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 gratitude, 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 quantity 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.