XIV.
John Villard passed a wakeful night in his new rooms at Newbern Shepard Hall. A strange and unwonted feeling had taken possession of him; one which he was slow to recognize, but which cried loudly to him of his folly and presumption, even while it refused to be put off.
After that first dance, Salome had paused by an open window and he had stood idly watching her. Suddenly a tremendous desire to clasp her in his arms, to hold her close, to demand her full surrender, swept over him. So sudden and strong was the passion, that it was with difficulty that he kept from seizing the soft hand which lay dangerously near on the window-sill. So over-mastering was it, that he dared not stay or even speak. He turned on his heel and went out under the quiet stars, alone.
In the days when she had held aloof from the mill, and the superintendents scarcely ever saw her, Geoffrey Burnham had regarded her as “something too bright and good for human nature’s daily food,” looking upon her as immensely above him, socially speaking. But now that she had become familiarly associated with them in the daily affairs and interests of the mill, Burnham thought of her as having entered the field of good comradeship, and felt that friendly, if not exactly equal, terms existed between them.
With John Villard it was different. He had begun by looking with a certain degree of scorn upon a woman who held tremendous interests so lightly as she had done in the old days. He had felt for her all the contempt a man who does not know them—a man with serious purposes—may feel for the irresponsible butterflies he imagines society-girls to be. With her deeper interest in the side of life which interested him, and her efforts to raise the standard of the mills, her realization of what to him was a sacred object in life and her devotion to it, his thought of her had changed.
With him, familiar every-day contact had notmade of her a comrade, in the ordinary sense of the word. Her beauty and refinement, together with the consciousness which never left his sensitive soul, that it was her wealth and her generosity which made the new conditions possible,—these things only served to raise her to a pedestal where she stood, forever apart from the rest of the universe,—a woman to be revered and worshiped; not a woman to be aspired to.
Suddenly, he found himself in love with her. The tide of feeling which swept over him was one that no man could mistake. It was not enough that he might worship her on her pedestal, with a devotion silent and unknown. He wanted to hold her in his arms. He wanted her eyes to droop before his glance—not to look at him in the steady fashion he knew so well. He wanted to feel her heart beating against his. He wanted to kiss her.
“Poor fool!” he told himself, a hundred times that night. “As if she would even look at me—a poor factory-boy, self-educated, self-trained, and—yes, self-conceited!”
He remembered his youth; how poor he had been; how he had studied by moonlight tosave the expense of a candle; how he had worked all through his boyhood in a cotton-mill, that he might help his older sister to support their mother; how, after his mother had died and his sister married, he had remained poor and alone and almost friendless; how little he had seen and known of women; how utterly lacking he was in all the graces of society and the refinements that he supposed to come from outward polish only; in short, how utterly at variance with her tastes and interests and aims his life had been.
He remembered her life of luxury, of travel, of careful training, and the indulgence of cultivated, æsthetic tastes. What was he, that he should dare to even think of her? What but a presumptuous fool, that he should dream of touching even her frail, white hand? And yet, her eyes had drooped when they met his that day, when they all went over the Hall together. Stay—what did it mean? Did she?—could she feel?—but, no. He was a presumptuous idiot to think of it.
He paced the floor for an hour. Then he lit a cigar and, under its peaceful influences, he tried again to fix his mind on the mills, on thechanged condition of things, on anything,—but her. Still, constantly, over and over, her tall, white-robed figure took shape in the curling wreaths of vapor, and he fell to dreaming what it would be like to have a happy home of his own, with her as its center and joy.
Again, he was exasperated with himself and called himself hard names. He threw away the half-smoked weed and resolutely prepared for bed; but only to toss wearily about, combating himself on the old grounds until the dawn, pushing its way through the crevices of his blinds, told him to rise and set his face again toward the workaday world. It was the first time that hard-working, earnest, practical John Villard had ever passed a sleepless night.
He had hardly seen how he was to bear the daily contact with Salome, after that. He was too modest and too honest with himself to dream that there might be any hope for him. He had, at one time during the night, thought of leaving the mills, and going away to try a new and easier life than this promised to be. Then he called himself a coward and remembered her words:
“I have depended on you from the first,”and he determined to stay, cost what it might. Besides, all his hopes and interests were with the Shawsheen workers. No: he could not leave them, he could not leave her now.
So he went forth in the morning, unchanged in outward appearance, and yet, stronger and better for this first grand fight with himself. And he met her with his usual deferential bow and smile when, by and by, she came to the office for her usual morning’s study of business affairs.
It was unanimously agreed that the opening of the Hall had been a grand success. The mill-hands, themselves, seemed to feel the new attitude into which they had suddenly stepped, and were already brighter and more hopeful.
On her way to the mills, Salome had met a young overseer, who was hurrying in to town for something. She greeted him pleasantly, calling him by name, when, to her surprise, he stopped.
“I’d like to thank you, Miss Shepard,” the burly young fellow began, “for what you are doing for us. If all the employers took the interest in their operatives as you do in us, we’d want no more Unions, and there’d be nomore strikes. I’m thinking you’ve got ahead of the rest of us on the labor question, and found the right answer to it.”
“I’m very glad to hear you say that,” Salome answered, with a glow at her heart which no speech from a man of the world had ever produced. “I want to find it, if I haven’t yet. But, you know it doesn’t depend on me alone. I may try, as hard as I can, but if you people don’t co-operate with me, I’m helpless. I want to depend on you, Mr. Brady.”
“And you can that, miss,” was the hearty answer. “You’ve got us all on your side now, sure. I went up this morning to see the houses. They are fine ones, too.”
“And did you pick out one for yourself, Mr. Brady? You are married, I believe?”
“I am that; and I’ve got as good a wife as ever the saints sent to bless a man. Yes, I picked out the one I liked best; but the woman’ll have to see it first, you know. And then, do you know, I think I’ll buy it. The terms are so easy, and I’ve a little money laid by, that I’d like to use; and I’m thinking Carrie’d be happier in a home of our own.”
“Now, that’s sensible of you,” said Salome,delighted that her houses were in such good prospect of pleasing. “If you do it, I’ve no doubt a good many others will. And, by and by, we shall have quite a community of property owners.”
Brady straightened himself up unconsciously at the word, touched his hat and passed on, his heart warmed and gratified by the kindly notice; while Salome entered the office in unusually good spirits.
“It seems to me,” she began, addressing herself to Burnham, “that everything is swinging round into the circle of my plans far better than I had dared hope. I expected opposition, or at least indifference, on the part of the operatives. On the contrary, they are all as delighted with the state of affairs as I am.”
“Why shouldn’t they be?” was Burnham’s comment. “They’d be ungrateful wretches if they weren’t. They’ve far more to gain than you have to lose, remember.”
“But you’ve been trying to make me believe,” pursued Salome, “that they didn’t want their condition improved; that they were satisfied to be let alone; and that they’d resist every improvement I offered.”
“Wait a little and see;” Burnham tried to make his tone impartial, if not skeptical; “you’ve only begun yet. Don’t expect the habits of months and years, the loose customs and low tastes, are going to be overthrown in a single night. The affair of last night, for instance, was doubtless the most orderly entertainment and the quietest dance they ever had. But it don’t follow that they will all of them be satisfied to drop entirely the old order of low dances when they had plenty to drink, even if they didn’t have salads and coffee, or ice-cream and cake. There’s no telling how many of them will be stealing off to those places before winter is over.”
“Then we must get up some form of entertainment that will hold them to us,” said Salome firmly. “They sha’n’t fall back, if anything we can compass can save them.”
Villard looked across his big ledger at her, as if she had been an angel sent from Heaven direct, to preach a higher political economy to the cotton factories of earth. She caught his look and smiled back at him; but she said no more.
She did not speak to him until just as she was ready to go home.
“How do you like your new quarters, Mr. Villard?” she said, then. “I hope you rested well last night?”
Villard remembered his sleepless hours vaguely, as in a dream. She looked so bright and untroubled herself.
“You deserted me after that first dance. Did I dance so badly that you feared or dreaded to be caught by me again? If it hadn’t been for Mr. Burnham and Mr. Fales I should have felt quite a wall-flower.”
“You never could be that, Miss Shepard,” poor Villard managed to say.
“Well, as soon as the young people get moved in we must start some classes. I know a good dressmaker whom I can get, and Marion will teach them some other things, if they want it.”
She lingered some minutes, talking over the Hall and her plans, and left him with a confused image of herself mixing up with the figures of the ledger in a most incongruous way. Alas! John Villard was to have many a hard fight with himself before he could drive away that image at will.
The young operatives—and all that dwelt within the corporation boarding-house walls—began that very night to pick up their effects, and make ready to move into their new quarters. Mrs. French had all she could attend to in preparing for her large family, assigning rooms, and attending to the thousand details of opening the Hall. But before the week was closed, every old boarding-house was closed and the new home full.
Marion Shaw found her time altogether occupied. Her work was to lie directly among the girls, as Villard’s influence was to save the boys and young men. Marion had a gentle and pleasing manner that made friends everywhere she went. She had had a good deal of experience in managing boarding-school girls, and although they are a widely different class from factory girls, human nature—girl-nature, is the same everywhere. Before the week was over, Marion had made friends with many of the girls, and had already interested them in keeping their rooms tidy, in forming a girls’ club, which should embrace all sorts of good ends, and in rousing in them what was of infinite value in the work she had laid out,—adesire to become as near like her and Salome as it was possible for them to be.
“We shall have to endure the cross of having them cut all their dresses like ours, wear ribbons like ours, do up their hair like ours, and get up the most astonishing hats purporting to be like ours,” said she to Salome one night; “but if it all comes of their wanting to be like us,—you understand me, dear,—I mean of their wanting to reach a higher ideal of course,—we can bear it.”
“We shall have to,” was the answer. “The truth of it is, they will be trying to copy our habits and manners and characters, too.”
“Then we shall have to be all the more careful,” said Marion seriously.
Life to Marion Shaw was a serious thing. Although she was but twenty-seven years old, she had come to realize that life may not be for any what the fancy of youth pictures it; and even to realize that the highest good which life can hold is not to be happy. Already she knew that happiness is but a relative term, and that only by ceasing to search and plan for it, can any of us find it even in small degree.
Just now, she walked dangerously near to happiness. On the opening night, Geoffrey Burnham had kept closely at her side all the evening, and after the affair was over, he had walked home with her, while Robert Fales had gone ahead with Salome.
At the door, the two had paused a little, looking at the exquisite, moonlit October night. Suddenly the extraordinary interest Burnham had felt in this young woman had culminated. He seized both her hands in his, and pressed them close to his breast.
“Why have you not come to me before?” he murmured, passionately. “Why have you waited all these years?”
“I was waiting for you,” she answered, with a smile.