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The Stillwater Tragedy

T >> Thomas Bailey Aldrich >> The Stillwater Tragedy




"I insist on conducting my own business in my own way."

The voice was the voice of Slocum, but the backbone was Richard's.

"Then, sir, the Association don't object to a reasonable number of
apprentices."

"How many is that?"

"As many as you want, I expect, sir," said Stevens, shuffling his
feet.

"Very well, Stevens. Go round to the front gate and Mr. Shackford
will let you in."

There were two doors to the office, one leading into the yard, and
the other, by which the deputation had entered and was now making its
exit, opened upon the street.

Richard heaved a vast sigh of relief as he took down the beam
securing the principal entrance.

"Good-morning, boys," he chirped, with a smile as bright as newly
minted gold. "I hope you enjoyed yourselves."

The quartet ducked their heads bashfully, and Stevens replied,
"Can't speak for the others, Mr. Shackford, but I never enjoyed
myself worse."

Piggott lingered a moment behind the rest, and looking back over
his shoulder said, "That peach garden was what fetched us!"

Richard gave a loud laugh, for the peach garden had been a
horticultural invention of his own.

In the course of the forenoon the majority of the hands presented
themselves at the office, dropping into the yard in gangs of five or
six, and nearly all were taken on. To dispose definitely of Lumley,
Giles, and Peterson, they were not taken on at Slocum's Yard, though
they continued to be, directly or indirectly, Slocum's pensioners,
even after they were retired to the town farm.

Once more the chisels sounded merrily under the long shed. That
same morning the spinners went back to the mules, but the molders
held out until nightfall, when it was signified to them that they
demands would be complied with.

The next day the steam-whistles of the Miantowona Iron Works and
Dana's Mills sent the echoes flying beyond that undulating line of
pines and hemlocks which half encircles Stillwater, and falls away
loosely on either side, like an unclasped girdle.

A calm, as if from out the cloudless blue sky that arched it day
after day, seemed to drift down upon the village. Han-Lin, with no
more facial expression than an orange, suddenly reappeared on the
streets, and went about repairing his laundry, unmolested. The
children were playing in the sunny lanes again, unafraid, and mothers
sat on doorsteps in the summer twilights, singing softly to the baby
in arm. There was meat on the table, and the tea-kettle hummed
comfortably at the back of the stove. The very winds that rustled
through the fragrant pines, and wandered fitfully across the vivid
green of the salt marshes, breathed peace and repose.

Then, one morning, this blissful tranquility was rudely shattered.
Old Mr. Lemuel Shackford had been found murdered in his own house in
Welch's Court.






XVIII





The general effect on Stillwater of Mr. Shackford's death and the
peculiar circumstances attending the tragedy have been set forth in
the earlier chapters of this narrative. The influence which that
event exerted upon several persons then but imperfectly known to the
reader is now to occupy us.

On the conclusion of the strike, Richard had returned, in the
highest spirits, to his own rooms in Lime Street; but the quiet week
that followed found him singularly depressed. His nerves had been
strung to their utmost tension during those thirteen days of
suspense; he had assumed no light responsibility in the matter of
closing the yard, and there had been moments when the task of
sustaining Mr. Slocum had appeared almost hopeless. Now that the
strain was removed a reaction set in, and Richard felt himself
unnerved by the fleeing shadow of the trouble which had not caused
him to flinch so long as it faced him.

On the morning and at the moment when Mary Hennessey was pushing
open the scullery door of the house in Welch's Court, and was about
to come upon the body of the forlorn old man lying there in his
night-dress, Richard sat eating his breakfast in a silent and
preoccupied mood. He had retired very late the previous night, and
his lack-lustre eyes showed the effect of insufficient sleep. His
single fellow-boarder, Mr. Pinkham, had not returned from his
customary early walk, and only Richard and Mrs. Spooner, the
landlady, were at table. The former was in the act of lifting the
coffee-cup to his lips, when the school-master burst excitedly into
the room.

"Old Mr. Shackford is dead!" he exclaimed, dropping into a chair
near the door. "There's a report down in the village that he has been
murdered. I don't know if it is true. . . . . God forgive my
abruptness! I didn't think!" and Mr. Pinkham turned an apologetic
face towards Richard, who sat there deathly pale, holding the cup
rigidly within an inch or two of his lip, and staring blankly into
space like a statue.

"I--I ought to have reflected," murmured the school-master,
covered with confusion at his maladroitness. "It was very
reprehensible in Craggie to make such an announcement to me so
suddenly, on a street corner. I--I was quite upset by it."

Richard pushed back his chair without replying, and passed into
the hall, where he encountered a messenger from Mr. Slocum,
confirming Mr. Pinkham's intelligence, but supplementing it with the
rumor that Lemuel Shackford had committed suicide.

Richard caught up his hat from a table, and hurried to Welch's
Court. Before reaching the house he had somewhat recovered his
outward composure; but he was still pale and internally much
agitated, for he had received a great shock, as Lawyer Perkins
afterwards observed to Mr. Ward in the reading-room of the tavern.
Both these gentlemen were present when Richard arrived, as were also
several of the immediate neighbors and two constables. The latter
were guarding the door against the crowd, which had already begun to
collect in the front yard.

A knot of carpenters, with their tool-boxes on their shoulders,
had halted at the garden gate on their way to Bishop's new stables,
and were glancing curiously at the unpainted façade of the house,
which seemed to have taken on a remote, bewildered expression, as if
it had an inarticulate sense of the horror within. The men ceased
their whispered conversation as Richard approached, and respectfully
moved aside to let him pass.

Nothing had been changed in the cheerless room on the ground
floor, with its veneered mahogany furniture and its yellowish leprous
wall-paper, peeling off at the seams here and there. A cane-seated
chair, overturned near the table, had been left untouched, and the
body was still lying in the position in which the Hennessey girl had
discovered it. A strange chill--something unlike any atmospherical
sharpness, a chill that seemed to exhale from the thin, pinched
nostrils--permeated the apartment. The orioles were singing madly
outside, their vermilion bosoms glowing like live coals against the
tender green of the foliage, and appearing to break into flame as
they took sudden flights hither and thither; but within all was
still. On entering the chamber Richard was smitten by the
silence,--that silence which shrouds the dead, and is like no other.
Lemuel Shackford had not been kind or cousinly; he had blighted
Richard's childhood with harshness and neglect, and had lately heaped
cruel insult upon him; but as he stood there alone, and gazed for a
moment at the firmly shut lips, upon which the mysterious white dust
of death had already settled,--the lips that were never to utter any
more bitter things,--the tears gathered in Richard's eyes and ran
slowly down his cheeks. After all said and done, Lemuel Shackford was
his kinsman, and blood is thicker than water!

Coroner Whidden shortly appeared on the scene, accompanied by a
number of persons; a jury was impaneled, and then began that inquest
which resulted in shedding so very little light on the catastrophe.

The investigation completed, there were endless details to attend
to,--papers to be hurriedly examined and sealed, and arrangements
made for the funeral on the succeeding day. These matters occupied
Richard until late in the afternoon, when he retired to his lodgings,
looking in on Margaret for a few minutes on his way home.

"This is too dreadful!" said Margaret, clinging to his hand, with
fingers nearly as icy as his own.

"It is unspeakably sad," answered Richard,--"the saddest thing I
ever knew."

"Who--who could have been so cruel?"

Richard shook his head.

"No one knows."

The funeral took place on Thursday, and on Friday morning, as has
been stated, Mr. Taggett arrived in Stillwater, and installed himself
in Welch's Court, to the wonder of many in the village, who would not
have slept a night in that house, with only a servant in the north
gable, for half the universe. Mr. Taggett was a person who did not
allow himself to be swayed by his imagination.

Here, then, he began his probing of a case which, on the surface,
promised to be a very simple one. The man who had been seen driving
rapidly along the turnpike sometime near daybreak, on Wednesday, was
presumably the man who could tell him all about it. But it did not
prove so. Neither Thomas Blufton, nor William Durgin, nor any of the
tramps subsequently obliged to drop into autobiography could be
connected with the affair.

These first failures served to stimulate Mr. Taggett; it required
a complex case to stir his ingenuity and sagacity. That the present
was not a complex case he was still convinced, after four days'
futile labor upon it. Mr. Shackford had been killed--either with
malice prepense or on the spur of the moment--for his money. The
killing had likely enough not been premeditated; the old man had
probably opposed the robbery. Now, among the exceptionally rough
population of the town there were possibly fifty men who would not
have hesitated to strike down Mr. Shackford if he had caught them
_flagrante delicto_ and resisted them, or attempted to call for
succor. That the crime was committed by some one in Stillwater or in
the neighborhood Mr. Taggett had never doubted since the day of his
arrival. The clumsy manner in which the staple had been wrenched from
the scullery door showed the absence of a professional hand. Then the
fact that the deceased was in the habit of keeping money in his
bedchamber was a fact well known in the village, and not likely to be
known outside of it, though of course it might have been. It was
clearly necessary for Mr. Taggett to carry his investigation into the
workshops and among the haunts of the class which was indubitably to
furnish him with the individual he wanted. Above all, it was
necessary that the investigation should be secret. An obstacle
obtruded itself here: everybody in Stillwater knew everybody, and a
stranger appearing on the streets or dropping frequently into the
tavern would not escape comment.

The man with the greatest facility for making the requisite
searches would of course be some workman. But a workman was the very
agent not to be employed under the circumstances. How many times, and
by what strange fatality, had a guilty party been selected to shadow
his own movements, or those of an accomplice! No, Mr. Taggett must
rely only on himself, and his plan forthwith matured. Its execution,
however, was delayed several days, the cooperation of Mr. Slocum and
Mr. Richard Shackford being indispensable.

At this stage Richard went to New York, where his cousin had made
extensive investments in real estate. For a careful man, the late Mr.
Shackford had allowed his affairs there to become strangely tangled.
The business would detain Richard a fortnight.

Three days after his departure Mr. Taggett himself left
Stillwater, having apparently given up the case; a proceeding which
was severely criticized, not only in the columns of The Stillwater
Gazette, but by the townsfolks at large, who immediately relapsed
into a state of apprehension approximating that of the morning when
the crime was discovered. Mr. Pinkham, who was taking tea that
evening at the Danas', threw the family into a panic by asserting his
belief that this was merely the first of a series of artistic
assassinations in the manner of those Memorable Murders recorded by
De Quincey. Mr. Pinkham may have said this to impress the four Dana
girls with the variety of his reading, but the recollection of De
Quincey's harrowing paper had the effect of so unhinging the young
school-master that when he found himself, an hour or two afterwards,
in the lonely, unlighted street he flitted home like a belated ghost,
and was ready to drop at every tree-box.

The next forenoon a new hand was taken on at Slocum's Yard. The
new hand, who had come on foot from South Millville, at which town he
had been set down by the seven o'clock express that morning, was
placed in the apprentice department,--there were five or six
apprentices now. Though all this was part of an understood
arrangement, Mr. Slocum nearly doubted the fidelity of his own eyes
when Mr. Taggett, a smooth-faced young fellow of one and twenty, if
so old, with all the traits of an ordinary workman down to the
neglected fingernails, stepped up to the desk to have the name of
Blake entered on the pay-roll. Either by chance or by design, Mr.
Taggett had appeared but seldom on the streets of Stillwater; the few
persons who had had anything like familiar intercourse with him in
his professional capacity were precisely the persons with whom his
present movements were not likely to bring him into juxtaposition,
and he ran slight risk of recognition by others. With his hair
closely cropped, and the overhanging brown mustache removed, the man
was not so much disguised as transformed. "I shouldn't have known
him!" muttered Mr. Slocum, as he watched Mr. Taggett passing from the
office with his hat in his hand. During the ensuing ten or twelve
days Mr. Slocum never wholly succeeded in extricating himself from
the foggy uncertainty generated by that one brief interview. From the
moment Mr. Taggett was assigned a bench under the sheds, Mr. Slocum
saw little or nothing of him.

Mr. Taggett took lodging in a room in one of the most crowded of
the low boarding-houses,--a room accommodating two beds besides his
own: the first occupied by a brother neophyte in marble-cutting, and
the second by a morose middle-aged man with one eyebrow a trifle
higher than the other, as if it had been wrenched out of line by the
strain of habitual intoxication. This man's name was Wollaston, and
he worked at Dana's.

Mr. Taggett's initial move was to make himself popular in the
marble yard, and especially at the tavern, where he spent money
freely, though not so freely as to excite any remark except that the
lad was running through pretty much all his small pay,--a
recklessness which was charitably condoned in Snelling's bar-room. He
formed multifarious friendships, and had so many sensible views on
the labor problem, advocating the general extinguishment of
capitalists, and so on, that his admittance to the Marble Workers'
Association resolved itself into merely a question of time. The old
prejudice against apprentices was already wearing off. The quiet,
evasive man of few words was now a loquacious talker, holding his own
with the hardest hitters, and very skillful in giving offense to no
one. "Whoever picks up Blake for a fool," Dexter remarked one night,
"will put him down again." Not a shadow of suspicion followed Mr.
Taggett in his various comings and goings. He seemed merely a
good-natured, intelligent devil; perhaps a little less devilish and a
trifle more intelligent than the rest, but not otherwise different.
Denyven, Peters, Dexter, Willson, and others in and out of the Slocum
clique were Blake's sworn friends. In brief, Mr. Taggett had the
amplest opportunities to prosecute his studies. Only for a pained
look which sometimes latterly shot into his eyes, as he worked at the
bench, or as he walked alone in the street, one would have imagined
that he was thoroughly enjoying the half-vagabond existence.

The supposition would have been erroneous, for in the progress of
those fourteen days' apprenticeship Mr. Taggett had received a wound
in the most sensitive part of his nature: he had been forced to give
up what no man ever relinquishes without a wrench,--his own idea.

With the exception of an accident in Dana's Mill, by which
Torrini's hand had been so badly mangled that amputation was deemed
necessary, the two weeks had been eventless outside of Mr. Taggett's
personal experience. What that experience was will transpire in its
proper place. Margaret was getting daily notes from Richard, and Mr.
Slocum, overburdened with the secret of Mr. Taggett's presence in the
yard,--a secret confined exclusively to Mr. Slocum, Richard, and
Justice Beemis,--was restlessly awaiting developments.

The developments came that afternoon when Mr. Taggett walked into
the office and startled Mr. Slocum, sitting at the desk. The two
words which Mr. Taggett then gravely and coldly whispered in Mr.
Slocum's ear were,--

"RICHARD SHACKFORD."






XIX





Mr. Slocum, who had partly risen from the chair, sank back into
his seat. "Good God!" he said, turning very pale. "Are you mad?"

Mr. Taggett realized the cruel shock which the pronouncing of that
name must have caused Mr. Slocum. Mr. Taggett had meditated his line
of action, and had decided that the most merciful course was
brusquely to charge young Shackford with the crime, and allow Mr.
Slocum to sustain himself for a while with the indignant disbelief
which would be natural to him, situated as he was. He would then in a
manner be prepared for the revelations which, if suddenly presented,
would crush him.

If Mr. Taggett was without imagination, as he claimed, he was not
without a certain feminine quickness of sympathy often found in
persons engaged in professions calculated to blunt the finer
sensibilities. In his intercourse with Mr. Slocum at the Shackford
house, Mr. Taggett had been won by the singular gentleness and
simplicity of the man, and was touched by his misfortune.

After his exclamation, Mr. Slocum did not speak for a moment or
two, but with his elbows resting on the edge of the desk sat
motionless, like a person stunned. Then he slowly lifted his face, to
which the color had returned, and making a movement with his right
hand as if he were sweeping away cobwebs in front of him rose from
the chair.

"You are simply mad," he said, looking Mr. Taggett squarely and
calmly in the eyes. "Are you aware of Mr. Richard Shackford's
character and his position here?"

"Precisely."

"Do you know that he is to marry my daughter?"

"I am very sorry for you, sir."

"You may spare me that. It is quite unnecessary. You have fallen
into some horrible delusion. I hope you will be able to explain it."

"I am prepared to do so, sir."

"Are you serious?"

"Very serious, Mr. Slocum."

"You actually imagine that Richard Shackford--Pshaw! It's simply
impossible!"

"I am too young a man to wish even to seem wiser than you, but my
experience has taught me that nothing is impossible."

"I begin to believe so myself. I suppose you have grounds, or
something you consider grounds, for your monstrous suspicion. What
are they? I demand to be fully informed of what you have been doing
in the yard, before you bring disgrace upon me and my family by
inconsiderately acting on some wild theory which perhaps ten words
can refute."

"I should be in the highest degree criminal, Mr. Slocum, if I were
to make so fearful an accusation against any man unless I had the
most incontestable evidence in my hands."

Mr. Taggett spoke with such cold-blooded conviction that a chill
crept over Mr. Slocum, in spite of him.

"What is the nature of this evidence?"

"Up to the present stage, purely circumstantial."

"I can imagine that," said Mr. Slocum, with a slight smile.

"But so conclusive as to require no collateral evidence. The
testimony of an eye-witness of the crime could scarcely add to my
knowledge of what occurred that Tuesday night in Lemuel Shackford's
house."

"Indeed, it is all so clear! But of course a few eye-witnesses
will turn up eventually," said Mr. Slocum, whose whiteness about the
lips discounted the assurance of his sarcasm.

"That is not improbable," returned Mr. Taggett.

"And meanwhile what are the facts?"

"They are not easily stated. I have kept a record of my work day
by day, since the morning I entered the yard. The memoranda are
necessarily confused, the important and the unimportant being jumbled
together; but the record as it stands will answer your question more
fully than I could, even if I had the time--which I have not--to go
over the case with you. I can leave these notes in your hands, if you
desire it. When I return from New York"--

"You are going to New York!" exclaimed Mr. Slocum, with a start.
"When?"

"This evening."

"If you lay a finger on Richard Shackford, you will make the
mistake of your life, Mr. Taggett!"

"I have other business there. Mr. Shackford will be in Stillwater
to-morrow night. He engaged a state-room on the Fall River boat this
morning."

"How can you know that?"

"Since last Tuesday none of his movements have been unknown to
me."

"Do you mean to say that you have set your miserable spies upon
him?" cried Mr. Slocum.

"I should not state the fact in just those words," Mr. Taggett
answered. "The fact remains."

"Pardon me," said Mr. Slocum. "I am not quite myself. Can you
wonder at it?"

"I do not wonder."

"Give me those papers you speak of, Mr. Taggett. I would like to
look through them. I see that you are a very obstinate person when
you have once got a notion into your head. Perhaps I can help you out
of your error before it is irreparable." Then, after hesitating a
second, Mr. Slocum added, "I may speak of this to my daughter?
Indeed, I could scarcely keep it from her."

"Perhaps it is better she should be informed."

"And Mr. Shackford, when he returns to-morrow?"

"If he broaches the subject of his cousin's death, I advise you to
avoid it."

"Why should I?"

"It might save you or Miss Slocum some awkwardness,--but you must
use your own discretion. As the matter stands it makes no difference
whether Mr. Shackford knows his position to-day or to-morrow. It is
too late for him to avail himself of the knowledge. Otherwise, of
course, I should not have given myself away in this fashion."

"Very well," said Mr. Slocum, with an impatient movement of his
shoulders; "neither I nor my daughter will open our lips on this
topic. In the mean while you are to take no further steps without
advising me. That is understood?"

"That is perfectly understood," returned Mr. Taggett, drawing a
narrow red note-book from the inner pocket of his workman's blouse,
and producing at the same time a small nickel-plated door-key. "This
is the key of Mr. Shackford's private workshop in the extension. I
have not been able to replace it on the mantel-shelf of his
sitting-room in Lime Street. Will you have the kindness to see that
it is done at once?"

A moment later Mr. Slocum stood alone in the office, with Mr.
Taggett's diary in his hand. It was one of those costly little
volumes--gilt-edged and bound in fragrant crushed Levant
morocco--with which city officials are annually supplied by a
community of grateful taxpayers.

The dark crimson of the flexible covers, as soft and slippery to
the touch as a snake's skin, was perhaps the fitting symbol of the
darker story that lay coiled within. With a gesture of repulsion, as
if some such fancy had flitted through his mind, Mr. Slocum tossed
the note-book on the desk in front of him, and stood a few minutes
moodily watching the _reflets_ of the crinkled leather as the
afternoon sunshine struck across it. Beneath his amazement and
indignation he had been chilled to the bone by Mr. Taggett's brutal
confidence. It was enough to chill one, surely; and in spite of
himself Mr. Slocum began to feel a certain indefinable dread of that
little crimson-bound book.

Whatever it contained, the reading of those pages was to be a
repellent task to him; it was a task to which he could not bring
himself at the moment; to-night, in the privacy of his own chamber,
he would sift Mr. Taggett's baleful fancies. Thus temporizing, Mr.
Slocum dropped the volume into his pocket, locked the office door
behind him, and wandered down to Dundon's drug-store to kill the
intervening hour before supper-time. Dundon's was the aristocratic
lounging place of the village,--the place where the only genuine
Havana cigars in Stillwater were to be had, and where the favored
few, the initiated, could get a dash of hochheimer or cognac with
their soda-water.

At supper, that evening, Mr. Slocum addressed scarcely a word to
Margaret, and Margaret was also silent. The days were dragging
heavily with her; she was missing Richard. Her own daring travels had
never extended beyond Boston or Providence; and New York, with
Richard in it, seemed drearily far away. Mr. Slocum withdrew to his
chamber shortly after nine o'clock, and, lighting the pair of candles
on the dressing-table, began his examination of Mr. Taggett's
memoranda.

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