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The Stillwater Tragedy

T >> Thomas Bailey Aldrich >> The Stillwater Tragedy




"I haven't any, sir. I had a hundred in my sea-chest, but that was
lost,--pencillings of old archways, cathedral spires, bits of frieze,
and such odds and ends as took my fancy in the ports we touched at. I
recollect one bit. I think I could do it for you now. Shall I?"

Mr. Slocum nodded assent, smiling at the young fellow's
enthusiasm, and only partially suspecting his necessity. Richard
picked up a pen and began scratching on a letter sheet which lay on
the desk. He was five or six minutes at the work, during which the
elder man watched him with an amused expression.

"It's a section of cornice on the façade of the Hindoo College at
Calcutta," said Richard, handing him the paper,--"no, it's the
custom-house. I forget which; but it doesn't matter."

The amused look gradually passed out of Mr. Slocum's countenance
as he examined the sketch. It was roughly but clearly drawn, and full
of facility. "Why, that's very clever!" he said, holding it at
arms'-length; and then, with great gravity, "I hope you are not a
genius, Richard; that would be too much of a fine thing. If you are
not, you can be of service to me in my plans."

Richard laughingly made haste to declare that to the best of his
knowledge and belief he was not a genius, and it was decided on the
spot that Richard should assist Mr. Simms, the bookkeeper, and
presently try his hand at designing ornamental patterns for the
carvers, Mr. Slocum allowing him apprentice wages until the quality
of his work should be ascertained.

"It is very little," said Mr. Slocum, "but it will pay your board,
if you do not live at home."

"I shall not remain at my cousin's," Richard replied, "if you call
that home."

"I can imagine it is not much of a home. Your cousin, not to put
too fine a point on it, is a wretch."

"I am sorry to hear you say that, sir; he's my only living
kinsman."

"You are fortunate in having but one, then. However, I am wrong to
abuse him to you; but I cannot speak of him with moderation, he has
just played me such a despicable trick. Look here."

Mr. Slocum led Richard to the door, and pointing to a row of new
workshops which extended the entire length of one side of the marble
yard, said,--

"I built these last spring. After the shingles were on we
discovered that the rear partition, for a distance of seventy-five
feet, overlapped two inches on Shackford's meadow. I was ready to
drop when I saw it, your cousin is such an unmanageable old fiend. Of
course I went to him immediately, and what do you think? He demanded
five hundred dollars for that strip of land! Five hundred dollars for
a few inches of swamp meadow not worth ten dollars the acre! 'Then
take your disreputable old mill off my property!' says Shackford,--he
called it a disreputable old mill! I was hasty, perhaps, and I told
him to go to the devil. He said he would, and he did; for he went to
Blandmann. When the lawyers got hold of it, they bothered the life
out of me; so I just moved the building forward two inches, at an
expense of seven hundred dollars. Then what does the demon do but
board up all my windows opening on the meadow! Richard, I make it a
condition that you shall not lodge at Shackford's."

"Nothing could induce me to live another day in the same house
with him, sir," answered Richard, suppressing an inclination to
smile; and then seriously, "His bread is bitter."

Richard went back with a light heart to Welch's Court. At the gate
of the marble yard he met William Durgin returning to work. The
steam-whistle had sounded the call, and there was no time for
exchange of words; so Richard gave his comrade a bright nod and
passed by. Durgin turned and stared after him.

"Looks as if Slocum had taken him on; but it never can be as
apprentice; he wouldn't dare do it."

Mr. Shackford had nearly finished his frugal dinner when Richard
entered. "If you can't hit it to be in at your meals," said Mr.
Shackford, helping himself absently to the remaining chop, "perhaps
you had better stop away altogether."

"I can do that now, cousin," replied Richard sunnily. "I have
engaged with Slocum."

The old man laid down his knife and fork.

"With Slocum! A Shackford a miserable marble-chipper!"

There was so little hint of the aristocrat in Lemuel Shackford's
sordid life and person that no one suspected him of even self-esteem.
He went as meanly dressed as a tramp, and as careless of contemporary
criticism; yet clear down in his liver, or somewhere in his anatomy,
he nourished an odd abstract pride in the family Shackford. Heaven
knows why! To be sure, it dated far back; its women had always been
virtuous, and its men, if not always virtuous, had always been
ship-captains. But beyond this the family had never amounted to
anything, and now there was so very little left of it. For Richard as
Richard Lemuel cared nothing; for Richard as a Shackford he had a
chaotic feeling that defied analysis and had never before risen to
the surface. It was therefore with a disgust entirely apart from the
hatred of Slocum or regard for Richard that the old man exclaimed, "A
Shackford a miserable marble-chipper!"

"That is better than hanging around the village with my hands in
my pockets. Isn't it?"

"I don't know that anybody has demanded that you should hang
around the village."

"I ought to go away, you mean? But I have found work here, and I
might not find it elsewhere."

"Stillwater is not the place to begin life in. It's the place to
go away from, and come back to."

"Well, I have come back."

"And how? With one shirt and a lot of bad sailor habits."

"My one shirt is my only very bad habit," said Richard, with a
laugh,--he could laugh now,--"and I mean to get rid of that."

Mr. Shackford snapped his fingers disdainfully.

"You ought to have stuck to the sea; that's respectable. In ten
years you might have risen to be master of a bark; that would have
been honorable. You might have gone down in a gale,--you probably
would,--and that would have been fortunate. But a stone-cutter! You
can understand," growled Mr. Shackford, reaching out for his straw
hat, which he put on and crushed over his brows, "I don't keep a
boarding-house for Slocum's hands."

"Oh, I'm far from asking it!" cried Richard. "I am thankful for
the two nights' shelter I have had."

"That's some of your sarcasm, I suppose," said Mr. Shackford, half
turning, with his hands on the door-knob.

"No, it is some of my sincerity. I am really obliged to you. You
weren't very cordial, to be sure, but I did not deserve cordiality."

"You have figured that out correctly."

"I want to begin over again, you see, and start fair."

"Then begin by dropping Slocum."

"You have not given me a chance to tell you what the arrangement
is. However, it's irrevocable."

"I don't want to hear. I don't care a curse, so long as it is an
arrangement," and Mr. Shackford hurried out of the room, slamming the
door behind him.

Then Richard, quite undisturbed by his cousin's unreasonableness,
sat himself down to eat the last meal he was ever to eat under that
roof,--a feat which his cousin's appetite had rendered comparatively
easy.

While engaged in this, Richard resolved in his mind several
questions as to his future abode. He could not reconcile his thought
to any of the workingmen's boarding-houses, of which there were five
or six in the slums of the village, where the doorways were greasy,
and women flitted about in the hottest weather with thick woolen
shawls over their heads. Yet his finances did not permit him to
aspire to lodgings much more decent. If he could only secure a small
room somewhere in a quiet neighborhood. Possibly Mrs. Durgin would
let him have a chamber in her cottage. He was beginning life over
again, and it struck him as nearly an ideal plan to begin it on the
identical spot where he had, in a manner, made his first start.
Besides, there was William Durgin for company, when the long nights
of the New England winter set in. The idea smiled so pleasantly in
Richard's fancy that he pushed the plate away from him impatiently,
and picked up his hat which lay on the floor beside the chair.

That evening he moved from the Shackford house to Mrs. Durgin's
cottage in Cross Street. It was not an imposing ceremony. With a
small brown-paper parcel under his arm, he walked from one threshold
to the other, and the thing was done.






VIII





The six months which followed Richard's installment in the office
at Slocum's Yard were so crowded with novel experience that he
scarcely noted their flight. The room at the Durgins, as will
presently appear, turned out an unfortunate arrangement; but
everything else had prospered. Richard proved an efficient aid to Mr.
Simms, who quietly shifted the pay-roll to the younger man's
shoulders. This was a very complicated account to keep, involving as
it did a separate record of each employee's time and special work. An
ancient bookkeeper parts lightly with such trifles when he has a
capable assistant. It also fell to Richard's lot to pay the hands on
Saturdays. William Durgin blinked his surprise on the first occasion,
as he filed in with the others and saw Richard posted at the desk,
with the pay-roll in his hand and the pile of greenbacks lying in
front of him.

"I suppose you'll be proprietor next," remarked Durgin, that
evening, at the supper table.

"When I am, Will," answered Richard cheerily, "you will be on the
road to foreman of the finishing shop."

"Thank you," said Durgin, not too graciously. It grated on him to
play the part of foreman, even in imagination, with Dick Shackford as
proprietor. Durgin could not disconnect his friend from that seedy,
half-crestfallen figure to whom, a few months earlier, he had given
elementary instruction on the Marble Workers' Association.

Richard did not find his old schoolmate so companionable as memory
and anticipation had painted him. The two young men moved on
different levels. Richard's sea life, now that he had got at a
sufficient distance from it, was a perspective full of pleasant
color; he had a taste for reading, a thirst to know things, and his
world was not wholly shut in by the Stillwater horizon. It was still
a pitifully narrow world, but wide compared with Durgin's, which
extended no appreciable distance in any direction from the Stillwater
hotel. He spent his evenings chiefly there, returning home late at
night, and often in so noisy a mood as to disturb Richard, who slept
in an adjoining apartment. This was an annoyance; and it was an
annoyance to have Mrs. Durgin coming to him with complaints of
William. Other matters irritated Richard. He had contrived to
replenish his wardrobe, and the sunburn was disappearing from his
hands, which the nature of his occupation left soft and unscarred.
Durgin was disposed at times to be sarcastic on these changes, but
always stopped short of actual offense; for he remembered that
Shackford when a boy, amiable and patient as he was, had had a
tiger's temper at bottom. Durgin had seen it roused once or twice,
and even received a chance sweep of the paw. Richard liked Durgin's
rough wit as little as Durgin relished Richard's good-natured
bluntness. It was a mistake, that trying to pick up the dropped
thread of old acquaintance.

As soon as the permanency of his position was assured, and his
means warranted the step, Richard transported himself and his effects
to a comfortable chamber in the same house with Mr. Pinkham, the
school-master, the perpetual falsetto of whose flute was positively
soothing after four months of William Durgin's bass. Mr. Pinkham
having but one lung, and that defective, played on the flute.

"You see what you've gone and done, William," remarked Mrs. Durgin
plaintively, "with your ways. There goes the quietest young man in
Stillwater, and four dollars a week!"

"There goes a swell, you'd better say. He was always a proud
beggar; nobody was ever good enough for him."

"You shouldn't say that, William. I could cry, to lose him and his
cheerfulness out of the house," and Mrs. Durgin began to whimper.

"Wait till he's out of luck again, and he'll come back to us fast
enough. That's when his kind remembers their friends. Blast him! he
can't even take a drop of beer with a chum at the tavern."

"And right, too. There's beer enough taken at the tavern without
him."

"If you mean me, mother, I'll get drunk tonight."

"No, no!" cried Mrs. Durgin, pleadingly, "I didn't mean you,
William, but Peters and that set."

"I thought you couldn't mean me," said William, thrusting his
hands into the pockets of his monkey-jacket, and sauntering off in
the direction of the Stillwater hotel, where there was a choice
company gathered, it being Saturday night, and the monthly meeting of
the Union.

Mr. Slocum had wasted no time in organizing a shop for his
experiment in ornamental carving. Five or six men, who had worked
elsewhere at this branch, were turned over to the new department,
with Stevens as foreman and Richard as designer. Very shortly Richard
had as much as he could do to furnish the patterns required. These
consisted mostly of scrolls, wreaths, and mortuary dove-wings for
head-stones. Fortunately for Richard he had no genius, but plenty of
a kind of talent just abreast with Mr. Slocum's purpose. As the
carvers became interested in their work, they began to show Richard
the respect and good-will which at first had been withheld, for they
had not quite liked being under the supervision of one who had not
served at the trade. His youth had also told against him; but
Richard's pleasant, off-hand manner quickly won them. He had come in
contact with rough men on shipboard; he had studied their ways, and
he knew that with all their roughness there is no class so sensitive.
This insight was of great service to him. Stevens, who had perhaps
been the least disposed to accept Richard, was soon his warm ally.

"See what a smooth fist the lad has!" he said one day holding up a
new drawing to the shop. "A man with a wreath of them acorns on his
head-stone oughter be perfectly happy, damn him!"

It was, however, an anchor with a broken chain pendent--a design
for a monument to the late Captain Septimius Salter, who had parted
his cable at sea--which settled Richard's status with Stevens.

"Boys, that Shackford is what I call a born genei."

After all, is not the one-eyed man who is king among the blind the
most fortunate of monarchs? Your little talent in a provincial
village looms a great deal taller than your mighty genius in a city.
Richard Whackford working for Rowland Slocum at Stillwater was
happier than Michaelangelo in Rome with Pope Julius II. at his back.
And Richard was the better paid, too!

One day he picked up a useful hint from a celebrated sculptor, who
had come to the village in search of marble for the base of a
soldiers' monument. Richard was laboriously copying a spray of fern,
the delicacy of which eluded his pencil. The sculptor stood a moment
silently observing him.

"Why do you spend an hour doing only passably well what you could
do perfectly in ten minutes?"

"I suppose it is because I am stupid, sir," said Richard.

"No stupid man ever suspected himself of being anything but
clever. You can draw capitally; but nature beats you out and out at
designing ferns. Just ask her to make you a fac-simile in plaster,
and see how handily she will lend herself to the job. Of course you
must help her a little."

"Oh, I am not above giving nature a lift," said Richard modestly.

"Lay a cloth on your table, place the fern on the cloth, and pour
a thin paste of plaster of Paris over the leaf,--do that gently, so
as not to disarrange the spray. When the plaster is set, there's your
mold; remove the leave, oil the matrix, and pour in fresh plaster.
When that is set, cut away tdhe mold carefully, and there's your
spray of fern, as graceful and perfect as if nature had done it all
by herself. You get the very texture of the leaf by this process."

After that, Richard made casts instead of drawings for the
carvers, and fancied he was doing a new thing, until he visited some
marble-works in the great city.

At this period, whatever change subsequently took place in his
feeling, Richard was desirous of establishing friendly relations with
his cousin. The young fellow's sense of kinship was singularly
strong, and it was only after several repulses at the door of the
Shackford house and on the street that he relinquished the hope of
placating the sour old man. At times Richard was moved almost to pity
him. Every day Mr. Shackford seemed to grow shabbier and more
spectral. He was a grotesque figure now, in his napless hat and
broken-down stock. The metal button-holes on his ancient waistcoat
had worn their way through the satin coverings, leaving here and
there a sparse fringe around the edges, and somehow suggesting little
bald heads. Looking at him, you felt that the inner man was as
threadbare and dilapidated as his outside; but in his lonely old age
he asked for no human sympathy or companionship, and, in fact, stood
in no need of either. With one devouring passion he set the world at
defiance. He loved his gold,--the metal itself, the weight an color
and touch of it. In his bedroom on the ground-floor Mr. Shackford
kept a small iron-clamped box filled to the lid with bright yellow
coins. Often, at the dead of night, with door bolted and curtain
down, he would spread out the glittering pieces on the table, and
bend over them with an amorous glow in his faded eyes. These were his
blond mistresses; he took a fearful joy in listening to their
rustling, muffle laughter as he drew them towards him with eager
hands. If at that instant a blind chanced to slam, or a footfall to
echo in the lonely court, then the withered old sultan would hurry
his slaves back into their iron-bound seraglio, and extinguish the
light. It would have been a wasted tenderness to pity him. He was
very happy in his own way, that Lemuel Shackford.






IX





Towards the close of his second year with Mr. Slocum, Richard was
assigned a work-room by himself, and relieved of his accountant's
duties. His undivided energies were demanded by the carving
department, which had proved a lucrative success.

The rear of the lot on which Mr. Slocum's house stood was shut off
from the marble yard by a high brick wall pierced with a private door
for Mr. Slocum's convenience. Over the kitchen in the extension,
which reached within a few feet of the wall, was a disused chamber,
approachable on the outside by a flight of steps leading to a
veranda. To this room Richard and his traps were removed. With a
round table standing in the center, with the plaster models arranged
on shelves and sketches in pencil and crayon tacked against the
whitewashed walls, the apartment was transformed into a delightful
atelier. An open fire-place, with a brace of antiquated iron-dogs
straddling the red brick hearth, gave the finishing touch. The
occupant was in easy communication with the yard, from which the busy
din of clinking chisels came u musically to his ear, and was still
beyond the reach of unnecessary interruption. Richard saw clearly all
the advantages of this transfer, but he was far form having any
intimation that he had made the most important move of his life.

The room had two doors: one opened on the veranda, and the other
into a narrow hall connecting the extension with the main building.
Frequently, that first week after taking possession, Richard detected
the sweep of a broom and the rustle of drapery in this passage-way,
the sound sometimes hushing itself quite close to the door, as if
some one had paused a moment just outside. He wondered whether it was
the servant-maid or Margaret Slocum, whom he knew very well by sight.
It was, in fact, Margaret, who was dying with the curiosity of
fourteen to peep into the studio, so carefully locked whenever the
young man left it,--dying with curiosity to see the workshop, and
standing in rather great awe of the workman.

In the home circle her father had a habit of speaking with deep
respect of young Shackford's ability, and once she had seen him at
their table,--at a Thanksgiving. On this occasion Richard had
appalled her by the solemnity of his shyness,--poor Richard, who was
so unused to the amenities of a handsomely served dinner, that the
chill which came over him cooled the Thanksgiving turkey on his
palate.

When it had been decided that he was to have the spare room for
his workshop, Margaret, with womanly officiousness, had swept it and
dusted it and demolished the cobwebs; but since then she had not been
able to obtain so much as a glimpse of the interior. A ten minutes'
sweeping had sufficed for the chamber, but the passage-way seemed in
quite an irreclaimable state, judging by the number of times it was
necessary to sweep it in the course of a few days. Now Margaret was
not an unusual mixture of timidity and daring; so one morning, about
a week after Richard was settled, she walked with quaking heart up to
the door of the studio, and knocked as bold as brass.

Richard opened the door, and smiled pleasantly at Margaret
standing on the threshold with an expression of demure defiance in
her face. Did Mr. Shackford want anything more in the way of pans and
pails for his plaster? No, Mr. Shackford had everything he required
of the kind. But would not Miss Margaret walk in? Yes, she would step
in for a moment, but with a good deal of indifference, though, giving
an air of chance to her settled determination to examine that room
from top to bottom.

Richard showed her his drawings and casts, and enlightened her on
all the simple mysteries of the craft. Margaret, of whom he was a
trifle afraid at first, amused him with her candor and sedateness,
seeming now a mere child, and now an elderly person gravely
inspecting matters. The frankness and simplicity were hers by nature,
and the oldish ways--notably her self-possession, so quick to assert
itself after an instant's forgetfulness--came perhaps of losing her
mother in early childhood, and the premature duties which that
misfortune entailed. She amused him, for she was only fourteen; but
she impressed him also, for she was Mr. Slocum's daughter. Yet it was
not her lightness, but her gravity, that made Richard smile to
himself.

"I am not interrupting you?" she asked presently.

"Not in the least," said Richard. "I am waiting for these molds to
harden. I cannot do anything until then."

"Papa says you are very clever," remarked Margaret, turning her
wide black eyes full upon him. _"Are_ you?"

"Far from it," replied Richard, laughing to veil his confusion,
"but I am glad your father thinks so."

"You should not be glad to have him think so," returned Margaret
reprovingly, "if you are not clever. I suppose you are, though. Tell
the truth, now."

"It is not fair to force a fellow into praising himself."

"You are trying to creep out!"

"Well, then, there are many cleverer persons than I in the world,
and a few not so clever."

"That won't do," said Margaret positively.

"I don't understand what you mean by cleverness, Miss Margaret.
There are a great many kinds and degrees. I can make fairly honest
patterns for the men to work by; but I am not an artist, if you mean
that."

"You are not an artist?"

"No; an artist creates, and I only copy, and that in a small way.
Any one can learn to prepare casts; but to create a bust or a
statue--that is to say, a fine one--a man must have genius."

"You have no genius?"

"Not a grain."

"I am sorry to hear that," said Margaret, with a disappointed
look. "But perhaps it will come," she added encouragingly. "I have
read that nearly all great artists and poets are almost always
modest. They know better than anybody else how far they fall short of
what they intend, and so they don't put on airs. You don't, either. I
like that in you. May be you have genius without knowing it, Mr.
Shackford."

"It is quite without knowing it, I assure you!" protested Richard,
with suppressed merriment. "What an odd girl!" he thought. "She is
actually talking to me like a mother!"

The twinkling light in the young man's eyes, or something that
jarred in his manner, caused Margaret at once to withdraw into
herself. She went silently about the room, examining the tools and
patterns; then, nearing the door, suddenly dropped Richard a quaint
little courtesy, and was gone.

This was the colorless beginning of a friendship that was destined
speedily to be full of tender lights and shadows, and to flow on with
unsuspected depth. For several days Richard saw nothing more of
Margaret, and scarcely thought of her. The strangle little figure was
fading out of his mind, when, one afternoon, it again appeared at his
door. This time Margaret had left something of her sedateness behind;
she struck Richard as being both less ripe and less immature than he
had fancied; she interested rather than amused him. Perhaps he had
been partially insulated by his own shyness on the first occasion,
and had caught only a confused and inaccurate impression of
Margaret's personality. She remained half an hour in the workshop,
and at her departure omitted the formal courtesy.

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