before. Not another sound would the desert render up--only the strange
dry swishing by of the particles of stuff rasping the desert's surface
as they passed and rose.
"Barney!" she called, by a mighty effort. There was no response.
Crying now, in her anguish and plight, she led the pony this way and
that, up and down, listening, trying to force a shout through her
swollen lips. At length, in despair, she knew she could search no
more. A lifelessness of feeling was creeping upon her. Mechanically
she walked beside her pony, and it was the animal that was leading.
It seemed as if she had plodded onward thus for hours, when at length
she stumbled upon a gray little mound in the drifting alkali.
"Barney!" she said, in a voice scarcely more than a whisper. Crooning
and sobbing, she lifted him up--unconscious, but clinging to the
still, little form that was hugged to the shelter of his breast.
"Hang on--oh, hang on to the horse, dear, please," she coaxed, in all
the tender strength of a new-born love. "Barney--try--try, dear,
please. I'll be your wife--I'll do anything--if only you'll try."
She had raised him bodily to the pony's back. Stiffly as a man that
freezes he straddled the animal. He made no answer, no movement.
She feared he must be dead. She dared not look at the little papoose.
Barney's weight rested partially upon her shoulder. She tossed away
the reins.
"Go on, Sancho--go on home," she croaked to the horse, passionately.
The pony seemed to comprehend. With some faint fragrance of the waters
of Bitter Hole in his nostrils, the willing creature fought slowly,
steadily forward, against the terrible drift.
* * * * *
John Tuttle and Henry Wooster descried a group, like a sculpture in
whitened stone endowed with life, creep strangely out from the
blizzard of alkali. A blinded horse, with head bent low, bearing on
its back a motionless man, and led by a stumbling, blinded girl,
against whose shoulder the helpless rider leaned, came with ghostlike
slowness and silence toward them.
And all day long, one by one, more men came forth, like ghosts, from
the dead-land. But the twilight had come and the wind had died away
before teamster Slivers limped from the desert. He came afoot. He had
ridden his horse to death, in his desperate quest. He could barely
see--and his hair was white, even below the coating of the dust.
Moody ran to meet him.
"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, God! 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 glasses; 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 God," 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 God!" 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--assured 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 attitude, 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 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.
"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?"
* * * * *
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.