The Stillwater Tragedy

by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  XVIII

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

  On the conclusion of the strike, Richard had returned, in thehighest spirits, to his own rooms in Lime Street; but the quiet weekthat followed found him singularly depressed. His nerves had beenstrung to their utmost tension during those thirteen days ofsuspense; he had assumed no light responsibility in the matter ofclosing the yard, and there had been moments when the task ofsustaining Mr. Slocum had appeared almost hopeless. Now that thestrain was removed a reaction set in, and Richard felt himselfunnerved by the fleeing shadow of the trouble which had not causedhim to flinch so long as it faced him.

  On the morning and at the moment when Mary Hennessey was pushingopen the scullery door of the house in Welch's Court, and was aboutto come upon the body of the forlorn old man lying there in hisnight-dress, Richard sat eating his breakfast in a silent andpreoccupied mood. He had retired very late the previous night, andhis lack-lustre eyes showed the effect of insufficient sleep. Hissingle fellow-boarder, Mr. Pinkham, had not returned from hiscustomary early walk, and only Richard and Mrs. Spooner, thelandlady, were at table. The former was in the act of lifting thecoffee-cup to his lips, when the school-master burst excitedly intothe room.

  "Old Mr. Shackford is dead!" he exclaimed, dropping into a chairnear the door. "There's a report down in the village that he has beenmurdered. I don't know if it is true.... God forgive myabruptness! I didn't think!" and Mr. Pinkham turned an apologeticface towards Richard, who sat there deathly pale, holding the cuprigidly within an inch or two of his lip, and staring blankly intospace like a statue.

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

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

  Richard caught up his hat from a table, and hurried to Welch'sCourt. Before reaching the house he had somewhat recovered hisoutward composure; but he was still pale and internally muchagitated, for he had received a great shock, as Lawyer Perkinsafterwards observed to Mr. Ward in the reading-room of the tavern.Both these gentlemen were present when Richard arrived, as were alsoseveral of the immediate neighbors and two constables. The latterwere guarding the door against the crowd, which had already begun tocollect 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 facade of the house,which seemed to have taken on a remote, bewildered expression, as ifit had an inarticulate sense of the horror within. The men ceasedtheir whispered conversation as Richard approached, and respectfullymoved aside to let him pass.

  Nothing had been changed in the cheerless room on the groundfloor, with its veneered mahogany furniture and its yellowish leprouswall-paper, peeling off at the seams here and there. A cane-seatedchair, overturned near the table, had been left untouched, and thebody was still lying in the position in which the Hennessey girl haddiscovered it. A strange chill--something unlike any atmosphericalsharpness, a chill that seemed to exhale from the thin, pinchednostrils--permeated the apartment. The orioles were singing madlyoutside, their vermilion bosoms glowing like live coals against thetender green of the foliage, and appearing to break into flame asthey took sudden flights hither and thither; but within all wasstill. On entering the chamber Richard was smitten by thesilence,--that silence which shrouds the dead, and is like no other.Lemuel Shackford had not been kind or cousinly; he had blightedRichard's childhood with harshness and neglect, and had lately heapedcruel insult upon him; but as he stood there alone, and gazed for amoment at the firmly shut lips, upon which the mysterious white dustof death had already settled,--the lips that were never to utter anymore bitter things,--the tears gathered in Richard's eyes and ranslowly down his cheeks. After all said and done, Lemuel Shackford washis kinsman, and blood is thicker than water!

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

  The investigation completed, there were endless details to attendto,--papers to be hurriedly examined and sealed, and arrangementsmade for the funeral on the succeeding day. These matters occupiedRichard 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, withfingers nearly as icy as his own.

  "It is unspeakably sad," answered Richard,--"the saddest thing Iever 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 hasbeen stated, Mr. Taggett arrived in Stillwater, and installed himselfin Welch's Court, to the wonder of many in the village, who would nothave slept a night in that house, with only a servant in the northgable, for half the universe. Mr. Taggett was a person who did notallow 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 drivingrapidly along the turnpike sometime near daybreak, on Wednesday, waspresumably the man who could tell him all about it. But it did notprove so. Neither Thomas Blufton, nor William Durgin, nor any of thetramps subsequently obliged to drop into autobiography could beconnected with the affair.

  These first failures served to stimulate Mr. Taggett; it requireda complex case to stir his ingenuity and sagacity. That the presentwas not a complex case he was still convinced, after four days'futile labor upon it. Mr. Shackford had been killed--either withmalice prepense or on the spur of the moment--for his money. Thekilling had likely enough not been premeditated; the old man hadprobably opposed the robbery. Now, among the exceptionally roughpopulation of the town there were possibly fifty men who would nothave hesitated to strike down Mr. Shackford if he had caught them_flagrante delicto_ and resisted them, or attempted to call forsuccor. That the crime was committed by some one in Stillwater or inthe neighborhood Mr. Taggett had never doubted since the day of hisarrival. The clumsy manner in which the staple had been wrenched fromthe scullery door showed the absence of a professional hand. Then thefact that the deceased was in the habit of keeping money in hisbedchamber was a fact well known in the village, and not likely to beknown outside of it, though of course it might have been. It wasclearly necessary for Mr. Taggett to carry his investigation into theworkshops and among the haunts of the class which was indubitably tofurnish him with the individual he wanted. Above all, it wasnecessary that the investigation should be secret. An obstacleobtruded itself here: everybody in Stillwater knew everybody, and astranger appearing on the streets or dropping frequently into thetavern would not escape comment.

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

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

  Three days after his departure Mr. Taggett himself leftStillwater, having apparently given up the case; a proceeding whichwas severely criticized, not only in the columns of The StillwaterGazette, but by the townsfolks at large, who immediately relapsedinto a state of apprehension approximating that of the morning whenthe crime was discovered. Mr. Pinkham, who was taking tea thatevening at the Danas', threw the family into a panic by asserting hisbelief that this was merely the first of a series of artisticassassinations in the manner of those Memorable Murders recorded byDe Quincey. Mr. Pinkham may have said this to impress the four Danagirls with the variety of his reading, but the recollection of DeQuincey's harrowing paper had the effect of so unhinging the youngschool-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. Thenew hand, who had come on foot from South Millville, at which town hehad been set down by the seven o'clock express that morning, wasplaced in the apprentice department,--there were five or sixapprentices now. Though all this was part of an understoodarrangement, Mr. Slocum nearly doubted the fidelity of his own eyeswhen Mr. Taggett, a smooth-faced young fellow of one and twenty, ifso old, with all the traits of an ordinary workman down to theneglected fingernails, stepped up to the desk to have the name ofBlake entered on the pay-roll. Either by chance or by design, Mr.Taggett had appeared but seldom on the streets of Stillwater; the fewpersons who had had anything like familiar intercourse with him inhis professional capacity were precisely the persons with whom hispresent movements were not likely to bring him into juxtaposition,and he ran slight risk of recognition by others. With his hairclosely cropped, and the overhanging brown mustache removed, the manwas not so much disguised as transformed. "I shouldn't have knownhim!" muttered Mr. Slocum, as he watched Mr. Taggett passing from theoffice with his hat in his hand. During the ensuing ten or twelvedays Mr. Slocum never wholly succeeded in extricating himself fromthe foggy uncertainty generated by that one brief interview. From themoment Mr. Taggett was assigned a bench under the sheds, Mr. Slocumsaw little or nothing of him.

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

  Mr. Taggett's initial move was to make himself popular in themarble yard, and especially at the tavern, where he spent moneyfreely, though not so freely as to excite any remark except that thelad was running through pretty much all his small pay,--arecklessness which was charitably condoned in Snelling's bar-room. Heformed multifarious friendships, and had so many sensible views onthe labor problem, advocating the general extinguishment ofcapitalists, and so on, that his admittance to the Marble Workers'Association resolved itself into merely a question of time. The oldprejudice against apprentices was already wearing off. The quiet,evasive man of few words was now a loquacious talker, holding his ownwith the hardest hitters, and very skillful in giving offense to noone. "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 agood-natured, intelligent devil; perhaps a little less devilish and atrifle more intelligent than the rest, but not otherwise different.Denyven, Peters, Dexter, Willson, and others in and out of the Slocumclique were Blake's sworn friends. In brief, Mr. Taggett had theamplest opportunities to prosecute his studies. Only for a painedlook which sometimes latterly shot into his eyes, as he worked at thebench, or as he walked alone in the street, one would have imaginedthat he was thoroughly enjoying the half-vagabond existence.

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

  With the exception of an accident in Dana's Mill, by whichTorrini's hand had been so badly mangled that amputation was deemednecessary, the two weeks had been eventless outside of Mr. Taggett'spersonal experience. What that experience was will transpire in itsproper place. Margaret was getting daily notes from Richard, and Mr.Slocum, overburdened with the secret of Mr. Taggett's presence in theyard,--a secret confined exclusively to Mr. Slocum, Richard, andJustice Beemis,--was restlessly awaiting developments.

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

  "RICHARD SHACKFORD."