The Stepson Read Free Page A

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 thewaxy 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 facestaring at her, she had laughed that lovely reassuring laugh of hers.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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