A sorely perplexed man sat there, bending over his papers by the
lamp-light. Mr. Taggett had established himself at the Shackford
house on his arrival, preferring it to the hotel, where he would have
been subjected to the curiosity of the guests and to endless
annoyances. Up to this moment, perhaps not a dozen persons in the
place had had more than a passing glimpse of him. He was a very busy
man, working at his desk from morning until night, and then taking
only a brief walk, for exercise in some unfrequented street. His
meals were sent in from the hotel to the Shackford house, where the
constables reported to him, and where he held protracted conferences
with Justice Beemis, Coroner Whidden, Lawyer Perkins, and a few
others, and declined to be interviewed by the local editor.
To the outside eye that weather-stained, faded old house appeared
a throbbing seat of esoteric intelligence. It was as if a hundred
invisible magnetic threads converged to a focus under that roof and
incessantly clicked out the most startling information,--information
which was never by any chance allowed to pass beyond the charmed
circle. The pile of letters which the mail brought to Mr. Taggett
every morning--chiefly anonymous suggestions, and offers of
assistance from lunatics in remote cities--was enough in itself to
exasperate a community.
Covertly at first, and then openly, Stillwater began seriously to
question Mr. Taggett's method of working up the case. The Gazette, in
a double-leaded leader, went so far as to compare him to a bird with
fine feathers and no song, and to suggest that perhaps the bird might
have sung if the inducement offered had been more substantial. A
singer of Mr. Taggett's plumage was not to be taught by such chaff as
five hundred dollars. Having killed his man, the editor proceeded to
remark that he would suspend judgment until next week.
As if to make perfect the bird comparison, Mr. Taggett, after
keeping the public in suspense for six days and nights, abruptly flew
away, with all the little shreds and straws of evidence he had picked
up, to build his speculative nest elsewhere.
The defection of Mr. Taggett caused a mild panic among a certain
portion of the inhabitants, who were not reassured by the statement
in the Gazette that the case would now be placed in the proper
hands,--the hand so the county constabulary. "Within a few days,"
said the editor in conclusion, "the matter will undoubtedly be
cleared up. At present we cannot say more;" and it would have puzzled
him very much to do so.
A week passed, and no fresh light was thrown upon the catastrophe,
nor did anything occur to rattle the usual surface of life in the
village. A man--it was Torrini, the Italian--got hurt in Dana's iron
foundry; one of Blufton's twin girls died; and Mr. Slocum took on a
new hand from out of town. That was all. Stillwater was the
Stillwater of a year ago, with always the exception of that shadow
lying upon it, and the fact that small boys who had kindling to get
in were careful to get it in before nightfall. It would appear that
the late Mr. Shackford had acquired a habit of lingering around
wood-piles after dark, and also of stealing into bed-chambers, where
little children were obliged to draw the sheets over their heads in
order not to see him.
The action of the county constabulary had proved quite as
mysterious and quite as barren of result as Mr. Taggett's had been.
They had worn his mantle of secrecy, and arrested the tramps over
again.
Another week dragged by, and the editorial prediction seemed as
far as ever from fulfillment. But on the afternoon which closed that
fortnight a very singular thing did happen. Mr. Slocum was sitting
alone in his office, which occupied the whole of a small building at
the right of the main gate to the marble works. When the door behind
him softly opened and a young man, whose dress covered with
stone-dust indicated his vocation, appeared on the threshold. He
hesitated a second, and then stepped into the room. Mr. Slocum turned
round with a swift, apprehensive air.
"You gave me a start! I believe I haven't any nerves left. Well?"
"Mr. Slocum, I have found the man."
The proprietor of the marble yard half rose from the desk in his
agitation.
"Who is it?" he asked beneath his breath.
The same doubt or irresolution which had checked the workman at
the threshold seemed again to have taken possession of him. It was
fully a moment before he gained the mastery over himself; but the
mastery was complete; for he leaned forward gravely, almost coldly,
and pronounced two words. A quick pallor overspread Mr. Slocum's
features.
"Good God!" he exclaimed, sinking back into the chair. "Are you
mad?"
V
The humblest painter of real life, if he could have his desire,
would select a picturesque background for his figures; but events
have an inexorable fashion for choosing their own landscape. In the
present instance it is reluctantly conceded that there are few uglier
or more commonplace towns in New England than Stillwater,--a
straggling, overgrown village, with whose rural aspects are curiously
blended something of the grimness and squalor of certain shabby city
neighborhoods. Being of comparatively recent date, the place has none
of those colonial associations which, like sprigs of lavender in an
old chest of drawers, are a saving grace to other quite as dreary
nooks and corners.
Here and there at what is termed the West End is a neat brick
mansion with garden attached, where nature asserts herself in dahlias
and china-asters; but the houses are mostly frame houses that have
taken a prevailing dingy tint from the breath of the tall chimneys
which dominate the village. The sidewalks in the more aristocratic
quarter are covered with a thin, elastic paste of asphalt, worn down
to the gravel in patches, and emitting in the heat of the day an
astringent, bituminous odor. The population is chiefly of the rougher
sort, such as breeds in the shadow of foundries and factories, and if
the Protestant pastor and the fatherly Catholic priest, whose
respective lots are cast there, have sometimes the sense of being
missionaries dropped in the midst of a purely savage community, the
delusion is not wholly unreasonable.
The irregular heaps of scoria that have accumulated in the
vicinity of the iron works give the place an illusive air of
antiquity; bit it is neither ancient nor picturesque. The oldest and
most pictorial thing in Stillwater is probably the marble yard,
around three sides of which the village may be said to have sprouted
up rankly, bearing here and there an industrial blossom in the shape
of an iron-mill or a cardigan-jacket manufactory. Rowland Slocum, a
man of considerable refinement, great kindness of heart, and no
force, inherited the yard from his father, and at the period this
narrative opens (the summer of 187-) was its sole proprietor and
nominal manager, the actual manager being Richard Shackford, a
prospective partner in the business and the betrothed of Mr. Slocum's
daughter Margaret.
Forty years ago every tenth person in Stillwater was either a
Shackford or a Slocum. Twenty years later both names were nearly
extinct there. That fatality which seems to attend certain New
England families had stripped every leaf but two from the Shackford
branch. These were Lemuel Shackford, then about forty-six, and
Richard Shackford, aged four. Lemuel Shackford had laid up a
competency as ship-master in the New York and Calcutta trade, and in
1852 had returned to his native village, where he found his name and
stock represented only by little Dick, a very cheerful orphan, who
stared complacently with big blue eyes at fate, and made mud-pies in
the lane whenever he could elude the vigilance of the kindly old
woman who had taken him under her roof. This atom of humanity, by
some strange miscalculation of nature, was his cousin.
The strict devotion to his personal interests which had enabled
Mr. Shackford to acquire a fortune thus early caused him to look
askance at a penniless young kinsman with stockings down at heel, and
a straw hat three sizes too large for him set on the back of his
head. But Mr. Shackford was ashamed to leave little Dick a burden
upon the hands of a poor woman of no relationship whatever to the
child; so little Dick was transferred to that dejected house which
has already been described, and was then known as the Sloper house.
Here, for three of four years, Dick grew up, as neglected as a
weed, and every inch as happy. It should be mentioned that for the
first year or so a shock-headed Cicely from the town-farm had
apparently been hired not to take care of him. But Dick asked nothing
better than to be left to his own devices, which, moreover, were
innocent enough. He would sit all day in the lane at the front gate
pottering with a bit of twig or a case-knife in the soft clay. From
time to time passers-by observed that the child was not making
mud-pies, but tracing figures, comic or grotesque as might happen,
and always quite wonderful for their lack of resemblance to anything
human. That patch of reddish-brown clay was his sole resource, his
slate, his drawing-book, and woe to anybody who chanced to walk over
little Dick's arabesques. Patient and gentle in his acceptance of the
world's rebuffs, this he would not endure. He was afraid of Mr.
Shackford, yet one day, when the preoccupied man happened to trample
on a newly executed hieroglyphic, the child rose to his feet white
with rage, his fingers clenched, and such a blue fire flashing in the
eyes that Mr. Shackford drew back aghast.
"Why, it's a little devil!"
While Shackford junior was amusing himself with his primitive
bas-reliefs, Shackford senior amused himself with his lawsuits. From
the 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 a
betterment assessment, and fought the town; now he secured an
injunction on the Miantowona Iron Works, and fought the corporation.
He was understood to have a perpetual case in equity before the
Marine Court in New York, to which city he made frequent and
unannounced journeys. His immediate neighbors stood in terror of him.
He was like a duelist, on the alert to twist the slightest thing into
a _casus belli_. The law was his rapier, his recreation, and he
was willing to bleed for it.
Meanwhile that fairy world of which every baby becomes a Columbus
so soon as it is able to walk remained an undiscovered continent to
little 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 single
incident of those years lights up the whole situation. A vague rumor
had been blown to Dick of a practice of hanging up stockings at
Christmas. It struck his materialistic mind as a rather senseless
thing to do; but nevertheless he resolved to try it one Christmas
Eve. He lay awake a long while in the frosty darkness, skeptically
waiting for something remarkable to happen; once he crawled out of
the cot-bed and groped his way to the chimney place. The next morning
he was scarcely disappointed at finding nothing in the piteous little
stocking, except the original holes.
The years that stole silently over the heads of the old man and
the young child in Welch's Court brought a period of wild prosperity
to Stillwater. The breath of war blew the forges to a white heat, and
the baffling problem of the mediæval alchemists was solved. The baser
metals were transmuted into gold. A disastrous, prosperous time, with
the air rent periodically by the cries of newsboys as battles were
fought, and by the roll of the drum in the busy streets as fresh
recruits were wanted. Glory and death to the Southward, and at the
North pale women in black.
All which interested Dick mighty little. After he had learned to
read at the district school, he escaped into another world. Two
lights were now generally seen burning of a night in the Shackford
house: one on the ground-floor where Mr. Shackford sat mouthing his
contracts and mortgages, and weaving his webs like a great, lean,
gray spider; and the other in the north gable, where Dick hung over a
tattered copy of Robinson Crusoe by the flicker of the candle-ends
which he had captured during the day.
Little Dick was little Dick no more: a tall, heavily built blond
boy, with a quiet, sweet disposition, that at first offered
temptations to the despots of the playground; but a sudden flaring up
once or twice of that unexpected spirit which had broken out in his
babyhood brought him immunity from serious persecution.
The boy's home life at this time would have seemed pathetic to an
observer,--the more pathetic, perhaps, in that Dick himself was not
aware of its exceptional barrenness. The holidays that bring new
brightness to the eyes of happier children were to him simply days
when he did not go to school, and was expected to provide an extra
quantity of kindling wood. He was housed, and fed, and clothed, after
a fashion, but not loved. Mr. Shackford did not ill-treat the lad, in
the sense of beating him; he merely neglected him. Every year the man
became more absorbed in his law cases and his money, which
accumulated magically. He dwelt in a cloud of calculations. Though
all 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 of
yours?"
It was Mr. Leonard Tappleton who ventured the question. Few
persons 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 in
the family."
"Just so," assented Mr. Shackford, dryly. "I could throw a bit of
business in his way now and then,--eh?"
"You could make his fortune, Shackford. I don't see but you might
employ 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 a
smile in which his eyes took no share, it was merely a momentary
curling up of crisp wrinkles. He did not usually smile at other
people's pleasantries; but when a person worth three or four hundred
thousand dollars condescends to indulge a joke, it is not to be
passed over like that of a poor relation. "Yes, yes," muttered the
old man, as he stooped and picked up a pin, adding it to a row of
similarly acquired pins which gave the left lapel of his threadbare
coat the appearance of a miniature harp, "I shall make a lawyer of
him."
It had long been settled in Mr. Shackford's mind that Richard, so
soon as he had finished his studies, should enter the law-office of
Blandmann & Sharpe, a firm of rather sinister reputation in South
Millville.
At fourteen Richard's eyes had begun to open on the situation; at
fifteen he saw very clearly; and one day, without much preliminary
formulating of his plan, he decided on a step that had been taken by
every male Shackford as far back as tradition preserves the record of
his family.
A friendship had sprung up between Richard and one William Durgin,
a school-mate. This Durgin was a sallow, brooding boy, a year older
than himself. The two lads were antipodal in disposition,
intelligence, and social standing; for though Richard went poorly
clad, the reflection of his cousin's wealth gilded him. Durgin was
the son of a washerwoman. An intimacy between the two would perhaps
have been unlikely but for one fact: it was Durgin's mother who had
given little Dick a shelter at the period of his parents' death.
Though the circumstance did not lie within the pale of Richard's
personal memory, he acknowledged the debt by rather insisting on
Durgin's friendship. It was William Durgin, therefore, who was
elected to wait upon Mr. Shackford on a certain morning which found
that gentleman greatly disturbed by an unprecedented
occurrence,--Richard had slept out of the house the previous night.
Durgin was the bearer of a note which Mr. Shackford received in
some astonishment, and read deliberately, blinking with weak eyes
behind the glasses. Having torn off the blank page and laid it aside
for his own more economical correspondence (the rascal had actually
used a whole sheet to write ten words!), Mr. Shackford turned, and
with the absorbed air of a naturalist studying some abnormal bug
gazed over the steel bow of his spectacles at Durgin.
"Skit!"
Durgin hastily retreated.
"There's a poor lawyer saved," muttered the old man, taking down
his overcoat from a peg behind the door, and snapping off a shred of
lint 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.