“It must have come very hard to her; Ida was all she had,” he considered. “It must have been very hard.” He thought of the tear-stained, illegible letter Ida’s mother had sent him after she had had his telegram. An illness had prevented her from coming to the funeral; and she lived so far away, somewhere in Iowa. Her heart was bleeding for him, she wrote. Her own loss was almost blotted out in the thought of his terrible grief. He had never finished it—that letter; he could not. Such words had seemed too sacred for him to read, feeling as he did. So he had torn it up.
“Ida was very good to her mother,” he reflected; “at least she was conscientiously always trying to do her best by her, support her and all that. She took it awfully as a duty—but she did it.”
Once, after they were married, Ida had gone back, for six months, to the private school that she might have money to send her mother in a sudden financial stress. Haldane thought of that, too, with keen regret that he had not been able to earn the necessary money himself—he was ill that winter. Yes, surely, Ida had been splendid in the matter of her mother. “It’s a pity that things weren’t so that Ida’s mother could have come to see us here in New York,” Haldane said, as he opened the envelope—“come before Ida died.” The letter itself was not long. When he had finished with it—and this only after a third reading—he laid it down slowly and stared silently at the fine old-fashioned characters.
“Great God!” he said at last, gently, “the poor old lady!”
“My dear daughter,” ran the letter, “mother is so sorry to have to tell you this now when all your thoughts and energies must be centred on the wonderful event so soon to happen. It seems to me I’ve always been calling on you for help and you have done so much. Oh, it hurts me to have to worry and distress you now, dear.
“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 attitude he was to assume. 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 God! 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?”