The Stepson Read Free

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.
    â€˜Take those bottles away and get what I ordered.’
    George stared helplessly.
    â€˜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.

II
    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 himthree 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 experienceswas another man: the old Ben Humphrey, sitting now in his chair over the fire, watched him with an almost dispassionate curiosity. And the children: