Chapter 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.

THE END.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling. 2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.