Miss Haldin

“ I haven’t obtained your full confidence as yet, Natalia Victorovna, but that will come. All in good time. The sister of Viktor Haldin cannot be without importance.... It’s simply impossible. And no woman can remain sitting on the steps. ”

“ Nothing could touch him now; in the eyes of the revolutionists there was now no shadow on his past. The phantom of Haldin had been indeed walked over, was left behind lying powerless and passive on the pavement covered with snow. And this was the phantom’s mother consumed with grief and white as a ghost. He had felt a pitying surprise. But that, of course, was of no importance. Mothers did not matter. ”

“ For me there is a heroic ring about the very name of Haldin. They must have been trembling with fear in their Ministries—all those men with fiendish hearts. Here I stand talking to you, and when I think of all the cruelties, oppressions, and injustices that are going on at this very moment, my head begins to swim. I have looked closely at what would seem inconceivable if one’s own eyes had not to be trusted. I have looked at things that made me hate myself for my helplessness. ”

“ I did my best, too, to save her and hers before the blow fell.”
“What would you do, if you found her?”
“Take her away to a safe place, if she would let me, and guard her there at the risk of my life—at the cost, if need be.”
“The maid whom you seek,” said Haldane, after a further examination of the charred sticks on the hearth, “is a pious and devout maiden; has your life been hitherto fit to mate with such?”
“Whatever I have been,” was the reply, “I would give her no cause for regret hereafter. A man who has suffered as I have has no mind left for trifling. ”

“ How very many, like him, might be saved, were more women of tact and culture, large-hearted also and willing to give a part of their time to such noble uses!
By a personal and human ministry, the method that has ever been most effective in God's providence, Haldane was at last brought into close, intimate relations with the Divine Teacher himself. He was led to look away from his own fitful emotions and vague experiences to One who was his strong and unchanging friend. ”

“ The humbled sumner laid two silver pennies in her hand, and left the hut with some new ideas in his head.
“Well, my dear, you’ve a brave heart!” said Haldane, when the sound of his footsteps had died away. “I marvel you dared speak. It is well he took you for an angel; but suppose he had not, and had come round the screen to see? When I told you the worst outlaw in the forest would not dare to look in on you, I was not speaking of them. They stick at nothing, commonly.”
“If he had,” said Ermine quietly, “the Lord would have known how to protect me. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ermine lived in an age when it was a most extraordinary occurrence for a woman to have any power to dispose of herself in marriage, and such a thing was almost regarded as unnatural and improper. She held out her hand to Stephen.
“I will go where the Lord sends me,” she said simply. “Dear Mother Haldane saved my life, and she has more right to dispose of me than any one else. Be it so.”
“When folks are wed, they commonly have gifts made them,” said Haldane with a smile. “I haven’t much to give, and you’ll think my gift a queer one: but I wish you’d take it, Ermine. It’s Gib.” ”

“ I honor and respect you for making the attempt upon which you are bent, but I fear that pride rather than wisdom is your counsellor in carrying out your resolution; and both God's word and human experience prove that pride goes but a little way before a fall."
"I have reached a depth," replied Haldane, bitterly, "from whence I cannot fall; and it will be hereafter some consolation to remember that I was not lifted out of the mire, but that I got out. If I cannot climb up again it were better I perished in the gutter of my shame." ”

“ At others and most of the time, he uses that ungainly mode of expression, which in itself, is laughable. At any rate, whoever he may be, he is a friend, and the interest which in takes in the safety of Haverland and his family, is as efficient as it is singular."
"Maybe the interest is in Ina," said Haldidge with a sly look.
"I understand you, but you are mistaken. He has assured me as much. No; there seems nothing of that feeling at all in him. He loves her as he would a child, but no more." ”

“ Shrive me for obeying the Bishop, and bringing doom upon the heretics! Nay, witch!—art thou so far gone down the black road that thou reckonest such good works to be sins?”
And the sumner laughed bitterly.
“It is thy confession of sin wherewith I deal,” answered Haldane sternly. “It is thy conscience, not mine, whereon it lieth heavy. Who is it that goeth down the black road—the man that cannot rest for the haunting of dead faces, or the poor, harmless, old woman, that bade him seek peace from the Church of God?” ”

“ Did the pathos of his voice, his strongly manifested sympathy, combine with all that had gone before to melt the young man's heart? Or, in answer to the prayer, was there present One whose province it is to give life? Like the wind that mysteriously rises and comes toward one with its viewless, yet distinctly felt power. Haldane was conscious of influences at work in his heart that were as potent as they were incomprehensible. ”

“ But now—He’s forgotten me.”
“No, never, never, Mother Haldane! It is thou who hast forgotten Him. He sent me to thee to-night to tell thee so.”
“Gently now, my dear! Keep still. Don’t you use up your bit of strength for a worthless old woman, no good to any body. There ain’t nobody in the world as cares for me, child. No, there ain’t nobody!” ”

“ Haldane’s bidding was obeyed. The dawn had scarcely broken on the following morning, when Stephen and Ermine, with Gib in the arms of the latter, set forth on their journey to London. Haldane stood in her doorway to watch them go.
“Thank God!” she said, when she had entirely lost sight of them. “Thank God, my darling is safe! I can bear anything that comes now. It is only what such as me have to look for. And Ermine said the good Lord wouldn’t fail them that trusted Him. I’m only a poor ignorant old woman, and He knows it ”

“ But you have no occasion to blame yourself, Laura. It is one of those things which never could have been helped. Besides, Haldane is serving a Master who is pledged to shape seeming evils for his good. I had no thought of speaking of him at all, only your remark seemed so like injustice that I could not be silent. In the future, moreover, you may do something for him. Society is too unrelenting, and does not sufficiently recognize the struggle he has made, and is yet making; and he is so morbidly sensitive that he will not take anything that even looks like social alms. ”

“ Haldane, in her low monotone, "all will be well. It is your being carried away by gusts of impulse and violent passions that makes all the trouble. If you had followed your conscience you would at once have left Hillaton at my request, and hidden yourself in the seclusion that I indicated. If you had done so, you might have saved yourself and us from all that has since occurred."
"But I would have lost my self-respect. I should have done worse—"
"Self-respect!" interrupted his mother, with an expression akin to disgust flitting across her pale face. ”

“ A short time elapsing, before any fresh rap occurred, Haldane went to look at her patient.
“Well, my dear, and how are you getting on? Not asleep, I see. Look at them rabbits! I can make you broth enough now. Get my living this way, look you. And it’s fair too, for I gives ’em good herbs. Fine cures I make by times, I can tell you.”
“I wondered what you gave the last,” said Ermine.
The old woman set her arms akimbo and laughed.
“Eh, I get lots o’ that sort. It’s a good wash they want, both for health and comeliness; and I make ’em take it that way. ”

“ Growther," said Haldane, wearily, "I hardly know what is the matter. I am losing zest and courage unaccountably. My old, happy and hopeful feelings are about all gone, and in their place all sorts of evil thoughts seem to be swarming into my mind. I have tried to keep all this to myself, but I have become so wretched that I must speak. Mrs. Arnot is away, or she might help me, as she ever does. I wish that I felt differently; I pray that I may, but in spite of all I seem drifting back to my old miserable self. Every day I fear that I shall have trouble at the mill. ”

“ All the hope I have of you is inspired by his disposition and power to help you. You may continue to stand aloof from him, declining his aid, just as you avoided your mother, and myself all these weeks when we were longing to help you; but if you sink, yours will be the fate of one who refuses to grasp the strong hand that is and ever has been seeking yours."
"Mrs. Arnot," said Haldane thoughtfully, "if all you say is true there is hope for me—there is hope for every one." ”

“ Although the discharge of the leading persecutor, and Mr. Ivison's letter, did not add to Haldane's popularity at the mill, they led to his being severely let alone at first, and an increasingly frank and affable manner on the part of the young man, as he gained in patience and serenity, gradually disarmed those who were not vindictive and blind from prejudice.
Poor Mrs. Haldane seemed destined to be her son's evil genius to the end. When people take a false view of life there seems a fatality in all their actions. ”

“ Modesty is a grace which fine-looking young men of large wealth are often taught by some severe experiences, if it is ever learned. Haldane, as yet, had not received such wholesome depletion. His self-approval and assurance, moreover, were quite natural, since his mother and sisters had seldom lost an opportunity of developing and confirming these traits. The yielding of women to his will and wishes had been one of the most uniform experiences of his life, and he had come to regard it as the natural order of things. ”

“ And dropping her voice to a whisper, Haldane emerged from the screen, and desired the applicant to enter.
It was a very handsome young woman who came in, on whose face the indulgence of evil passions—envy, jealousy, and anger—had left as strong a mark as beauty. She crossed herself as she stepped over the threshold.
“Have you a charm that will win hearts?” she asked.
“Whose heart do you desire to win?” was the reply.
“That of Wigan the son of Egglas.”
“Has it strayed from you?”
“I have never had it. He loves Brichtiva, on the other side of the wood, and he will not look on me. I hate her. ”

“ She could scarcely have given Haldane a plain talk on the evils of fast living to save her life, but if she could keep young men from going to destruction by smiling upon them, by games of backgammon and by music, she felt in the mood to be a missionary all her life, especially if she could have so safe and attractive a field of labor as her aunt's back parlor.
But the poor child would soon learn that perverse human nature is much the same in a drawing-room and a tenement-house, and that all who seek to improve it are doomed to meet much that is excessively annoying and discouraging. ”

“ Haldane was silent. His fingers were itching for a stout malacca and for a scoundrel's back upon which to exercise it. He would have given so much to focus the malignant slander that had followed the woman he loved, and had made even him, her adoring lover, begin to doubt her, with a wavering faith of which he was now so deeply ashamed.
Oh, to have some one to punish with sharp physical pain, some craven hound to offer up as a sacrifice to his own remorse! ”

“ Young Haldane took the reins with a great show of solicitude and vigilance, appearing to dread another display of viciousness from the mare, that was now most sheeplike in her docility; and thus, with his confiding victim, he jogged along through the crowded street, the object of general approval and outspoken commendation.
"My dear young friend," began the doctor fervently, "I feel that you have already repaid me amply for my labors in your behalf."
"Thank you," said Haldane demurely; "I think we are getting even." ”

“ Haldane was not long in reaching a conclusion as he sat over a dying fire in his humble quarters at the hermitage. If he saw much of Laura Romeyn he would love her of necessity by every law of his being. Assuring himself of the hopelessness of his affection would make no difference to one of his temperament. ”

“ Hilda's production of Mrs. Halliday was so perfect that it failed absolutely to touch him, almost to interest him. He had no means of measuring or of valuing that kind of woman, the restless brilliant type that lives upon its emotions and tilts at the problems of its sex with a curious comfort in the joust. He was too far from the circle of her modern influence to consider her with anything but impatience if he had met her original person, and her reflection, her reproduction, seemed to him frivolous and meaningless. ”