“Our three lives were like that!” Miss Haldin twined the fingers of both
her hands together in demonstration, then separated them slowly, looking
straight into my face. “That’s what poor mother found to torment herself
and me with, for all the years to come,” added the strange girl. At that
moment her indefinable charm was revealed to me in the conjunction of
passion and stoicism. I imagined what her life was likely to be by the
side of Mrs. Haldin’s terrible immobility, inhabited by that fixed idea.
But my concern was reduced to silence by my ignorance of her modes
of feeling. Difference of nationality is a terrible obstacle for our
complex Western natures. But Miss Haldin probably was too simple to
suspect my embarrassment. She did not wait for me to say anything, but
as if reading my thoughts on my face she went on courageously--
“At first poor mother went numb, as our peasants say; then she began to
think and she will go on now thinking and thinking in that unfortunate
strain. You see yourself how cruel that is....”
I never spoke with greater sincerity than when I agreed with her that it
would be deplorable in the highest degree. She took an anxious breath.
“But all these strange details in the English paper,” she exclaimed
suddenly. “What is the meaning of them? I suppose they are true? But is
it not terrible that my poor brother should be caught wandering alone,
as if in despair, about the streets at night....”
We stood so close to each other in the dark anteroom that I could see
her biting her lower lip to suppress a dry sob. After a short pause she
said--
“I suggested to mother that he may have been betrayed by some false
friend or simply by some cowardly creature. It may be easier for her to
believe that.”