Life at High Tide Part 20

"The truth is that Mr. Liddell is going to foreclose the mortgage on the house. He says he cannot wait longer than a week or two. I've tried every way to get the interest, but I can't do it. The little I had left, your cousin George invested for me, and now he tells me--I don't understand it at all--that it's quite lost. I know you'll say I was foolish to let George have it, but he promised so much--and George has been so good to me. I won't ask you and Leonard to give me a home; that would be unfair to you both. I'm so distressed and upset. Write me, if you can, and tell me what you think is best." And there was more in the same distressed key.

Haldane was as near his decision, perhaps, when he laid down the letter as hours afterward when he stumbled to bed. It was strangely clear to him--the att.i.tude he was to a.s.sume. Not that he did not make a fight of it, and a sharp fight. But, after all, he knew from the first how it was destined to end.

"I asked for my chance to make it up to her," he muttered. "Well, I've got it, haven't I? Isn't this it? If where _she_ is she knows to-night that I never loved her--sometimes even hated her--then she knows that I'll try to pay it back to her in the only way I can. I'll bring her mother here to live with me.... My G.o.d! and I wanted so the _freedom_ of it all again, just to feel _free_.... No, this is it--my way--I'll take it. It's what I owe Ida. I can't reason it out logically and I dare say the world would put it straight that I didn't have to do this--take her mother--but I will. I wouldn't feel right about it in this life or in any next if I didn't. Yes, that's the reparation."

Haldane's last thought before he slept that night, as it was in the fortnight before she came, was, "What is Ida's mother like? I wonder if--she is like--like Ida?"

It had been six months--a whole winter and more--since Ida's mother had come to live with Leonard Haldane. And altogether unexpectedly it had been, for Haldane, quite the most beautiful winter he had ever spent. As for Ida's mother--well, when she was alone her eyes were constantly filling with tears--tears of thankfulness that the Lord had sent her, in the language of her frequent prayers of grat.i.tude, a son to stay the declining years of her life--a son to her who had so wanted a son all these years.

Haldane could never forget that night he had gone, with sharp misgivings, to the station to meet Mrs. Locke. "I suppose I'm a fool,"

he had muttered, as he paced miserably up and down the draughty, smoky enclosure where her train, already very late, was to come in. "But it's my debt to the dead I'm going to pay." He added a moment later: "What I shall hate most of all, what will be hardest to bear, will be her endless sympathy. For she won't know--she'll never know--just how it was between Ida and me."

He was to look for a "little dried-up, frightened woman in a black bonnet, with a handkerchief in her left hand"--so Mrs. Locke had written him. Haldane had smiled at the frank characterization--that, somehow, didn't sound like Ida's spirit in her mother.

She was the last to come out through the iron gate. Almost he had given her up, she had delayed so long. A little, dried-up, frightened woman in a black bonnet--that was she. Like a tiny, stray cloud, very nervous and out of place. Her face was white with fatigue, the excitement of the journey, and the thought of how she should meet--ought she to call him Leonard? And when Haldane saw her he suddenly smiled boyishly--as if there could be such a thing as a problem over this scared, half-tearful, ridiculously pathetic, white-haired old woman with a black-bordered handkerchief in her shaking left hand.

Before he considered it he had said gently, "Well, mother--"

The tears in her eyes welled over as she gasped in a whisper, "My boy!"

So, after all, there was no awkward, conscious period of adjustment for the two. They took up their life simply and quite as if it were no new thing to them both--as if they had come together again after a long separation. And it was, perhaps, in a way, just that--a coming together of elements that had long been kept apart. "She's not like Ida," Haldane kept saying to himself.

"You're just like a mother in a storybook; the kind you always want when you read about them," Haldane often told her. "You know, I never had one--one that I remember; mine died so long ago."

"And you--you're--quite my son," she would answer shyly, her voice trembling with the joy of it. It was such a regret to her that she hadn't Leonard's readiness of speech and the courage to break down her reserve--for she wanted to tell him, as she said to herself, just how she felt, just how good he was to her.

So it was a beautiful winter for them both. Naturally there was the fact of Ida that had to be faced. That was tremendously hard at first.

He constantly felt her grieving for him, for the failure of all his hopes, the wreck of all a man holds so precious. And there were all the details of Ida's sickness and death to be gone over with her mother--the things she had done just before. How she looked; the quant.i.ty of flowers; even what she wore for her burial. Instinctively Haldane knew how dear these matters were to her, and he went over them faithfully, effacing his own bitterness of memory as best he might.

When Mrs. Locke hesitatingly asked him one evening if--if Ida had--had _said_ anything--left any message for _her_, Haldane's heart ached for her; Ida had left no message. He softened it as best he might.

"You see, she didn't know, couldn't know, that--that she was going to die. It was all so sudden, you know, so awfully sudden."

Mrs. Locke nodded. "Yes--I see. Poor Ida! She did so much for me always."

After a month or so, quite unconsciously, they ceased to mention Ida.

Haldane, when he thought of it at all--and that with relief--wondered vaguely why Ida's mother did not talk more about her. "Perhaps it's because she doesn't want to keep hurting me," he thought it out, "bless her!"

Gradually the intimacy between Haldane and his mother--for she was quite that to him--grew into a relation that was as rare as it was tender. They both felt it keenly. Their talk was all of him, his affairs, his music. He played to her for hours in the evenings he was not at the orchestra; when he was teaching in the mornings she would steal into the room, and sit, sewing, in a corner, listening gratefully to the dreary routine of his pupils' exercises. She seemed never to tire of "being near Leonard." And always she was asking, "Won't you play a little from _the opera_, Leonard?"

Once she said to him, with her timid smile: "It's like heaven, having so much music all the time. Seems as if all my life I've been just starved to death for tunes."

Haldane bent and kissed her white hair. "Well, mother," he laughed, "it's quite a real piece of heaven to have you around the place."

"You're spoiling me," she cried; "how can I ever go back to Iowa?"

"Who said Iowa in this house?" he demanded of her. "You're to stay always--as long as you can stand me--_always_."

"My son!" she kept murmuring after he had gone, as if she loved the words on her lips. "He's just the kind of son I used to hope I might have," she sighed. "I don't see--it's so strange why he's so good to me. I'm not at all like _her_. Ida was so sensible always, and I'm not at all--Ida always told me I couldn't take care of myself, that I was very foolish. I don't see why Leonard is so kind to me. It must he just because I'm her mother. Leonard must have loved her so much, and understood her. Poor Ida!"

The spring had broken through its first slender greenish film into the freshness of its young beauty. The sense of faint, far voices endlessly calling was in the air. Again the windows of the little flat were opened and again the afternoon sun warmed to golden green the new growth of leaves on the horse-chestnut in the rectangular enclosure outside.

Haldane had never felt so splendidly the birth of new things--in himself and in the world. All the morning he had been constantly picking up his violin, playing what he called his "Spring-feelings"-- unrhythmic wild s.n.a.t.c.hes of melody.

"G.o.d! it's good, good, _good_," he cried, throwing back his head.

"Good to have lived out of it all into this."

"Mother," he called presently, "what on earth are you doing there all alone? Come out and play with me. You've looked over those old books and papers, spring-cleaned your old closets, too long. If you don't come out at once, I'll come and drag you out bodily--I will indeed."

He ran to her door in another moment, and flinging it open wide, he called: "If you will insist on being led forth--Why, mother, what is it? what's the matter? _What is it?_ Are you _ill_? Why--"

She sat on a low stool drawn up close to her bed. Her hands were clasped straight out before her over a little book bound in faded imitation red leather--a little book Haldane, on the instant, with curious alertness, knew as one of Ida's old school note-books. On her face was a look so bewildered, so grieved, so terror-stricken almost, that Haldane suddenly ceased to speak. She raised her eyes to him with the pleading of a hurt animal. For a time neither uttered a word. And then, all at once, it seemed to Haldane as if he _knew_. His gaze fell hesitatingly. When, at last, he spoke, it was in a very gentle voice.

"Mother--is it anything we can talk out together--now?"

She shook her head dumbly, the tears gathering in her eyes. "Oh, Lennie!" she whispered, finally, as if he were a little boy. "It isn't true, is it?"

Haldane did not reply. She reached out the little red book to him slowly. "You'd--you'd better read it. I--found it--this afternoon."

He took the book, without wonder, and went back, softly closing the door on her. Unconsciously he sat down before the little, cheap, oak desk--Ida's desk--and began to read. It was, perhaps, two hours afterward when he had finished. The room was dark and very still.

"So she knew," he said, slowly. "After all, she knew. And I never guessed." His head sank down on his arms.

It was a curious inconsistency in the mind of Ida Locke which had prompted her to write in that red-covered note-book just what she had written. No one would have guessed the secret strain of introspection in her, nor guessed the impulse which led her to put into writing her hidden life. Unless, indeed, that introspection and that impulse are always part of the intuitions of love--yielded to or not, as may be.

The entries were scattered--as if put down when the stress of feeling had overcome her. They ranged over the two years of their married life. In each one she had seemed, with a startling lucidity, to have apprehended exactly her husband's state of mind toward her. She had written freely, baldly, without excess of sentimentality. "I know he hates me sometimes; I see it in his eyes." Again: "He is hideously kind." "He lives in a mental room that I can't break into." In another place it ran: "Why is it? I am his mental equal; his superior in education. I'm his wife and he asked me to marry him. And yet he can't bear to have me near him. He hates me to-day." "I'm afraid," she wrote again, "how Leonard will regard our child. If he should hate it, too.

Perhaps we shall both not live through it." And so it ran on, with awful candor.

"I'm so sorry she had to know," Haldane sighed again and again. "And, now, what's to be the end of it? What will Ida's mother do? Lord G.o.d, she'll never forgive me--never."

Late that night Mrs. Locke came in. Haldane had scarcely stirred from his chair. The note-book lay open before him on the desk. He looked at her compa.s.sionately, for now his thoughts were all for the shrinking, hurt woman beside him. She had never before seemed so fragile, so dependent, and yet he could not but mark in her hearing a new resolution of forces, a dignity as of a stern decision. Haldane did not wait for her to question.

"You will want to know," he began, wearily, "if all this written here is true. All this Ida wrote down. You want to ask me that? It's--it's all true, quite true." He waited, but she gave no sign. "Quite true; I--I suppose it wouldn't be worth while for me to explain things now.

You will think I've lied to you all along. In a way, I have. No, I suppose you don't want to hear me make futile explanations, excuses."

"If there--there is anything to be said, Leonard, you had better say it--now," she answered, nervously, twisting her handkerchief in her fingers.

He hesitated painfully. "Everything I might say seems to be trying to s.h.i.+ft the load from my shoulders on to--another's," he said, at last.

"It was a mistake--that's all. A mistake for us. Before it began--our marriage--it was different, but afterward--She was very good to me; looked after me and all that, but--Oh, I'm afraid I'm only hurting you the worse by saying all this. You won't, you can't understand. Let it be that it was all my fault. It was, it was. Believe that, please....

And I know you won't want to stay here with me any longer--after this.

I quite understand that. A man who--who felt as she wrote it all down here--such a man you wouldn't, you couldn't--" He stopped hopelessly.

"I can't bear to have you go," he burst out, impulsively. "Where will you go? Back there to Iowa?"

She nodded sorrowfully.