“I’m glad, that’s all there is to it—glad. I can’t help being glad—I’ve tried, too, but now, to-day, it’s bound to come out. Glad! It’s like being let out of school.”
That word—school—brought him back sharply. It seemed to precipitate all the old worry in the solution that but a moment ago was so clear. He came back hesitatingly from the window and threw himself down before the desk again, unable to restrain something he vaguely named his conscience from its weary accusations.
“It’s an awful thing. It’s true, it is. I’m a beast. I’m all wrong to be like this. It’s a terrible thing to be glad a person is—” He shivered as he withheld the end of the sentence, though he realized his cowardice in so withholding. “And that person your—” Again he hesitated.
Haldane, by the desk, was a figure to make, involuntarily, demands on one’s sympathy. It seemed all his life—perhaps thirty years long—he had been doing this in one way or another, and by no effort of his. People had a fashion of “looking out for him.” Not that he had grown up particularly incapable or helpless; it might rather have been due to a certain appealing gentleness of bearing, something that was the resultant of a half-shy manner, expanding into boyish confidence winningly; a shortish, slender figure, scarcely robust; eager, friendly brown eyes behind his glasses; and a keen desire to be liked. It might be seen, in the present sharp nervous play of emotion over his face, how utterly he was unsuited to the weight of mental discomfort,—how it fretted and galled him. That he was a gentleman, and by nature of a morbidly just and fair disposition, only made his present distress the more intolerable to him.
“Lord God,” he muttered, hopelessly, “why, why had it all to be?” And this question might, in the end, be taken as an aimless appeal to the Almighty to know why He had deliberately led him into a wretchedly miserable condition of mind and left him there.
It was the day after Ida’s burial—Haldane’s wife’s burial. A week ago he had taken her to a city hospital, and she had died there—she and her baby—in the night, away from Haldane. He had gone dazedly, very conscientiously, through the dreadful, relentless activity that follows immediately on the heels of death; there was some alleviation in the thought that everything had been done just as she would have liked to have it. To-day the house was free of the grieving, sickening smell of flowers; the last of the people had mercifully fulfilled their duty to Ida and him and had gone, leaving him the humiliation of their honest, warm-hearted words and halting phrases of sympathy.
“Great God!” he had kept saying to himself as he listened to them, “if you knew,—if you knew!”
At times he felt, as he thought of those friends, secretly resentful. “If it hadn’t been for them, I don’t believe I,” he caught himself saying—“I’d ever have married.” But again he stopped his mental train abruptly. It was such a wearisome business, this “being fair”—he put it so—to her; this conscientious erasing of self-justification which he felt to be so unworthy. It would have been such a relief to Haldane to be, for an hour, obliviously selfish in his estimate of his two years of marriage with Ida.
There had been nothing, after all, remarkable in Haldane’s experience—save for him; nothing very far removed from the commonplace. His father—a simple-hearted musician—had trained his son in music since the days when the lad could first hold a violin under his little chin. He had died when the boy was twenty, and Haldane had gone on, contentedly enough and absorbed, to take his father’s place among the violins of an orchestra, and to teach music. As he grew older his father’s friends told him he was leading a wretchedly lonely life; that he ought to marry. And at this Haldane smiled his deprecating, affectionate smile—a smile that, somehow, convinced his advisers in their own wisdom.
When Ida Locke came to live in a hall bedroom of the untidy boarding-house Haldane for years had called home, it was not long before she, too, quite unaffectedly, took to the idea that the good-natured musician needed “looking after.” And since, all her life, she had tremendously given herself to the care of people around her, it was no unusual experience—she sought it frankly, importantly.