There was, in Haldane’s subsequent attitude toward the question of his marriage to Ida Locke, nothing worth the name of heroic. Indeed, looked at from the commonplace, critical standpoint, the situation was not so bad. It was Haldane’s personal conception of it which caused the difficulty. Probably it was his sense of fairness to her which made him accept matters quietly—as he did accept them. It was his comfort to-day, out of all the ruck of his artificial self-reproach, that Ida had never known—as he said—how he felt toward her.
“She never knew,” he repeated often, “she never knew. She couldn’t, I’m sure. Thank God for that!”
What she had never known was, in Haldane’s mind, his real idea of her as his wife. For he had been very kind; he had patiently let her look out for him; he had kept the fret of his heart off his tongue, and the sulkiness of his temper off his face. What he had not succeeded in doing, however, was to keep the hurt of his soul out of his eyes. So they had gone on with it for the two years, with a prospect of going on with it forever, Haldane growing daily quieter, more reserved, if anything more gently kind, and more pathetically hopeless. With Ida it was, rather, a large, legitimate outlet for all the sensibleness, practicality, capable qualities, she so generously possessed. It seemed to her, when she knew her child was coming, that she was wonderfully reaching the culmination of womanhood and wifehood. Yet, after all, it had been but just death for Ida.
All this was running through Haldane’s brain as he sat, on the day after his wife’s burial, before her little oak desk. And the result he had to make out of it was always the same:
“I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad.”
The room seemed less burdensome when he came back to it late that night. Oppressed with the hatefulness of his attitude of the afternoon, Haldane had seized his hat and had fled out into the streets. He had dined at a restaurant, a thing he had not done in years, and had listened to a bad orchestra play cheerful tunes—tunes that somehow livened him up, stayed comfortably in his mind afterwards. Every one he saw seemed so happy. He assured himself that happiness—a quiet content, at least—was to be his now. Why not? Why disguise the fact that he was really, underneath, glad? So he smiled and lingered and sipped his coffee, feeling suddenly the beautiful realization that he was again of the world—irresponsible, careless. Coming back into the dull flat was not half the gloomy effort he had fancied it was going to be. For one blessed thing, he came when he chose. Besides, something had given him a sense of his right, his cheerful right, to be as he liked, what he liked. Haldane went about the tiny rooms humming gently; he played softly on the piano some old love-songs he had composed when he was twenty—things she had never heard.
Presently he sat down, lighted a fresh cigarette, and set himself to thinking out matters anew.
“It was a mistake, that’s all,” he said, at last. “And that’s plain. A mistake for me. But now it’s all over and done with. There’s nothing to be got out of this endless accusing and regret over something that couldn’t be helped—helped, at least, after it was once started.... I’ll always wear my hurt of it; that I know. It hurts like the devil to think I didn’t—couldn’t—give her the love she ought to have had. If there were any way—any possible way of reparation, ... but I suppose there isn’t. Nothing except to live decently and honorably—if that’s reparation. Thank God, ’tisn’t as if there were any other woman mixed up in it—I haven’t got that to worry me at any rate. I wonder whether a man gets his punishment for—but no, you can’t help feeling, and being, and loving, just as it comes. It’s this dreadful unconventionality of—not really liking—loving a person you are supposed to love that warps your judgment. And we lie about it to ourselves and to others till when we have to face the real truth we go all to pieces.... But, just the same, I’d feel so much easier if there were only some way I could make it up to Ida now that she’s gone. Poor Ida, poor Ida.”
Haldane’s eyes strayed to the little, cheap desk again, and for a moment the distress of the afternoon was renewed. But he resolutely threw off the accusing mood he so feared. There was a pile of letters lying there—letters that he had had neither the time nor the heart to look into for the past week. He picked them up now with relief at finding something tangible to be done. Most of them were letters of consolation and sympathy for him from his friends and hers; the worn phrases one can so little avoid in such missives touched him with a sense of their dual ineffectuality. Other letters were addressed to Ida—commonplace messages and bills which she had not been able to open. And there was one from her mother—written evidently before she had heard of her daughter’s imminent illness and death. This last Haldane laid aside until he had finished the others; and even then he looked at it long and somewhat tenderly before he opened it.