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 Shackford 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 leaf, oil the matrix, and pour in fresh plaster.
When that is set, cut away the 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 and 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.