Life at High Tide Part 19

"Barney?--Sally?--the kid?" the teamster demanded, raucously.

"Back--and goin' to live," said Moody. "The Injuns up to Red Shirt heard where the little feller was and was goin' on the war-trail, sudden, but the mother came down on the stage to-day,--and got her pretty little kid."

"Oh, G.o.d! I didn't deserve it!" said Slivers, and letting himself fall limply to the earth, he lay with his face in the curve of his arm and shook with emotion.

THE REPARATION

BY EMERY POTTLE

He looked up from the desk where he had been sitting for the last hour, his head down on his arms, trying to shut out the brave, old cry of life coming in through the open windows, pulling gently at his heart, cheeping through the darkened room as lightly and as blithely as the birds in the horse-chestnut tree just outside--the brave cry of life that, somehow, for all its clamorous traditions, seemed just then something peaceful, something that held release, freedom.

He stared about him, furtively, for an instant, as if instinctively on his guard against an unwelcome eye. Then, presently, he smiled, and going to a window, pushed open the blinds, leaning, with elbows on the sill, gratefully out into the rectangular enclosure, walled in high by houses, where the late afternoon sun glanced with uncertain warmth on the horse-chestnut.

There was now, he told himself, no use of evading or denying it longer; right or wrong, things had come to a point with him where anything but the truth was unbearable; it was there, like a live thing with him in the room, and out in the court, too,--almost as if he could put out his hand and draw it in close to him. Freedom, that was it. His lips made the word noiselessly, again and again, fascinated with the sensation. "Free, free," he kept whispering, stretching out his hands greedily, drawing in full breaths of the late September air.

"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 gla.s.ses; 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 G.o.d," 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 G.o.d!" 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.

It is scarcely probable that, in the beginning, any thought of ultimate marriage entered her head. Those who knew her invariably said, "Ida is a sensible girl." Rather, her "looking after" Haldane took itself out in the hearty channels of dry boots, overshoes, tea of late afternoons, candid suggestions as to proper winter underwear, remedies for his frequent colds. This solicitude--which was, in essence, quite maternal--made a bond between the two; this and the fact that they both were workers--for Ida taught English in a private school.

It is hardly necessary to elaborate their romance, if it was such, from this point. Gradually, hastened by the awful propinquity in a third-rate boarding-house, Haldane really came to believe--as along the line of least resistance--in his personal incapacity and his loneliness; gradually Ida Locke began to realize that, for the first time, this Love she had read of and dreamed of doubtfully had become a reality for her. She was not a little amazed and gratified at its plain practicability--its _sensibleness_, she put it.

That she so liked him--indeed, he liked _her_ enormously, he considered--a.s.sured Haldane in his moments of misgiving. The very largeness in her ample effect of good looks, her genius for managing his affairs and hers, her prim neatness of dress, her utter freedom from any sort of weak dependence on him, her uncompromising rigidity of moral att.i.tude, and, above all, her _goodness_ to him--this convinced him of her ultimate fitness to be a wife to him; and it must be said that he had never heretofore given anything but the scantest attention to the matter of sentimental attachments; it had not occurred to him, definitely, that he was even likely some day to fall splendidly in love.

So when he asked her, shyly, gently, to marry him she consented frankly--too frankly, Haldane almost admitted. And since, in the world as she knew it, men did not ask women to marry them unless they loved them really, she took much for granted, and began, at once, to look for a cheap flat.

Ida gave up her teaching when they married and went to their Harlem flat. Indeed, she considered this her domestic right; now, after almost a dozen years--she was older than Haldane--of instruction, she wanted "to rest, and keep house," she told her husband.

Then, suddenly, illogically perhaps, after not more than three months of it, Haldane knew it was all quite intolerable to him. Before the desk to-day, Ida's desk, he saw luminously just how intolerable it had been--these two years of marriage.

The more irritatingly unbearable, too, it was because of the excellence of Ida's qualities--qualities he had taken humorously before marriage, but which later he had to take seriously. He began to hate her constant and intimate possession of his motives and tastes, her inquiries as to what he ate for lunch, and whether he considered his flannels quite adequate. He childishly resented her little nagging economies--and especially because he knew they were generally necessary. He chafed at the practical, sensible view he was argued resolutely into on every matter. What made it hard was that Haldane could not decently account for his revulsion of feeling toward Ida, now she was his wife. Worse than all, he saw how lightly she held in esteem his music--his one real love. To her it was a graceful trade to earn a living by--nothing else. And when she finally made it out that in his position in the orchestra he was likely never to rise much higher, unconsciously the fiddling seemed to her rather more of a small business. She told him he ought to be more ambitious.

One night Haldane had played to Ida--he resented so her name Ida--parts of the score of a light opera he had been at work on for years;--he would never play it on the boarding-house piano.

The moment was as vivid for Haldane now as it was then. He could hear again her brisk cheerful voice when he had finished and was waiting--more hopeful than he had ever yet been with her: "That's _pretty_. It's funny--isn't it, dear?--to think you made it up out of your own head. I never _could_ understand--Leonard, have you got entirely rid of your sore throat?--Why don't you try to sell some of your little tunes?"

The disappointment of it all, for an instant, had brought angry tears to his eyes. He remembered now just the bitter hopelessness of feeling how she had failed him--and the remembrance hurt anew. That night he had seen almost clearly how it was to be with him and her in all the years to come.

There was, in Haldane's subsequent att.i.tude 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 G.o.d 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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.sured 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 G.o.d, '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.

"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 G.o.d!" 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.