“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 God, 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 compassionately, 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 shift 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.
“And have no more music? And—and—oh, it’s cruel. Why had you to find it out? It didn’t matter anyway when it was all done with. Why did you have to know? ... And you haven’t any money. You must let me help you. Let me do that—just that. Can’t you forget it all enough for that? Surely you’ve liked me—for what you’ve liked in me, let me help you. Great heavens, if I thought of you alone out there, without money—Must you go?”