The Stepson (26 page)

At the same moment a body sagged heavily against her and collapsed to the ground. ‘All right! All right!' said David's voice again, and she stood still, her great body heaving breathlessly, while David bent over the old man. He was struggling feebly and gropingly where he lay. In the silence his sharp, rattling gasps grew gradually fainter as David knelt beside him, holding him still. Soon he
had sunk into a kind of stupor and David and Mrs. Jobson carried him into the house….

It was many weeks before Ben Humphrey was up and about again. By degrees strength returned to him, and with the help of a stick he was able to hobble about the farm. But his old alertness and vigour did not return. He had become a little old man, sometimes fretful and irritable, but generally contented and easily pleased. As his mind cleared he began to remember things which had happened before his illness, and he would talk of them to Mrs. Jobson and ask her questions. But when she tried to convince him of David's innocence it seemed that the question no longer interested him. He was devoted to David: he trusted to him completely in all matters relating to the farm and relied on him in the pathetic way in which a child relies on its father, and he had forgotten, it seemed, or at least ceased to feel that he had ever suspected him.

And so time moved on. The fields were ploughed and sown and the harvests gathered; beasts were bought and sold, born and mated; winters and springs, summers and autumns succeeded one another, and under them the old unalterable life of the farm continued, calm and unhurrying, as it had continued for the last four centuries. The small rippling of its surface made by Kate's brief sojourn had spent itself and became as if it had never been.

The End

This electronic edition published in July 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

Copyright © Martin Armstrong

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ISBN: 9781448205943
eISBN: 9781448205639

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