The Stepson (3 page)

Having addressed the envelope and put the letter inside it, Humphrey, his red hands extended on the table before him, fell into a dream. He felt old, melancholy, and soft-hearted. He loved his boy with a curious tenderness, a sense apart from, and, as
it seemed to those who knew only the outward man, at variance with the rest of his nature — sharp, bright, and hard-bitten like a flake of polished flint. He loved David for himself, for he and the boy, so different in temperament, were excellent friends. But he loved him too because in him survived something of the colour, the beauty, and the still inscrutable mystery of his dead wife. Then, thinking of Rachel, his thoughts turned again to Kate and his eyes shone. Dark, heavy-browed creature, so unresponsive and so desirable! How little he knew of her yet: of her body, nothing; of her mind, next to nothing. What thrilling discoveries lay before him once again. A subdued, tingling excitement crept through his body and along his limbs. He could feel the quickened pulse of the heart in his breast. Like an epicure surveying the feast he is about to begin, he heaved a sigh of happy anticipation: once more he felt alert, vigorous, and young.

Kate patten had cleared the table after the midday dinner in the room which served as kitchen and living-room to the little house attached to the school, where she had lived since her father became schoolmaster at Penridge ten years before.

Her father had gone to the schoolroom to take afternoon school. From the little scullery where she was washing up, Kate could hear from time to time the monotonous sing-song of the children repeating their lessons. The building which included the village school and the schoolmaster's cottage was a meagre-looking stone structure with a slate roof. The gable, which was its only noticeable feature, resembled a long stupid face which wore an unchanging expression of melancholy surprise. The place looked derelict by the roadside. Unlike most buildings, it had never become a part of its surroundings. It was as if a single empty truck had been abandoned in the remote country; the railway-lines, the engine that drew it, and the train of which it had been a part having vanished. Opposite to it, a small modern church, built through the whim of some wealthy Victorian donor in a cumbrous and bastard attempt at the Byzantine style, mouldered among yews and black evergreen oaks. To the right of the school a row of cottages, each with its little garden in front of it, looked on to the village green which was also the
school playground. At right-angles to the cottages, the inn, the post office, and the one village shop bounded its western edge and were separated from it by the road leading to Elchester. On all sides the country was undulating and well-wooded and the road, dropping down from the village into a narrow valley, crossed an old stone bridge over a brown, trout-haunted stream. It was, in fact, a beautiful countryside and even Penridge itself had a certain curious beauty of its own. But Kate hated it, and especially she hated the little school-house in which she had spent the unjoyful years of her youth.

As she stood washing the dishes and cutlery she thought with aversion of her dry, colourless, unlovable father with his white turn-down collar, his narrow black bow tie, and the black boots which he always polished so carefully. ‘The Schoolmaster must always set a good example,' was one of his favourite phrases and, when he said it, two vertical straight lines, which his daughter had come to hate, appeared as though carved with a gouge from the corners of his mouth to the sides of his weak, unstable chin. At such times his chin looked like the movable chin of a ventriloquist's doll. ‘What could have made Mother marry him?' she thought to herself, recalling the lively, passionate woman who had died when Kate herself was only fifteen; and it seemed to her that, having married him, the only thing for her
mother to do was to die — to die or to break away and leave him.

Having put the plates in the rack, she went to the coal-house and then reappeared in the kitchen with a pail full of coal. She was a handsome, strong woman, largely but not clumsily built. Her heavy black brows met over a well-shaped nose. Her heavy hair was black and abundant: it made the pale duskiness of her face look paler still. Her eyes were especially striking, a greenish grey. In one of them, when she was angry or excited a slight cast appeared which produced a startling hint of a something wild and sinister beneath her habitual quietness, as though some lurking ghost had shown itself for a grim and sudden moment at the window of a beautiful and serene old house. But in her normal moods her eyes were calm, deep, and cold, as now when she entered the kitchen carrying the heavy pail with the ease and thoughtless grace of a beautiful strong animal. As she set the pail down and stooped over it to put coal on the kitchen fire, lifting each piece in her hand and setting it firmly in its appointed place, her bosom showed round and full under her lifted arm. All her movements were slow but assured. There was nothing slack or torpid about them: rather they suggested a potential vehemence. What will happen to her? was the question which she provoked; for something, it seemed, must happen to her. She was a baffling, disturbing creature: her quietude was the
quietude not of earth or a stone, but of gunpowder.

When she had finished making up the fire, she dusted her hands on her apron and, having for the moment nothing to do, sat down sideways on a wooden upright chair and let her eyes move slowly about the room. She was examining the familiar objects which had surrounded her for so long, with a detached curiosity. Knowing that in a few days she would leave them all for ever she could now contemplate undismayed all these unlovely, common things which had surrounded and tortured her for ten years and which now had lost their power over her. She stared at the ugly faded wallpaper whose pattern and drab colours had burned themselves into her mind, and as she stared she sighed and her lips curled into a scornful smile. Then her eyes moved to a print from some old Christmas Number of the eighties, framed in a cork frame, representing a lady in a little bonnet with the strings tied in a bow under her chin, a tight-fitting bodice, and a voluminous skirt with a bustle, stepping out of a carriage and glancing sideways at a little ragged girl who offered her a bunch of flowers. How Kate hated that picture! For years, in her hours of weariness and despair, she had envisaged it hanging there in front of her, a silent, stubborn symbol of the relentless reality of material things. ‘Time goes by,' it had said to her, ‘and you can alter nothing. Things fade and grow fly-blown, but nothing moves. You
can never break through the wall of immovable destiny which encloses you.' And thinking suddenly that, even when she had escaped from it, the picture would still hang there, preserving like a powerful charm the everlasting staleness of things, she rose from her chair, took it from its nail, and slowly and calmly twisted the old frame to pieces and, taking the fly-specked cardboard picture, snapped it across and then across again and heaped the fragments of cardboard and cork on to the fire. On the wall a square of unfaded wallpaper showed where the picture had hung.

Kate smiled to herself as she sat down again. That simple, foolish act had strengthened her, helped her to realize that brute circumstance cannot for ever prevail against human desire. ‘In ten days,' she told herself with a feeling of triumph, ‘I shall be gone. These walls, the school, the church, the village, will never perhaps see me again,' and she thought that she would be glad never again to speak to her father. She hated him; she admitted it to herself now. It had been nothing but habit and the impossibility of escape which had bound her to him; and she wondered now if after a year or two she would feel again a little tenderness for him, a pity for his loneliness, and drive over perhaps to see him. Then his insufferably precise way of talking came into her mind again, and the exasperating movement of his chin when he pronounced one of his parrot-sayings - ‘A
Schoolmaster must always set a good example!' ‘Work before pleasure, Kate!' — and her black brows drew together at the thought and the sinister ghost flickered in the grey-green eye; for the old hatred boiled up again, and she told herself that, once away, she would never return.

Then her thoughts reached back to her one previous glimpse of freedom. That was six years ago. One of the cottages in the row near the school had been empty for some months when, one day as she was returning home, she saw a middle-aged woman come out of the gate, and next day she heard that the cottage had been taken by a young man and his mother. The news meant little to her, for Kate did not concern herself with the villagers, her father considering that as a schoolmaster he belonged to a class superior to that of the village-folk. Kate was at that time twenty-three, and her life had already settled into the uneventful rut in which it still moved. In those days, although she was not happy, she was resigned. It did not then occur to her to question her lot or to dream of revolting against it. It was ordained by Fate that she was to look after her father and she never thought of considering whether she loved him or hated him. Nor, when she began to notice the strong, good-looking young man going in and out of his cottage or striding down the Elchester road with a supple, powerful swing of his shoulders, did it seem to her possible that she would ever so
much as speak to him. They moved in different worlds and the fact that they were both strong and healthy and beautiful did not suggest to her conscious mind that they were therefore well fitted for one another.

But one day her father came in to dinner saying that the boy of the head-gardener at Penridge Hall was absent from school, and next day too the boy was absent.

‘I should like you to walk along to the Hall this afternoon, Kate,' he said, ‘and find out what is keeping the boy away. I am surprised that his parents have not sent word to me. Mr. Markham lives in the lodge at the Windham road entrance. Your quickest way is to go in at the entrance on the Elchester road, and follow the drive right past the front of the Hall to the entrance gates on the Windham side. In that way you will cut off more than a mile. You need not be afraid of passing the Hall as the family is in London.'

Kate had set out with a sense of adventure. It would be strange and exciting to penetrate into that private place which she had never once entered throughout the ten years of her life in Penridge.

It was the middle of March and the afternoon was sunny: pleasant scents of new greenery and wet turf hung in the tepid air: everywhere there was a sense of spring. Kate felt cheered and invigorated. She covered the two miles to the Hall gates on the Elchester
road at a good swinging speed. In just over half an hour she had reached the entrance. Except for the pure, rich voice of a thrush high up in a bare beech-tree, there was not a sound to break the listening stillness; and when Kate unlatched and latched again behind her the heavy gate, she felt a delicious alarm as the sharp snap of the latch broke the silence. For some way the gravelled drive ran between broad grass edges closed in by mounded shrubs. Jonquils sprang here and there out of the green grass and here and there a bright blue squill. Then the drive took a great sweep to the left, and in front of her, among tall trees, Kate saw the east end of the Hall with a glittering conservatory attached to it. When she had rounded the conservatory and the long front of the Hall opened before her, she stopped suddenly and caught her breath, for in the wide green lawn that extended the full length of the house she saw flowerbed upon flower-bed of bright flowers — daffodils, hyacinths and tulips. The tulips were of all colours; some sulphur yellow, some rose-coloured, and some streaked and slashed with scarlet, yellow, and slate-blue, their petals ragged-edged like feathers. It was as if each bunch of chalky green leaves reaching up out of its bulb had broken out into leaping smoky flames. She stood in front of the drawing-room windows, gazing entranced at the flaring tulips.

She had not noticed the figure of a man bending over one of the neighbouring beds, and she started
when she caught sight of him so unexpectedly near to her. He was coatless and wore a flannel shirt and brown corduroy breeches. On his head was an old brown felt hat. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up to the elbows. He was thrusting short sticks among the thick heads of blue hyacinth and tying to them some of the heads which had fallen sideways under their own weight. As she stood looking at him he raised his body. Then he put his hands on his hips and stretched his chest and shoulders to ease his back. His face was red with stooping. Kate noticed his strong, well-shaped arms. Then her eyes sought his face again and she saw that it was the handsome young man who lived in the cottage near the school. His eyes met hers, smiling.

‘I was going to Mr. Markham's cottage,' said Kate, blushing, ‘to ask about his boy.'

‘Mr. Markham's gone for the doctor,' said the young man. ‘Seemingly the boy's got the measles. You're the Schoolmaster's daughter, aren't you? I know you well by sight.' His eyes were fixed on her approvingly. ‘I have a message for your father,' he went on. ‘Mr. Markham asked me to take it when I went home. About the boy having the measles, that is.'

‘O, then I needn't go to the lodge,' Kate said. ‘Thank you,' and she turned to go. Then she paused. ‘What lovely flowers,' she said.

‘Yes,' said young Graham, looking down at the
hyacinths patronizingly. ‘Yes, they're not a bad show, are they?' and he invited Kate to walk round and inspect the other beds. He walked beside her, bending towards her when he spoke to her. She could feel the glow of his body beside her.

Then they stopped near the conservatory. ‘If you'll wait here a minute,' he said, ‘I'll get my coat. You're going back to the village, I suppose?'

Kate said that she was.

‘So am I,' he answered. ‘I won't be a minute'; and he went off at a run, turning down his shirt-sleeves as he ran. Soon he reappeared. With his coat on he seemed to Kate different: he was, somehow, less striking now. Just as they were about to set off he paused.