The Stillwater Tragedy
Page 5
V
The humblest painter of real life, if he could have his desire,would select a picturesque background for his figures; but eventshave an inexorable fashion for choosing their own landscape. In thepresent instance it is reluctantly conceded that there are few uglieror more commonplace towns in New England than Stillwater,--astraggling, overgrown village, with whose rural aspects are curiouslyblended something of the grimness and squalor of certain shabby cityneighborhoods. Being of comparatively recent date, the place has noneof those colonial associations which, like sprigs of lavender in anold chest of drawers, are a saving grace to other quite as drearynooks and corners.
Here and there at what is termed the West End is a neat brickmansion with garden attached, where nature asserts herself in dahliasand china-asters; but the houses are mostly frame houses that havetaken a prevailing dingy tint from the breath of the tall chimneyswhich dominate the village. The sidewalks in the more aristocraticquarter are covered with a thin, elastic paste of asphalt, worn downto the gravel in patches, and emitting in the heat of the day anastringent, bituminous odor. The population is chiefly of the roughersort, such as breeds in the shadow of foundries and factories, and ifthe Protestant pastor and the fatherly Catholic priest, whoserespective lots are cast there, have sometimes the sense of beingmissionaries dropped in the midst of a purely savage community, thedelusion is not wholly unreasonable.
The irregular heaps of scoria that have accumulated in thevicinity of the iron works give the place an illusive air ofantiquity; bit it is neither ancient nor picturesque. The oldest andmost pictorial thing in Stillwater is probably the marble yard,around three sides of which the village may be said to have sproutedup rankly, bearing here and there an industrial blossom in the shapeof an iron-mill or a cardigan-jacket manufactory. Rowland Slocum, aman of considerable refinement, great kindness of heart, and noforce, inherited the yard from his father, and a the period thisnarrative opens (the summer of 187-) was its sole proprietor andnominal manager, the actual manager being Richard Shackford, aprospective partner in the business and the betrothed of Mr. Slocum'sdaughter Margaret.
Forty years ago every tenth person in Stillwater was either aShackford or a Slocum. Twenty years later both names were nearlyextinct there. That fatality which seems to attend certain NewEngland families had stripped every leaf but two from the Shackfordbranch. These were Lemuel Shackford, then about forty-six, andRichard Shackford, aged four. Lemuel Shackford had laid up acompetency as ship-master in the New York and Calcutta trade, and in1852 had returned to his native village, where he found his name andstock represented only by little Dick, a very cheerful orphan, whostared complacently with big blue eyes at fate, and made mud-pies inthe lane whenever he could elude the vigilance of the kindly oldwoman who had taken him under her roof. This atom of humanity, bysome strange miscalculation of nature, was his cousin.
The strict devotion to his personal interests which had enabledMr. Shackford to acquire a fortune thus early caused him to lookaskance at a penniless young kinsman with stockings down at heel, anda straw hat three sizes too large for him set on the back of hishead. But Mr. Shackford was ashamed to leave little Dick a burdenupon the hands of a poor woman of no relationship whatever to thechild; so little Dick was transferred to that dejected house whichhas already been described, and was then known as the Sloper house.
Here, for three of four years, Dick grew up, as neglected as aweed, and every inch as happy. It should be mentioned that for thefirst year or so a shock-headed Cicely from the town-farm hadapparently been hired not to take care of him. But Dick asked nothingbetter than to be left to his own devices, which, moreover, wereinnocent enough. He would sit all day in the lane at the front gatepottering with a bit of twig or a case-knife in the soft clay. Fromtime to time passers-by observed that the child was not makingmud-pies, but tracing figures, comic or grotesque as might happen,and always quite wonderful for their lack of resemblance to anythinghuman. That patch of reddish-brown clay was his sole resource, hisslate, his drawing-book, and woe to anybody who chanced to walk overlittle Dick's arabesques. Patient and gentle in his acceptance of theworld's rebuffs, this he would not endure. He was afraid of Mr.Shackford, yet one day, when the preoccupied man happened to trampleon a newly executed hieroglyphic, the child rose to his feet whitewith rage, his fingers clenched, and such a blue fire flashing in theeyes that Mr. Shackford drew back aghast.
"Why, it's a little devil!"
While Shackford junior was amusing himself with his primitivebas-reliefs, Shackford senior amused himself with his lawsuits. Fromthe hour when he returned to the town until the end of his days Mr.Shackford was up to his neck in legal difficulties. Now he resisted abetterment assessment, and fought the town; now he secured aninjunction on the Miantowona Iron Works, and fought the corporation.He was understood to have a perpetual case in equity before theMarine Court in New York, to which city he made frequent andunannounced journeys. His immediate neighbors stood in terror of him.He was like a duelist, on the alert to twist the slightest thing intoa _casus belli_. The law was his rapier, his recreation, and hewas willing to bleed for it.
Meanwhile that fairy world of which every baby becomes a Columbusso soon as it is able to walk remained an undiscovered continent tolittle Dick. Grim life looked in upon him as he lay in the cradle.The common joys of childhood were a sealed volume to him. A singleincident of those years lights up the whole situation. A vague rumorhad been blown to Dick of a practice of hanging up stockings atChristmas. It struck his materialistic mind as a rather senselessthing to do; but nevertheless he resolved to try it one ChristmasEve. He lay awake a long while in the frosty darkness, skepticallywaiting for something remarkable to happen; once he crawled out ofthe cot-bed and groped his way to the chimney place. The next morninghe was scarcely disappointed at finding nothing in the piteous littlestocking, except the original holes.
The years that stole silently over the heads of the old man andthe young child in Welch's Court brought a period of wild prosperityto Stillwater. The breath of war blew the forges to a white heat, andthe baffling problem of the mediaeval alchemists was solved. The basermetals were transmuted into gold. A disastrous, prosperous time, withthe air rent periodically by the cries of newsboys as battles werefought, and by the roll of the drum in the busy streets as freshrecruits were wanted. Glory and death to the Southward, and at theNorth pale women in black.
All which interested Dick mighty little. After he had learned toread at the district school, he escaped into another world. Twolights were now generally seen burning of a night in the Shackfordhouse: one on the ground-floor where Mr. Shackford sat mouthing hiscontracts and mortgages, and weaving his webs like a great, lean,gray spider; and the other in the north gable, where Dick hung over atattered copy of Robinson Crusoe by the flicker of the candle-endswhich he had captured during the day.
Little Dick was little Dick no more: a tall, heavily built blondboy, with a quiet, sweet disposition, that at first offeredtemptations to the despots of the playground; but a sudden flaring uponce or twice of that unexpected spirit which had broken out in hisbabyhood brought him immunity from serious persecution.
The boy's home life at this time would have seemed pathetic to anobserver,--the more pathetic, perhaps, in that Dick himself was notaware of its exceptional barrenness. The holidays that bring newbrightness to the eyes of happier children were to him simply dayswhen he did not go to school, and was expected to provide an extraquantity of kindling wood. He was housed, and fed, and clothed, aftera fashion, but not loved. Mr. Shackford did not ill-treat the lad, inthe sense of beating him; he merely neglected him. Every year the manbecame more absorbed in his law cases and his money, whichaccumulated magically. He dwelt in a cloud of calculations. Thoughall his interests attached him to the material world, his dry,attenuated body seemed scarcely a part of it.
"Shackford, what are you going to do with that scapegrace ofyours?"
It was Mr. Leonard Tappleton who ventured the question.
Fewpersons dared to interrogate Mr. Shackford on his private affairs.
"I am going to make a lawyer of him," said Mr. Shackford,crackling his finger-joints like stiff parchment.
"You couldn't do better. You _ought_ to have an attorney inthe family."
"Just so," assented Mr. Shackford, dryly. "I could throw a bit ofbusiness in his way now and then,--eh?"
"You could make his fortune, Shackford. I don't see but you mightemploy him all the time. When he was not fighting the corporations,you might keep him at it suing you for his fees."
"Very good, very good indeed," responded Mr. Shackford, with asmile in which his eyes took no share, it was merely a momentarycurling up of crisp wrinkles. He did not usually smile at otherpeople's pleasantries; but when a person worth three or four hundredthousand dollars condescends to indulge a joke, it is not to bepassed over like that of a poor relation. "Yes, yes," muttered theold man, as he stooped and picked up a pin, adding it to a row ofsimilarly acquired pins which gave the left lapel of his threadbarecoat the appearance of a miniature harp, "I shall make a lawyer ofhim."
It had long been settled in Mr. Shackford's mind that Richard, sosoon as he had finished his studies, should enter the law-office ofBlandmann & Sharpe, a firm of rather sinister reputation in SouthMillville.
At fourteen Richard's eyes had begun to open on the situation; atfifteen he saw very clearly; and one day, without much preliminaryformulating of his plan, he decided on a step that had been taken byevery male Shackford as far back as tradition preserves the record ofhis family.
A friendship had sprung up between Richard and one William Durgin,a school-mate. This Durgin was a sallow, brooding boy, a year olderthan himself. The two lads were antipodal in disposition,intelligence, and social standing; for though Richard went poorlyclad, the reflection of his cousin's wealth gilded him. Durgin wasthe son of a washerwoman. An intimacy between the two would perhapshave been unlikely but for one fact: it was Durgin's mother who hadgiven little Dick a shelter at the period of his parents' death.Though the circumstance did not lie within the pale of Richard'spersonal memory, he acknowledged the debt by rather insisting onDurgin's friendship. It was William Durgin, therefore, who waselected to wait upon Mr. Shackford on a certain morning which foundthat gentleman greatly disturbed by an unprecedentedoccurrence,--Richard had slept out of the house the previous night.
Durgin was the bearer of a note which Mr. Shackford received insome astonishment, and read deliberately, blinking with weak eyesbehind the glasses. Having torn off the blank page and laid it asidefor his own more economical correspondence (the rascal had actuallyused a whole sheet to write ten words!), Mr. Shackford turned, andwith the absorbed air of a naturalist studying some abnormal buggazed over the steel bow of his spectacles at Durgin.
"Skit!"
Durgin hastily retreated.
"There's a poor lawyer saved," muttered the old man, taking downhis overcoat from a peg behind the door, and snapping off a shred oflint on the collar with his lean forefinger. Then his face relaxed,and an odd grin diffused a kind of wintry glow over it.
Richard had run away to sea.