Salome Shepard, reformer

by Helen M. Winslow

His father died when he was in Europe. When he came home, and entered the mills,—an arrangement the father effected just before his decease,—his pretty, white-faced mother had come to Shepardtown to be near her son. For him she lived and would die. Yielding weakly in everything to him, she avenged her position by setting herself against all other women. Salome had called upon her, and had invited her to her house, but in vain. Mrs. Burnham went nowhere, and wanted to see no one. Her son was all in all to her. And but for the constant fear that he would marry the handsome Miss Shepard, who, with all her wealth, she felt sure, would crowd her completely out of her son’s heart and home, she would have been a comparatively happy woman. Incredible to larger-hearted women, as it seems, there are women so selfish in their devotion to an only son, as to wreck his life, so far as its being of any practical value to himself and others is concerned, by the strength of their own weak persistence.

Burnham thought of his mother. He remembered the comfortable habits he had settled into; he wondered if any other woman would ever let him smoke in the best room in the house, or submit to his will when he chose, as he often did for days together, to speak only in monosyllables in his own house. He felt that, should he marry, his habits would all have to be changed; that the solitude which he prized, when he felt so inclined, might be absolute no longer. He remembered his mother’s peculiarities, and said to himself that there would be a devil of a row, should he undertake to bring a wife home. There might be constant bickerings, and that he never could abide. No; better let women alone.

Then he thought of Marion and sighed. Her tender eyes, when he parted from her two nights before, came up before him.

“Hang it,” he asked himself; “just how far have I gone with her, anyway?”

He felt himself a scoundrel again, to his credit be it written. But then, there were the habits of a lifetime, and his mother to be remembered. Could he overthrow all his established convictions?

And yet, just what might Marion be expecting of him? No, he had given her no definite encouragement in words. Still, one never can tell how a good, pure woman is going to take these things.

Burnham went out under the April sky and walked up and down the concrete walk bareheaded, until his mother, from her window, reminded him for the third time that he would certainly get cold out there; and shouldn’t she make him a cup of hot negus? Then he came in and renewed the conflict.

“I’ve let the thing run too long,” he said to himself, as he gazed into the open wood-fire, having refused the decoction his mother had patiently brought him. “I’ll have a reckoning with myself to-night, and decide this thing once for all.”

Burnham was a decided man, and, once determined, seldom changed his mind. He boasted, sometimes, of that quality, forgetting that it is only an ignorant or an unprogressive soul which will never acknowledge itself in the wrong, or change its course from the one marked out, perhaps in obstinacy or error.

Until midnight he argued with himself, although, unconsciously, his mind had been secretly made up at the start. When the clock struck twelve he rose and got together his writing materials.