Green Lane Farm began to rise above the slow curve of the country ahead of her.

There the cart-road that approached the farm curled towards the field-path and Kate paused at a stile to scan the road. But no moving thing appeared above the hedges that bordered it. There was no sign of David. She quickened her pace and soon she
had reached the point where the path met the road, crossed over, and climbed the stile on the other side where the path recommenced. There she left the pathway and cutting quickly across the field took up a position near a gap in the thick hedge, from which she could see the door of the farm.

The door was open. Not a soul was in sight, but near the door, tied to a ring in the wall, stood a chestnut horse. David had arrived already.

From where she stood, Kate could hear the horse stamp his foot from time to time on the stony ground. She stood there, her breast heaving after her hurried walk, and it seemed that hours passed over her. In the field at the other side of the hedge, a cock and five or six hens picked about in the grass with quiet cluckings. Kate's neck grew stiff and her eyes tired from her intent watching and, to rest them, she turned her head and glanced away. But she dared not leave the doorway unwatched for more than a few seconds. Soon her eyes were fixed on it again, and now something moved in the dark opening, the horse pricked his ears and turned his head, and a girl came out. Immediately behind her came a man. Kate's heart fluttered tumultuously, for it was David. They paused for a minute to speak to the horse and then advanced together along a path worn in the grass towards the spot where Kate was hiding. She watched them with bated breath. They were talking eagerly as they advanced, pleased, it
seemed, to have escaped alone together from the house. On they came, and now they were hardly ten yards from where Kate was hidden. The girl was small, golden-haired and of a bright, flower-like beauty. A little younger, she seemed, than David himself; and now he bent forward and gazed smiling into her eyes, and a slow surge of agonized despair rose in Kate's heart as she saw the look of delighted absorption in his flushed face. How perfectly fitted for one another they were in their fresh young beauty. At that moment Kate knew, beyond all shadow of doubt, that David was gone from her for ever. How mad her dream had been that this boy might one day come to love a pale, faded creature like herself. To him she must seem already middle-aged. A few yards before it reached the hedge the path curved away to the left. They were moving away from her now, parallel with the hedge, and she leaned forward to watch their retreating figures. David glanced back at the house and then Kate saw his arms close about the girl's small body, those arms in which she had fondly dreamed she herself might one day be clasped. They stood still in the path and their heads, the red and the gold, were laid together. They moved on, one of his arms still about her, and next minute the hedge had hidden them, and Kate came back to herself.

Though she knew that all was over, and much more surely over than if David's love had been a
mere sensual appetite like his father's, neither soul nor body could yet understand the meaning of her disaster. She could not realize that all her treasure of love which it had become her one object in life to squander upon David was flung back upon her as a thing undesired and resented. Her need to give was so overwhelming that, if she ceased to give, the very abundance of her love would choke her. It had become her very nature to give, and if nature is thwarted there can remain nothing but death. But slowly the truth began to dawn upon her, spreading like a deathly chill along her veins and curling about her heart. For a while longer she stood in the hedge, a human shape turned to stone. Then, awakening once more to her surroundings, she found that a chilly breeze had sprung up and she was very cold. Suddenly she was overcome by a sick hatred of the place where she still lingered. Her one impulse now was to escape from that: scene in which she had experienced so overwhelming a fatality, and turning aside she began stiffly and gropingly to make her way across the field towards the path. She fled from the emptiness behind her to the emptiness that awaited her ahead, looking neither to the right nor left, careless now whether or not she would be seen by David and his girl. She made for The Grange instinctively and without premeditation: there was no other place for her to go to.

The afternoon was already closing down towards
evening. A lowering band of red hanging low in the west showed the only trace of the sun that had been visible throughout the day. She hurried on, a dark moving shape among the motionless shapes of stiles and trees. Then, finding herself breathless, she checked her speed, remembering once again that there was nothing for her to hurry to. But soon she had forgotten, and in her need for action to deaden her pain she was soon hurrying again. When at last she began to approach The Grange she became aware that she was wrapped in clouds of vapour. Above her and all round her it rolled along, sometimes hiding everything, even to the path beneath her feet. The air was full of the half-sweet, half-acrid scent of wood-smoke.

Kate pushed on with bowed head through the swirling smoke, her clothes and her hair saturated with the pungent smell. They must be making a bonfire, she thought. But soon she realized that it must be something more than a bonfire, for the smoke had shut out the sunset, it blinded the fields on either side of the path, and now ahead of her and high up she could see, dulled and darkened by the smoke, the flicker of long flames. She stood still in the drift of smoke, staring in terror at those flames that flapped like great red flags torn upwards by the breeze. There was a noise of cracking and breaking and then a heavy thud, and a great shower of sparks was sprayed up suddenly into the air like a swarm
of fiery bees. Then the wind veered, and all that volume of smoke in which she stood swayed and then swung heavily away to the right, and Kate saw the barn terribly illuminated before her like the flaming skeleton of a huge ship.

‘No wonder!' she said to herself. ‘No wonder!' For it seemed to her, as she stood staring with wild eyes and haggard face at that terrifying apparition, that it was the very proof and visible sign of the destruction of her peace. Why had she been hurrying back to The Grange? What was there to return to? With the loss of David she had lost everything. In the magnitude of that disaster the dear old place itself, the friendly folk and the busy life which she had loved so dearly were totally extinguished from her mind; and, seized by a sudden fear that she might meet Ben or Mrs. Jobson or one of the other folk, she turned off the path and vanished into the darkness in the direction of the steep slope on the edge of which the farm stood.

It was late that night when the fire had at last been reduced to smoking embers that filled the air both indoors and out with the bitter smell of wet charred wood. Ben and David, hot, tired, and begrimed, came into the house and having washed themselves entered the parlour. The table was already laid, and in a moment Mrs. Jobson followed them bringing in the supper on a tray.

David dropped into a chair. ‘Well,' he said with a sigh, ‘I don't know what you feel, Dad, but I could do with a bit of food.'

‘And still more, with a good drink!' added Ben; and the two men turned to the table and began to help themselves.

They sat in silence, busily eating and drinking till Mrs. Jobson came in again with another dish. She stopped, surprised, by the table. ‘Hasn't Mrs. Humphrey come in yet?' she asked.

‘Come in?' said Ben, raising his head sharply. ‘Why? Where has she been?'

‘I thought she must be out watching the fire,' said Mrs. Jobson, her face turning suddenly anxious. ‘I've not seen her since this afternoon just after dinner.'

‘Why,' said Ben, pushing out his chair, ‘I made sure she had had her supper already.' He turned to his son. ‘Did you see her outside, David?'

David shook his head. ‘I've not seen her since I got back,' he said; and then, seeing his father's eyes fixed searchingly upon him, his face flushed.

The old man glanced again at Mrs. Jobson. ‘She must have gone to bed,' he said. ‘Her head was bad at dinner-time.'

‘I'll go up and see,' said Mrs. Jobson.

The two men sat silent as the old woman's footsteps went shuffling down the passage. To cover the constraint of their silence they continued their eating and drinking, but each knew that the other was waiting in a fever of doubt for Mrs. Jobson's return.