Salome Shepard, reformer

by Helen M. Winslow

Sometimes the two were left alone for a while, when the conversation took a fitful tone, as if uncertain whether to be light and frivolous, or tender and deep. Several times Burnham had seized Marion’s unresisting hand and kissed it passionately; and, finally, one evening when they were alone, he had put his arm about her waist and drawn her close to him.

“Why have we not had each other all these years?” he asked, looking into her sweet, confused eyes. “What cruel fate has kept you from me?”

“It does not matter, does it, so long as we have each other now?” Marion had asked in reply. And then he had bent and kissed the pure white brow and the clustering rings of hair.

After this, every night, Marion, kneeling by her bedside alone, thanked God for the love that had come to brighten her bereaved life.

And Burnham? Did he realize what he might be doing when he won this true and loyal woman’s heart? At first, he, too, was happy in the present. The past held nothing which he was proud to remember; and into the future he stubbornly refused to look. He had, for years,—“since his days of adolescence,” he told himself,—had no interest in women, although he knew that, in a place like Shepardtown, he was the object of several fond mammas’ machinations, and the admiration of most of the village girls. He had never met Marion’s counterpart. She interested and fascinated him. Simple and childish in many ways, she was grave and dignified in others. Her life, he could see, would be spent for others. She was one of those women who are a constant sacrifice to the world around them; who give openly and always of their best, asking and expecting little in return. In short-Burnham knew it as well as any one could—she was a woman whose life and love and utmost service would be absorbed by a selfish man, only to be as unappreciated as they were undeserved on his part. And yet, ever since their first meeting, months before, there had been that subtle consciousness of each other drawing them on, that wave of feeling on meeting, that positive yearning when they were separated.

After Villard’s pointed questioning regarding Marion, Burnham began to question himself seriously. At first, when thoughts of the future had intruded into his calm moments, he thought of her as his wife; of himself as settled down in a house of his own; he even expected to be happy. But he did not put his thoughts into words. When he was with Marion, he avoided—not so much from intention perhaps as from a reluctance to break the spell of romance which hung over them—any mention of different relations in the future.

It was April before he brought himself to face about and look at the subject, calmly and seriously. Just where was he drifting with Marion?

One day he allowed himself to let fall some remark about her to Villard,—not in any way implying their peculiar relations, but yet speaking of her in such a way that Villard drew himself up to his straightest, and looked him in the eye a full moment. Not a word was said, but at that instant, Burnham felt the disagreeable consciousness of being a scoundrel.

He went home that evening and tried to read. Then he tried to smoke. Then he thought of going over to the Shepard mansion. He finally decided on sitting down and squarely meeting an issue that should have been faced six months before.

Geoffrey Burnham was thirty-seven years old. He had considered only his own taste and desires ever since he was born. When he was a boy, if he had wanted anything, he had it. If his father did not grant his every wish his mother would. And she, poor woman, had fostered in him the idea that all his personal, imperious desires were meant, always, to be immediately granted. The conquering of Self had been no part of his early discipline.