IX.
Marion Shaw was one of those women whose lives are a constant giving of their best, with no thought of return. We have all seen such women. From the self-sacrificing maiden aunt in the humblest home, up to the Florence Nightingales and Dorothea Dixes of the world, they are God’s angels, everywhere, to suffering humanity.
Marion Shaw and Salome Shepard had been in boarding-school together; and although the former had been left from the start to support herself and her widowed mother, the friendship between the two girls had never abated.
Marion’s mother had died a year before, and something material had dropped out of life for the girl. Grief and the solitude which ensued after her mother’s death told upon her constitution; and when Salome’s letter of invitationreached her, it was like a boon from Heaven. She threw up her situation in Madame Blanc’s private school and went to Shepardtown, arriving there late in the evening, before Salome’s visit to the counting-room.
When the latter came home they settled cosily in Salome’s room for an “old-time talk,” such as they had enjoyed as girls.
“Why didn’t you let me know you were tired to death with that interminable teaching?” asked Salome. “I should have had you come to me long ago. You are as pale as a ghost.”
“Oh, I’m all right now,” answered Marion, who never cared to talk of herself. “Tell me about the strike here. I read of it in a Boston newspaper, when it came on, and again when Mr. Greenough died. But, after the fashion of newspapers with regard to anything you care particularly to follow up, they dropped the subject the minute one’s interest was roused. And your letter was so meager! Yes, it was. You only write the barest details, and not too many of them. Is the strike ended?”
“No, but I hope it will be before night,” Salome replied. “I’ve given orders this morningthat a compromise be made at once. Yes, don’t stare at me, please. Why shouldn’t I give orders? They’re my mills.”
“I’m not staring. It’s vulgar to stare, and the lady professors at Mme. Blanc’s fashionable boarding-school do not stare. Why, it would be as much as their position is worth!” retorted Marion. “Yes, they’re your mills, I suppose, and a handsome piece of property they are too, in the eyes of poor me, who own only the clothes on my back. But, pardon me, dear, it does seem a little odd to hear Salome Shepard, the most exclusive and the most fashionable girl at school, talk about giving orders in a cotton-mill. You’re not getting strong-minded, are you, dear?”
“If to begin to take an active interest in two thousand souls, who are dependent upon my money and the business interests it represents, is to become strong-minded, I’m afraid I shall have to plead guilty.” Salome looked narrowly at her friend. Possibly she had mistaken her, and their sympathies were farther apart than she had hoped.
“Bless you!” responded Marion heartily, “I’m strong-minded myself; want to vote andall that. Don’t believe intemperance and lots of other evils will ever be subdued in this country, until women have something to say, and say it through the ballot-box. It is not so very dreadful when you once get on to that platform, is it?”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought of voting particularly,” Salome hastened to answer. “I don’t really think I want that. But I do want to do something for my people.”
“And you’ll find,” retorted Marion, “before you’ve gone very far, that if you had the power of legislation, you could help them ten times as well.”
“Possibly,” Salome answered, doubtfully. “But, Marion, there are so many things absolutely necessary to be done for the Shawsheen operatives. If you could see them and the homes they live in, the temptations to which they are exposed, the poverty in which they live!”
“And you propose to go to work among them,—to reform them?”
“Yes, God helping me; them and the factory system together. Behold me,” said Salome, rising to her full height, and puttingon a mock-tragic air: “Behold and see: Salome Shepard, Reformer. That’s my platform.”
“Salome, dear, what do you mean?” Mrs. Soule had just come in. “Don’t mind her, Marion, she delights in hearing herself talk like a suffrage leader, lately. I don’t approve of it, as she knows; but I can only wait for the mood to pass.”
“Which it never will, aunty dear,” Salome hastened to say. “So long as I live and am in a condition to work for the people who need substantial and material aid, as these people do, my life will be devoted to their service. I cannot go on living the aimless, indifferent life which has been mine ever since I left school. I must have some active interest, or I shall stagnate, or, worse still, settle into a cold, hard, selfish woman of the world. Unfortunately I was born with a heart; unfortunately for your ideal of the proper young lady of the period, I was born with a conscience, and this conscience tells me that my fortune was given me only in trust. It is not mine for selfish enjoyment alone; it is mine to make the world better and happier and purer.”
“And you are going to work among thosemiserable drunken operatives,” said her aunt coldly, “whose sordid lives, and ungrateful hearts, the whole of them, are not worth the effort of even one month of your life, even if you were at all a capable woman of affairs, a woman of judgment and discretion, a woman of sound business sense,—which you are not.”
“Yes, ‘among the drunken miserable operatives,’” replied Salome, ignoring the latter part of her aunt’s speech. “Among those sordid lives and ungrateful hearts, that were worth the Christ’s dying, and for whom He worked, living.”
“You don’t think of joining the Salvation Army, I hope?” exclaimed her aunt, quite beside herself at this new development of her niece’s purposes.
Salome laughed.
“I shall hardly have the time, aunty. I’ve accepted a position at the Shawsheen Mills.”
“A position?” gasped Mrs. Soule. “Oh, Salome! Who offered you—whodaredoffer you aposition?”
“The fair owner of the mills offered it,” answered Salome, enjoying the situation to its fullest extent. “And I accepted, aunty.Marion, in me you see the agent of the Shawsheen Mills!”
Marion Shaw rose and clasped her friend closely to her bosom. She admired her splendid courage and avowed principles, and honored this woman, with money and leisure at her command, who was willing and anxious to devote her life to service for others. But not so Mrs. Soule.
She applied a delicate mull and lace handkerchief to her eyes, and wept to think to what an end had come her years of training; her careful watch, that Salome should never, by any chance, come in contact with a lower world; her life-long aim to make of Salome the perfect being prescribed by her somewhat limited and narrowed rules of ladyhood.
She begged; she pleaded; she argued; she threatened; she resorted to ridicule; but Salome stood firm, and now laughingly and then earnestly defended the course she had taken.
“It’s of no use, aunty, as you see, for us to argue the case. I do not forget all your kindness and love for me; but I must choose for myself,” she said, finally. “I am old enoughto decide questions of right and wrong. Hereafter we will not argue any more. I must do this; you must submit; and that is all there is about it. Now, let’s make up and be friends,” and she bent down and kissed her aunt on both cheeks, as she used to do when she was a little girl.
“You, a child of Cora de Bourdillon’s!” murmured her aunt, softening a little.
“Cora de Bourdillon was my mother,” said Salome. “But before and above all else, Newbern Shepard was my grandfather. I am like him. I must be like him. And you must submit to the laws of heredity.”
So there was never any more prolonged discussion between them. Salome’s nature being so much the stronger, kind-hearted, weak Mrs. Soule could not oppose her further. But many times, in after years, was she heard to deplore the fact that Cora de Bourdillon’s child was so thorough-going an epitome of Newbern Shepard.
“A good man,” she would say. “A perfectly honest and well-meaning man; but not like Us!”