The general effect on Stillwater of Mr. Shackford's death and the
peculiar circumstances attending the tragedy have been set forth in
the earlier chapters of this narrative. The influence which that
event exerted upon several persons then but imperfectly known to the
reader is now to occupy us.
On the conclusion of the strike, Richard had returned, in the
highest spirits, to his own rooms in Lime Street; but the quiet week
that followed found him singularly depressed. His nerves had been
strung to their utmost tension during those thirteen days of
suspense; he had assumed no light responsibility in the matter of
closing the yard, and there had been moments when the task of
sustaining Mr. Slocum had appeared almost hopeless. Now that the
strain was removed a reaction set in, and Richard felt himself
unnerved by the fleeing shadow of the trouble which had not caused
him to flinch so long as it faced him.
On the morning and at the moment when Mary Hennessey was pushing
open the scullery door of the house in Welch's Court, and was about
to come upon the body of the forlorn old man lying there in his
night-dress, Richard sat eating his breakfast in a silent and
preoccupied mood. He had retired very late the previous night, and
his lack-lustre eyes showed the effect of insufficient sleep. His
single fellow-boarder, Mr. Pinkham, had not returned from his
customary early walk, and only Richard and Mrs. Spooner, the
landlady, were at table. The former was in the act of lifting the
coffee-cup to his lips, when the school-master burst excitedly into
the room.
"Old Mr. Shackford is dead!" he exclaimed, dropping into a chair
near the door. "There's a report down in the village that he has been
murdered. I don't know if it is true.... God forgive my
abruptness! I didn't think!" and Mr. Pinkham turned an apologetic
face towards Richard, who sat there deathly pale, holding the cup
rigidly within an inch or two of his lip, and staring blankly into
space like a statue.
"I--I ought to have reflected," murmured the school-master,
covered with confusion at his maladroitness. "It was very
reprehensible in Craggie to make such an announcement to me so
suddenly, on a street corner. I--I was quite upset by it."
Richard pushed back his chair without replying, and passed into
the hall, where he encountered a messenger from Mr. Slocum,
confirming Mr. Pinkham's intelligence, but supplementing it with the
rumor that Lemuel Shackford had committed suicide.
Richard caught up his hat from a table, and hurried to Welch's
Court. Before reaching the house he had somewhat recovered his
outward composure; but he was still pale and internally much
agitated, for he had received a great shock, as Lawyer Perkins
afterwards observed to Mr. Ward in the reading-room of the tavern.
Both these gentlemen were present when Richard arrived, as were also
several of the immediate neighbors and two constables. The latter
were guarding the door against the crowd, which had already begun to
collect 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 façade of the house,
which seemed to have taken on a remote, bewildered expression, as if
it had an inarticulate sense of the horror within. The men ceased
their whispered conversation as Richard approached, and respectfully
moved aside to let him pass.
Nothing had been changed in the cheerless room on the ground
floor, with its veneered mahogany furniture and its yellowish leprous
wall-paper, peeling off at the seams here and there. A cane-seated
chair, overturned near the table, had been left untouched, and the
body was still lying in the position in which the Hennessey girl had
discovered it. A strange chill--something unlike any atmospherical
sharpness, a chill that seemed to exhale from the thin, pinched
nostrils--permeated the apartment. The orioles were singing madly
outside, their vermilion bosoms glowing like live coals against the
tender green of the foliage, and appearing to break into flame as
they took sudden flights hither and thither; but within all was
still. On entering the chamber Richard was smitten by the
silence,--that silence which shrouds the dead, and is like no other.
Lemuel Shackford had not been kind or cousinly; he had blighted
Richard's childhood with harshness and neglect, and had lately heaped
cruel insult upon him; but as he stood there alone, and gazed for a
moment at the firmly shut lips, upon which the mysterious white dust
of death had already settled,--the lips that were never to utter any
more bitter things,--the tears gathered in Richard's eyes and ran
slowly down his cheeks. After all said and done, Lemuel Shackford was
his kinsman, and blood is thicker than water!
Coroner Whidden shortly appeared on the scene, accompanied by a
number of persons; a jury was impaneled, and then began that inquest
which resulted in shedding so very little light on the catastrophe.
The investigation completed, there were endless details to attend
to,--papers to be hurriedly examined and sealed, and arrangements
made for the funeral on the succeeding day. These matters occupied
Richard 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, with
fingers nearly as icy as his own.
"It is unspeakably sad," answered Richard,--"the saddest thing I
ever 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 has
been stated, Mr. Taggett arrived in Stillwater, and installed himself
in Welch's Court, to the wonder of many in the village, who would not
have slept a night in that house, with only a servant in the north
gable, for half the universe. Mr. Taggett was a person who did not
allow 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 driving
rapidly along the turnpike sometime near daybreak, on Wednesday, was
presumably the man who could tell him all about it. But it did not
prove so. Neither Thomas Blufton, nor William Durgin, nor any of the
tramps subsequently obliged to drop into autobiography could be
connected with the affair.
These first failures served to stimulate Mr. Taggett; it required
a complex case to stir his ingenuity and sagacity. That the present
was not a complex case he was still convinced, after four days'
futile labor upon it. Mr. Shackford had been killed--either with
malice prepense or on the spur of the moment--for his money. The
killing had likely enough not been premeditated; the old man had
probably opposed the robbery. Now, among the exceptionally rough
population of the town there were possibly fifty men who would not
have hesitated to strike down Mr. Shackford if he had caught them
_flagrante delicto_ and resisted them, or attempted to call for
succor. That the crime was committed by some one in Stillwater or in
the neighborhood Mr. Taggett had never doubted since the day of his
arrival. The clumsy manner in which the staple had been wrenched from
the scullery door showed the absence of a professional hand. Then the
fact that the deceased was in the habit of keeping money in his
bedchamber was a fact well known in the village, and not likely to be
known outside of it, though of course it might have been. It was
clearly necessary for Mr. Taggett to carry his investigation into the
workshops and among the haunts of the class which was indubitably to
furnish him with the individual he wanted. Above all, it was
necessary that the investigation should be secret. An obstacle
obtruded itself here: everybody in Stillwater knew everybody, and a
stranger appearing on the streets or dropping frequently into the
tavern would not escape comment.
The man with the greatest facility for making the requisite
searches would of course be some workman. But a workman was the very
agent not to be employed under the circumstances. How many times, and
by what strange fatality, had a guilty party been selected to shadow
his own movements, or those of an accomplice! No, Mr. Taggett must
rely only on himself, and his plan forthwith matured. Its execution,
however, was delayed several days, the cooperation of Mr. Slocum and
Mr. Richard Shackford being indispensable.
At this stage Richard went to New York, where his cousin had made
extensive investments in real estate. For a careful man, the late Mr.
Shackford had allowed his affairs there to become strangely tangled.
The business would detain Richard a fortnight.
Three days after his departure Mr. Taggett himself left
Stillwater, having apparently given up the case; a proceeding which
was severely criticized, not only in the columns of The Stillwater
Gazette, but by the townsfolks at large, who immediately relapsed
into a state of apprehension approximating that of the morning when
the crime was discovered. Mr. Pinkham, who was taking tea that
evening at the Danas', threw the family into a panic by asserting his
belief that this was merely the first of a series of artistic
assassinations in the manner of those Memorable Murders recorded by
De Quincey. Mr. Pinkham may have said this to impress the four Dana
girls with the variety of his reading, but the recollection of De
Quincey's harrowing paper had the effect of so unhinging the young
school-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. The
new hand, who had come on foot from South Millville, at which town he
had been set down by the seven o'clock express that morning, was
placed in the apprentice department,--there were five or six
apprentices now. Though all this was part of an understood
arrangement, Mr. Slocum nearly doubted the fidelity of his own eyes
when Mr. Taggett, a smooth-faced young fellow of one and twenty, if
so old, with all the traits of an ordinary workman down to the
neglected fingernails, stepped up to the desk to have the name of
Blake entered on the pay-roll. Either by chance or by design, Mr.
Taggett had appeared but seldom on the streets of Stillwater; the few
persons who had had anything like familiar intercourse with him in
his professional capacity were precisely the persons with whom his
present movements were not likely to bring him into juxtaposition,
and he ran slight risk of recognition by others. With his hair
closely cropped, and the overhanging brown mustache removed, the man
was not so much disguised as transformed. "I shouldn't have known
him!" muttered Mr. Slocum, as he watched Mr. Taggett passing from the
office with his hat in his hand. During the ensuing ten or twelve
days Mr. Slocum never wholly succeeded in extricating himself from
the foggy uncertainty generated by that one brief interview. From the
moment Mr. Taggett was assigned a bench under the sheds, Mr. Slocum
saw little or nothing of him.
Mr. Taggett took lodging in a room in one of the most crowded of
the low boarding-houses,--a room accommodating two beds besides his
own: the first occupied by a brother neophyte in marble-cutting, and
the second by a morose middle-aged man with one eyebrow a trifle
higher than the other, as if it had been wrenched out of line by the
strain of habitual intoxication. This man's name was Wollaston, and
he worked at Dana's.
Mr. Taggett's initial move was to make himself popular in the
marble yard, and especially at the tavern, where he spent money
freely, though not so freely as to excite any remark except that the
lad was running through pretty much all his small pay,--a
recklessness which was charitably condoned in Snelling's bar-room. He
formed multifarious friendships, and had so many sensible views on
the labor problem, advocating the general extinguishment of
capitalists, and so on, that his admittance to the Marble Workers'
Association resolved itself into merely a question of time. The old
prejudice against apprentices was already wearing off. The quiet,
evasive man of few words was now a loquacious talker, holding his own
with the hardest hitters, and very skillful in giving offense to no
one. "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 a
good-natured, intelligent devil; perhaps a little less devilish and a
trifle more intelligent than the rest, but not otherwise different.
Denyven, Peters, Dexter, Willson, and others in and out of the Slocum
clique were Blake's sworn friends. In brief, Mr. Taggett had the
amplest opportunities to prosecute his studies. Only for a pained
look which sometimes latterly shot into his eyes, as he worked at the
bench, or as he walked alone in the street, one would have imagined
that he was thoroughly enjoying the half-vagabond existence.
The supposition would have been erroneous, for in the progress of
those fourteen days' apprenticeship Mr. Taggett had received a wound
in the most sensitive part of his nature: he had been forced to give
up what no man ever relinquishes without a wrench,--his own idea.
With the exception of an accident in Dana's Mill, by which
Torrini's hand had been so badly mangled that amputation was deemed
necessary, the two weeks had been eventless outside of Mr. Taggett's
personal experience. What that experience was will transpire in its
proper place. Margaret was getting daily notes from Richard, and Mr.
Slocum, overburdened with the secret of Mr. Taggett's presence in the
yard,--a secret confined exclusively to Mr. Slocum, Richard, and
Justice Beemis,--was restlessly awaiting developments.
The developments came that afternoon when Mr. Taggett walked into
the office and startled Mr. Slocum, sitting at the desk. The two
words which Mr. Taggett then gravely and coldly whispered in Mr.
Slocum's ear were,--
"RICHARD SHACKFORD."