Part 11

It seemed to her that this was the strangest thing her unaccountable niece had ever done. She really must remonstrate with her on the impropriety of her conduct. And seeing that Salome would not be restrained from making this erratic trip, she proposed to go, too, as chaperon. Only Salome must wait for the noon train, as she could not possibly get ready for an earlier one.

“The noon train!” exclaimed Salome, buttoning her gloves. “No, auntie, Mr. Villard may not live until then. I shall go to him at once. You forget that I am no longer a young girl. I am a business woman, and my chief assistant lies dying.” She bent over and kissed her aunt, who was still remonstrating, and ran down the steps to the waiting carriage, where Marion had already taken her seat.

Marion, too, had offered to go with her; but Salome had only replied:

“No, dear. If you will take my place here, that is all I ask.”

And when the train finally drew out of Shepardtown, and she had left her friend standing on the platform, she gave an involuntary sigh. Only the strong heart, which can best bear its grief alone, will understand her feeling.

The train had never seemed so slow to her. Strained and anxious with that nervous intensity which makes a woman waste her strength in a half-conscious physical effort to propel, by her own will-power, the great, unsympathetic, methodical engine, she sat straight up in her seat with heart and soul benumbed. Constantly before her, was the picture of John Villard—mangled, bleeding, dying—perhaps dead. Her brain reeled as she thought of him lying pale and cold in death.

She remembered how, only three days ago, he had clasped her hand and looked into her eyes; how he had called her “Salome,” his voice deep and tender with emotion. Dead? No, it could not be. And still the long, unfeeling train stopped to take on its horde of passengers, or to let off a working-man or a school-girl.

The hour’s ride to Boston seemed to her an eternity; and when, at last, they rolled into the long, covered shed, Salome was first to reach the steps, and first to touch the platform.

Ordering a carriage, she was soon on her way across the city. But here again the slowness of her progress drove her nearly frantic. She called to the driver and told him she would double his fee if he caught the next train for the scene of the accident. He did not know what time that would be, but he accepted the offer and drove at such a rate of speed that an agent of the Humane Society ran after him to catch his number,—and did not succeed.

When they reached the Albany station, Salome threw him the smallest bill she had, a two-dollar one,—and without waiting for the change, hastened to the ticket-office. It was beset with more than the usual crowd of curious questioners and eager passengers, whose plans the accident had thrown into confusion. It was some minutes before Salome could reach the window. She was about to turn away in despair when the agent recognized her.

“Let that lady pass, there,” he said, authoritatively; and then Salome learned that a relief train had been sent early in the morning, that another would be starting in ten minutes, and that regular trains would be run in the course of an hour or two, “carrying by,” at Jones’s Crossing, where the accident had occurred.

“And the injured ones, are they still——” her voice failed her.

“They are still living,” answered the agent. “But some of them are so badly hurt they must die. Stand back there, one minute,” he said to the crowd. “Well, I don’t know, miss, whether you could go on the relief train. You might go out and ask, though they’ve shut down on the crowd.”

Salome turned away. For the first time since breakfast a clear thought came into her brain. She went out to the train-gate.

No, they could not take any one. There were so many wanting to go, and they only took one car. Oh, a friend of the injured? Well, she must go to the division superintendent, or the general passenger agent. There was the “G. P. A.” over there.

Salome walked over to the official designated,—a pleasant gentleman with kind eyes.

“I am Miss Shepard of Shepardtown,” she said; “my chief superintendent is among the injured, and is probably dying. He has no friends, and I must get to him. Can you help me?”

The official took out a little book, wrote her name on a blank pass, and handed it to her.

“Anything we can do for him or for you, Miss Shepard, we shall be glad to do. You needn’t hesitate to ask. Your grandfather was once kind to me, when I was a poor boy.”

The passenger agent hurried away to the engine, giving some last orders, and Salome did not have a chance to thank him.

“You’ll have to hurry, miss,” a brakeman said who was standing near. “The train is going.”

A moment later she was on the way for Jones’s Crossing.

This train had the right of way and a clear track for some distance. They seemed to fly, as they sped out through the suburbs into the country beyond.

The bloom of the May morning was still on the tender, up-springing grass and the fresh foliage of the trees. Birds sang cheerfully on, in spite of the thundering engine on its way to the scene of woe. But there was no more beauty in the world for Salome.

Three or four physicians sat in the corner of the one baggage-car which they all occupied together, and, used as they were to scenes of death and suffering, talked indifferently of politics and the misdoings of Congress. The brakeman laughed as the conductor passed him with some trivial remark. To Salome it seemed that she alone, of all the world, cared because thirteen persons lay dead and twenty more were fatally injured, a few miles away.

Afterwards, when she saw the tenderness and courageous sympathy of these people among the suffering, she reversed her judgment.

A small woman in black sat at the opposite end of the car, and was the only other passenger.

“Who is that?” She stopped the conductor to ask the question, at last drawn out of her own sorrow by the pathetic attitude of the woman’s figure.

“That’s the engineer’s mother. He is fatally hurt. He’s the last of her five boys, and her sole dependence. It’s pretty rough on her; but the boys won’t let her suffer.”

His words came like a reproach to her. What right had she, with all her wealth and friends and pleasures, to think of herself as the only suffering one? What was her sorrow, compared to that of this bereaved mother?

She felt an impulse to go over to the motionless figure and speak a word of comfort. And then she felt the train slacking up.

“We’re almost there,” the conductor said, as he passed her again.

When the train stopped, two of the physicians, having heard who she was, came forward with offers of assistance. The others were kindly aiding the pathetic old lady in black.

And then Salome found herself face to face with such a scene as she had never even dreamed of.

The public is, through the “enterprising” journalistic system of the present day, already too familiar with such scenes of sickening horror. To Salome, this one came as the vivid realization of things she had hitherto carefully avoided in the newspapers.

At first, she turned faint and sick at the prospect. Several dead bodies lay plainly in sight, partially covered with a blanket. The living must first be cared for; and groans on every side, from those who, even yet, had not been extricated from the debris, told how much still remained to be done.

“Tell me,” she said, catching at the arm of a doctor who had been on the ground since daybreak, “where is Mr. Villard?”

“Villard? Let’s see—tall man? Dark hair and full beard? Yes. He was removed to the tavern over there an hour ago.” And he passed on to another sufferer.

Salome looked across the railroad track, in the direction the physician had pointed. There was a country store, a “tavern,” and three or four less pretentious buildings.

Hastily she clambered over the torn-up track, down the embankment and across the narrow, open field. There were no signs of life around the group of houses. Everybody was at the scene of the accident.

She walked into the tavern. It seemed to be deserted. Through the narrow hall she could see, at the end of the building, a dining-room; at one side was the office, where no one was in view. The clerk heard her step, however, and came hastily from the dining-room.

“Is there a Mr. Villard here?” she began—“a patient, from the accident?”

“There are three men upstairs who were hurt,” the clerk answered. “There’s no one here to tend office, or I’d show you up.”

“I must find him. Is there no one to show me the way?” she asked, impatient at this last trivial delay.

“They’re each in different rooms up there,” was the reply. “Walk right up the stairs. There’s nurses up there. They’ll tell you.”

Salome turned up the narrow, dingy staircase. At the top there was no one in sight. Groans came from behind a closed door. Inside, she could hear voices, subdued to an undertone. In the absolute silence, she heard the word “amputation.” Could this be Villard’s room?

She leaned against the wall, unable to try that latch. While she stood there, helpless and dazed, she lifted her eyes to the opposite doorway. It was open.

Inside, there seemed to be no one. Certainly there was no attendant. She stepped forward and looked in. There, on the white, clean bed, lay the form of John Villard, his face whiter than the pillow it rested against, his dark hair contrasting strangely with his paleness.

With the sight, all the repressed love of the last two years swept over Salome like a resistless impulse. A hand seemed clutching at her heart. Her limbs seemed paralyzed; but in an instant she was beside the bed, looking down at the closed eyes. A terrible fear that he was dead swept over her. With an inarticulate groan, she knelt beside him and laid her hand against his face.

He opened his eyes and smiled faintly. He thought he had died and reached Heaven.

XX.

Villard’s convalescence was slow and tedious. When Salome had found him, his dislocated shoulder had been restored to place, and his broken ankle set. Then, as there were not nurses enough for the great need, he had been left alone.

What passed in that first ten minutes after Salome had found him is still a sacred memory between them. At last, she said, looking at him through wet eyes, “You must have a nurse.”

“Oh, Salome, do not leave me,” he answered; and his voice, weakened from his injuries and tender with the passion which, at last, he had not been afraid to declare, was like music to her heart.

She bent her blushing face upon the pillow beside him. “May I stay and take care of you?” she asked, softly.

“May you? Oh, Salome!”

Another silence fell between them. Both hearts were too full for words.

“Then we must be married to-day.” Salome had waited a little for him to say it; but, manlike, he had not been thinking of the proprieties.

“I cannot leave you to hired nurses now,” she murmured. “So, there is only this one way out of it.”

“And a blessed way it is.”

And so they were married, that bright May morning, amid scenes of anguish, and while Villard still hovered near the gates of death. And for weeks they remained at “Jones’s Tavern,” he ill, wretched, racked with pain; she, bearing the trials and discomforts of the place, vigils of long night-watches, the dull, dragging anxiety; and yet, there was never a happier or more blessed honeymoon.

When he was able to be moved on a stretcher, he was taken to Shepardtown. Their home-coming was a glad one, although it was necessarily quiet. Every operative in the mills had been at the station, when the train that bore the two who had done so much for them came steaming in. Salome nodded to many of them, with moist but happy eyes. But the family physician, who had met them in Boston, would allow of no hand-shaking.

“Time enough for that by and by,” he told the men who stood foremost in the crowd. “Do you want to kill him?”

He could not prevent several of the strongest ones from stepping forward, however, and taking the stretcher in their own hands, and bearing Villard very gently to the waiting carriage.

“I never thought to enter this house so,” Villard whispered to Salome, when he was carefully borne up the stairs in the Shepard mansion and placed tenderly in bed.

“Thank Heaven, you were permitted to come, even _so_,” she replied, with a shudder. He had been so near Death’s door, instead!

“I can’t and won’t say I approve of what you’ve done,” said Mrs. Soule that night. “If you must marry him at all, I could not see why you should want to do it then and there. You might have waited, I think, and had such a wedding as befits a daughter of the Bourdillons. Besides, all this watching and care has pulled you down. You look pale and worn. You’ll lose your beauty before you are thirty-five.”

Salome did not answer. These matters seemed so trivial.

“I suppose, at least, you’ll give a reception when he gets well enough. You really owe it to society and your own position. All your father’s, your mother’s, and your own friends will expect it. You have planned for that, I suppose? Since you had no wedding gown, you ought to give Redfern _carte blanche_ for your reception gown. Have you written them?”

“Auntie,” said Salome, “John and I have been, in these past weeks, where we did not think of party gowns.”

“No, I suppose there was not much at Jones’s Crossing to remind you of them. But now, you certainly are thinking of one _now_?”

Salome sighed. There was really no use in expecting her little, exquisite, cameo-cut aunt to understand her.

“I suppose we may give some sort of reception. All my people are waiting anxiously to see John,” she said.

“Factory-people!” exclaimed Mrs. Soule indignantly; but her niece had moved away.

It was several weeks later, when Villard was first able to come downstairs. As soon as possible for him to bear the excitement, the operatives were invited to the house one evening, and permitted to shake hands with the man whom they had always considered their friend, and to whom they had now become closely endeared. The marriage between him and Salome had, somehow, seemed to draw him closer to them. They were now his people as well as hers.

“This isn’t going to take you away from us at the Hall?” said one of the young men during the evening. “Mr. Fales and Mr. Welman are good—but they are not you.”

“I shall be there every evening,” was Villard’s reply. “I am much more anxious not to lose you than you can be not to lose me.”

“I don’t know about that,” the younger one said.

When they had all gone away, and Marion had sent them both upstairs for the night, Salome drew her husband down to her favorite seat in a cosy bay-window, where the August moon was streaming in through vines and foliage, making a checkered radiance around them.

“John,” she began, “I have a plan to tell you.”

“What is it, dear?” he asked, drawing her head to his shoulder.

“I am going to retire from active business.” She laughed softly.

“What _can_ you mean?”

“Can’t you see? I’m going to retire. You are now the head of the Shawsheen Mills.”

Villard said nothing. In spite of the great love between them, he could not forget that she was wealthy nor that he was poor.

“I have to-day made over the entire mill property to you,” she went on. “I am not going to have it said that your wife has all the money and all the power, and that you are only her dependent.”

“Salome! you dear, generous heart,” said Villard brokenly; “I cannot accept.” He felt that she had divined his sensitiveness, although she had been too delicate to speak of it. “I am poor, but I am not a beggar.”

“And I, too, am proud,” she replied, laying her hand on his cheek. “I will not have people saying that you are tied to a rich wife and are subject to her whims. Oh, I know how they talk; I have seen and heard them all my life! Why, they would say you were a fortune-hunter.”

“You do not think so?” he asked, gently.

“Confess, dear,” she answered him. “If it had not been for that, wouldn’t you have spoken long ago?”

Villard pressed her closer.

“I came very near it, as it was,” he said, presently. “But I could not bear to be thought that.”

“I had the necessary papers made out this afternoon,” she said after an eloquent silence, “when I was out. So you see the thing is done whether you will or not. You need have no hesitation. I still have a large fortune left, you know, from the Bourdillons.”

“If it were anybody else in the world but my noble, generous wife,” he began, “I would refuse, even now.”

“If it were any one else but my noble husband,” she replied, “I could not yield control of the mills, and all the plans I have cherished for the employes. But I know in whom I trust,” and her eyes shone with wifely pride and affection.

“There are still so many things to do,” said Villard, a little later. “I know I can always depend on you to help me.”

“Oh, I am not laying down the work and retiring to the old life of idleness,” was the reply. “I shall leave the management of the mills to their new owner. It’s no part of a married woman’s business to manage her husband’s office. But I shall have all the more leisure left for doing good. I have no end of schemes to lay before you; and, I have no doubt, you have wiser plans than mine.”

“I am glad, on the whole,” said Villard thoughtfully, “that you are going to have more freedom. You are tired and worn with watching and caring for me,—dear, blessed soul that you are. Your burdens, in the past two years, have been borne marvelously well. Any other woman would have given way long ago. But, after all, I am a selfish man.”

“You, John!”

“Yes. I must confess, I want you all to myself, a part of the time.”

“All I have and all I am, dear, is yours. And yet, I cannot help feeling that we have still a great work to do. Employers, on all sides, are looking to see us fail in our attempts. As we stand or fall, will factories outside of Shepardtown be benefited or injured.”

“I remember what you once said, Salome. Your brave words were a watchword with me many a time when my courage was low.”

“What were they?”

“‘We want to show the world that the spirit of Him crucified may rule in a cotton-mill as fully as in the life of a saint.’ My darling, nobody but you would have had the courage to say that. We will take the sentiment as our rule of life.”

“And act on Rossetti’s beautiful words,” added Salome:

“And though age wearies by the way, And hearts break in the furrow, We’ll sow the golden grain to-day, The harvest reap to-morrow! Build up heroic lives, and all Be like the sheathen saber, Ready to flash out at God’s call, Oh, Chivalry of Labor!”

And then they sat silent in the checkered moonlight.

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