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+Project Gutenberg's The Stillwater Tragedy, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Stillwater Tragedy
+
+Author: Thomas Bailey Aldrich
+
+Release Date: April, 2004  [EBook #5435]
+Posting Date: July 11, 2010
+[This file last updated on July 21, 2010]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by This eBook was created by Charles Aldarondo
+(pg@aldarondo.net).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Stillwater Tragedy
+
+By Thomas Bailey Aldrich
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+It is close upon daybreak. The great wall of pines and hemlocks
+that keep off the west wind from Stillwater stretches black and
+indeterminate against the sky. At intervals a dull, metallic sound,
+like the guttural twang of a violin string, rises form the
+frog-invested swamp skirting the highway. Suddenly the birds stir in
+their nests over there in the woodland, and break into that wild
+jargoning chorus with which they herald the advent of a new day. In
+the apple-orchards and among the plum-trees of the few gardens in
+Stillwater, the wrens and the robins and the blue-jays catch up the
+crystal crescendo, and what a melodious racket they make of it with
+their fifes and flutes and flageolets!
+
+The village lies in a trance like death. Possibly not a soul hears
+this music, unless it is the watchers at the bedside of Mr. Leonard
+Tappleton, the richest man in town, who has lain dying these three
+days, and cannot last until sunrise. Or perhaps some mother, drowsily
+hushing her wakeful baby, pauses a moment and listens vacantly to the
+birds singing. But who else?
+
+The hubbub suddenly ceases,--ceases as suddenly as it began,--and
+all is still again in the woodland. But it is not so dark as before.
+A faint glow of white light is discernible behind the ragged line of
+the tree-tops. The deluge of the darkness is receding from the face
+of the earth, as the mighty waters receded of old.
+
+The roofs and tall factory chimneys of Stillwater are slowly
+taking shape in the gloom. Is that a cemetery coming into view
+yonder, with its ghostly architecture of obelisks and broken columns
+and huddled head-stones? No, that is only Slocum's Marble Yard, with
+the finished and unfinished work heaped up like snowdrifts,--a
+cemetery in embryo. Here and there in an outlying farm a lantern
+glimmers in the barn-yard: the cattle are having their fodder
+betimes. Scarlet-capped chanticleer gets himself on the nearest
+rail-fence and lifts up his rancorous voice like some irate old
+cardinal launching the curse of Rome. Something crawls swiftly along
+the gray of the serpentine turnpike,--a cart, with the driver lashing
+a jaded horse. A quick wind goes shivering by, and is lost in the
+forest.
+
+Now a narrow strip of two-colored gold stretches along the
+horizon.
+
+Stillwater is gradually coming to its senses. The sun has begun to
+twinkle on the gilt cross of the Catholic chapel and make itself
+known to the doves in the stone belfry of the South Church. The
+patches of cobweb that here and there cling tremulously to the coarse
+grass of the inundated meadows have turned into silver nets, and the
+mill-pond--it will be steel-blue later--is as smooth and white as if
+it had been paved with one vast unbroken slab out of Slocum's Marble
+Yard. Through a row of button-woods on the northern skirt of the
+village is seen a square, lap-streaked building, painted a
+disagreeable brown, and surrounded on three sides by a platform,--one
+of seven or eight similar stations strung like Indian heads on a
+branch thread of the Great Sagamore Railway.
+
+Listen! That is the jingle of the bells on the baker's cart as it
+begins its rounds. From innumerable chimneys the curdled smoke gives
+evidence that the thrifty housewife--or, what is rarer in Stillwater,
+the hired girl--has lighted the kitchen fire.
+
+The chimney-stack of one house at the end of a small court--the
+last house on the easterly edge of the village, and standing quite
+alone--sends up no smoke. Yet the carefully trained ivy over the
+porch, and the lemon verbena in a tub at the foot of the steps,
+intimate that the place is not unoccupied. Moreover, the little
+schooner which acts as weather-cock on one of the gables, and is now
+heading due west, has a new top-sail. It is a story-and-a-half
+cottage, with a large expanse of roof, which, covered with porous,
+unpainted shingles, seems to repel the sunshine that now strikes full
+upon it. The upper and lower blinds on the main building, as well as
+those on the extensions, are tightly closed. The sun appears to beat
+in vain at the casements of this silent house, which has a curiously
+sullen and defiant air, as if it had desperately and successfully
+barricaded itself against the approach of morning; yet if one were
+standing in the room that leads from the bed-chamber on the
+ground-floor--the room with the latticed window--one would see a ray
+of light thrust through a chink of the shutters, and pointing like a
+human finger at an object which lies by the hearth.
+
+This finger, gleaming, motionless, and awful in its precision,
+points to the body of old Mr. Lemuel Shackford, who lies there dead
+in his night-dress, with a gash across his forehead.
+
+In the darkness of that summer night a deed darker than the night
+itself had been done in Stillwater.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+That morning, when Michael Hennessey's girl Mary--a girl sixteen
+years old--carried the can of milk to the rear door of the silent
+house, she was nearly a quarter of hour later than usual, and looked
+forward to being soundly rated.
+
+"He's up and been waiting for it," she said to herself, observing
+the scullery door ajar. "Won't I ketch it! It's him for growling and
+snapping at a body, and it's me for always being before or behind
+time, bad luck to me. There's no plazing him."
+
+Mary pushed back the door and passed through the kitchen, nerving
+herself all the while to meet the objurgations which she supposed
+were lying in wait for her. The sunshine was blinding without, but
+sifted through the green jalousies, it made a gray, crepuscular light
+within. As the girl approached the table, on which a plate with knife
+and fork had been laid for breakfast, she noticed, somewhat
+indistinctly at first, a thin red line running obliquely across the
+floor from the direction of the sitting-room and ending near the
+stove, where it had formed a small pool. Mary stopped short, scarcely
+conscious why, and peered instinctively into the adjoining apartment.
+Then, with a smothered cry, she let fall the milk-can, and a dozen
+white rivulets, in strange contrast to that one dark red line which
+first startled her, went meandering over the kitchen floor. With her
+eyes riveted upon some object in the next room, the girl retreated
+backward slowly and heavily dragging one foot after the other, until
+she reached the gallery door; then she turned swiftly, and plunged
+into the street.
+
+Twenty minutes later, every man, woman, and child in Stillwater
+knew that old Mr. Shackford had been murdered.
+
+Mary Hennessey had to tell her story a hundred times during the
+morning, for each minute brought to Michael's tenement a fresh
+listener hungry for the details at first hand.
+
+"How was it, Molly? Tell a body, dear!"
+
+"Don't be asking me!" cried Molly, pressing her palms to her eyes
+as if to shut out the sight, but taking all the while a secret creepy
+satisfaction in living the scene over again. "It was kinder dark in
+the other room, and there he was, laying in his night-gownd, with his
+face turned towards me, so, looking mighty severe-like, jest as if he
+was a-going to say, 'It's late with the milk ye are, ye hussy!'--a
+way he had of spaking."
+
+"But he didn't spake, Molly darlin'?"
+
+"Niver a word. He was stone dead, don't you see. It was that still
+you could hear me heart beat, saving there wasn't a drop of beat in
+it. I let go the can, sure, and then I backed out, with me eye on 'im
+all the while, afeard to death that he would up and spake them
+words."
+
+"The pore child! for the likes of her to be wakin' up a murthered
+man in the mornin'!"
+
+There was little or no work done that day in Stillwater outside
+the mills, and they were not running full handed. A number of men
+from the Miantowona Iron Works and Slocum's Yard--Slocum employed
+some seventy or eighty hands--lounged about the streets in their
+blouses, or stood in knots in front of the tavern, smoking short clay
+pipes. Not an urchin put in an appearance at the small red brick
+building on the turnpike. Mr. Pinkham, the school-master, waited an
+hour for the recusants, then turned the key in the lock and went
+home.
+
+Dragged-looking women, with dishcloth or dustpan in hand, stood in
+door-ways or leaned from windows, talking in subdued voices with
+neighbors on the curb-stone. In a hundred far-away cities the news of
+the suburban tragedy had already been read and forgotten; but here
+the horror stayed.
+
+There was a constantly changing crowd gathered in front of the
+house in Welch's Court. An inquest was being held in the room
+adjoining the kitchen. The court, which ended at the gate of the
+cottage, was fringed for several yards on each side by rows of
+squalid, wondering children, who understood it that Coroner Whidden
+was literally to sit on the dead body,--Mr. Whidden, a limp,
+inoffensive little man, who would not have dared to sit down on a
+fly. He had passed, pallid and perspiring, to the scene of his
+perfunctory duties.
+
+The result of the investigation was awaited with feverish
+impatience by the people outside. Mr. Shackford had not been a
+popular man; he had been a hard, avaricious, passionate man, holding
+his own way remorselessly. He had been the reverse of popular, but he
+had long been a prominent character in Stillwater, because of his
+wealth, his endless lawsuits, and his eccentricity, an illustration
+of which was his persistence in living entirely alone in the isolated
+and dreary old house, that was henceforth to be inhabited by his
+shadow. Not his shadow alone, however, for it was now remembered that
+the premises were already held in fee by another phantasmal tenant.
+At a period long anterior to this, one Lydia Sloper, a widow, had
+died an unexplained death under that same roof. The coincidence
+struck deeply into the imaginative portion of Stillwater. "The Widow
+Sloper and old Shackford have made a match of it," remarked a local
+humorist, in a grimmer vein than customary. Two ghosts had now set up
+housekeeping, as it were, in the stricken mansion, and what might not
+be looked for in the way of spectral progeny!
+
+It appeared to the crowd in the lane that the jury were
+unconscionably long in arriving at a decision, and when the decision
+was at length reached it gave but moderate satisfaction. After a
+spendthrift waste of judicial mind the jury had decided that "the
+death of Lemuel Shackford was caused by a blow on the left temple,
+inflicted with some instrument not discoverable, in the hands of some
+person or persons unknown."
+
+"We knew that before," grumbled a voice in the crowd, when, to
+relieve public suspense, Lawyer Perkins--a long, lank man, with
+stringy black hair--announced the verdict from the doorstep.
+
+The theory of suicide had obtained momentary credence early in the
+morning, and one or two still clung to it with the tenacity that
+characterizes persons who entertain few ideas. To accept this theory
+it was necessary to believe that Mr. Shackford had ingeniously hidden
+the weapon after striking himself dead with a single blow. No, it was
+not suicide. So far from intending to take his own life, Mr.
+Shackford, it appeared, had made rather careful preparations to live
+that day. The breakfast-table had been laid over night, the coals
+left ready for kindling in the Franklin stove, and a kettle, filled
+with water to be heated for his tea or coffee, stood on the hearth.
+
+Two facts had sharply demonstrated themselves: first, that Mr.
+Shackford had been murdered; and, second, that the spur to the crime
+had been the possession of a sum of money, which the deceased was
+supposed to keep in a strong-box in his bedroom. The padlock had been
+wrenched open, and the less valuable contents of the chest, chiefly
+papers, scattered over the carpet. A memorandum among the papers
+seemed to specify the respective sums in notes and gold that had been
+deposited in the box. A document of some kind had been torn into
+minute pieces and thrown into the waste-basket. On close scrutiny a
+word or two here and there revealed the fact that the document was of
+a legal character. The fragments were put into an envelope and given
+in charge of Mr. Shackford's lawyer, who placed seals on that and on
+the drawers of an escritoire which stood in the corner and contained
+other manuscript.
+
+The instrument with which the fatal blow had been dealt--for the
+autopsy showed that there had been but one blow--was not only not
+discoverable, but the fashion of it defied conjecture. The shape of
+the wound did not indicate the use of any implement known to the
+jurors, several of whom were skilled machinists. The wound was an
+inch and three quarters in length and very deep at the extremities;
+in the middle it scarcely penetrated to the cranium. So peculiar a
+cut could not have been produced with the claw part of a hammer,
+because the claw is always curved, and the incision was straight. A
+flat claw, such as is used in opening packing-cases, was suggested. A
+collection of the several sizes manufactured was procured, but none
+corresponded with the wound; they were either too wide or too narrow.
+Moreover, the cut was as thin as the blade of a case-knife.
+
+"That was never done by any tool in these parts," declared
+Stevens, the foreman of the finishing shop at Slocum's.
+
+The assassin or assassins had entered by the scullery door, the
+simple fastening of which, a hook and staple, had been broken. There
+were footprints in the soft clay path leading from the side gate to
+the stone step; but Mary Hennessey had so confused and obliterated
+the outlines that now it was impossible accurately to measure them. A
+half-burned match was found under the sink,--evidently thrown there
+by the burglars. It was of a kind known as the safety-match, which
+can be ignited only by friction on a strip of chemically prepared
+paper glued to the box. As no box of this description was discovered,
+and as all the other matches in the house were of a different make,
+the charred splinter was preserved. The most minute examination
+failed to show more than this. The last time Mr. Shackford had been
+seen alive was at six o'clock the previous evening.
+
+Who had done the deed?
+
+Tramps! answered Stillwater, with one voice, though Stillwater lay
+somewhat out of the natural highway, and the tramp--that bitter
+blossom of civilization whose seed was blown to us from over
+seas--was not then so common by the New England roadsides as he
+became five or six years later. But it was intolerable not to have a
+theory; it was that or none, for conjecture turned to no one in the
+village. To be sure, Mr. Shackford had been in litigation with
+several of the corporations, and had had legal quarrels with more
+than one of his neighbors; but Mr. Shackford had never been
+victorious in any of these contests, and the incentive of revenge was
+wanting to explain the crime. Besides, it was so clearly robbery.
+
+Though the gathering around the Shackford house had reduced itself
+to half a dozen idlers, and the less frequented streets had resumed
+their normal aspect of dullness, there was a strange, electric
+quality in the atmosphere. The community was in that state of
+suppressed agitation and suspicion which no word adequately
+describes. The slightest circumstance would have swayed it to the
+belief in any man's guilt; and, indeed, there were men in Stillwater
+quite capable of disposing of a fellow-creature for a much smaller
+reward than Mr. Shackford had held out. In spite of the tramp theory,
+a harmless tin-peddler, who had not passed through the place for
+weeks, was dragged from his glittering cart that afternoon, as he
+drove smilingly into town, and would have been roughly handled if Mr.
+Richard Shackford, a cousin of the deceased, had not interfered.
+
+As the day wore on, the excitement deepened in intensity, though
+the expression of it became nearly reticent. It was noticed that the
+lamps throughout the village were lighted an hour earlier than usual.
+A sense of insecurity settled upon Stillwater with the falling
+twilight,--that nameless apprehension which is possibly more trying
+to the nerves than tangible danger. When a man is smitten
+inexplicably, as if by a bodiless hand stretched out of a
+cloud,--when the red slayer vanishes like a mist and leaves no
+faintest trace of his identity,--the mystery shrouding the deed
+presently becomes more appalling than the deed itself. There is
+something paralyzing in the thought of an invisible hand somewhere
+ready to strike at your life, or at some life dearer than your own.
+Whose hand, and where is it? Perhaps it passes you your coffee at
+breakfast; perhaps you have hired it to shovel the snow off your
+sidewalk; perhaps it has brushed against you in the crowd; or may be
+you have dropped a coin into the fearful palm at a street corner. Ah,
+the terrible unseen hand that stabs your imagination,--this immortal
+part of you which is a hundred times more sensitive than your poor
+perishable body!
+
+In the midst of situations the most solemn and tragic there often
+falls a light purely farcical in its incongruity. Such a gleam was
+unconsciously projected upon the present crisis by Mr. Bodge, better
+known in the village as Father Bodge. Mr. Bodge was stone deaf,
+naturally stupid, and had been nearly moribund for thirty years with
+asthma. Just before night-fall he had crawled, in his bewildered,
+wheezy fashion, down to the tavern, where he found a somber crowd in
+the bar-room. Mr. Bodge ordered his mug of beer, and sat sipping it,
+glancing meditatively from time to time over the pewter rim at the
+mute assembly. Suddenly he broke out: "S'pose you've heerd that old
+Shackford's ben murdered."
+
+So the sun went down on Stillwater. Again the great wall of pines
+and hemlocks made a gloom against the sky. The moon rose from behind
+the tree-tops, frosting their ragged edges, and then sweeping up to
+the zenith hung serenely above the world, as if there were never a
+crime, or a tear, or a heart-break in it all.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+On the afternoon of the following day Mr. Shackford was duly
+buried. The funeral, under the direction of Mr. Richard Shackford,
+who acted as chief mourner and was sole mourner by right of kinship,
+took place in profound silence. The carpenters, who had lost a day on
+Bishop's new stables, intermitted their sawing and hammering while
+the services were in progress; the steam was shut off in the
+iron-mills, and no clinking of the chisel was heard in the marble
+yard for an hour, during which many of the shops had their shutters
+up. Then, when all was over, the imprisoned fiend in the boilers gave
+a piercing shriek; the leather bands slipped on the revolving drums,
+the spindles leaped into life again, and the old order of things was
+reinstated,--outwardly, but not in effect.
+
+In general, when the grave closes over a man his career is ended.
+But Mr. Shackford was never so much alive as after they had buried
+him. Never before had he filled so large a place in the public eye.
+Though invisible, he sat at every fireside. Until the manner of his
+death had been made clear, his ubiquitous presence was not to be
+exorcised. On the morning of the memorable day a reward of one
+hundred dollars--afterwards increased to five hundred, at the
+insistence of Mr. Shackford's cousin--had been offered by the board
+of selectmen for the arrest and conviction of the guilty party.
+Beyond this and the unsatisfactory inquest, the authorities had done
+nothing, and were plainly not equal to the situation.
+
+When it was stated, the night of the funeral, that a professional
+person was coming to Stillwater to look into the case, the
+announcement was received with a breath of relief.
+
+The person thus vaguely described appeared on the spot the next
+morning. To mention the name of Edward Taggett is to mention a name
+well known to the detective force of the great city lying sixty miles
+southwest of Stillwater. Mr. Taggett's arrival sent such a thrill of
+expectancy through the village that Mr. Leonard Tappleton, whose
+obsequies occurred this day, made his exit nearly unobserved. Yet
+there was little in Mr. Taggett's physical aspect calculated to stir
+either expectation or enthusiasm: a slender man of about twenty-six,
+but not looking it, with overhanging brown mustache, sparse
+side-whiskers, eyes of no definite color, and faintly accentuated
+eyebrows. He spoke precisely, and with a certain unembarrassed
+hesitation, as persons do who have two thoughts to one word,--if
+there are such persons. You might have taken him for a physician, or
+a journalist, or the secretary of an insurance company; but you would
+never have supposed him the man who had disentangled the complicated
+threads of the great Barnabee Bank defalcation.
+
+Stillwater's confidence, which had risen into the nineties, fell
+to zero at sight of him. "Is _that_ Taggett?" they asked. That
+was Taggett; and presently his influence began to be felt like a
+sea-turn. The three Dogberrys of the watch were dispatched on secret
+missions, and within an hour it was ferreted out that a man in a cart
+had been seen driving furiously up the turnpike the morning after the
+murder. This was an agricultural district, the road led to a market
+town, and teams going by in the early dawn were the rule and not the
+exception; but on that especial morning a furiously driven cart was
+significant. Jonathan Beers, who farmed the Jenks land, had heard the
+wheels and caught an indistinct glimpse of the vehicle as he was
+feeding the cattle, but with a reticence purely rustic had not been
+moved to mention the circumstance before.
+
+"Taggett has got a clew," said Stillwater under its breath.
+
+By noon Taggett had got the man, cart and all. But it was only
+Blufton's son Tom, of South Millville, who had started in hot haste
+that particular morning to secure medical service for his wife, of
+which she had sorely stood in need, as two tiny girls in a willow
+cradle in South Millville now bore testimony.
+
+"I haven't been cutting down the population _much,"_ said
+Blufton, with his wholesome laugh.
+
+Thomas Blufton was well known and esteemed in Stillwater, but if
+the crime had fastened itself upon him it would have given something
+like popular satisfaction.
+
+In the course of the ensuing forty-eight hours four or five tramps
+were overhauled as having been in the neighborhood at the time of the
+tragedy; but they each had a clean story, and were let go. Then one
+Durgin, a workman at Slocum's Yard, was called upon to explain some
+half-washed-out red stains on his overalls, which he did. He had
+tightened the hoops on a salt-pork barrel for Mr. Shackford several
+days previous; the red paint on the head of the barrel was fresh, and
+had come off on his clothes. Dr. Weld examined the spots under a
+microscope, and pronounced them paint. It was manifest that Mr.
+Taggett meant to go to the bottom of things.
+
+The bar-room of the Stillwater hotel was a center of interest
+these nights; not only the bar-room proper, but the adjoining
+apartment, where the more exclusive guests took their seltzer-water
+and looked over the metropolitan newspapers. Twice a week a social
+club met here, having among its members Mr. Craggie, the postmaster,
+who was supposed to have a great political future, Mr. Pinkham,
+Lawyer Perkins, Mr. Whidden, and other respectable persons. The room
+was at all times in some sense private, with a separate entrance from
+the street, though another door, which usually stood open, connected
+it with the main salon. In this was a long mahogany counter, one
+section of which was covered with a sheet of zinc perforated like a
+sieve, and kept constantly bright by restless caravans of lager-beer
+glasses. Directly behind that end of the counter stood a Gothic
+brass-mounted beer-pump, at whose faucets Mr. Snelling, the landlord,
+flooded you five or six mugs in the twinkling of an eye, and raised
+the vague expectation that he was about to grind out some popular
+operatic air. At the left of the pump stretched a narrow mirror,
+reflecting he gaily-colored wine-glasses and decanters which stood on
+each other's shoulders, and held up lemons, and performed various
+acrobatic feats on a shelf in front of it.
+
+The fourth night after the funeral of Mr. Shackford, a dismal
+southeast storm caused an unusual influx of idlers in both rooms.
+With the rain splashing against the casements and the wind slamming
+the blinds, the respective groups sat discussing in a desultory way
+the only topic which could be discussed at present. There had been a
+general strike among the workmen a fortnight before; but even that
+had grown cold as a topic.
+
+"That was hard on Tom Blufton," said Stevens, emptying the ashes
+out of his long-stemmed clay pipe, and refilling the bowl with cut
+cavendish from a jar on a shelf over his head.
+
+Michael Hennessey sat down his beer-mug with an air of
+argumentative disgust, and drew one sleeve across his glistening
+beard.
+
+"Stevens, you've as many minds as a weather-cock, jist! Didn't ye
+say yerself it looked mighty black for the lad when he was took?"
+
+"I might have said something of the sort," Stevens admitted
+reluctantly, after a pause. "His driving round at daybreak with an
+empty cart did have an ugly look at first."
+
+"Indade, then."
+
+"Not to anybody who knew Tom Blufton," interrupted Samuel Piggott,
+Blufton's brother-in-law. "The boy hasn't a bad streak in him. It was
+an outrage. Might as well have suspected Parson Langly or Father
+O'Meara."
+
+"If this kind of thing goes on," remarked a man in the corner with
+a patch over one eye, "both of them reverend gents will be hauled up,
+I shouldn't wonder."
+
+"That's so, Mr. Peters," responded Durgin. "If my respectability
+didn't save me, who's safe?"
+
+"Durgin is talking about his respectability! He's joking."
+
+"Look here, Dexter," said Durgin, turning quickly on the speaker,
+"when I want to joke, I talk about your intelligence."
+
+"What kind of man is Taggett, anyhow?" asked Piggott. "You saw
+him, Durgin."
+
+"I believe he was at Justice Beemis's office the day Blufton and I
+was there; but I didn't make him out in the crowd. Shouldn't know him
+from Adam."
+
+"Stillwater's a healthy place for tramps jest about this time,"
+suggested somebody. "Three on 'em snaked in to-day."
+
+"I think, gentlemen, that Mr. Taggett is on the right track
+there," observed Mr. Snelling, in the act of mixing another Old
+Holland for Mr. Peters. "Not too sweet, you said? I feel it in my
+bones that it was a tramp, and that Mr. Taggett will bring him yet."
+
+"He won't find him on the highway yonder," said a tall, swarthy
+man named Torrini, an Italian. Nationalities clash in Stillwater.
+"That tramp is a thousand miles from here."
+
+"So he is if he has any brains under his hat," returned Snelling.
+"But they're on the lookout for him. The minute he pawns anything,
+he's gone."
+
+"Can't put up greenbacks or gold, can he? He didn't take nothing
+else," interposed Bishop, the veterinary surgeon.
+
+"Now jewelry nor nothing?"
+
+"There wasn't none, as I understand it," said Bishop, "except a
+silver watch. That was all snug under the old man's piller."
+
+"Wanter know!" ejaculated Jonathan Beers.
+
+"I opine, Mr. Craggie," said the school-master, standing in the
+inner room with a rolled-up file of the Daily Advertiser in his hand,
+"that the person who--who removed our worthy townsman will never be
+discovered."
+
+"I shouldn't like to go quite so far as that, sir," answered Mr.
+Craggie, with that diplomatic suavity which leads to postmasterships
+and seats in the General Court, and has even been known to oil a dull
+fellow's way into Congress. "I cannot take quite so hopeless a view
+of it. There are difficulties, but they must be overcome, Mr.
+Pinkham, and I think they will be."
+
+"Indeed, I hope so," returned the school-master. "But there are
+cases--are there not?--in which the--the problem, if I may so
+designate it, has never been elucidated, and the persons who
+undertook it have been obliged to go to the foot, so to speak."
+
+"Ah, yes, there are such cases, certainly. There was the Burdell
+mystery in New York, and, later, the Nathan affair--By the way, I've
+satisfactory theories of my own touching both. The police were
+baffled, and remain so. But, my _dear_ sir, observe for a moment
+the difference."
+
+Mr. Pinkham rested one finger on the edge of a little round table,
+and leaned forward in a respectful attitude to observe the
+difference.
+
+"Those crimes were committed in a vast metropolis affording a
+thousand chances for escape, as well as offering a thousand
+temptations to the lawless. But we are a limited community. We have
+no professional murderers among us. The deed which has stirred
+society to its utmost depths was plainly done by some wayfaring
+amateur. Remorse has already arrived upon him, if the police haven't.
+For the time being he escapes; but he is bound to betray himself
+sooner or later. If the right steps are taken,--and I have myself the
+greatest confidence in Mr. Taggett,--the guilty party can scarcely
+fail to be brought to the bar of justice, if he doesn't bring himself
+there."
+
+"Indeed, indeed, I hope so," repeated Mr. Pinkham.
+
+"The investigation is being carried on very closely."
+
+"Too closely," suggested the school-master.
+
+"Oh dear, no," murmured Mr. Craggie. "The strictest secrecy is
+necessary in affairs of this delicate nature. If Tom, Dick, and Harry
+were taken behind the scenes," he added, with the air of one wishing
+to say too much, "the bottom would drop out of everything."
+
+Mr. Pinkham shrunk from commenting on a disaster like that, and
+relapsed into silence. Mr. Craggie, with his thumbs in the arm-holes
+of his waistcoat, and his legs crossed in an easy, senatorial
+fashion, leaned back in the chair and smiled blandly.
+
+"I don't suppose there's nothing new, boys!" exclaimed a fat,
+florid man, bustling in good-naturedly at the public entrance, and
+leaving a straight wet trail on the sanded floor from the threshold
+to the polished mahogany counter. Mr. Wilson was a local humorist of
+the Falstaffian stripe, though not so much witty in himself as the
+cause of wit in others.
+
+"No, Jimmy, there isn't anything new," responded Dexter.
+
+"I suppose you didn't hear that the ole man done somethin'
+handsome for me in his last will and testyment."
+
+"No, Jemmy, I don't think he has made any provision whatever for
+an almshouse."
+
+"Sorry to hear that, Dexter," said Willson, absorbedly chasing a
+bit of lemon peel in his glass with the spoon handle, "for there
+isn't room for us all up at the town-farm. How's your grandmother?
+Finds it tol'rably comfortable?"
+
+They are a primitive, candid people in their hours of unlaced
+social intercourse in Stillwater. This delicate _tu quoque_ was
+so far from wounding Dexter that he replied carelessly,--
+
+"Well, only so so. The old woman complains of too much
+chicken-sallid, and hot-house grapes all the year round."
+
+"Mr. Shackford must have left a large property," observed Mr.
+Ward, of the firm of Ward & Lock, glancing up from the columns of the
+Stillwater Gazette. The remark was addressed to Lawyer Perkins, who
+had just joined the group in the reading-room.
+
+"Fairly large," replied that gentleman crisply.
+
+"Any public bequests?"
+
+"None to speak of."
+
+Mr. Craggie smiled vaguely.
+
+"You see," said Lawyer Perkins, "there's a will and no will,--that
+is to say, the fragments of what is supposed to be a will were found,
+and we are trying to put the pieces together. It is doubtful if we
+can do it; it is doubtful if we can decipher it after we have done
+it; and if we decipher it it is a question whether the document is
+valid or not."
+
+"That is a masterly exposition of the dilemma, Mr. Perkins," said
+the school-master warmly.
+
+Mr. Perkins had spoken in his court-room tone of voice, with one
+hand thrust into his frilled shirt-bosom. He removed this hand for a
+second, as he gravely bowed to Mr. Pinkham.
+
+"Nothing could be clearer," said Mr. Ward. "In case the paper is
+worthless, what then? I am not asking you in your professional
+capacity," he added hastily; for Lawyer Perkins had been known to
+send in a bill on as slight a provocation as Mr. Ward's.
+
+"That's a point. The next of kin has his claims."
+
+"My friend Shackford, of course," broke in Mr. Craggie. "Admirable
+young man!--one of my warmest supporters."
+
+"He is the only heir at law so far as we know," said Mr. Perkins.
+
+"Oh," said Mr. Craggie, reflecting. "The late Mr. Shackford might
+have had a family in Timbuctoo or the Sandwich Islands."
+
+"That's another point."
+
+"The fact would be a deuced unpleasant point for young Shackford
+to run against," said Mr. Ward.
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"If Mr. Lemuel Shackford," remarked Coroner Whidden, softly
+joining the conversation to which he had been listening in his
+timorous, apologetic manner, "had chanced, in the course of his early
+sea-faring days, to form any ties of an unhappy complexion"--
+
+"Complexion is good," murmured Mr. Craggie. "Some Hawaiian lady!"
+
+--"perhaps that would be a branch of the case worth investigating
+in connection with the homicide. A discarded wife, or a disowned son,
+burning with a sense of wrong"--
+
+"Really, Mr. Whidden!" interrupted Lawyer Perkins witheringly, "it
+is bad enough for my client to lose his life, without having his
+reputation filched away from him."
+
+"I--I will explain! I was merely supposing"--
+
+"The law never supposes, sir!"
+
+This threw Mr. Whidden into great mental confusion. As coroner was
+he not an integral part of the law, and when, in his official
+character, he supposed anything was not that a legal supposition? But
+was he in his official character now, sitting with a glass of
+lemonade at his elbow in the reading-room of the Stillwater hotel?
+Was he, or was he not, a coroner all the time? Mr. Whidden stroked an
+isolated tuft of hair growing low on the middle of his forehead, and
+glared mildly at Mr. Perkins.
+
+"Young Shackford has gone to New York, I understand," said Mr.
+Ward, breaking the silence.
+
+Mr. Perkins nodded. "Went this morning to look after the
+real-estate interests there. It will probably keep him a couple of
+weeks,--the longer the better. He was of no use here. Lemuel's death
+was a great shock to him, or rather the manner of it was."
+
+"That shocked every one. They were first cousin's weren't they?"
+Mr. Ward was a comparatively new resident in Stillwater.
+
+"First cousins," replied Lawyer Perkins; "but they were never very
+intimate, you know."
+
+"I imagine nobody was ever very intimate with Mr. Shackford."
+
+"My client was somewhat peculiar in his friendships."
+
+This was stating it charitably, for Mr. Perkins knew, and every
+one present knew, that Lemuel Shackford had not had the shadow of a
+friend in Stillwater, unless it was his cousin Richard.
+
+A cloud of mist and rain was blown into the bar-room as the street
+door stood open for a second to admit a dripping figure from the
+outside darkness.
+
+ _"What's_ blowed down?" asked Durgin, turning round on his
+stool and sending up a ring of smoke which uncurled itself with
+difficulty in the dense atmosphere.
+
+"It's only some of Jeff Stavers's nonsense."
+
+"No nonsense at all," said the new-comer, as he shook the heavy
+beads of rain from his felt hat. "I was passing by Welch's
+Court--it's as black as pitch out, fellows--when slap went something
+against my shoulder; something like wet wings. Well, I was scared.
+It's a bat, says I. But the thing didn't fly off; it was still
+clawing at my shoulder. I put up my hand, and I'll be shot if it
+wasn't the foremast, jib-sheet and all, of the old weather-cock on
+the north gable of the Shackford house! Here you are!" and the
+speaker tossed the broken mast, with the mimic sails dangling from
+it, into Durgin's lap.
+
+A dead silence followed, for there was felt to be something weirdly
+significant in the incident.
+
+"That's kinder omernous," said Mr. Peters, interrogatively.
+
+"Ominous of what?" asked Durgin, lifting the wet mass from his
+knees and dropping it on the floor.
+
+"Well, sorter queer, then."
+
+"Where does the queer come in?" inquired Stevens, gravelly. "I
+don't know; but I'm hit by it."
+
+"Come, boys, don't crowd a feller," said Mr. Peters, getting
+restive. "I don't take the contract to explain the thing. But it does
+seem some way droll that the old schooner should be wrecked so soon
+after what has happened to the old skipper. If you don't see it, or
+sense it, I don't insist. What's yours, Denyven?"
+
+The person addressed as Denyven promptly replied, with a fine
+sonorous English accent, "a mug of 'alf an' 'alf,--with a head on it,
+Snelling."
+
+At the same moment Mr. Craggie, in the inner room was saying to
+the school-master,--
+
+"I must really take issue with you there, Mr. Pinkham. I admit
+there's a good deal in spiritualism which we haven't got at yet; the
+science is in its infancy; it is still attached to the bosom of
+speculation. It is a beautiful science, that of psychological
+phenomena, and the spiritualists will yet become an influential class
+of"--Mr. Craggie was going to say voters, but glided over
+it--"persons. I believe in clairvoyance myself to a large extent.
+Before my appointment to the post-office I had it very strong. I've
+no doubt that in the far future this mysterious factor will be made
+great use of in criminal cases; but at present I should resort to it
+only in the last extremity,--the very last extremity, Mr. Pinkham!"
+
+"Oh, of course," said the school-master deprecatingly. "I threw it
+out only as the merest suggestion. I shouldn't think of--of--you
+understand me?"
+
+"Is it beyond the dreams of probability," said Mr. Craggie,
+appealing to Lawyer Perkins, "that clairvoyants may eventually be
+introduced into cases in our courts?"
+
+"They are now," said Mr. Perkins, with a snort,--"the police bring
+'em it."
+
+Mr. Craggie finished the remainder of his glass of sherry in
+silence, and presently rose to go. Coroner Whidden and Mr. Ward had
+already gone. The guests in the public room were thinning out; a
+gloom, indefinable and shapeless like the night, seemed to have
+fallen upon the few that lingered. At a somewhat earlier hour than
+usual the gas was shut off in the Stillwater hotel.
+
+In the lonely house in Welch's Court a light was still burning.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+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 mediaeval 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.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+After a lapse of four years, during which he had as completely
+vanished out of the memory of Stillwater as if he had been lying all
+the while in the crowded family tomb behind the South Church, Richard
+Shackford reappeared one summer morning at the door of his cousin's
+house in Welch's Court. Mr. Shackford was absent at the moment, and
+Mrs. Morganson, an elderly deaf woman, who came in for a few hours
+every day to do the house-work, was busy in the extension. Without
+announcing himself, Richard stalked up-stairs to the chamber in the
+gable, and went directly to a little shelf in one corner, upon which
+lay the dog's-eared copy of Robinson Crusoe just as he had left it,
+save the four years' accumulation of dust. Richard took the book
+fiercely in both hands, and with a single mighty tug tore it from top
+to bottom, and threw the fragments into the fire-place.
+
+A moment later, on the way down-stairs, he encountered his kinsman
+ascending.
+
+"Ah, you have come back!" was Mr. Shackford's grim greeting after
+a moment's hesitation.
+
+"Yes," said Richard, with embarrassment, though he had made up his
+mind not to be embarrassed by his cousin.
+
+"I can't say I was looking for you. You might have dropped me a
+line; you were politer when you left. Why do you come back, and why
+did you go away?" demanded the old man, with abrupt fierceness. The
+last four years had bleached him and bent him and made him look very
+old.
+
+"I didn't like the idea of Blandmann & Sharpe, for one thing,"
+said Richard, "and I thought I liked the sea."
+
+"And did you?"
+
+"No, sir! I enjoyed seeing foreign parts, and all that."
+
+"Quite the young gentleman on his travels. But the sea didn't
+agree with you, and now you like the idea of Blandmann & Sharpe?"
+
+"Not the least in the world, I assure you!" cried Richard. "I take
+to it as little as ever I did."
+
+"Perhaps that is fortunate. But it's going to be rather difficult
+to suit your tastes. What _do_ you like?"
+
+"I like you, cousin Lemuel; you have always been kind to me--in
+your way," said poor Richard, yearning for a glimmer of human warmth
+and sympathy, and forgetting all the dreariness of his uncared-for
+childhood. He had been out in the world, and had found it even
+harder-hearted than his own home, which now he idealized in the first
+flush of returning to it. Again he saw himself, a blond-headed little
+fellow with stocking down at heel, climbing the steep staircase, or
+digging in the clay at the front gate with the air full of the breath
+of lilacs. That same penetrating perfume, blown through the open
+hall-door as he spoke, nearly brought the tears to his eyes. He had
+looked forward for years to this coming back to Stillwater. Many a
+time, as he wandered along the streets of some foreign sea-port, the
+rich architecture and the bright costumes had faded out before him,
+and given place to the fat gray belfry and slim red chimneys of the
+humble New England village where he was born. He had learned to love
+it after losing it; and now he had struggled back through countless
+trials and disasters to find no welcome.
+
+"Cousin Lemuel," said Richard gently, "only just us two are left,
+and we ought to be good friends, at least."
+
+"We are good enough friends," mumbled Mr. Shackford, who could not
+evade taking the hand which Richard had forlornly reached out to him,
+"but that needn't prevent us understanding each other like rational
+creatures. I don't care for a great deal of fine sentiment in people
+who run away without so much as thank you."
+
+"I was all wrong!"
+
+"That's what folks always say, with the delusion that it makes
+everything all right."
+
+"Surely it help,--to admit it."
+
+"That depends; it generally doesn't. What do you propose to do?"
+
+"I hardly know at the moment; my plans are quite in the air."
+
+"In the air!" repeated Mr. Shackford. "I fancy that describes
+them. Your father's plans were always in the air, too, and he never
+got any of them down."
+
+"I intend to get mine down."
+
+"Have you saved by anything?"
+
+"Not a cent."
+
+"I thought as much."
+
+"I had a couple of hundred dollars in my sea-chest; but I was
+shipwrecked, and lost it. I barely saved myself. When Robinson
+Crusoe"--
+
+"Damn Robinson Crusoe!" snapped Mr. Shackford.
+
+"That's what I say," returned Richard gravely. "When Robinson
+Crusoe was cast on an uninhabited island, shrimps and soft-shell
+crabs and all sorts of delicious mollusks--readily boiled, I've no
+doubt--crawled up on the beach, and begged him to eat them; but
+_I_ nearly starved to death."
+
+"Of course. You will always be shipwrecked, and always be starved
+to death; you are one of that kind. I don't believe you are a
+Shackford at all. When they were not anything else they were good
+sailors. If you only had a drop of _his_ blood in your veins!"
+and Mr. Shackford waved his head towards a faded portrait of a
+youngish, florid gentleman with banged hair and high coat-collar,
+which hung against the wall half-way up the stair-case. This was the
+counterfeit presentment of Lemuel Shackford's father seated with his
+back at an open window, through which was seen a ship under full
+canvas with the union-jack standing out straight in the wrong
+direction. "But what are you going to do for yourself? You can't
+start a subscription paper, and play with shipwrecked mariner, you
+know."
+
+"No, I hardly care to do that," said Richard, with a good-natured
+laugh, "though no poor devil ever had a better outfit for the
+character."
+
+"What _are_ you calculated for?"
+
+Richard was painfully conscious of his unfitness for many things;
+but he felt there was nothing in life to which he was so ill adapted
+as his present position. Yet, until he could look about him, he must
+needs eat his kinsman's reluctant bread, or starve. The world was
+younger and more unsophisticated when manna dropped from the clouds.
+
+Mr. Shackford stood with his neck craned over the frayed edge of
+his satin stock and one hand resting indecisively on the banister,
+and Richard on the step above, leaning his back against the blighted
+flowers of the wall-paper. From an oval window at the head of the
+stairs the summer sunshine streamed upon them, and illuminated the
+high-shouldered clock which, ensconced in an alcove, seemed to be
+listening to the conversation.
+
+"There's no chance for you in the law," said Mr. Shackford, after
+a long pause. "Sharpe's nephew has the berth. A while ago I might
+have got you into the Miantowona Iron Works; but the rascally
+directors are trying to ruin me now. There's the Union Store, if they
+happen to want a clerk. I suppose you would be about as handy behind
+a counter as a hippopotamus. I have no business of my own to train
+you to. You are not good for the sea, and the sea has probably
+spoiled you for anything else. A drop of salt water just poisons a
+landsman. I am sure I don't know what to do with you."
+
+"Don't bother yourself about it at all," said Richard, cheerfully.
+"You are going back on the whole family, ancestors and posterity, by
+suggesting that I can't make my own living. I only want a little time
+to take breath, don't you see, and a crust and a bed for a few days,
+such as you might give any wayfarer. Meanwhile, I will look after
+things around the place. I fancy I was never an idler here since the
+day I learnt to split kindling."
+
+"There's your old bed in the north chamber," said Mr. Shackford,
+wrinkling his forehead helplessly. "According to my notion, it is not
+so good as a bunk, or a hammock slung in a tidy forecastle, but it's
+at your service, and Mrs. Morganson, I dare say, can lay an extra
+plate at table."
+
+With which gracious acceptance of Richard's proposition, Mr.
+Shackford resumed his way upstairs, and the young man thoughtfully
+descended to the hall-door and thence into the street, to take a
+general survey of the commercial capabilities of Stillwater.
+
+The outlook was not inspiring. A machinist, or a mechanic, or a
+day laborer might have found a foot-hold. A man without handicraft
+was not in request in Stillwater. "What is your trade?" was the
+staggering question that met Richard at the threshold. He went from
+workshop to workshop, confidently and cheerfully at first, whistling
+softly between whiles; but at every turn the question confronted him.
+In some places, where he was recognized with thinly veiled surprise
+as that boy of Shackford's, he was kindly put off; in others he
+received only a stare or a brutal No.
+
+By noon he had exhausted the leading shops and offices in the
+village, and was so disheartened that he began to dread the thought
+of returning home to dinner. Clearly, he was a superfluous person in
+Stillwater. A mortar-splashed hod-carrier, who had seated himself on
+a pile of brick and was eating his noonday rations from a tin can
+just brought to him by a slatternly girl, gave Richard a spasm of envy.
+Here was a man who had found his place, and was establishing--what
+Richard did not seem able to establish in his own case--a right to
+exist.
+
+At supper Mr. Shackford refrained from examining Richard on his
+day's employment, for which reserve, or indifference, the boy was
+grateful. When the silent meal was over the old man went to his
+papers, and Richard withdrew to his room in the gable. He had
+neglected to provide himself with a candle. However, there was
+nothing to read, for in destroying Robinson Crusoe he had destroyed
+his entire library; so he sat and brooded in the moonlight, casting a
+look of disgust now and then at the mutilated volume on the hearth.
+That lying romance! It had been, indirectly, the cause of all his
+woe, filling his boyish brain with visions of picturesque adventure,
+and sending him off to sea, where he had lost four precious years of
+his life.
+
+"If I had stuck to my studies," reflected Richard while
+undressing, "I might have made something of myself. He's a great
+friend, Robinson Crusoe."
+
+Richard fell asleep with as much bitterness in his bosom against
+DeFoe's ingenious hero as if Robinson had been a living person
+instead of a living fiction, and out of this animosity grew a dream
+so fantastic and comical that Richard awoke himself with a bewildered
+laugh just as the sunrise reddened the panes of the chamber window.
+In this dream somebody came to Richard and asked him if he had heard
+of that dreadful thing about young Crusoe.
+
+"No, confound him!" said Richard, "what is it?"
+
+"It has been ascertained," said somebody, who seemed to Richard at
+once an intimate friend and an utter stranger,--"it has been
+ascertained beyond a doubt that the man Friday was not a man Friday
+at all, but a light-minded young princess from one of the neighboring
+islands who had fallen in love with Robinson. Her real name was
+Saturday."
+
+"Why, that's scandalous!" cried Richard with heat. "Think of the
+admiration and sympathy the world has been lavishing on this precious
+pair; Robinson Crusoe and his girl Saturday! That puts a different
+face on it."
+
+"Another great moral character exploded," murmured the shadowy
+shape, mixing itself up with the motes of a sunbeam and drifting out
+through the window. Then Richard fell to laughing in his sleep, and
+so awoke. He was still confused with the dream as he sat on the edge
+of his bed, pulling himself together in the broad daylight.
+
+"Well," he muttered at length, "I shouldn't wonder! There's
+nothing too bad to be believed of that man."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Richard made an early start that morning in search of employment,
+and duplicated the failure of the previous day. Nobody wanted him. If
+nobody wanted him in the village where he was born and bred, a
+village of counting-rooms and workshops, was any other place likely
+to need him? He had only one hope, if it could be called a hope; at
+any rate, he had treated it tenderly as such and kept it for the
+last. He would apply to Rowland Slocum. Long ago, when Richard was an
+urchin making pot-hooks in the lane, the man used occasionally to pat
+him on the head and give him pennies. This was not a foundation on
+which to rear a very lofty castle; but this was all he had.
+
+It was noon when Richard approached the marble yard, and the men
+were pouring out into the street through the wide gate in the rough
+deal fence which inclosed the works,--heavy, brawny men, covered with
+fine white dust, who shouldered each other like cattle, and took the
+sidewalk to themselves. Richard stepped aside to let them pass, eying
+them curiously as possible comrades. Suddenly a slim dark fellow, who
+had retained his paper cap and leather apron, halted and thrust forth
+a horny hand. The others went on.
+
+"Hullo, Dick Shackford!"
+
+"What, is that you, Will? _You_ here?"
+
+"Been here two years now. One of Slocum's apprentices," added
+Durgin, with an air of easy grandeur.
+
+"Two years? How time flies--when it doesn't crawl! Do you like
+it?"
+
+"My time will be out next--Oh, the work? Well, yes; it's not bad,
+and there's a jolly set in the yard. But how about you? I heard last
+night you'd got home. Been everywhere and come back wealthy? The boys
+used to say you was off pirating."
+
+"No such luck," answered Richard, with a smile. "I didn't prey on
+the high seas,--quite the contrary. The high sea captured my kit and
+four years' savings. I will tell you about it some day. If I have a
+limb to my name and a breath left to my body, it is no thanks to the
+Indian Ocean. That is all I have got, Will, and I am looking around
+for bread and butter,--literally bread and butter."
+
+"No? and the old gentleman so rich!"
+
+Durgin said this with sincere indignation, and was perhaps
+unconscious himself of experiencing that nameless, shadowy
+satisfaction which Rochefoucauld says we find in the adversity of our
+best friends. Certainly Richard looked very seedy in his suit of
+slop-shop clothes.
+
+"I was on my way to Mr. Slocum's to see if I could do anything
+with him," Richard continued.
+
+"To get a job, do you mean?"
+
+"Yes, to get work,--to learn _how_ to work; to master a
+trade, in short."
+
+"You can't be an apprentice, you know," said Durgin.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Slocum has two."
+
+"Suppose he should happen to want another? He might."
+
+"The Association wouldn't allow it."
+
+"What Association?"
+
+"The Marble Workers' Association, of course."
+
+_"They_ wouldn't allow it! How is that?"
+
+"This the way of it. Slocum is free to take on two apprentices
+every year, but no more. That prevents workmen increasing too fast,
+and so keeps up wages. The Marble Workers' Association is a very neat
+thing, I can tell you."
+
+"But doesn't Mr. Slocum own the yard? I thought he did."
+
+"Yes, he owns the yard."
+
+"If he wished to extend the business, couldn't he employ more
+hands?"
+
+"As many as he could get,--skilled workmen; but not apprentices."
+
+"And Mr. Slocum agrees to that?" inquired Richard.
+
+"He does."
+
+"And likes it?"
+
+"Not he,--he hates it; but he can't help himself."
+
+"Upon my soul, I don't see what prevents him taking on as many
+apprentices as he wants to."
+
+"Why, the Association, to be sure," returned Durgin, glancing at
+the town clock, which marked seven minutes past the hour.
+
+"But how could they stop him?"
+
+"In plenty of ways. Suppose Slocum has a lot of unfinished
+contracts on hand,--he always has fat contracts,--and the men was to
+knock off work. That would be kind of awkward, wouldn't it?"
+
+"For a day or two, yes. He could send out of town for hands,"
+suggested Richard.
+
+"And they wouldn't come, if the Association said 'Stay where you
+are.' They are mostly in the ring. Some outsiders might come,
+though."
+
+"Then what?"
+
+"Why, then the boys would make it pretty hot for them in
+Stillwater. Don't you notice?"
+
+"I notice there is not much chance for me," said Richard,
+despondingly. "Isn't that so?"
+
+"Can't say. Better talk with Slocum. But I must get along; I have
+to be back sharp at one. I want to hear about your knocking around
+the worst kind. Can't we meet somewhere tonight,--at the tavern?"
+
+"The tavern? That didn't used to be a quiet place."
+
+"It isn't quiet now, but there's nowhere else to go of a night.
+It's a comfortable den, and there's always some capital fellows
+dropping in. A glass of lager with a mate is not a bad thing after a
+hard day's work."
+
+"Both are good things when they are of the right sort."
+
+"That's like saying I'm not the right sort, isn't it?"
+
+"I meant nothing of the kind. But I don't take to the tavern. Not
+that I'm squeamish; I have lived four years among sailors, and have
+been in rougher places than you ever dreamed of; but all the same I
+am afraid of the tavern. I've seen many a brave fellow wrecked on
+that reef."
+
+"You always was a bit stuck up," said Durgin candidly.
+
+"Not an inch. I never had much reason to be; and less now than
+ever, when I can scarcely afford to drink water, let alone beer. I
+will drop round to your mother's some evening--I hope she's
+well,--and tell you of my ups and downs. That will be pleasanter for
+all hands."
+
+"Oh, as you like."
+
+"Now for Mr. Slocum, though you have taken the wind out of me."
+
+The two separated, Durgin with a half smile on his lip, and
+Richard in a melancholy frame of mind. He passed from the
+grass-fringed street into the deserted marble yard, where it seemed
+as if the green summer had suddenly turned into white winter, and
+threading his way between the huge drifts of snowy stone, knocked at
+the door of Mr. Slocum's private office.
+
+William Durgin had summed up the case fairly enough as it stood
+between the Marble Workers' Association and Rowland Slocum. The
+system of this branch of the trades-union kept trained workmen
+comparatively scarce, and enabled them to command regular and even
+advanced prices at periods when other trades were depressed. The
+older hands looked upon a fresh apprentice in the yard with much the
+same favor as workingmen of the era of Jacquard looked upon the
+introduction of a new piece of machinery. Unless the apprentice had
+exceptional tact, he underwent a rough novitiate. In any case he
+served a term of social ostracism before he was admitted to full
+comradeship. Mr. Slocum could easily have found openings each year
+for a dozen learners, had the matter been under his control; but it
+was not. "I am the master of each man individually," he declared,
+"but collectively they are my master." So his business, instead of
+naturally spreading and becoming a benefit to the many, was kept
+carefully pruned down to the benefit of the few. He was often forced
+to decline important contracts, the filling of which would have
+resulted to the advantage of every person in the village.
+
+Mr. Slocum recognized Richard at once, and listened kindly to his
+story. It was Mr. Slocum's way to listen kindly to every one; but he
+was impressed with Richard's intelligence and manner, and became
+desirous, for several reasons, to assist him. In the first place,
+there was room in the shops for another apprentice; experienced hands
+were on jobs that could have been as well done by beginners; and, in
+the second place, Mr. Slocum had an intuition that Lemuel Shackford
+was not treating the lad fairly, though Richard had said nothing to
+this effect. Now, Mr. Slocum and Mr. Shackford were just then at
+swords' points.
+
+"I don't suppose I could annoy Shackford more," was Mr. Slocum's
+reflection, "than by doing something for this boy, whom he has always
+shamelessly neglected."
+
+The motive was not a high one; but Richard would have been well
+satisfied with it, if he could have divined it. He did divine that
+Mr. Slocum was favorably inclined towards him, and stood watching
+that gentleman's face with hopeful anxiety.
+
+"I have my regulation number of young men, Richard," said Mr.
+Slocum, "and there will be no vacancy until autumn. If you could wait
+a few months."
+
+Richard's head drooped.
+
+"Can't do that? You write a good hand, you say. Perhaps you could
+assist the book-keeper until there's a chance for you in the yard."
+
+"I think I could, sir," said Richard eagerly.
+
+"If you were only a draughtsman, now, I could do something much
+better for you. I intend to set up a shop for ornamental carving, and
+I want some one to draw patterns. If you had a knack at designing, if
+you could draw at all"--
+
+Richard's face lighted up.
+
+"Perhaps you _have_ a turn that way. I remember the queer
+things you used to scratch in the mud in the court, when you were a
+little shaver. Can you draw?"
+
+"Why, that is the one thing I can do!" cried Richard,--"in a rough
+fashion, of course," he added, fearing he had overstated it.
+
+"It is a rough fashion that will serve. You must let me see some
+of your sketches."
+
+"I haven't any, sir. I had a hundred in my sea-chest, but that was
+lost,--pencillings of old archways, cathedral spires, bits of frieze,
+and such odds and ends as took my fancy in the ports we touched at. I
+recollect one bit. I think I could do it for you now. Shall I?"
+
+Mr. Slocum nodded assent, smiling at the young fellow's
+enthusiasm, and only partially suspecting his necessity. Richard
+picked up a pen and began scratching on a letter sheet which lay on
+the desk. He was five or six minutes at the work, during which the
+elder man watched him with an amused expression.
+
+"It's a section of cornice on the facade of the Hindoo College at
+Calcutta," said Richard, handing him the paper,--"no, it's the
+custom-house. I forget which; but it doesn't matter."
+
+The amused look gradually passed out of Mr. Slocum's countenance
+as he examined the sketch. It was roughly but clearly drawn, and full
+of facility. "Why, that's very clever!" he said, holding it at
+arms'-length; and then, with great gravity, "I hope you are not a
+genius, Richard; that would be too much of a fine thing. If you are
+not, you can be of service to me in my plans."
+
+Richard laughingly made haste to declare that to the best of his
+knowledge and belief he was not a genius, and it was decided on the
+spot that Richard should assist Mr. Simms, the bookkeeper, and
+presently try his hand at designing ornamental patterns for the
+carvers, Mr. Slocum allowing him apprentice wages until the quality
+of his work should be ascertained.
+
+"It is very little," said Mr. Slocum, "but it will pay your board,
+if you do not live at home."
+
+"I shall not remain at my cousin's," Richard replied, "if you call
+that home."
+
+"I can imagine it is not much of a home. Your cousin, not to put
+too fine a point on it, is a wretch."
+
+"I am sorry to hear you say that, sir; he's my only living
+kinsman."
+
+"You are fortunate in having but one, then. However, I am wrong to
+abuse him to you; but I cannot speak of him with moderation, he has
+just played me such a despicable trick. Look here."
+
+Mr. Slocum led Richard to the door, and pointing to a row of new
+workshops which extended the entire length of one side of the marble
+yard, said,--
+
+"I built these last spring. After the shingles were on we
+discovered that the rear partition, for a distance of seventy-five
+feet, overlapped two inches on Shackford's meadow. I was ready to
+drop when I saw it, your cousin is such an unmanageable old fiend. Of
+course I went to him immediately, and what do you think? He demanded
+five hundred dollars for that strip of land! Five hundred dollars for
+a few inches of swamp meadow not worth ten dollars the acre! 'Then
+take your disreputable old mill off my property!' says Shackford,--he
+called it a disreputable old mill! I was hasty, perhaps, and I told
+him to go to the devil. He said he would, and he did; for he went to
+Blandmann. When the lawyers got hold of it, they bothered the life
+out of me; so I just moved the building forward two inches, at an
+expense of seven hundred dollars. Then what does the demon do but
+board up all my windows opening on the meadow! Richard, I make it a
+condition that you shall not lodge at Shackford's."
+
+"Nothing could induce me to live another day in the same house
+with him, sir," answered Richard, suppressing an inclination to
+smile; and then seriously, "His bread is bitter."
+
+Richard went back with a light heart to Welch's Court. At the gate
+of the marble yard he met William Durgin returning to work. The
+steam-whistle had sounded the call, and there was no time for
+exchange of words; so Richard gave his comrade a bright nod and
+passed by. Durgin turned and stared after him.
+
+"Looks as if Slocum had taken him on; but it never can be as
+apprentice; he wouldn't dare do it."
+
+Mr. Shackford had nearly finished his frugal dinner when Richard
+entered. "If you can't hit it to be in at your meals," said Mr.
+Shackford, helping himself absently to the remaining chop, "perhaps
+you had better stop away altogether."
+
+ "I can do that now, cousin," replied Richard sunnily. "I have
+engaged with Slocum."
+
+The old man laid down his knife and fork.
+
+"With Slocum! A Shackford a miserable marble-chipper!"
+
+There was so little hint of the aristocrat in Lemuel Shackford's
+sordid life and person that no one suspected him of even self-esteem.
+He went as meanly dressed as a tramp, and as careless of contemporary
+criticism; yet clear down in his liver, or somewhere in his anatomy,
+he nourished an odd abstract pride in the family Shackford. Heaven
+knows why! To be sure, it dated far back; its women had always been
+virtuous, and its men, if not always virtuous, had always been
+ship-captains. But beyond this the family had never amounted to
+anything, and now there was so very little left of it. For Richard as
+Richard Lemuel cared nothing; for Richard as a Shackford he had a
+chaotic feeling that defied analysis and had never before risen to
+the surface. It was therefore with a disgust entirely apart from the
+hatred of Slocum or regard for Richard that the old man exclaimed, "A
+Shackford a miserable marble-chipper!"
+
+"That is better than hanging around the village with my hands in
+my pockets. Isn't it?"
+
+"I don't know that anybody has demanded that you should hang
+around the village."
+
+"I ought to go away, you mean? But I have found work here, and I
+might not find it elsewhere."
+
+"Stillwater is not the place to begin life in. It's the place to
+go away from, and come back to."
+
+"Well, I have come back."
+
+"And how? With one shirt and a lot of bad sailor habits."
+
+"My one shirt is my only very bad habit," said Richard, with a
+laugh,--he could laugh now,--"and I mean to get rid of that."
+
+Mr. Shackford snapped his fingers disdainfully.
+
+"You ought to have stuck to the sea; that's respectable. In ten
+years you might have risen to be master of a bark; that would have
+been honorable. You might have gone down in a gale,--you probably
+would,--and that would have been fortunate. But a stone-cutter! You
+can understand," growled Mr. Shackford, reaching out for his straw
+hat, which he put on and crushed over his brows, "I don't keep a
+boarding-house for Slocum's hands."
+
+"Oh, I'm far from asking it!" cried Richard. "I am thankful for
+the two nights' shelter I have had."
+
+"That's some of your sarcasm, I suppose," said Mr. Shackford, half
+turning, with his hands on the door-knob.
+
+"No, it is some of my sincerity. I am really obliged to you. You
+weren't very cordial, to be sure, but I did not deserve cordiality."
+
+"You have figured that out correctly."
+
+"I want to begin over again, you see, and start fair."
+
+"Then begin by dropping Slocum."
+
+"You have not given me a chance to tell you what the arrangement
+is. However, it's irrevocable."
+
+"I don't want to hear. I don't care a curse, so long as it is an
+arrangement," and Mr. Shackford hurried out of the room, slamming the
+door behind him.
+
+Then Richard, quite undisturbed by his cousin's unreasonableness,
+sat himself down to eat the last meal he was ever to eat under that
+roof,--a feat which his cousin's appetite had rendered comparatively
+easy.
+
+While engaged in this, Richard resolved in his mind several
+questions as to his future abode. He could not reconcile his thought
+to any of the workingmen's boarding-houses, of which there were five
+or six in the slums of the village, where the doorways were greasy,
+and women flitted about in the hottest weather with thick woolen
+shawls over their heads. Yet his finances did not permit him to
+aspire to lodgings much more decent. If he could only secure a small
+room somewhere in a quiet neighborhood. Possibly Mrs. Durgin would
+let him have a chamber in her cottage. He was beginning life over
+again, and it struck him as nearly an ideal plan to begin it on the
+identical spot where he had, in a manner, made his first start.
+Besides, there was William Durgin for company, when the long nights
+of the New England winter set in. The idea smiled so pleasantly in
+Richard's fancy that he pushed the plate away from him impatiently,
+and picked up his hat which lay on the floor beside the chair.
+
+That evening he moved from the Shackford house to Mrs. Durgin's
+cottage in Cross Street. It was not an imposing ceremony. With a
+small brown-paper parcel under his arm, he walked from one threshold
+to the other, and the thing was done.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Towards the close of his second year with Mr. Slocum, Richard was
+assigned a work-room by himself, and relieved of his accountant's
+duties. His undivided energies were demanded by the carving
+department, which had proved a lucrative success.
+
+The rear of the lot on which Mr. Slocum's house stood was shut off
+from the marble yard by a high brick wall pierced with a private door
+for Mr. Slocum's convenience. Over the kitchen in the extension,
+which reached within a few feet of the wall, was a disused chamber,
+approachable on the outside by a flight of steps leading to a
+veranda. To this room Richard and his traps were removed. With a
+round table standing in the center, with the plaster models arranged
+on shelves and sketches in pencil and crayon tacked against the
+whitewashed walls, the apartment was transformed into a delightful
+atelier. An open fire-place, with a brace of antiquated iron-dogs
+straddling the red brick hearth, gave the finishing touch. The
+occupant was in easy communication with the yard, from which the busy
+din of clinking chisels came musically to his ear, and was still
+beyond the reach of unnecessary interruption. Richard saw clearly all
+the advantages of this transfer, but he was far form having any
+intimation that he had made the most important move of his life.
+
+The room had two doors: one opened on the veranda, and the other
+into a narrow hall connecting the extension with the main building.
+Frequently, that first week after taking possession, Richard detected
+the sweep of a broom and the rustle of drapery in this passage-way,
+the sound sometimes hushing itself quite close to the door, as if
+some one had paused a moment just outside. He wondered whether it was
+the servant-maid or Margaret Slocum, whom he knew very well by sight.
+It was, in fact, Margaret, who was dying with the curiosity of
+fourteen to peep into the studio, so carefully locked whenever the
+young man left it,--dying with curiosity to see the workshop, and
+standing in rather great awe of the workman.
+
+In the home circle her father had a habit of speaking with deep
+respect of young Shackford's ability, and once she had seen him at
+their table,--at a Thanksgiving. On this occasion Richard had
+appalled her by the solemnity of his shyness,--poor Richard, who was
+so unused to the amenities of a handsomely served dinner, that the
+chill which came over him cooled the Thanksgiving turkey on his
+palate.
+
+When it had been decided that he was to have the spare room for
+his workshop, Margaret, with womanly officiousness, had swept it and
+dusted it and demolished the cobwebs; but since then she had not been
+able to obtain so much as a glimpse of the interior. A ten minutes'
+sweeping had sufficed for the chamber, but the passage-way seemed in
+quite an irreclaimable state, judging by the number of times it was
+necessary to sweep it in the course of a few days. Now Margaret was
+not an unusual mixture of timidity and daring; so one morning, about
+a week after Richard was settled, she walked with quaking heart up to
+the door of the studio, and knocked as bold as brass.
+
+Richard opened the door, and smiled pleasantly at Margaret
+standing on the threshold with an expression of demure defiance in
+her face. Did Mr. Shackford want anything more in the way of pans and
+pails for his plaster? No, Mr. Shackford had everything he required
+of the kind. But would not Miss Margaret walk in? Yes, she would step
+in for a moment, but with a good deal of indifference, though, giving
+an air of chance to her settled determination to examine that room
+from top to bottom.
+
+Richard showed her his drawings and casts, and enlightened her on
+all the simple mysteries of the craft. Margaret, of whom he was a
+trifle afraid at first, amused him with her candor and sedateness,
+seeming now a mere child, and now an elderly person gravely
+inspecting matters. The frankness and simplicity were hers by nature,
+and the oldish ways--notably her self-possession, so quick to assert
+itself after an instant's forgetfulness--came perhaps of losing her
+mother in early childhood, and the premature duties which that
+misfortune entailed. She amused him, for she was only fourteen; but
+she impressed him also, for she was Mr. Slocum's daughter. Yet it was
+not her lightness, but her gravity, that made Richard smile to
+himself.
+
+"I am not interrupting you?" she asked presently.
+
+"Not in the least," said Richard. "I am waiting for these molds to
+harden. I cannot do anything until then."
+
+"Papa says you are very clever," remarked Margaret, turning her
+wide black eyes full upon him. _"Are_ you?"
+
+"Far from it," replied Richard, laughing to veil his confusion,
+"but I am glad your father thinks so."
+
+"You should not be glad to have him think so," returned Margaret
+reprovingly, "if you are not clever. I suppose you are, though. Tell
+the truth, now."
+
+"It is not fair to force a fellow into praising himself."
+
+"You are trying to creep out!"
+
+"Well, then, there are many cleverer persons than I in the world,
+and a few not so clever."
+
+"That won't do," said Margaret positively.
+
+"I don't understand what you mean by cleverness, Miss Margaret.
+There are a great many kinds and degrees. I can make fairly honest
+patterns for the men to work by; but I am not an artist, if you mean
+that."
+
+"You are not an artist?"
+
+"No; an artist creates, and I only copy, and that in a small way.
+Any one can learn to prepare casts; but to create a bust or a
+statue--that is to say, a fine one--a man must have genius."
+
+"You have no genius?"
+
+"Not a grain."
+
+"I am sorry to hear that," said Margaret, with a disappointed
+look. "But perhaps it will come," she added encouragingly. "I have
+read that nearly all great artists and poets are almost always
+modest. They know better than anybody else how far they fall short of
+what they intend, and so they don't put on airs. You don't, either. I
+like that in you. May be you have genius without knowing it, Mr.
+Shackford."
+
+"It is quite without knowing it, I assure you!" protested Richard,
+with suppressed merriment. "What an odd girl!" he thought. "She is
+actually talking to me like a mother!"
+
+The twinkling light in the young man's eyes, or something that
+jarred in his manner, caused Margaret at once to withdraw into
+herself. She went silently about the room, examining the tools and
+patterns; then, nearing the door, suddenly dropped Richard a quaint
+little courtesy, and was gone.
+
+This was the colorless beginning of a friendship that was destined
+speedily to be full of tender lights and shadows, and to flow on with
+unsuspected depth. For several days Richard saw nothing more of
+Margaret, and scarcely thought of her. The strangle little figure was
+fading out of his mind, when, one afternoon, it again appeared at his
+door. This time Margaret had left something of her sedateness behind;
+she struck Richard as being both less ripe and less immature than he
+had fancied; she interested rather than amused him. Perhaps he had
+been partially insulated by his own shyness on the first occasion,
+and had caught only a confused and inaccurate impression of
+Margaret's personality. She remained half an hour in the workshop,
+and at her departure omitted the formal courtesy.
+
+After this, Margaret seldom let a week slip without tapping once
+or twice at the studio, at first with some pretext or other, and then
+with no pretense whatever. When Margaret had disburdened herself of
+excuses for dropping in to watch Richard mold his leaves and flowers,
+she came oftener, and Richard insensibly drifted into the habit of
+expecting her on certain days, and was disappointed when she failed
+to appear. His industry had saved him, until now, from discovering
+how solitary his life really was; for his life was as solitary--as
+solitary as that of Margaret, who lived in the great house with only
+her father, the two servants, and an episodical aunt. The mother was
+long ago dead; Margaret could not recollect when that gray headstone,
+with blotches of rusty-green moss breaking out over the lettering,
+was not in the churchyard; and there never had been any brothers or
+sisters.
+
+To Margaret Richard's installation in the empty room, where as a
+child she had always been afraid to go, was the single important
+break she could remember in the monotony of her existence; and now a
+vague yearning for companionship, the blind sense of the plant
+reaching towards the sunshine, drew her there. The tacitly prescribed
+half hour often lengthened to an hour. Sometimes Margaret brought a
+book with her, or a piece of embroidery, and the two spoke scarcely
+ten words, Richard giving her a smile now and then, and she returning
+a sympathetic nod as the cast came out successfully.
+
+Margaret at fifteen--she was fifteen now--was not a beauty. There
+is the loveliness of the bud and the loveliness of the full-blown
+flower; but Margaret as a blossom was not pretty. She was awkward and
+angular, with prominent shoulder-blades, and no soft curves anywhere
+in her slimness; only her black hair, growing low on the forehead,
+and her eyes were fine. Her profile, indeed, with the narrow forehead
+and the sensitive upper lip, might fairly have suggested the mask of
+Clytie which Richard had bought of an itinerant image-dealer, and
+fixed on a bracket over the mantel-shelf. But her eyes were her
+specialty, if one may say that. They were fringed with such heavy
+lashes that the girl seemed always to be in half-mourning. Her smile
+was singularly sweet and bright, perhaps because it broke through so
+much somber coloring.
+
+If there was a latent spark of sentiment between Richard and
+Margaret in those earlier days, neither was conscious of it; they had
+seemingly begun where happy lovers generally end,--by being dear
+comrades. He liked to have Margaret sitting there, with her needle
+flashing in the sunlight, or her eyelashes making a rich gloom above
+the book as she read aloud. It was so agreeable to look up from his
+work, and not be alone. He had been alone so much. And Margaret found
+nothing in the world pleasanter than to sit there and watch Richard
+making his winter garden, as she called it. By and by it became her
+custom to pass every Saturday afternoon in that employment.
+
+Margaret was not content to be merely a visitor; she took a
+housewifely care of the workshop, resolutely straightening out its
+chronic disorder at unexpected moments, and fighting the white dust
+that settled upon everything. The green-paper shade, which did not
+roll up very well, at the west window was of her devising. An empty
+camphor vial on Richard's desk had always a clove pink, or a pansy,
+or a rose, stuck into it, according to the season. She hid herself
+away and peeped out in a hundred feminine things in the room.
+Sometimes she was a bit of crochet-work left on a chair, and
+sometimes she was only a hair-pin, which Richard gravely picked up
+and put on the mantel-piece.
+
+Mr. Slocum threw no obstacles in the path of this idyllic
+friendship; possibly he did not observe it. In his eyes Margaret was
+still a child,--a point of view that necessarily excluded any
+consideration of Richard. Perhaps, however, if Mr. Slocum could have
+assisted invisibly at a pretty little scene which took place in the
+studio, one day, some twelve or eighteen months after Margaret's
+first visit to it, he might have found food for reflection.
+
+It was a Saturday afternoon. Margaret had come into the workshop
+with her sewing, as usual. The papers on the round table had been
+neatly cleared away, and Richard was standing by the window,
+indolently drumming on the glass with a palette-knife.
+
+"Not at work this afternoon?"
+
+"I was waiting for you."
+
+"That is no excuse at all," said Margaret, sweeping across the
+room with a curious air of self-consciousness, and arranging her
+drapery with infinite pains as she seated herself.
+
+Richard looked puzzled for a moment, and then exclaimed,
+"Margaret, you have got on a long dress!"
+
+"Yes," said Margaret, with dignity. "Do you like it,--the train?"
+
+"That's a train?"
+
+"Yes," said Margaret, standing up and glancing over her left
+shoulder at the soft folds of maroon-colored stuff, which, with a
+mysterious feminine movement of the foot, she caused to untwist
+itself and flow out gracefully behind her. There was really something
+very pretty in the hesitating lines of the tall, slender figure, as
+she leaned back that way. Certain unsuspected points emphasized
+themselves so cunningly.
+
+"I never saw anything finer," declared Richard. "It was worth
+waiting for."
+
+"But you shouldn't have waited," said Margaret, with a gratified
+flush, settling herself into the chair again. "It was understood that
+you were never to let me interfere with your work."
+
+"You see you have, by being twenty minutes late. I've finished
+that acorn border for Stevens's capitals, and there's nothing more to
+do for the yard. I am going to make something for myself, and I want
+you to lend me a hand."
+
+"How can I help you, Richard?" Margaret asked, promptly stopping
+the needle in the hem.
+
+"I need a paper-weight to keep my sketches from being blown about,
+and I wish you literally to lend me a hand,--a hand to take a cast
+of."
+
+"Really?"
+
+"I think that little white claw would make a very neat
+paper-weight," said Richard.
+
+Margaret gravely rolled up her sleeve to the elbow, and
+contemplated the hand and wrist critically.
+
+"It is like a claw, isn't it. I think you can find something
+better than that."
+
+"No; that is what I want, and nothing else. That, or no
+paper-weight for me."
+
+"Very well, just as you choose. It will be a fright."
+
+"The other hand, please."
+
+"I gave you the left because I've a ring on this one."
+
+"You can take off the ring, I suppose."
+
+"Of course I can take it off."
+
+"Well, then, do."
+
+"Richard," said Margaret severely, "I hope you are not a fidget."
+
+"A what?"
+
+"A fuss, then,--a person who always wants everything some other
+way, and makes just twice as much trouble as anybody else."
+
+"No, Margaret, I am not that. I prefer your right hand because the
+left is next to the heart, and the evaporation of the water in the
+plaster turns it as cold as snow. Your arm will be chilled to the
+shoulder. We don't want to do anything to hurt the good little heart,
+you know."
+
+"Certainly not," said Margaret. "There!" and she rested her right
+arm on the table, while Richard placed the hand in the desired
+position on a fresh napkin which he had folded for the purpose.
+
+"Let your hand lie flexible, please. Hold it naturally. Why do you
+stiffen the fingers so?"
+
+"I don't; they stiffen themselves, Richard. They know they are
+going to have their photograph taken, and can't look natural. Who
+ever does?"
+
+After a minute the fingers relaxed, and settled of their own
+accord into an easy pose. Richard laid his hand softly on her wrist.
+
+"Don't move now."
+
+"I'll be as quiet as a mouse," said Margaret giving a sudden queer
+little glance at his face.
+
+Richard emptied a paper of white powder into a great yellow bowl
+half filled with water and fell to stirring it vigorously, like a
+pastry-cook beating eggs. When the plaster was of the proper
+consistency he began building it up around the hand, pouring on a
+spoonful at a time, here and there, carefully. In a minute or two the
+inert white fingers were completely buried. Margaret made a comical
+grimace.
+
+"Is it cold?"
+
+"Ice," said Margaret, shutting her eyes involuntarily.
+
+"If it is too disagreeable we can give it up," suggested Richard.
+
+"No, don't touch it!" she cried, waving him back with her free
+arm. "I don't mind; but it's as cold as so much snow. How curious!
+What does it?"
+
+"I suppose a scientific fellow could explain the matter to you
+easily enough. When the water evaporates a kind of congealing process
+sets in,--a sort of atmospheric change, don't you know? The sudden
+precipitation of the--the"--
+
+"You're as good as Tyndall on Heat," said Margaret demurely.
+
+"Oh, Tyndall is well enough in his way," returned Richard, "but of
+course he doesn't go into things so deeply as I do."
+
+"The idea of telling me that 'a congealing process set in,' when I
+am nearly frozen to death!" cried Margaret, bowing her head over the
+imprisoned arm.
+
+"Your unseemly levity, Margaret, makes it necessary for me to
+defer my remarks on natural phenomena until some more fitting
+occasion."
+
+"Oh, Richard, don't let an atmospherical change come over
+_you!"_
+
+"When you knocked at my door, months ago," said Richard, "I didn't
+dream you were such a satirical little piece, or may be you wouldn't
+have got in. You stood there as meek as Moses, with your frock
+reaching only to the tops of your boots. You were a deception,
+Margaret."
+
+"I was dreadfully afraid of you, Richard."
+
+"You are not afraid of me nowadays."
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+"You are showing your true colors. That long dress, too! I believe
+the train has turned your head."
+
+"But just now you said you admired it."
+
+"So I did, and do. It makes you look quite like a woman, though."
+
+"I want to be a woman. I would like to be as old--as old as Mrs.
+Methuselah. Was there a Mrs. Methuselah?"
+
+"I really forget," replied Richard, considering. "But there must
+have been. The old gentleman had time enough to have several. I
+believe, however, that history is rather silent about his domestic
+affairs."
+
+"Well, then," said Margaret, after thinking it over, "I would like
+to be as old as the youngest Mrs. Methuselah."
+
+"That was probably the last one," remarked Richard, with great
+profundity. "She was probably some giddy young thing of seventy or
+eighty. Those old widowers never take a wife of their own age. I
+shouldn't want you to be seventy, Margaret,--or even eighty."
+
+"On the whole, perhaps, I shouldn't fancy it myself. Do you
+approve of persons marrying twice?"
+
+"N--o, not at the same time."
+
+"Of course I didn't mean that," said Margaret, with asperity. "How
+provoking you can be!"
+
+"But they used to,--in the olden time, don't you know?"
+
+"No, I don't."
+
+Richard burst out laughing. "Imagine him," he cried,--"imagine
+Methuselah in his eight or nine hundredth year, dressed in his
+customary bridal suit, with a sprig of century-plant stuck in his
+button-hole!"
+
+"Richard," said Margaret solemnly, "you shouldn't speak jestingly
+of a scriptural character."
+
+At this Richard broke out again. "But gracious me!" he exclaimed,
+suddenly checking himself. "I am forgetting you all this while!"
+
+Richard hurriedly reversed the mass of plaster on the table, and
+released Margaret's half-petrified fingers. They were shriveled and
+colorless with the cold.
+
+"There isn't any feeling in it whatever," said Margaret, holding
+up her hand helplessly, like a wounded wing.
+
+Richard took the fingers between his palms, and chafed them
+smartly for a moment or two to restore the suspended circulation.
+
+"There, that will do," said Margaret, withdrawing her hand.
+
+"Are you all right now?"
+
+"Yes, thanks;" and then she added, smiling, "I suppose a
+scientific fellow could explain why my fingers seem to be full of hot
+pins and needles shooting in every direction."
+
+"Tyndall's your man--Tyndall on Heat," answered Richard, with a
+laugh, turning to examine the result of his work. "The mold is
+perfect, Margaret. You were a good girl to keep so still."
+
+Richard then proceeded to make the cast, which was soon placed on
+the window-ledge to harden in the sun. When the plaster was set, he
+cautiously chipped off the shell with a chisel, Margaret leaning over
+his shoulder to watch the operation,--and there was the little white
+claw, which ever after took such dainty care of his papers, and
+ultimately became so precious to him as a part of Margaret's very
+self that he would not have exchanged it for the Venus of Milo.
+
+But as yet Richard was far enough from all that.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+Three years glided by with Richard Shackford as swiftly as those
+periods of time which are imagined to elapse between the acts of a
+play. They were eventless, untroubled years, and have no history.
+Nevertheless, certain changes had taken place. Little by little Mr.
+Slocum had relinquished the supervision of the workshops to Richard,
+until now the affairs of the yard rested chiefly on his shoulders. It
+was like a dream to him when he looked directly back to his humble
+beginning, though as he reflected upon it, and retraced his progress
+step by step, he saw there was nothing illogical or astonishing in
+his good fortune. He had won it by downright hard work and the
+faithful exercise of a sufficing talent.
+
+In his relations with Margaret, Richard's attitude had undergone
+no appreciable change. Her chance visits to the studio through the
+week and those pleasant, half-idle Saturday afternoons had become to
+both Richard and Margaret a matter of course, like the sunlight, or
+the air they breathed.
+
+To Richard, Margaret Slocum at nineteen was simply a charming,
+frank girl,--a type of gracious young womanhood. He was conscious of
+her influence; he was very fond of Margaret; but she had not yet
+taken on for him that magic individuality which makes a woman the one
+woman in the world to her lover. Though Richard had scant experience
+in such matters, he was not wrong in accepting Margaret as the type
+of a class of New England girls, which, fortunately for New England,
+is not a small class. These young women for the most part lead quiet
+and restricted lives so far as the actualities are concerned, but
+very deep and full lives in the world of books and imagination, to
+which they make early escapes. They have the high instincts that come
+of good blood, the physique that naturally fits fine manners; and
+when chance takes one of these maidens from her island country home
+or from some sleepy town on the sea-board, and sets her amid the
+complications of city existence, she is an unabashed and unassuming
+lady. If in Paris, she differs from the Parisiennes only in the
+greater delicacy of her lithe beauty, her innocence which is not
+ignorance, and her French pronunciation; if in London, she differs
+from English girls only in the matter of rosy cheeks and the rising
+inflection. Should none of these fortunate transplantings befall her,
+she always merits them by adorning with grace and industry and
+intelligence the narrower sphere to which destiny has assigned her.
+
+Destiny had assigned Margaret Slocum to a very narrow sphere; it
+had shut her up in an obscure New England manufacturing village, with
+no society, strictly speaking, and no outlets whatever to large
+experiences. To her father's affection, Richard's friendship, and her
+household duties she was forced to look for her happiness. If life
+held wider possibilities for her, she had not dreamed of them. She
+looked up to Richard with respect,--perhaps with a dash of sentiment
+in the respect; there was something at once gentle and virile in his
+character which she admired and leaned upon; in his presence the
+small housekeeping troubles always slipped from her; but her heart,
+to use a pretty French phrase, had not consciously spoken,--possibly
+it had murmured a little, incoherently, to itself, but it had not
+spoken out aloud, as perhaps it would have done long ago if an
+impediment had been placed in the way of their intimacy. With all her
+subtler intuitions, Margaret was as far as Richard from suspecting
+the strength and direction of the current with which they were
+drifting. Freedom, habit, and the nature of their environment
+conspired to prolong this mutual lack of perception. The hour had
+sounded, however, when these two were to see each other in a
+different light.
+
+One Monday morning in March, at the close of the three years in
+question, as Richard mounted the outside staircase leading to his
+studio in the extension, the servant-maid beckoned to him from the
+kitchen window.
+
+Margaret had failed to come to the studio the previous Saturday
+afternoon. Richard had worked at cross-purposes and returned to his
+boarding-house vaguely dissatisfied, as always happened to him on
+those rare occasions when she missed the appointment; but he had
+thought little of the circumstance. Nor had he been disturbed on
+Sunday at seeing the Slocum pew vacant during both services. The
+heavy snow-storm which had begun the night before accounted for at
+least Margaret's absence.
+
+"Mr. Slocum told me to tell you that he shouldn't be in the yard
+to-day," said the girl. "Miss Margaret is very ill."
+
+"Ill!" Richard repeated, and the smile with which he had leaned
+over the rail towards the window went out instantly on his lip.
+
+"Dr. Weld was up with her until five o'clock this morning," said
+the girl, fingering the corner of her apron. "She's that low."
+
+"What is the matter?"
+
+"It's a fever."
+
+"What kind of fever?"
+
+"I don't mind me what the doctor called it. He thinks it come from
+something wrong with the drains."
+
+"He didn't say typhoid?"
+
+"Yes, that's the name of it."
+
+Richard ascended the stairs with a slow step, and a moment
+afterwards stood stupidly in the middle of the workshop. "Margaret is
+going to die," he said to himself, giving voice to the dark
+foreboding that had instantly seized upon him, and in a swift vision
+he saw the end of all that simple, fortunate existence which he had
+lived without once reflecting it could ever end. He mechanically
+picked up a tool from the table, and laid it down again. Then he
+seated himself on the low bench between the windows. It was
+Margaret's favorite place; it was not four days since she sat there
+reading to him. Already it appeared long ago,--years and years ago.
+He could hardly remember when he did not have this heavy weight on
+his heart. His life of yesterday abruptly presented itself to him as
+a reminiscence; he saw now how happy that life had been, and how
+lightly he had accepted it. It took to itself all that precious
+quality of things irrevocably lost.
+
+The clamor of the bell in the South Church striking noon, and the
+shrilling of the steam-whistle softened by the thick-falling snow,
+roused Richard from his abstraction. He was surprised that it was
+noon. He rose from the bench and went home through the storm,
+scarcely heeding the sleet that snapped in his face like whip-lashes.
+Margaret was going to die!
+
+For four or five weeks the world was nearly a blank to Richard
+Shackford. The insidious fever that came and went, bringing alternate
+despair and hope to the watchers in the hushed room, was in his veins
+also. He passed the days between his lonely lodgings in Lime Street
+and the studio, doing nothing, restless and apathetic by turns, but
+with always a poignant sense of anxiety. He ceased to take any
+distinct measurement of time further than to note that an interval of
+months seemed to separate Monday from Monday. Meanwhile, if new
+patterns had been required by the men, the work in the carving
+departments would have come to a dead lock.
+
+At length the shadow lifted, and there fell a day of soft May
+weather when Margaret, muffled in shawls and as white as death, was
+seated once more in her accustomed corner by the west window. She had
+insisted on being brought there the first practicable moment; nowhere
+else in the house was such sunshine, and Mr. Slocum himself had
+brought her in his arms. She leaned back against the pillows, smiling
+faintly. Her fingers lay locked on her lap, and the sunlight showed
+through the narrow transparent palace. It was as if her hands were
+full of blush-roses.
+
+Richard breathed again, but not with so free a heart as before.
+What if she had died? He felt an immense pity for himself when he
+thought of that, and he thought of it continually as the days wore
+on.
+
+Either a great alteration had wrought itself in Margaret, or
+Richard beheld her through a clearer medium during the weeks of
+convalescence that followed. Was this the slight, sharp-faced girl he
+used to know? The eyes and the hair were the same; but the smile was
+deeper, and the pliant figure had lost its extreme slimness without a
+sacrifice to its delicacy. The spring air was filling her veins with
+abundant health, and mantling her cheeks with a richer duskiness than
+they had ever worn. Margaret was positively handsome. Her beauty had
+come all in a single morning, like the crocuses. This beauty began to
+awe Richard; it had the effect of seeming to remove her further and
+further from him. He grew moody and restless when they were together,
+and was wretched alone. His constraint did not escape Margaret. She
+watched him, and wondered at his inexplicable depression when every
+one in the household was rejoicing in her recovery. By and by this
+depression wounded her, but she was too spirited to show the hurt.
+She always brought a book with her now, in her visits to the studio;
+it was less awkward to read than to sit silent and unspoken to over a
+piece of needle-work.
+
+"How very odd you are!" said Margaret, one afternoon, closing the
+volume which she had held mutely for several minutes, waiting for
+Richard to grasp the fact that she was reading aloud.
+
+"I odd!" protested Richard, breaking with a jerk from one of his
+long reveries. "In what way?"
+
+"As if I could explain--when you put the quotation suddenly, like
+that."
+
+"I didn't intend to be abrupt. I was curious to know. And then the
+charge itself was a trifle unexpected, if you will look at it. But
+never mind," he added with a smile; "think it over, and tell me
+to-morrow."
+
+"No, I will tell you now, since you are willing to wait."
+
+"I wasn't really willing to wait, but I knew if I didn't pretend
+to be I should never get it out of you."
+
+"Very well, then; your duplicity is successful. Richard, I was
+puzzled where to begin with your oddities."
+
+"Begin at the beginning."
+
+"No, I will take the nearest. When a young lady is affable enough
+to read aloud to you, the least you can do is to listen to her. That
+is a deference you owe to the author, when it happens to be
+Hawthorne, to say nothing of the young lady."
+
+"But I _have_ been listening, Margaret. Every word!"
+
+"Where did I leave off?"
+
+"It was where--where the"--and Richard knitted his brows in the
+vain effort to remember--"where the young daguerreotypist,
+what's-his-name, took up his residence in the House of the Seven
+Gables."
+
+"No, sir! You stand convicted. It was ten pages further on. The
+last words were,"--and Margaret read from the book,--
+
+"'Good-night, cousin,' said Phoebe, strangely affected by
+Hepsibah's manner. 'If you being to love me, I am glad.'"
+
+"There, sir! what do you say to that?"
+
+Richard did not say anything, but he gave a guilty start, and shot
+a rapid glance at Margaret coolly enjoying her triumph.
+
+"In the next place," she continued soberly, after a pause, "I
+think it very odd in you not to reply to me,--oh, not now, for of
+course you are without a word of justification; but at other times.
+Frequently, when I speak to you, you look at me so," making a vacant
+little face, "and then suddenly disappear,--I don't mean bodily, but
+mentally."
+
+"I am no great talker at best," said Richard with a helpless air.
+"I seldom speak unless I have something to say."
+
+"But other people do. I, for instance."
+
+"Oh, you, Margaret; that is different. When you talk I don't much
+mind what you are talking about."
+
+"I like a neat, delicate compliment like that!"
+
+"What a perverse girl you are to-day!" cried Richard. "You won't
+understand me. I mean that your words and your voice are so pleasant
+they make anything interesting, whether it's important or not."
+
+"If no one were to speak until he had something important to
+communicate," observed Margaret, "conversation in this world would
+come to a general stop." Then she added, with a little ironical
+smile, "Even you, Richard, wouldn't be talking all the time."
+
+Formerly Margaret's light sarcasms, even when they struck him
+point-blank, used to amuse Richard, but now he winced at being merely
+grazed.
+
+Margaret went on: "But it's not a bit necessary to be circular or
+instructive--with me. I am interested in trivial matters,--in the
+weather, in my spring hat, in what you are going to do next, and the
+like. One must occupy one's self with something. But you, Richard,
+nowadays you seem interested in nothing, and have nothing whatever to
+say."
+
+Poor Richard! He had a great deal to say, but he did not know how,
+nor if it were wise to breathe it. Just three little words, murmured
+or whispered, and the whole conditions would be changed. With those
+fateful words uttered, what would be Margaret's probable attitude,
+and what Mr. Slocum's? Though the line which formerly drew itself
+between employer and employee had grown faint with time, it still
+existed in Richard's mind, and now came to the surface with great
+distinctness, like a word written in sympathetic ink. If he spoke,
+and Margaret was startled or offended, then there was an end to their
+free, unembarrassed intercourse,--perhaps an end to all intercourse.
+By keeping his secret in his breast he at least secured the present.
+But that was to risk everything. Any day somebody might come and
+carry Margaret off under his very eyes. As he reflected on this, the
+shadow of John Dana, the son of the rich iron-manufacturer, etched
+itself sharply upon Richard's imagination. Within the week young Dana
+had declared in the presence of Richard that "Margaret Slocum was an
+awfully nice little thing," and the Othello in Richard's blood had
+been set seething. Then his thought glanced from John Dana to Mr.
+Pinkham and the Rev. Arthur Langly, both of whom were assiduous
+visitors at the house. The former had lately taken to accompanying
+Margaret on the piano with his dismal little flute, and the latter
+was perpetually making a moth of himself about her class at
+Sunday-school.
+
+Richard stood with the edge of his chisel resting idly upon the
+plaster mold in front of him, pondering these things. Presently he
+heard Margaret's voice, as if somewhere in the distance, saying,--
+
+"I have not finished yet, Richard."
+
+"Go on," said Richard, falling to work again with a kind of
+galvanic action. "Go on, please."
+
+"I have a serious grievance. Frankly, I am hurt by your
+preoccupation and indifference, your want of openness or
+cordiality,--I don't know how to name it. You are the only person who
+seems to be unaware that I escaped a great danger a month ago. I am
+obliged to remember all the agreeable hours I have spent in the
+studio to keep off the impression that during my illness you got used
+to not seeing me, and that now my presence somehow obstructs your
+work and annoys you."
+
+Richard threw his chisel on the bench, and crossed over to the
+window where Margaret was.
+
+"You are as wrong as you can be," he said, looking down on her
+half-lifted face, from which a quick wave of color was subsiding; for
+the abruptness of Richard's movement had startled her.
+
+"I am glad if I am wrong."
+
+"It is nearly an unforgivable thing to be as wide of the mark as
+you are. Oh, Margaret, if you had died that time!"
+
+"You would have been very sorry?"
+
+"Sorry? No. That doesn't express it; one outlives mere sorrow. If
+anything had happened to you, I should never have got over it. You
+don't know what those five weeks were to me. It was a kind of death
+to come to this room day after day, and not find you."
+
+Margaret rested her eyes thoughtfully on the space occupied by
+Richard rather than on Richard himself, seeming to look through and
+beyond him, as if he were incorporeal.
+
+"You missed me like that?" she said slowly.
+
+"I missed you like that."
+
+Margaret meditated a moment. "In the first days of my illness I
+wondered if you didn't miss me a little; afterwards everything was
+confused in my mind. When I tried to think, I seemed to be somebody
+else,--I seemed to be _you_ waiting for me here in the studio.
+Wasn't that singular? But when I recovered, and returned to my old
+place, I began to suspect I had been bearing your anxiety,--that I
+had been distressed by the absence to which you had grown
+accustomed."
+
+"I never got used to it, Margaret. It became more and more
+unendurable. This workshop was full of--of your absence. There wasn't
+a sketch or a cast or an object in the room that didn't remind me of
+you, and seem to mock at me for having let the most precious moments
+of my life slip away unheeded. That bit of geranium in the glass
+yonder seemed to say with its dying breath, 'You have cared for
+neither of us as you ought to have cared; my scent and her goodness
+have been all one to you,--things to take or to leave. It was for no
+merit of yours that she was always planning something to make life
+smoother and brighter for you. What had you done to deserve it? How
+unselfish and generous and good she has been to you for years and
+years! What would have become of you without her? She left me here on
+purpose'--it's the geranium leaf that is speaking all the while,
+Margaret--'to say this to you, and to tell you that she was not half
+appreciated; but now you have lost her.'"
+
+As she leaned forward listening, with her lips slightly parted,
+Margaret gave an unconscious little approbative nod of the head.
+Richard's fanciful accusation of himself caused her a singular thrill
+of pleasure. He had never before spoken to her in just this fashion;
+the subterfuge which his tenderness had employed, the little detour
+it had made in order to get at her, was a novel species of flattery.
+She recognized the ring of a distinctly new note in his voice; but,
+strangely enough, the note lost its unfamiliarity in an instant.
+Margaret recognized that fact also, and as she swiftly speculated on
+the phenomenon her pulse went one or two strokes faster.
+
+"Oh, you poor boy!" she said, looking up with a laugh, and a flush
+so interfused that they seemed one, "that geranium took a great deal
+upon itself. It went quite beyond its instructions, which were simply
+to remind you of me now and then. One day, while you were out,--the
+day before I was taken ill,--I placed the flowers on the desk there,
+perhaps with a kind of premonition that I was going away from you for
+a time."
+
+"What if you had never come back?"
+
+"I wouldn't think of that if I were you," said Margaret softly.
+
+"But it haunts me,--that thought. Sometimes of a morning, after I
+unlock the workshop door, I stand hesitating, with my hand on the
+latch, as one might hesitate a few seconds before stepping into a
+tomb. There were days last month, Margaret, when this chamber did
+appear to me like a tomb. All that was happy in my past seemed to lie
+buried here; it was something visible and tangible; I used to steal
+in and look upon it."
+
+"Oh, Richard!"
+
+"If you only knew what a life I led as a boy in my cousin's house,
+and what a doleful existence for years afterwards, until I found you,
+perhaps you would understand my despair when I saw everything
+suddenly slipping away from me. Margaret! the day your father brought
+you in here, I had all I could do not to kneel down at your
+feet"--Richard stopped short. "I didn't mean to tell you that," he
+added, turning towards the work-table. Then he checked himself, and
+came and stood in front of her again. He had gone too far not to go
+further. "While you were ill I made a great discovery."
+
+"What was that, Richard?"
+
+"I discovered that I had been blind for two or three years."
+
+"Blind?" repeated Margaret.
+
+"Stone-blind. I discovered it by suddenly seeing--by seeing that I
+had loved you all the while, Margaret! Are you offended?"
+
+"No," said Margaret, slowly; she was a moment finding her voice to
+say it. "I--ought I to be offended?"
+
+"Not if you are not!" said Richard.
+
+"Then I am not. I--I've made little discoveries myself," murmured
+Margaret, going into full mourning with her eyelashes.
+
+But it was only for an instant. She refused to take her happiness
+shyly or insincerely; it was something too sacred. She was a trifle
+appalled by it, if the truth must be told. If Richard had scattered
+his love-making through the month of her convalescence, or if he had
+made his avowal in a different mood, perhaps Margaret might have met
+him with some natural coquetry. But Richard's tone and manner had
+been such as to suppress any instinct of the kind. His declaration,
+moreover, had amazed her. Margaret's own feelings had been more or
+less plain to her that past month, and she had diligently disciplined
+herself to accept Richard's friendship, since it seemed all he had to
+give. Indeed, it had seemed at times as if he had not even that.
+
+When Margaret lifted her eyes to him, a second after her
+confession, they were full of a sweet seriousness, and she had no
+thought of withdrawing the hands which Richard had taken, and was
+holding lightly, that she might withdraw them if she willed. She felt
+no impulse to do so, though as Margaret looked up she saw her father
+standing a few paces behind Richard.
+
+With an occult sense of another presence in the room, Richard,
+turned at the same instant.
+
+Mr. Slocum had advanced two steps into the apartment, and had been
+brought to a dead halt by the surprising tableau in the embrasure of
+the window. He stood motionless, with an account-book under his arm,
+while a dozen expressions chased each other over his countenance.
+
+"Mr. Slocum," said Richard, who saw that only one course lay open
+to him, "I love Margaret, and I have been telling her."
+
+At that the flitting shadows on Mr. Slocum's face settled into one
+grave look. He did not reply immediately, but let his glance wander
+from Margaret to Richard, and back again to Margaret, slowly
+digesting the fact. It was evident he had not relished it. Meanwhile
+the girl had risen from the chair and was moving towards her father.
+
+"This strikes me as very extraordinary," he said at last. "You
+have never given any intimation that such a feeling existed. How long
+has this been going on?"
+
+"I have always been fond of Margaret, sir; but I was not aware of
+the strength of the attachment until the time of her illness, when
+I--that is, we--came near to losing her."
+
+"And you, Margaret?"
+
+As Mr. Slocum spoke he instinctively put one arm around Margaret,
+who had crept closely to his side.
+
+"I don't know when I began to love Richard," said Margaret simply.
+
+"You don't know!"
+
+"Perhaps it was while I was ill; perhaps it was long before that;
+may be my liking for him commenced as far back as the time he made
+the cast of my hand. How can I tell, papa? I don't know."
+
+"There appears to be an amazing diffusion of ignorance here!"
+
+Margaret bit her lip, and kept still. Her father was taking it a
+great deal more seriously than she had expected. A long, awkward
+silence ensued. Richard broke it at last by remarking uneasily,
+"Nothing has been or was to be concealed from you. Before going to
+sleep to-night, Margaret would have told you all I've said to her."
+
+"You should have consulted with me before saying anything."
+
+"I intended to do so, but my words got away from me. I hope you
+will overlook it, sir, and not oppose my loving Margaret, though I
+see as plainly as you do that I am not worthy of her."
+
+"I have not said that. I base my disapproval on entirely different
+ground. Margaret is too young. A girl of seventeen or eighteen"--
+
+"Nineteen," said Margaret, parenthetically.
+
+"Of nineteen, then,--has no business to bother her head with such
+matters. Only yesterday she was a child!"
+
+Richard glanced across at Margaret, and endeavored to recall her
+as she impressed him that first afternoon, when she knocked defiantly
+at the workshop door to inquire if he wanted any pans and pails; but
+he was totally unable to reconstruct that crude little figure with
+the glossy black head, all eyes and beak, like a young hawk's.
+
+"My objection is impersonal," continued Mr. Slocum. "I object to
+the idea. I wish this had not happened. I might not have disliked
+it--years hence; I don't say; but I dislike it now."
+
+Richard's face brightened. "It will be years hence in a few
+years!"
+
+Mr. Slocum replied with a slow, grave smile, "I am not going to be
+unreasonable in a matter where I find Margaret's happiness concerned;
+and yours, Richard, I care for that, too; but I'll have no
+entanglements. You and she are to be good friends, and nothing
+beyond. I prefer that Margaret should not come to the studio so
+often; you shall see her whenever you like at our fireside, of an
+evening. I don't think the conditions hard."
+
+Mr. Slocum had dictated terms, but it was virtually a surrender.
+Margaret listened to him with her cheek resting against his arm, and
+a warm light nestled down deep under her eyelids.
+
+Mr. Slocum drew a half-pathetic sigh. "I presume I have not done
+wisely. Every one bullies me. The Marble Workers' Association ruins
+my yard for me, and now my daughter is taken off my hands. By the
+way, Richard," he said, interrupting himself brusquely, and with an
+air of dismissing the subject, "I forgot what I came for. I've been
+thinking over Torrini's case, and have concluded that you had better
+make up his account and discharge him."
+
+"Certainly, sir," replied Richard, with a shadow of dissent in his
+manner, "if you wish it."
+
+"He causes a deal of trouble in the yard."
+
+"I am afraid he does. Such a clean workman when he's sober!"
+
+"But he is never sober."
+
+"He has been in a bad way lately, I admit."
+
+"His example demoralizes the men. I can see it day by day."
+
+"I wish he were not so necessary at this moment," observed
+Richard. "I don't know who else could be trusted with the frieze for
+the Soldiers' Monument. I'd like to keep him on a week or ten days
+longer. Suppose I have a plain talk with Torrini?"
+
+"Surely we have enough good hands to stand the loss of one."
+
+"For a special kind of work there is nobody in the yard like
+Torrini. That is one reason why I want to hold on to him for a while,
+and there are other reasons."
+
+"Such as what?"
+
+"Well, I think it would not be wholly politic to break with him
+just now."
+
+"Why not now as well as any time?"
+
+"He has lately been elected secretary of the Association."
+
+"What of that?"
+
+"He has a great deal of influence there."
+
+"If we put him out of the works it seems to me he would lose his
+importance, if he really has any to speak of."
+
+"You are mistaken if you doubt it. His position gives him a chance
+to do much mischief, and he would avail himself of it very adroitly,
+if he had a personal grievance."
+
+"I believe you are actually afraid of the fellow."
+
+Richard smiled. "No, I am not afraid of him, but I don't underrate
+him. The men look up to Torrini as a sort of leader; he's an
+effective speaker, and knows very well how to fan a dissatisfaction.
+Either he or some other disturbing element has recently been at work
+among the men. There's considerable grumbling in the yard."
+
+"They are always grumbling, aren't they?"
+
+"Most always, but this is more serious than usual; there appears
+to be a general stir among the trades in the village. I don't
+understand it clearly. The marble workers have been holding secret
+meetings."
+
+"They mean business, you think?"
+
+"They mean increased wages, perhaps."
+
+"But we are now paying from five to ten per cent more than any
+trade in the place. What are they after?"
+
+"So far as I can gather, sir, the finishers and the slab-sawers
+want an advance,--I don't know how much. Then there's some talk about
+having the yard closed an hour earlier on Saturdays. All this is
+merely rumor; but I am sure there is something in it."
+
+"Confound the whole lot! If we can't discharge a drunken hand
+without raising the pay of all the rest, we had better turn over the
+entire business to the Association. But do as you like, Richard. You
+see how I am bullied, Margaret. He runs everything! Come, dear."
+
+And Mr. Slocum quitted the workshop, taking Margaret with him.
+Richard remained standing awhile by the table, in a deep study, with
+his eyes fixed on the floor. He thought of his early days in the
+sepulchral house in Welch's Court, of his wanderings abroad, his long
+years of toil since then, and this sudden blissful love that had come
+to him, and Mr. Slocum's generosity. Then he thought of Torrini, and
+went down into the yard gently to admonish the man, for Richard's
+heart that hour was full of kindness for all the world.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+In spite of Mr. Slocum's stipulations respecting the frequency of
+Margaret's visits to the studio, she was free to come and go as she
+liked. It was easy for him to say, Be good friends, and nothing
+beyond; but after that day in the workshop it was impossible for
+Richard and Margaret to be anything but lovers. The hollowness of
+pretending otherwise was clear even to Mr. Slocum. In the love of a
+father for a daughter there is always a vague jealousy which refuses
+to render a coherent explanation of itself. Mr. Slocum did not escape
+this, but he managed, nevertheless, to accept the inevitable with
+very fair grace, and presently to confess to himself that the
+occurrence which had at first taken him aback was the most natural in
+the world. That Margaret and Richard, thrown together as they had
+been, should end by falling in love with each other was not a result
+to justify much surprise. Indeed, there was a special propriety in
+their doing so. The Shackfords had always been reputable people in
+the village,--down to Lemuel Shackford, who of course was an old
+musk-rat. The family attributes of amiability and honesty had skipped
+him, but they had reappeared in Richard. It was through his foresight
+and personal energy that the most lucrative branch of the trade had
+been established. His services entitled him to a future interest in
+the business, and Mr. Slocum had intended he should have it. Mr.
+Slocum had not dreamed of throwing in Margaret also; but since that
+addition had suggested itself, it seemed to him one of the happy
+features of the arrangement. Richard would thus be doubly identified
+with the yard, to which, in fact, he had become more necessary than
+Mr. Slocum himself.
+
+"He has more backbone with the men than I have," acknowledged Mr.
+Slocum. "He knows how to manage them, and I don't."
+
+As soft as Slocum was a Stillwater proverb. Richard certainly had
+plenty of backbone; it was his only capital. In Mr. Slocum's
+estimation it was sufficient capital. But Lemuel Shackford was a very
+rich man, and Mr. Slocum could not avoid seeing that it would be
+decent in Richard's only surviving relative if, at this juncture, he
+were to display a little interest in the young fellow's welfare.
+
+"If he would only offer to advance a few thousand dollars for
+Richard," said Mr. Slocum, one evening, to Margaret, with whom he had
+been talking over the future--"the property must all come to him some
+time,--it would be a vast satisfaction to me to tell the old man that
+we can get along without any of his ill-gotten gains. He made the
+bulk of his fortune during the war, you know. The old sea-serpent,"
+continued Mr. Slocum, with hopeless confusion of metaphor, "had a
+hand in fitting out more than one blockade-runner. They used to talk
+of a ship that got away from Charleston with a cargo of cotton that
+netted the share-holders upwards of two hundred thousand dollars. He
+denies it now, but everybody knows Shackford. He'd betray his country
+for fifty cents in postage-stamps."
+
+"Oh, papa! you are too hard on him."
+
+In words dropped cursorily from time to time, Margaret imparted to
+Richard the substance of her father's speech, and it set Richard
+reflecting. It was not among the probabilities that Lemuel Shackford
+would advance a dollar to establish Richard, but if he could induce
+his cousin even to take the matter into consideration, Richard felt
+that it would be a kind of moral support to him circumstanced as he
+was. His pride revolted at the idea of coming quite unbacked and
+disowned, as well as empty-handed, to Mr. Slocum.
+
+For the last twelve months there had been a cessation of ordinary
+courtesies between the two cousins. They now passed each other on the
+street without recognition. A year previously Mr. Shackford had
+fallen ill, and Richard, aware of the inefficient domestic
+arrangements in Welch's Court, had gone to the house out of sheer
+pity. The old man was in bed, and weak with fever, but at seeing
+Richard he managed to raise himself on one elbow.
+
+"Oh, it's you!" he exclaimed, mockingly. "When a rich man is sick
+the anxious heirs crowd around him; but they're twice as honestly
+anxious when he is perfectly well."
+
+"I came to see if I could do anything for you!" cried Richard,
+with a ferocious glare, and in a tone that went curiously with his
+words, and shook to the foundations his character of Good Samaritan.
+
+"The only thing you can do for me is to go away."
+
+"I'll do that with pleasure," retorted Richard bitterly.
+
+And Richard went, vowing he would never set foot across the
+threshold again. He could not help having ugly thoughts. Why should
+all the efforts to bring about a reconciliation and all the
+forbearance be on his side? Thenceforth the crabbed old man might go
+to perdition if he wanted to.
+
+And now here was Richard meditating a visit to that same house to
+beg a favor!
+
+Nothing but his love for Margaret could have dragged him to such a
+banquet of humble-pie as he knew was spread for his delectation, the
+morning he passed up the main street of Stillwater and turned into
+Welch's Court.
+
+As Richard laid his hand on the latch of the gate, Mr. Shackford,
+who was digging in the front garden, looked up and saw him. Without
+paying any heed to Richard's amicable salutation, the old man left
+the shovel sticking in the sod, and walked stiffly into the house. At
+another moment this would have amused Richard, but now he gravely
+followed his kinsman, and overtook him at the foot of the staircase.
+
+"Cousin Shackford, can you spare me five or ten minutes?"
+
+"Don't know as I can," said Mr. Shackford, with one foot on the
+lower stair. "Time is valuable. What do you want? You want
+something."
+
+"Certainly, or I wouldn't think of trespassing on your time."
+
+"Has Slocum thrown you over?" inquired the old man, turning
+quickly. A straw which he held between his thin lips helped to give
+him a singularly alert expression.
+
+"No; Mr. Slocum and I agree the best in the world. I want to talk
+with you briefly on certain matters; I want to be on decent terms
+with you, if you will let me."
+
+"Decent terms means money, doesn't it?" asked Mr. Shackford, with
+a face as wary and lean as a shark's.
+
+"I do wish to talk about money, among other things," returned
+Richard, whom this brutal directness disconcerted a little,--"money
+on satisfactory security."
+
+"You can get it anywhere with that."
+
+"So I might, and be asking no favor; but I would rather get it of
+you, and consider it an obligation."
+
+"I would rather you wouldn't."
+
+"Listen to me a moment."
+
+"Well, I'm listening."
+
+Mr. Shackford stood in an attitude of attention, with his head
+canted on one side, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, and the straw
+between his teeth tilted up at an angle of forty degrees.
+
+"I have, as you know, worked my way in the marble yard to the
+position of general manager," began Richard.
+
+"I didn't know," said Mr. Shackford, "but I understand. You're a
+sort of head grave-stone maker."
+
+"That is taking a rather gloomy view of it," said Richard, "but no
+matter. The point is, I hold a responsible position, and I now have a
+chance to purchase a share in the works."
+
+"Slocum is willing to take you in, eh?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then the concern is hit."
+
+"Hit?"
+
+"Slocum is going into bankruptcy."
+
+"You are wrong there. The yard was never so prosperous; the coming
+year we shall coin money like a mint."
+
+"You ought to know," said Mr. Shackford, ruminatively. "A thing as
+good as a mint must be a good thing."
+
+"If I were a partner in the business, I could marry Margaret."
+
+"Who's Margaret?"
+
+"Mr. Slocum's daughter."
+
+"That's where the wind is! Now how much capital would it take to
+do all that?" inquired Mr. Shackford, with an air of affable
+speculation.
+
+"Three or four thousand dollars,--perhaps less."
+
+"Well, I wouldn't give three or four cents to have you marry
+Slocum's daughter. Richard, you can't pull any chestnuts out of the
+fire with my paw."
+
+Mr. Shackford's interrogation and his more than usual conciliatory
+manner had lighted a hope which Richard had not brought with him. Its
+sudden extinguishment was in consequence doubly aggravating.
+
+"Slocum's daughter!" repeated Mr. Shackford. "I'd as soon you
+would marry Crazy Nan up at the work-house."
+
+The association of Crazy Nan with Margaret sent a red flush into
+Richard's cheek. He turned angrily towards the door, and then halted,
+recollecting the resolve he had made not to lose his temper, come
+what would. If the interview was to end there it had better not have
+taken place.
+
+"I had no expectation that you would assist me pecuniarily," said
+Richard, after a moment. "Let us drop the money question; it
+shouldn't have come up between us. I want you to aid me, not by
+lending me money, but by giving me your countenance as the head of
+the family,--by showing a natural interest in my affairs, and seeming
+disposed to promote them."
+
+"By just seeming?"
+
+"That is really all I desire. If you were to propose to put
+capital into the concern, Mr. Slocum would refuse it."
+
+"Slocum would refuse it! Why in the devil should he refuse it?"
+
+"Because"--Richard hesitated, finding himself unexpectedly on
+delicate ground--"because he would not care to enter into business
+relations with you, under the circumstances."
+
+Mr. Shackford removed the straw from his mouth, and holding it
+between his thumb and forefinger peered steadily through his
+half-closed eyelids at Richard.
+
+"I don't understand you."
+
+"The dispute you had long ago, over the piece of meadow land
+behind the marble yard. Mr. Slocum felt that you bore on him rather
+heavily in that matter, and has not quite forgiven you for forcing
+him to rebuild the sheds."
+
+"Bother Slocum and his sheds! I understand him. What I don't
+understand is _you_. I am to offer Slocum three or four thousand
+dollars to set you up, and he is to decline to take it. Is that it?"
+
+"That is not it at all," returned Richard. "My statement was this:
+If you were to propose purchasing a share for me in the works, Mr.
+Slocum would not entertain the proposition, thinking--as I don't
+think--that he would mortify you by the refusal of your money."
+
+"The only way Slocum could mortify me would be by getting hold of
+it. But what are you driving at, anyhow? In one breath you demand
+several thousand dollars, and in the next breath you tell me that
+nobody expects it, or wants it, or could be induced to have it on any
+terms. Perhaps you will inform me what you are here for?"
+
+"That is what you will never discover!" cried Richard. "It is not
+in you to comprehend the ties of sympathy that ought to hold between
+two persons situated as we are. In most families this sympathy binds
+closely at times,--at christenings, or burials, or when some member
+is about to take an important step in life. Generally speaking, blood
+is thicker than water; but your blood, cousin Shackford, seems to be
+a good deal thinner. I came here to consult with you as my sole
+remaining kinsman, as one authorized by years and position to give me
+wise counsel and kindly encouragement at the turning point in my
+fortune. I didn't wish to go among those people like a tramp, with
+neither kith nor kin to say a word for me. Of course you don't
+understand that. How should you? A sentiment of that kind is
+something quite beyond your conception."
+
+Richard's words went into one ear and out the other, without
+seeming for an instant to arrest Mr. Shackford's attention. The idea
+of Slocum not accepting money--anybody's money--presented itself to
+Mr. Shackford in so facetious a light as nearly to throw him into
+good humor. His foot was on the first step of the staircase, which he
+now began slowly to mount, giving vent, as he ascended, to a series
+of indescribable chuckles. At the top of the landing he halted, and
+leaned over the rail.
+
+"To think of Slocum refusing,--that's a good one!"
+
+In the midst of his jocularity a sudden thought seemed to strike
+Mr. Shackford; his features underwent a swift transformation, and as
+he grasped the rail in front of him with both hands a malicious
+cunning writhed and squirmed in every wrinkle of his face.
+
+"Sir!" he shrieked, "it was a trap! Slocum would have taken it! If
+I had been ass enough to make any such offer, he would have jumped at
+it. What do you and Slocum take me for? You're a pair of rascals!"
+
+Richard staggered back, bewildered and blinded, as if he had
+received a blow in the eyes.
+
+"No," continued Mr. Shackford, with a gesture of intense contempt,
+"you are less than rascals. You are fools. A rascal has to have
+brains!"
+
+"You shameless old man!" cried Richard, as soon as he could get
+his voice.
+
+To do Mr. Shackford justice, he was thoroughly convinced that
+Richard had lent himself to a preposterous attempt to obtain money
+from him. The absence of ordinary shrewdness in the method stamped it
+at once as belonging to Slocum, of whose mental calibre Mr. Shackford
+entertained no flattering estimate.
+
+"Slocum!" he muttered, grinding the word between his teeth.
+"Family ties!" he cried, hurling the words scornfully over the
+banister as he disappeared into one of the upper chambers.
+
+Richard stood with one hand on the newel-post, white at the lip
+with rage. For a second he had a wild impulse to spring up the
+staircase, but, controlling this, he turned and hurried out of the
+house.
+
+At the gate he brushed roughly against a girl, who halted and
+stared. It was a strange thing to see Mr. Richard Shackford, who
+always had a pleasant word for a body, go by in that blind, excited
+fashion, striking one fist into the palm of the other hand, and
+talking to his own self! Mary Hennessey watched him until he wheeled
+out of Welch's Court, and then picking up her basket, which she had
+rested on the fence, went her way.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+At the main entrance to the marble works Richard nearly walked
+over a man who was coming out, intently mopping his forehead with a
+very dirty calico handkerchief. It was an English stone-dresser named
+Denyven. Richard did not recognize him at first.
+
+"That you, Denyven!... what has happened!"
+
+"I've 'ad a bit of a scrimmage, sir."
+
+"A scrimmage in the yard, in work hours!"
+
+The man nodded.
+
+"With whom?"
+
+"Torrini, sir,--he's awful bad this day."
+
+"Torrini,--it is always Torrini! It seems odd that one man should
+be everlastingly at the bottom of everything wrong. How did it
+happen? Give it to me straight, Denyven; I don't want a crooked
+story. This thing has got to stop in Slocum's Yard."
+
+"The way of it was this, sir: Torrini wasn't at the shop this
+morning. He 'ad a day off."
+
+"I know."
+
+"But about one o'clock, sir, he come in the yard. He 'ad been at
+the public 'ouse, sir, and he was hummin'. First he went among the
+carvers, talking Hitalian to 'em and making 'em laugh, though he was
+in a precious bad humor hisself. By and by he come over to where me
+and my mates was, and began chaffin' us, which we didn't mind it,
+seeing he was 'eavy in the 'ead. He was as clear as a fog 'orn all
+the same. But when he took to banging the tools on the blocks, I
+sings out, ''Ands off!' and then he fetched me a clip. I was never
+looking for nothing less than that he'd hit me. I was a smiling at
+the hinstant."
+
+"He must be drunker than usual."
+
+"Hevidently, sir. I went down between two slabs as soft as you
+please. When I got on my pins, I was for choking him a bit, but my
+mates hauled us apart. That's the 'ole of it, sir. They'll tell you
+the same within."
+
+"Are you hurt, Denyven?"
+
+"Only a bit of a scratch over the heye, sir,--and the nose," and
+the man began mopping his brow tenderly. "I'd like to 'ave that
+Hitalian for about ten minutes, some day when he's sober, over yonder
+on the green."
+
+"I'm afraid he would make the ten minutes seem long to you."
+
+"Well, sir, I'd willingly let him try his 'and."
+
+"How is it, Denyven," said Richard, "that you and sensible
+workingmen like you, have permitted such a quarrelsome and
+irresponsible fellow to become a leader in the Association? He's
+secretary, or something, isn't he?"
+
+"Well, sir, he writes an uncommonly clean fist, and then he's a
+born horator. He's up to all the parli'mentary dodges. Must 'ave 'ad
+no end of hexperience in them sort of things on the other side."
+
+"No doubt,--and that accounts for him being over here."
+
+"As for horganizing a meeting, sir"--
+
+"I know. Torrini has a great deal of that kind of ability; perhaps
+a trifle too much for his own good or anybody else's. There was never
+any trouble to speak of among the trades in Stillwater till he and
+two or three others came here with foreign grievances. These men get
+three times the pay they ever received in their own land, and are
+treated like human beings for the first time in their lives. But what
+do they do? They squander a quarter of their week's wages at the
+tavern,--no rich man could afford to put a fourth of his income into
+drink,--and make windy speeches at the Union. I don't say all of
+them, but too many of them. The other night, I understand, Torrini
+compared Mr. Slocum to Nero,--Mr. Slocum, the fairest and gentlest
+man that ever breathed! What rubbish!"
+
+"It wasn't just that way, sir. His words was, and I 'eard
+him,--'from Nero down to Slocum.'"
+
+"It amounts to the same thing, and is enough to make one laugh, if
+he didn't make one want to swear. I hear that that was a very lively
+meeting the other night. What was that nonsense about 'the privileged
+class'?"
+
+"Well, there is a privileged class in the States."
+
+"So there is, but it's a large class, Denyven. Every soul of us
+has the privilege of bettering out condition if we have the brain and
+the industry to do it. Energy and intelligence come to the front, and
+have the right to be there. A skillful workman gets double the pay of
+a bungler, and deserves it. Of course there will always be rich and
+poor, and sick and sound, and I don't see how that can be changed.
+But no door is shut against ability, black or white. Before the year
+2400 we shall have a chrome-yellow president and a black-and-tan
+secretary of the treasury. But, seriously, Denyven, whoever talks
+about privileged classes here does it to make mischief. There are
+certain small politicians who reap their harvest in times of public
+confusion, just as pickpockets do. Nobody can play the tyrant or the
+bully in this country,--not even a workingman. Here's the Association
+dead against an employer who, two years ago, ran his yard full-handed
+for a twelvemonth at a loss, rather than shut down, as every other
+mill and factory in Stillwater did. For years and years the
+Association has prevented this employer from training more than two
+apprentices annually. The result is, eighty hands find work, instead
+of a hundred and eighty. Now, that can't last."
+
+"It keeps wages fixed in Stillwater, sir."
+
+"It keeps out a hundred workmen. It sends away capital."
+
+"Torrini says, sir"--
+
+"Steer clear of Torrini and what he says. He's a dangerous
+fellow--for his friends. It is handsome in you, Denyven, to speak up
+for him--with that eye of yours."
+
+"Oh, I don't love the man, when it comes to that; but there's no
+denying he's right smart," replied Denyven, who occasionally marred
+his vernacular with Americanisms. "The Association couldn't do
+without him."
+
+"But Slocum's Yard can," said Richard, irritated to observe the
+influence Torrini exerted on even such men as Denyven.
+
+"That's between you and him, sir, of course, but"--
+
+"But what?"
+
+"Well, sir, I can't say hexactly; but if I was you I would bide a
+bit."
+
+"No, I think Torrini's time has come."
+
+"I don't make bold to advise you, sir. I merely throws out the
+hobservation."
+
+With that Denyven departed to apply to his bruises such herbs and
+simples as a long experience had taught him to be efficacious.
+
+He had gone only a few rods, however, when it occurred to him that
+there were probabilities of a stormy scene in the yard; so he turned
+on his tracks, and followed Richard Shackford.
+
+Torrini was a Neapolitan, who had come to the country seven or
+eight years before. He was a man above the average intelligence of
+his class; a marble worker by trade, but he had been a fisherman, a
+mountain guide among the Abruzzi, a soldier in the papal guard, and
+what not, and had contrived to pick up two or three languages, among
+the rest English, which he spoke with purity. His lingual gift was
+one of his misfortunes.
+
+Among the exotics in Stillwater, which even boasted a featureless
+Celestial, who had unobtrusively extinguished himself with a
+stove-pipe hat, Torrini was the only figure that approached
+picturesqueness. With his swarthy complexion and large, indolent
+eyes, in which a southern ferocity slept lightly, he seemed to
+Richard a piece out of his own foreign experience. To him Torrini was
+the crystallization of Italy, or so much of that Italy as Richard had
+caught a glimpse of at Genoa. To the town-folks Torrini perhaps
+vaguely suggested hand-organs and eleemosynary pennies; but Richard
+never looked at the straight-limbed, handsome fellow without
+recalling the Phrygian-capped sailors of the Mediterranean. On this
+account, and for other reasons, Richard had taken a great fancy to
+the man. Torrini had worked in the ornamental department from the
+first, and was a rapid and expert carver when he chose. He had
+carried himself steadily enough in the beginning, but in these later
+days, as Mr. Slocum had stated, he was scarcely ever sober. Richard
+had stood between him and his discharge on several occasions, partly
+because he was so skillful a workman, and partly through pity for his
+wife and children, who were unable to speak a word of English. But
+Torrini's influence on the men in the yard,--especially on the
+younger hands, who needed quite other influences,--and his
+intemperate speeches at the trades-union, where he had recently
+gained a kind of ascendancy by his daring, were producing the worst
+effects.
+
+At another hour Richard might have been inclined to condone this
+last offense, as he had condoned others; but when he parted from
+Denyven, Richard's heart was still hot with his cousin's insult. As
+he turned into the yard, not with his usual swinging gait, but with a
+quick, wide step, there was an unpleasant dilation about young
+Shackford's nostrils.
+
+Torrini was seated on a block of granite in front of the upper
+sheds, flourishing a small chisel in one hand and addressing the men,
+a number of whom had stopped work to listen to him. At sight of
+Richard they made a show of handling their tools, but it was so clear
+something grave was going to happen that the pretense fell through.
+They remained motionless, resting on their mallets, with their eyes
+turned towards Richard. Torrini followed the general glance, and
+pause din his harangue.
+
+"Talk of the devil!" he muttered, and then, apparently continuing
+the thread of his discourse, broke into a strain of noisy
+declamation.
+
+Richard walked up to him quietly.
+
+"Torrini," he said, "you can't be allowed to speak here, you
+know."
+
+"I can speak where I like," replied Torrini gravely. He was drunk,
+but the intoxication was not in his tongue. His head, as Denyven had
+asserted, was as clear as a fog-horn.
+
+"When you are sober, you can come to the desk and get your pay and
+your kit. You are discharged from the yard."
+
+Richard was standing within two paces of the man, who looked up
+with an uncertain smile, as if he had not quite taken in the sense of
+the words. Then, suddenly straightening himself, he exclaimed,--
+
+"Slocum don't dare do it!"
+
+"But I do."
+
+"You!"
+
+"When I do a thing Mr. Slocum backs me."
+
+"But who backs Slocum,--the Association, may be?"
+
+"Certainly the Association ought to. I want you to leave the yard
+now."
+
+"He backs Slocum," said Torrini, settling himself on the block
+again, "and Slocum backs down," at which there was a laugh among the
+men.
+
+Richard made a step forward.
+
+"Hands off!" cried a voice from under the sheds.
+
+"Who said that?" demanded Richard, wheeling around. No one
+answered, but Richard had recognized Durgin's voice. "Torrini, if you
+don't quit the yard in two minutes by the clock yonder, I shall put
+you out by the neck. Do you understand?"
+
+Torrini glared about him confusedly for a moment, and broke into
+voluble Italian; then, without a warning gesture, sprung to his feet
+and struck at Richard. A straight red line, running vertically the
+length of his cheek, showed where the chisel had grazed him. The
+shops were instantly in a tumult, the men dropping their tools and
+stumbling over the blocks, with cries of "Keep them apart!" "Shame on
+you!" "Look out, Mr. Shackford!"
+
+"Is it mad ye are, Torrany!" cried Michael Hennessey, hurrying
+from the saw-bench. Durgin held him back by the shoulders.
+
+"Let them alone," said Durgin.
+
+The flat steel flashed again in the sunlight, but fell harmlessly,
+and before the blow could be repeated, Richard had knitted his
+fingers in Torrini's neckerchief and twisted it so tightly that the
+man gasped. Holding him by this, Richard dragged Torrini across the
+yard, and let him drop on the sidewalk outside the gate, where he lay
+in a heap, inert.
+
+"That was nate," said Michael Hennessey, sententiously.
+
+Richard stood leaning on the gate-post to recover he breath. His
+face was colorless, and the crimson line defined itself sharply
+against the pallor; but the rage was dead within him. It had been one
+of his own kind of rages,--like lightning out of a blue sky. As he
+stood there a smile was slowly gathering on his lip.
+
+A score or two of the men had followed him, and now lounged in a
+half-circle a few paces in the rear. When Richard was aware of their
+presence, the glow came into his eyes again.
+
+"Who ordered you to knock off work?"
+
+"That was a foul blow of Torrini's, sir," said Stevens, stepping
+forward, "and I for one come to see fair play."
+
+"Give us your 'and, mate!" cried Denyven; "there's a pair of us."
+
+"Thanks," said Richard, softening at once, "but there's no need.
+Every man can go to his job. Denyven may stay, if he likes."
+
+The men lingered a moment, irresolute, and returned to the sheds
+in silence.
+
+Presently Torrini stretched out one leg, then the other, and
+slowly rose to his feet, giving a stupid glance at his empty hands as
+he did so.
+
+"Here's your tool," said Richard, stirring the chisel with the toe
+of his boot, "if that's what you're looking for."
+
+Torrini advanced a step as if to pick it up, then appeared to
+alter his mind, hesitated perhaps a dozen seconds, and turning
+abruptly on his heel walked down the street without a stagger.
+
+"I think his legs is shut off from the rest of his body by
+water-tight compartments," remarked Denyven, regarding Torrini's
+steady gait with mingled amusement and envy. "Are you hurt, sir?"
+
+"Only a bit of a scratch of the heye," replied Richard, with a
+laugh.
+
+"As I hobserved just now to Mr. Stevens, sir, there's a pair of
+us!"
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+After a turn through the shops to assure himself that order was
+restored, Richard withdrew in the direction of his studio. Margaret
+was standing at the head of the stairs, half hidden by the scarlet
+creeper which draped that end of the veranda.
+
+"What are you doing there?" said Richard looking up with a bright
+smile.
+
+"Oh, Richard, I saw it all!"
+
+"You didn't see anything worth having white cheeks about."
+
+"But he struck you ... with the knife, did he not?" said
+Margaret, clinging to his arm anxiously.
+
+"He didn't have a knife, dear; only a small chisel, which couldn't
+hurt any one. See for yourself; it is merely a cat-scratch."
+
+Margaret satisfied herself that it was nothing more; but she
+nevertheless insisted on leading Richard into the workshop, and
+soothing the slight inflammation with her handkerchief dipped in
+arnica and water. The elusive faint fragrance of Margaret's hair as
+she busied herself about him would of itself have consoled Richard
+for a deep wound. All this pretty solicitude and ministration was new
+and sweet to him, and when the arnica turned out to be cologne, and
+scorched his cheek, Margaret's remorse was so delicious that Richard
+half wished the mixture had been aquafortis.
+
+"You shouldn't have been looking into the yard," he said. "If I
+had known that you were watching us it would have distracted me. When
+I am thinking of you I cannot think of anything else, and I had need
+of my wits for a moment."
+
+"I happened to be on the veranda, and was too frightened to go
+away. Why did you quarrel?"
+
+In giving Margaret an account of the matter, Richard refrained
+from any mention of his humiliating visit to Welch's Court that
+morning. He could neither speak of it nor reflect upon it with
+composure. The cloud which shadowed his features from time to time
+was attributed by Margaret to the affair in the yard.
+
+"But this is the end of it, is it not?" she asked, with troubled
+eyes. "You will not have any further words with him?"
+
+"You needn't worry. If Torrini had not been drinking he would
+never have lifted his hand against me. When he comes out of his
+present state, he will be heartily ashamed of himself. His tongue is
+the only malicious part of him. If he hadn't a taste for drink and
+oratory,--if he was not 'a born horator,' as Denyven calls him,--he
+would do well enough."
+
+"No, Richard, he's a dreadful man. I shall never forget his
+face,--it was some wild animal's. And you, Richard," added Margaret
+softly, "it grieved me to see you look like that."
+
+"I was wolfish for a moment, I suppose. Things had gone wrong
+generally. But if you are going to scold me, Margaret, I would rather
+have some more--arnica."
+
+"I am not going to scold; but while you stood there, so white and
+terrible,--so unlike yourself,--I felt that I did not know you,
+Richard. Of course you had to defend yourself when the man attacked
+you, but I thought for an instant you would kill him."
+
+"Not I," said Richard uneasily, dreading anything like a rebuke
+from Margaret. "I am mortified that I gave up to my anger. There was
+no occasion."
+
+"If an intoxicated person were to wander into the yard, papa would
+send for a constable, and have the person removed."
+
+"Your father is an elderly man," returned Richard, not relishing
+this oblique criticism of his own simpler method. "What would be
+proper in his case would be considered cowardly in mine. It was my
+duty to discharge the fellow, and not let him dispute my authority. I
+ought to have been cooler, of course. But I should have lost caste
+and influence with the men if I had shown the least personal fear of
+Torrini,--if, for example, I had summoned somebody else to do what I
+didn't dare do myself. I was brought up in the yard, remember, and to
+a certain extent I have to submit to being weighed in the yard's own
+scales."
+
+"But a thing cannot be weighed in a scale incapable of containing
+it," answered Margaret. "The judgment of these rough, uninstructed
+men is too narrow for such as you. They quarrel and fight among
+themselves, and have their ideas of daring; but there is a higher
+sort of bravery, the bravery of self-control, which I fancy they do
+not understand very well; so their opinion of it is not worth
+considering. However, you know better than I."
+
+"No, I do not," said Richard. "Your instinct is finer than my
+reason. But you _are_ scolding me, Margaret."
+
+"No, I am loving you," she said softly. "How can I do that more
+faithfully than by being dissatisfied with anything but the best in
+you?"
+
+"I wasn't at my best a while ago?"
+
+"No, Richard."
+
+"I can never hope to be worthy of you."
+
+But Margaret protested against that. Having forced him to look at
+his action through her eyes, she outdid him in humility, and then the
+conversation drifted off into half-breathed nothings, which, though
+they were satisfactory enough for these two, would have made a third
+person yawn.
+
+The occurrence at Slocum's Yard was hotly discussed that night at
+the Stillwater hotel. Discussions in that long, low bar-room, where
+the latest village scandal always came to receive the finishing
+gloss, were apt to be hot. In their criticism of outside men and
+measures, as well as in their mutual vivisections, there was an
+unflinching directness among Mr. Snelling's guests which is not to be
+found in more artificial grades of society. The popular verdict on
+young Shackford's conduct was as might not have been predicted,
+strongly in his favor. He had displayed pluck, and pluck of the
+tougher fibre was a quality held in so high esteem in Stillwater that
+any manifestation of it commanded respect. And young Shackford had
+shown a great deal; he had made short work of the most formidable man
+in the yard, and given the rest to understand that he was not to be
+tampered with. This had taken many by surprise, for hitherto an
+imperturbable amiability had been the leading characteristic of
+Slocum's manager.
+
+"I didn't think he had it in him," declared Dexter.
+
+"Well, ye might," replied Michael Hennessey. "Look at the lad's
+eye, and the muscles of him. He stands on his own two legs like a
+monumint, so he does."
+
+"Never saw a monument with two legs, Mike."
+
+"Didn't ye? Wait till ye're layin' at the foot of one. But ye'll
+wait many a day, me boy. Ye'll be lucky if ye're supploid with a
+head-stone made out of a dale-board."
+
+"Couldn't get a wooden head-stone short of Ireland, Mike."
+Retorted Dexter, with a laugh. "You'd have to import it."
+
+"An' so I will; but it won't be got over in time, if ye go on
+interruptin' gintlemen when they're discoorsin'. What was I sayin',
+any way, when the blackguard chipped in?" continued Mr. Hennessey,
+appealing to the company, as he emptied the ashes from his pipe by
+knocking the bowl in the side of his chair.
+
+"You was talking of Dick Shackford's muscle," said Durgin, "and
+you never talked wider of the mark. It doesn't take much muscle, or
+much courage either, to knock a man about when he's in liquor. The
+two wasn't fairly matched."
+
+"You are right there, Durgin," said Stevens, laying down his
+newspaper. "They weren't fairly matched. Both men have the same
+pounds and inches, but Torrini had a weapon and that mad strength
+that comes to some folks with drink. If Shackford hadn't made a neat
+twist on the neckerchief, he wouldn't have got off with a scratch."
+
+"Shackford had no call to lay hands on him."
+
+"There you are wrong, Durgin," replied Stevens. "Torrini had no
+call in the yard; he was making a nuisance of himself. Shackford
+spoke to him, and told him to go, and when he didn't go Shackford put
+him out; and he put him out handsomely,--'with neatness and
+dispatch,' as Slocum's prospectuses has it."
+
+"He was right all the time," said Piggott. "He didn't strike
+Torrini before or after he was down, and stood at the gate like a
+gentleman, ready to give Torrini his chance if he wanted it."
+
+"Torrini didn't want it," observed Jemmy Willson. "Ther' isn't
+nothing mean about Torrini."
+
+"But he 'ad a dozen minds about coming back," said Denyven.
+
+"We ought to have got him out of the place quietly," said Jeff
+Stavers; "that was our end of the mistake. He is not a bad fellow,
+but he shouldn't drink."
+
+"He was crazy to come to the yard."
+
+"When a man 'as a day off," observed Denyven, "and the beer isn't
+narsty, he 'ad better stick to the public 'ouse."
+
+"Oh, you!" exclaimed Durgin. "Your opinion don't weigh. You took a
+black eye of him."
+
+"Yes, I took a black heye,--and I can give one, in a hemergency.
+Yes, I gives and takes."
+
+"That's where we differ," returned Durgin. "I do a more genteel
+business; I give, and don't take."
+
+"Unless you're uncommon careful," said Denyven, pulling away at
+his pipe, "you'll find yourself some day henlarging your business."
+
+Durgin pushed back his stool.
+
+"Gentlemen! gentlemen!" interposed Mr. Snelling, appearing from
+behind the bar with a lemon-squeezer in his hand, "we'll have no black
+eyes here that wasn't born so. I am partial to them myself when
+nature gives them; and I propose the health of Miss Molly Hennessey,"
+with a sly glance at Durgin, who colored, "to be drank at the expense
+of the house. Name your taps, gentlemen."
+
+"Snelling, me boy, ye'd win the bird from the bush with yer
+beguilin' ways. Ye've brought proud tears to the eyes of an aged
+parent, and I'll take a sup out of that high-showldered bottle which
+you kape under the counter for the gentle-folk in the other room."
+
+A general laugh greeted Mr. Hennessey's selection, and peace was
+restored; but the majority of those present were workmen from
+Slocum's, and the event of the afternoon remained the uppermost
+theme.
+
+"Shackford is a different build from Slocum," said Piggott.
+
+"I guess the yard will find that out when he gets to be
+proprietor," rejoined Durgin, clicking his spoon against the empty
+glass to attract Snelling's attention.
+
+"Going to be proprietor, is he?"
+
+"Some day or other," answered Durgin. "First he'll step into the
+business, and then into the family. He's had his eye on Slocum's girl
+these four or five years. Got a cast of her fist up in his workshop.
+Leave Dick Shackford alone for lining his nest and making it soft all
+round."
+
+"Why shouldn't he?" asked Stevens. "He deserves a good girl, and
+there's none better. If sickness or any sort of trouble comes to a
+poor man's door, she's never far off with her kind words and them
+things the rich have when they are laid up."
+
+"Oh, the girl is well enough."
+
+"You couldn't say less. Before your mother died,"--Mrs. Durgin had
+died the previous autumn,--"I see that angil going to your house many
+a day with a little basket of comforts tucked under her wing. But
+she's too good to be praised in such a place as this," added Stevens.
+After a pause he inquired, "What makes you down on Shackford? He has
+always been a friend to you."
+
+"One of those friends who walk over your head," replied Durgin. "I
+was in the yard two years before him, and see where he is."
+
+"Lord love you," said Stevens, leaning back in his chair and
+contemplating Durgin thoughtfully, "there is marble and marble; some
+is Carrara marble, and some isn't. The fine grain takes a polish you
+can't get on to the other."
+
+"Of course, he is statuary marble, and I'm full of seams and
+feldspar."
+
+"You are like the most of us,--not the kind that can be worked up
+into anything very ornamental."
+
+"Thank you for nothing," said Durgin, turning away. "I came from
+as good a quarry as ever Dick Shackford. Where's Torrini to-night?"
+
+"Nobody has seen him since the difficulty," said Dexter, "except
+Peters. Torrini sent for him after supper."
+
+As Dexter spoke, the door opened and Peters entered. He went
+directly to the group composed chiefly of Slocum's men, and without
+making any remark began to distribute among them certain small blue
+tickets, which they pocketed in silence. Glancing carelessly at his
+piece of card-board, Durgin said to Peters,--
+
+"Then it's decided?"
+
+Peters nodded.
+
+"How's Torrini?"
+
+"He's all right."
+
+"What does he say?"
+
+"Nothing in perticular," responded Peters, "and nothing at all
+about his little skylark with Shackford."
+
+"He's a cool one!" exclaimed Durgin.
+
+Though the slips of blue pasteboard had been delivered and
+accepted without comment, it was known in a second through the
+bar-room that a special meeting had been convened for the next night
+by the officers of the Marble Workers' Association.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+On the third morning after Torrini's expulsion from the yard, Mr.
+Slocum walked into the studio with a printed slip in his hand. A
+similar slip lay crumpled under a work-bench, where Richard had
+tossed it. Mr. Slocum's kindly visage was full of trouble and
+perplexity as he raised his eyes from the paper, which he had been
+re-reading on the way up-stairs.
+
+"Look at that!"
+
+"Yes," remarked Richard, "I have been honored with one of those
+documents."
+
+"What does it mean?"
+
+"It means business."
+
+The paper in question contained a series of resolutions
+unanimously adopted at a meeting of the Marble Workers' Association
+of Stillwater, held in Grimsey's Hall the previous night. Dropping
+the preamble, these resolutions, which were neatly printed with a
+type-writing machine on a half letter sheet, ran as follows:--
+
+_Resolved,_ That on and after the First of June proximo, the
+pay of carvers in Slocum's Marble Yard shall be $2.75 per day,
+instead of $2.50 as heretofore.
+
+_Resolved,_ That on and after the same date, the rubbers and
+polishers shall have $2.00 per day, instead of $1.75 as heretofore.
+
+_Resolved,_ That on and after the same date the millmen are
+to have $2.00 per day, instead of $1.75 as heretofore.
+
+_Resolved,_ That during the months of June, July, and August
+the shops shall knock off work on Saturdays at five P.M., instead of
+at six P.M.
+
+_Resolved,_ That a printed copy of these Resolutions be laid
+before the Proprietor of Slocum's Marble Yard, and that his immediate
+attention to them be respectfully requested. _Per order of
+Committee M. W. A._
+
+"Torrini is at the bottom of that," said Mr. Slocum.
+
+"I hardly think so. This arrangement, as I told you the other day
+before I had the trouble with him, has been in contemplation several
+weeks. Undoubtedly Torrini used his influence to hasten the movement
+already planned. The Association has too much shrewdness to espouse
+the quarrel of an individual."
+
+"What are we to do?"
+
+"If you are in the same mind you were when we talked over the
+possibility of an unreasonable demand like this, there is only one
+thing to do."
+
+"Fight it?"
+
+"Fight it."
+
+"I have been resolute, and all that sort of thing, in times past,"
+observed Mr. Slocum, glancing out of the tail of his eye at Richard,
+"and have always come off second best. The Association has drawn up
+most of my rules for me, and had its own way generally."
+
+"Since my time you have never been in so strong a position to make
+a stand. We have got all the larger contracts out of the way.
+Foreseeing what was likely to come, I have lately fought shy of
+taking new ones. Here are heavy orders from Rafter & Son, the
+Builders' Company, and others. We must decline them by to-night's
+mail."
+
+"Is it really necessary?" asked Mr. Slocum, knitting his forehead
+into what would have been a scowl if his mild pinkish eyebrows had
+permitted it.
+
+"I think so."
+
+"I hate to do that."
+
+"Then we are at the mercy of the Association."
+
+"If we do not come to their terms, you seriously believe they will
+strike?"
+
+"I do," replied Richard, "and we should be in a pretty fix."
+
+"But these demands are ridiculous."
+
+"The men are not aware of our situation; they imagine we have a
+lot of important jobs on hand, as usual at this season. Formerly the
+foreman of a shop had access to the order-book, but for the last year
+or two I have kept it in the safe here. The other day Dexter came to
+me and wanted to see what work was set down ahead in the blotter; but
+I had an inspiration and didn't let him post himself."
+
+"Is not some kind of compromise possible?" suggested Mr. Slocum,
+looking over the slip again. "Now this fourth clause, about closing
+the yard an hour early on Saturdays, I don't strongly object to that,
+though with eighty hands it means, every week, eighty hours' work
+which the yard pays for and doesn't get."
+
+"I should advise granting that request. Such concessions are never
+wasted. But, Mr. Slocum, this is not going to satisfy them. They have
+thrown in one reasonable demand merely to flavor the rest. I happen
+to know that they are determined to stand by their programme to the
+last letter."
+
+"You know that?"
+
+"I have a friend at court. Of course this is not to be breathed,
+but Denyven, without being at all false to his comrades, talks freely
+with me. He says they are resolved not to give an inch."
+
+"Then we will close the works."
+
+"That is what I wanted you to say, sir!" cried Richard.
+
+"With this new scale of prices and plenty of work, we might
+probably come out a little ahead the next six months; but it wouldn't
+pay for the trouble and the capital invested. Then when trade
+slackened, we should be running at a loss, and there'd be another
+wrangle over a reduction. We had better lie idle."
+
+"Stick to that, sir, and may be it will not be necessary."
+
+"But if they strike"--
+
+"They won't all strike. At least," added Richard, "I hope not. I
+have indirectly sounded several of the older hands, and they have
+half promised to hold on; only half promised, for every man of them
+at heart fears the trades-union more than No-bread--until No-bread
+comes."
+
+"Whom have you spoken with?"
+
+"Lumley, Giles, Peterson, and some others,--your pensioners, I
+call them."
+
+"Yes, they were in the yard in my father's time; they have not
+been worth their salt these ten years. When the business was turned
+over to me I didn't discharge any old hand who had given his best
+days to the yard. Somehow I couldn't throw away the squeezed lemons.
+An employer owes a good workman something beyond the wages paid."
+
+"And a workman owes a good employer something beyond the work
+done. You stood by these men after they outlived their usefulness,
+and if they do not stand by you now, they're a shabby set."
+
+"I fancy they will, Richard."
+
+"I think they had better, and I wish they would. We have enough
+odds and ends to keep them busy awhile, and I shouldn't like to have
+the clinking of chisels die out altogether under the old sheds."
+
+"Nor I," returned Mr. Slocum, with a touch of sadness in his
+intonation. "It has grown to be a kind of music to me," and he paused
+to listen to the sounds of ringing steel that floated up from the
+workshop.
+
+"Whatever happens, that music shall not cease in the yard except
+on Sundays, if I have to take the mallet and go at a slab all alone."
+
+"Slocum's Yard with a single workman in it would be a pleasing
+spectacle," said Mr. Slocum, smiling ruefully.
+
+"It wouldn't be a bad time for _that_ workman to strike,"
+returned Richard with a laugh.
+
+"He could dictate his own terms," returned Mr. Slocum, soberly.
+"Well, I suppose you cannot help thinking about Margaret; but don't
+think of her now. Tell me what answer you propose to give the
+Association,--how you mean to put it; for I leave the matter wholly
+to you. I shall have no hand in it, further than to indorse your
+action."
+
+"To-morrow, then," said Richard, "for it is no use to hurry up a
+crisis, I shall go to the workshops and inform them that their
+request for short hours on Saturdays is granted, but that the other
+changes they suggest are not to be considered. There will never be a
+better opportunity, Mr. Slocum, to settle another question which has
+been allowed to run too long."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"The apprentice question."
+
+"Would it be wise to touch on that at present?"
+
+"While we are straightening out matters and putting things on a
+solid basis, it seems to me essential to settle that. There was never
+a greater imposition, or one more short-sighted, than this rule which
+prevents the training of sufficient workmen. The trades-union will
+discover their error some day when they have succeeded in forcing
+manufacturers to import skilled labor by the wholesale. I would like
+to tell the Marble Workers' Association that Slocum's Yard has
+resolved to employ as many apprentices each year as there is room
+for."
+
+"I wouldn't dare risk it!"
+
+"It will have to be done, sooner or later. It would be a capital
+flank movement now. They have laid themselves open to an attack on
+that quarter."
+
+"I might as well close the gates for good and all."
+
+"So you will, if it comes to that. You can afford to close the
+gates, and they can't afford to have you. In a week they'd be back,
+asking you to open them. Then you could have your pick of the live
+hands, and drop the dead wood. If Giles or Peterson or Lumley or any
+of those desert us, they are not to be let on again. I hope you will
+promise me that, sir."
+
+"If the occasion offers, you shall reorganize the shops in your
+own way. I haven't the nerve for this kind of business, though I have
+seen a great deal of it in the villages, first and last. Strikes are
+terrible mistakes. Even when they succeed, what pays for the lost
+time and the money squandered over the tavern-bar? What makes up for
+the days or weeks when the fire was out on the hearth and the
+children had no bread? That is what happens, you know."
+
+"There is no remedy for such calamities," Richard answered. "Yet I
+can imagine occasions when it would be better to let the fire go out
+and the children want for bread."
+
+"You are not advocating strikes!" exclaimed Mr. Slocum.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I thought you were for fighting them."
+
+"So I am, in this instance; but the question has two sides. Every
+man has the right to set a price on his own labor, and to refuse to
+work for less; the wisdom of it is another matter. He puts himself in
+the wrong only when he menaces the person or the property of the man
+who has an equal right not to employ him. That is the blunder
+strikers usually make in the end, and one by which they lose public
+sympathy even when they are fighting an injustice. Now, sometimes it
+_is_ an injustice that is being fought, and then it is right to
+fight it with the only weapon a poor man has to wield against a power
+which possesses a hundred weapons,--and that's a strike. For example,
+the smelters and casters in the Miantowona Iron Works are meanly
+underpaid."
+
+"What, have they struck?"
+
+"There's a general strike threatened in the village; foundry-men,
+spinners, and all."
+
+"So much the worse for everybody! I did not suppose it was as bad
+as that. What has become of Torrini?"
+
+"The day after he left us he was taken on as forgeman at Dana's."
+
+"I am glad Dana has got him!"
+
+"At the meeting, last night, Torrini gave in his resignation as
+secretary of the Association; being no longer a marble worker, he was
+not qualified to serve."
+
+"We unhorsed him, then?"
+
+"Rather. I am half sorry, too."
+
+"Richard," said Mr. Slocum, halting in one of his nervous walks up
+and down the room, "you are the oddest composition of hardness and
+softness I ever saw."
+
+"Am I?"
+
+"One moment you stand braced like a lion to fight the whole yard,
+and the next moment you are pitying a miscreant who would have laid
+your head open without the slightest compunction."
+
+"Oh, I forgive him," said Richard. "I was a trifle hasty myself.
+Margaret thinks so too."
+
+"Much Margaret knows about it!"
+
+"I was inconsiderate, to say the least. When a man picks up a tool
+by the wrong end he must expect to get cut."
+
+"You didn't have a choice."
+
+"I shouldn't have touched Torrini. After discharging him and
+finding him disposed to resist my order to leave the yard, I ought to
+have called in a constable. Usually it is very hard to anger me; but
+three or four times in my life I have been carried away by a devil of
+a temper which I couldn't control, it seized me so unawares. That was
+one of the times."
+
+The mallets and chisels were executing a blithe staccato movement
+in the yard below, and making the sparks dance. No one walking among
+the diligent gangs, and observing the placid faces of the men as they
+bent over their tasks, would have suspected that they were awaiting
+the word that meant bread and meat and home to them.
+
+As Richard passed through the shops, dropping a word to a workman
+here and there, the man addressed looked up cheerfully and made a
+furtive dab at the brown paper cap, and Richard returned the salute
+smilingly; but he was sad within. "The foolish fellows," he said to
+himself, "they are throwing away a full loaf and are likely to get
+none at all." Giles and two or three of the ancients were squaring a
+block of marble under a shelter by themselves. Richard made it a
+point to cross over and speak to them. In past days he had not been
+exacting with these old boys, and they always had a welcome for him.
+
+Slocum's Yard seldom presented a serener air of contented industry
+than it wore that morning; but in spite of all this smooth outside it
+was a foregone conclusion with most of the men that Slocum, with
+Shackford behind him, would never submit to the new scale of wages.
+There were a few who had protested against these resolutions and
+still disapproved of them, but were forced to go with the
+Association, which had really been dragged into the current by the
+other trades.
+
+ The Dana Mills and the Miantowona Iron Works were paying lighter
+wages than similar establishments nearer the great city. The managers
+contended that they were paying as high if not higher rates, taking
+into consideration the cheaper cost of living in Stillwater. "But you
+get city prices for your wares," retorted the union; "you don't pay
+city rents, and you shall pay city wages." Meetings were held at
+Grimsey's Hall and the subject was canvassed, at first calmly and
+then stormily. Among the molders, and possibly the sheet-iron
+workers, there was cause for dissatisfaction; but the dissatisfaction
+spread to where no grievance existed; it seized upon the spinners,
+and finally upon the marble workers. Torrini fanned the flame there.
+Taking for his text the rentage question, he argued that Slocum was
+well able to give a trifle more for labor than his city competitors.
+"The annual rent of a yard like Slocum's would be four thousand or
+five thousand dollars in the city. It doesn't cost Slocum two hundred
+dollars. It is no more than just that the laborer should have a
+share--he only asks a beggarly share--of the prosperity which he has
+helped to build up." This was specious and taking. Then there came
+down from the great city a glib person disguised as The Workingman's
+Friend,--no workingman himself, mind you, but a ghoul that lives upon
+subscriptions and sucks the senses out of innocent human beings,--who
+managed to set the place by the ears. The result of all which was
+that one May morning every shop, mill, and factory in Stillwater was
+served with a notice from the trades-union, and a general strike
+threatened.
+
+But our business at present is exclusively with Slocum's Yard.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+"Since we are in for it," said Mr. Slocum the next morning, "put
+the case to them squarely."
+
+Mr. Slocum's vertebrae had stiffened over night.
+
+"Leave that to me, sir," Richard replied. "I have been shaping out
+in my mind a little speech which I flatter myself will cover the
+points. They have brought this thing upon themselves, and we are
+about to have the clearest of understandings. I never saw the men
+quieter."
+
+"I don't altogether admire that. It looks as if they hadn't any
+doubt as to the issue."
+
+"The clearest-headed have no doubt; they know as well as you and I
+do the flimsiness of those resolutions. But the thick heads are in a
+fog. Every man naturally likes his pay increased; if a simple fellow
+is told five or six hundred times that his wages ought to be raised,
+the idea is so agreeable and insidious that by and by he begins to
+believe himself grossly underpaid, though he may be getting twice
+what he is worth. He doesn't reason about it; that's the last thing
+he'll do for you. In this mood he lets himself be flown away by the
+breath of some loud-mouthed demagogue, who has no interest in the
+matter beyond hearing his own talk and passing round the hat after
+the meeting is over. That is what has happened to our folks below.
+But they _are_ behaving handsomely."
+
+"Yes, and I don't like it."
+
+Since seven o'clock the most unimpeachable decorum had reigned in
+the workshops. It was now nine, and this brief dialogue had occurred
+between Mr. Slocum and Richard on the veranda, just as the latter was
+on the point of descending into the yard to have his talk with the
+men.
+
+The workshops--or rather the shed in which the workshops were, for
+it was one low structure eighteen or twenty feet wide and open on the
+west side--ran the length of the yard, and with the short extension
+at the southerly end formed the letter L. There were no partitions,
+an imaginary line separating the different gangs of workers. A person
+standing at the head of the building could make himself heard more or
+less distinctly in the remotest part.
+
+The grating lisp of the wet saws eating their way into the marble
+boulder, and the irregular quick taps of the seventy or eighty
+mallets were not suspended as Richard took his stand beside a tall
+funereal urn at the head of the principal workshop. After a second's
+faltering he rapped smartly on the lip of the urn with the key of
+his studio-door.
+
+Instantly every arm appeared paralyzed, and the men stood
+motionless, with the tools in their hands.
+
+Richard began in a clear but not loud voice, though it seemed to
+ring on the sudden silence:--
+
+"Mr. Slocum has asked me to say a few words to you, this morning,
+about those resolutions, and one or two other matters that have
+occurred to him in this connection. I am no speech-maker; I never
+learned that trade"--
+
+"Never learned any trade," muttered Durgin, inaudibly.
+
+--"but I think I can manage some plain, honest talk, for
+straight-forward men."
+
+Richard's exordium was listened to with painful attention.
+
+"In the first place," he continued, "I want to remind you,
+especially the newer men, that Slocum's Yard has always given steady
+work and prompt pay to Stillwater hands. No hand has ever been turned
+off without sufficient cause, or kept on through mere favoritism.
+Favors have been shown, but they have been shown to all alike. If
+anything has gone crooked, it has been straightened out as soon as
+Mr. Slocum knew of it. That has been the course of the yard in the
+past, and the Proprietor doesn't want you to run away with the idea
+that that course is going to be changed. One change, for the time
+being, is going to be made at our own suggestion. From now, until the
+1st of September, this yard will close gates on Saturdays at five
+P.M. instead of six P.M."
+
+Several voices cried, "Good for Slocum!" "Where's Slocum?" "Why
+don't Slocum speak for himself?" cried one voice.
+
+"It is Mr. Slocum's habit," answered Richard, "to give his
+directions to me, I give them to the foremen, and the foremen to the
+shops. Mr. Slocum follows that custom on this occasion. With regard
+to the new scale of wages which the Association has submitted to him,
+the Proprietor refuses to accept it, or any modification of it."
+
+A low murmur ran through the workshops.
+
+"What's a modificashun, sir?" asked Jemmy Willson, stepping
+forward, and scratching his left ear diffidently.
+
+"A modification," replied Richard, considerably embarrassed to
+give an instant definition, "is a--a"--
+
+"A splitting of the difference, by--!" shouted somebody in the
+third shop.
+
+"Thank you," said Richard, glancing in the direction of his
+impromptu Webster's Unabridged. "Mr. Slocum does not propose to split
+the difference. The wages in every department are to be just what
+they are,--neither more nor less. If anybody wishes to make a
+remark," he added, observing a restlessness in several of the men, "I
+beg he will hold on until I get through. I shall not detain you much
+longer, as the parson says before he has reached the middle of his
+sermon.
+
+"What I say now, I was charged to make particularly clear to you.
+It is this: In future Mr. Slocum intends to run Slocum's Yard
+himself. Neither you, nor I, nor the Association will be allowed to
+run it for him. [Sensation.] Until now the Association has tied him
+down to two apprentices a year. From this hour, out, Mr. Slocum will
+take on, not two, or twenty, but two hundred apprentices if the
+business warrants it."
+
+The words were not clearly off Richard's lips when the foreman of
+the shop in which he was speaking picked up a couple of small drills,
+and knocked them together with a sharp click. In an instant the men
+laid aside their aprons, bundled up their tools, and marched out of
+the shed two by two, in dead silence. That same click was repeated
+almost simultaneously in the second shop, and the same evolution took
+place. Then click, click, click! went the drills, sounding fainter
+and fainter in the distant departments; and in less than three
+minutes there was not a soul left in Slocum's Yard except the Orator
+of the Day.
+
+Richard had anticipated some demonstration, either noisy or
+violent, perhaps both; but this solemn, orderly desertion dashed him.
+
+He stepped into the middle of the yard, and glancing up beheld
+Margaret and Mr. Slocum standing on the veranda. Even at that
+distance he could perceive the pallor on one face, and the
+consternation written all over the other.
+
+Hanging his head with sadness, Richard crossed the yard, which
+gave out mournful echoes to his footfalls, and swung to the large
+gate, nearly catching old Giles by the heel as he did so. Looking
+through the slats, he saw Lumley and Peterson hobbling arm in arm
+down the street,--after more than twenty-five years of kindly
+treatment.
+
+"Move number one," said Richard, lifting the heavy cross-piece
+into its place and fastening it with a wooden pin. "Now I must go and
+prop up Mr. Slocum."
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+There is no solitude which comes so near being tangible as that of
+a vast empty workshop, crowded a moment since. The busy, intense life
+that has gone from it mysteriously leaves behind enough of itself to
+make the stillness poignant. One might imagine the invisible ghost of
+doomed Toil wandering from bench to bench, and noiselessly fingering
+the dropped tools, still warm from the workman's palm. Perhaps this
+impalpable presence is the artisan's anxious thought, stolen back to
+brood over the uncompleted task.
+
+Though Mr. Slocum had spoken lightly of Slocum's Yard with only
+one workman in it, when he came to contemplate the actual fact he was
+struck by the pathos of it, and the resolution with which he awoke
+that morning began to desert him.
+
+"The worst is over," exclaimed Richard, joining his two friends on
+the veranda, "and everything went smoother than I expected."
+
+"Everything went, sure enough," said Mr. Slocum, gloomily; "they
+all went,--old Giles, and Lumley, and everybody."
+
+"We somewhat expected that, you know."
+
+"Yes, I expected it, and wasn't prepared for it."
+
+"It was very bad," said Richard, shaking his head.
+
+The desertion of Giles and his superannuated mates especially
+touched Mr. Slocum.
+
+"Bad is no word; it was damnable."
+
+"Oh, papa!"
+
+"Pardon me, dear; I couldn't help it. When a man's pensioners
+throw him over, he must be pretty far gone!"
+
+"The undertow was too strong for them, sir, and they were swept
+away with the rest. And they all but promised to stay. They will be
+the very first to come back."
+
+"Of course we shall have to take the old fellows on again," said
+Mr. Slocum, relenting characteristically.
+
+"Never!" cried Richard.
+
+"I wish I had some of your grit."
+
+"I have none to spare. To tell the truth, when I stood up there to
+speak, with every eye working on me, like a half-inch drill, I would
+have sold myself at a low figure."
+
+"But you were a perfect what's-his-name,--Demosthenes," said Mr.
+Slocum, with a faint smile. "We could hear you."
+
+"I don't believe Demosthenes ever moved an audience as I did
+mine!" cried Richard gaily. "If his orations produced a like effect,
+I am certain that the Grecian lecture-bureau never sent him twice to
+the same place."
+
+"I don't think, Richard, I would engage you over again."
+
+"I am sure Richard spoke very well," interrupted Margaret. "His
+speech was short"--
+
+"Say shortened, Margaret, for I hadn't got through when they
+left."
+
+"No, I will not jest about it. It is too serious for jesting. What
+is to become of the families of all these men suddenly thrown out of
+employment?"
+
+"They threw themselves out, Mag," said her father.
+
+"That does not mend the matter, papa. There will be great
+destitution and suffering in the village with every mill closed; and
+they are all going to close, Bridget says. Thank Heaven that this did
+not happen in the winter!"
+
+"They always pick their weather," observed Mr. Slocum.
+
+"It will not be for long," said Richard encouragingly. "Our own
+hands and the spinners, who had no ground for complaint, will return
+to work shortly, and the managers of the iron mills will have to
+yield a point or two. In a week at the outside everything will be
+running smoothly, and on a sounder foundation than before. I believe
+the strike will be an actual benefit to everybody in the end."
+
+By dint of such arguments and his own sanguine temperament,
+Richard succeeded in reassuring Mr. Slocum for the time being, though
+Richard did not hide from himself the gravity of the situation. There
+was a general strike in the village. Eight hundred men were without
+work. That meant, or would mean in a few days, two or three thousand
+women and children without bread. It does not take the wolf long to
+reach a poor man's door when it is left ajar.
+
+The trades-union had a fund for emergencies of this sort, and some
+outside aid might be looked for; but such supplies are in their
+nature precarious and soon exhausted. It is a noticeable feature of
+strikes that the moment the workman's pay stops his living expenses
+increase. Even the more economical becomes improvident. If he has
+money, the tobacco shop and the tavern are likely to get more of it
+than the butcher's cart. The prolonged strain is too great to be
+endured without stimulant.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+During the first and second days of the strike, Stillwater
+presented an animated and even a festive appearance. Throngs of
+operatives in their Sunday clothes strolled through the streets, or
+lounged at the corners chatting with other groups; some wandered into
+the suburbs, and lay in the long grass under the elms. Others again,
+though these were few, took to the turnpike or the railroad track,
+and tramped across country.
+
+It is needless to say that the bar-room of the tavern was crowded
+from early morning down to the hour when the law compelled Mr.
+Snelling to shut off his gas. After which, John Brown's "soul" could
+be heard "marching on" in the darkness, through various crooked lanes
+and alleys, until nearly daybreak.
+
+Among the earliest to scent trouble in the air was Han-Lin, the
+Chinaman before mentioned. He kept a small laundry in Mud Lane, where
+his name was painted perpendicularly on a light of glass in the
+basement window of a tenement house. Han-Lin intended to be buried
+some day in a sky-blue coffin in his own land, and have a dozen packs
+of firecrackers decorously exploded over his remains. In order to
+reserve himself for this and other ceremonies involving the burning
+of a great quantity of gilt paper, he quietly departed for Boston at
+the first sign of popular discontent. As Dexter described it,
+"Han-Lin coiled up his pig-tail, put forty grains of rice in a yallar
+bag,--enough to last him a month!--and toddled off in his two-story
+wooden shoes." He could scarcely have done a wiser thing, for poor
+Han-Lin's laundry was turned wrong side out within thirty-six hours
+afterwards.
+
+The strike was popular. The spirit of it spread, as fire and fever
+and all elemental forces spread. The two apprentices in Brackett's
+bakery had a dozen minds about striking that first morning. The
+younger lad, Joe Wiggin, plucked up courage to ask Brackett for a day
+off, and was lucky enough to dodge a piece of dough weighing nearly
+four pounds.
+
+Brackett was making bread while the sun shone. He knew that before
+the week was over there would be no cash customers, and he purposed
+then to shut up shop.
+
+On the third and fourth days there was no perceptible fall in the
+barometer. Trade was brisk with Snelling, and a brass band was
+playing national airs on a staging erected on the green in front of
+the post-office. Nightly meetings took place at Grimsey's Hall, and
+the audiences were good-humored and orderly. Torrini advanced some
+Utopian theories touching a universal distribution of wealth, which
+were listened to attentively, but failed to produce deep impression.
+
+"That's a healthy idea of Torrini's about dervidin' up property,"
+said Jemmy Willson. "I've heerd it afore; but it's sing'ler I never
+knowd a feller with any property to have that idea."
+
+"Ther' 's a great dale in it, I can tell ye," replied Michael
+Hennessey, with a well-blackened Woodstock pipe between his teeth and
+his hands tucked under his coat-tails. "Isn't ther', Misther
+Stavens?"
+
+When Michael had on his bottle-green swallow-tailed coat with the
+brass buttons, he invariably assumed a certain lofty air of ceremony
+in addressing his companions.
+
+"It is sorter pleasant to look at," returned Stevens, "but it
+don't seem to me an idea that would work. Suppose that, after all the
+property was divided, a fresh shipload of your friends was to land at
+New York or Boston; would there be a new deal?"
+
+"No, sir! by no means!" exclaimed Michael excitedly. "The
+furreners is counted out!"
+
+"But you're a foreigner yourself, Mike."
+
+"Am I, then? Bedad, I'm not! I'm a rale American Know Nothing."
+
+"Well, Mike," said Stevens maliciously, "when it comes to a
+reg'lar division of lands and greenbacks in the United States, I go
+in for the Chinese having their share."
+
+"The Chinese!" shouted Michael. "Oh, murther, Misther Stevens! Ye
+wouldn't be fur dividin' with thim blatherskites!"
+
+"Yes, with them,--as well as the rest," returned Stevens, dryly.
+
+Meanwhile the directors and stockholders of the various mills took
+counsel in a room at the rear of the National Bank. Mr. Slocum,
+following Richard's advice, declined to attend the meeting in person,
+or to allow his name to figure on the list of vice-presidents.
+
+"Why should we hitch our good cause to their doubtful one?"
+reflected Richard. "We have no concessions or proposals to make. When
+our men are ready to come back to us, they will receive just wages
+and fair treatment. They know that. We do not want to fight the
+molders. Let the iron-mills do their own fighting;" and Richard
+stolidly employed himself in taking an account of stock, and
+forwarding by express to their destination the ten or twelve carved
+mantel-pieces that happily completed the last contract.
+
+Then his responsibilities shrunk to winding up the office clock
+and keeping Mr. Slocum firmly on his legs. The latter was by far the
+more onerous duty, for Mr. Slocum ran down two or three times in the
+course of every twenty-four hours, while the clock once wound was
+fixed for the day.
+
+"If I could only have a good set of Waltham works put into your
+father," said Richard to Margaret, after one of Mr. Slocum's
+relapses, "he would go better."
+
+"Poor papa! he is not a fighter, like you."
+
+"Your father is what I call a belligerent non-combatant."
+
+Richard was seeing a great deal of Margaret these days. Mr. Slocum
+had invited him to sleep in the studio until the excitement was past.
+Margaret was afraid to have him take that long walk between the yard
+and his lodgings in Lime Street, and then her father was an old man
+to be without any protection in the house in such untoward times.
+
+So Richard slept in the studio, and had his plate at table, like
+one of the family. This arrangement was favorable to many a stolen
+five minutes with Margaret, in the hall or on the staircase. In these
+fortuitous moments he breathed an atmosphere that sustained him in
+his task of dispelling Mr. Slocum's recurrent fits of despondency.
+Margaret had her duties, too, at this period, and the forenoons were
+sacred to them.
+
+One morning as she passed down the street with a small wicker
+basket on her arm, Richard said to Mr. Slocum,--
+
+"Margaret has joined the strikers."
+
+The time had already come to Stillwater when many a sharp-faced
+little urchin--as dear to the warm, deep bosom that had nursed it as
+though it were a crown prince--would not have had a crust to gnaw if
+Margaret Slocum had not joined the strikers. Sometimes her heart
+drooped on the way home from these errands, upon seeing how little of
+the misery she could ward off. On her rounds there was one cottage in
+a squalid lane where the children asked for bread in Italian. She
+never omitted to halt at that door.
+
+"Is it quite prudent for Margaret to be going about so?" queried
+Mr. Slocum.
+
+"She is perfectly safe," said Richard,--"as safe as a Sister of
+Charity, which she is."
+
+Indeed, Margaret might then have gone loaded with diamonds through
+the streets at midnight. There was not a rough man in Stillwater who
+would not have reached forth an arm to shield her.
+
+"It is costing me nearly as much as it would to carry on the
+yard," said Mr. Slocum, "but I never put out any stamps more
+willingly."
+
+"You never took a better contract, sir, than when you agreed to
+keep Margaret's basket filled. It is an investment in real
+estate--hereafter."
+
+"I hope so," answered Mr. Slocum, "and I know it's a good thing
+now."
+
+Of the morals of Stillwater at this time, or at any time, the less
+said the better. But out of the slime and ooze below sprang the white
+flower of charity.
+
+The fifth day fell on a Sabbath, and the churches were crowded.
+The Rev. Arthur Langly selected his text from St. Matthew, chap.
+xxii, v. 21: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are
+Caesar's." But as he did not make it quite plain which was Caesar,--the
+trades-union or the Miantowona Iron Works,--the sermon went for
+nothing, unless it could be regarded as a hint to those persons who
+had stolen a large piece of belting from the Dana Mills. On the other
+hand, Father O'Meara that morning bravely told his children to
+conduct themselves in an orderly manner while they were out of work,
+or they would catch it in this world and in the next.
+
+On the sixth day a keen observer might have detected a change in
+the atmosphere. The streets were thronged as usual, and the idlers
+still wore their Sunday clothes, but the holiday buoyancy of the
+earlier part of the week had evaporated. A turn-out on the part of
+one of the trades, though it was accompanied by music and a banner
+with a lively inscription, failed to arouse general enthusiasm. A
+serious and even a sullen face was not rare among the crowds that
+wandered aimlessly up and down the village.
+
+On the seventh day it required no penetration to see the change.
+There was decidedly less good-natured chaffing and more drunkenness,
+though Snelling had invoked popular contumely and decimated his
+bar-room by refusing to trust for drinks. Bracket had let his ovens
+cool, and his shutters were up. The treasury of the trades-union was
+nearly drained, and there were growlings that too much had been
+fooled away on banners and a brass band for the iron men's parade the
+previous forenoon. It was when Brackett's eye sighted the banner with
+"Bread or Blood" on it, that he had put up his shutters.
+
+Torrini was now making violent harangues at Grimsey's Hall to
+largely augmented listeners, whom his words irritated without
+convincing. Shut off from the tavern, the men flocked to hear him and
+the other speakers, for born orators were just then as thick as
+unripe whortleberries. There was nowhere else to go. At home were
+reproaches that maddened, and darkness, for the kerosene had given
+out.
+
+Though all the trades had been swept into the movement, it is not
+to be understood that every workman was losing his head. There were
+men who owned their cottages and had small sums laid by in the
+savings-bank; who had always sent their children to the district
+school, and listened themselves to at least one of Mr. Langly's
+sermons or one of Father O'Meara's discourses every Sunday. These
+were anchored to good order; they neither frequented the bar-room nor
+attended the conclaves at Grimsey's Hall, but deplored as deeply as
+any one the spirit that was manifesting itself. They would have
+returned to work now--if they had dared. To this class belonged
+Stevens.
+
+"Why don't you come up to the hall, nights?" asked Durgin,
+accosting him on the street, one afternoon. "You'd run a chance of
+hearing me hold forth some of these evenings."
+
+"You've answered your own question, William. I shouldn't like to
+see you making an idiot of yourself."
+
+"This is a square fight between labor and capital," returned
+Durgin with dignity, "and every man ought to take a hand in it."
+
+"William," said Stevens meditatively, "do you know about the
+Siamese twins?"
+
+"What about 'em,--they're dead, ain't they?" replied Durgin, with
+surprise.
+
+"I believe so; but when they was alive, if you was to pinch one of
+those fellows, the other fellow would sing out. If you was to black
+the eye of the left-hand chap, the right-hand chap wouldn't have been
+able to see for a week. When either of 'em fetched the other a clip,
+he knocked himself down. Labor and capital is jined just as those two
+was. When you've got this fact well into your skull, William, I shall
+be pleased to listen to your ideas at Grimsey's Hall or anywhere
+else."
+
+Such conservatism as Stevens's, however, was necessarily swept out
+of sight for the moment. The wealthier citizens were in a state
+bordering on panic,--all but Mr. Lemuel Shackford. In his flapping
+linen duster, for the weather was very sultry now, Mr. Shackford was
+seen darting excitedly from street to street and hovering about the
+feverish crowds, like the stormy petrel wheeling on the edges of a
+gale. Usually as chary of his sympathies as of his gold, he
+astonished every one by evincing an abnormal interest in the
+strikers. The old man declined to put down anything on the
+subscription paper then circulating; but he put down his sympathies
+to any amount. He held no stock in the concerns involved; he hated
+Slocum, and he hated the directors of the Miantowona Iron Works. The
+least he hoped was that Rowland Slocum would be laid out.
+
+So far the strikers had committed no overt act of note, unless it
+was the demolition of Han-Lin's laundry. Stubbs, the provision
+dealer, had been taught the rashness of exposing samples of potatoes
+in his door-way, and the "Tonsorial Emporium" of Professor Brown, a
+colored citizen, had been invaded by two humorists, who, after having
+their hair curled, refused to pay for it, and the professor had been
+too agitated to insist. The story transpiring, ten or twelve of the
+boys had dropped in during the morning, and got shaved on the same
+terms. "By golly, gen'l'men!" expostulated the professor, "ef dis yah
+thing goes on, dis darkey will be cleaned cl'ar out fo de week's
+done." No act of real violence had been perpetrated as yet; but with
+bands of lawless men roaming over the village at all hours of the day
+and night, the situation was critical.
+
+The wheel of what small social life there was in Stillwater had
+ceased to revolve. With the single exception of Lemuel Shackford, the
+more respectable inhabitants kept in-doors as much as practicable.
+From the first neither Mr. Craggie nor Lawyer Perkins had gone to the
+hotel to consult the papers in the reading-room, and Mr. Pinkham did
+not dare to play on his flute of an evening. The Rev. Arthur Langly
+found it politic to do but little visiting in the parish. His was not
+the pinion to buffet with a wind like this, and indeed he was not
+explicitly called upon to do so. He sat sorrowfully in his study day
+by day, preparing the weekly sermon,--a gentle, pensive person,
+inclined in the best of weather to melancholia. If Mr. Langly had
+gone into arboriculture instead of into the ministry, he would have
+planted nothing but weeping-willows.
+
+In the mean time the mill directors continued their deliberations
+in the bank building, and had made several abortive attempts to
+effect an arrangement with the leaders of the union. This seemed
+every hour less possible and more necessary.
+
+On the afternoon of the seventh day of the strike a crowd gathered
+in front of the residence of Mr. Alexander, the superintendent of the
+Miantowona Iron Works, and began groaning and hooting. Mr. Alexander
+sought out Mr. Craggie, and urged him, as a man of local weight and
+one accustomed to addressing the populace, to speak a few words to
+the mob. That was setting Mr. Craggie on the horns of a cruel
+dilemma. He was afraid to disoblige the representative of so powerful
+a corporation as the Miantowona Iron Works, but he equally dreaded to
+risk his popularity with seven or eight hundred voters; so, like the
+crafty chancellor in Tennyson's poem, he dallied with his golden
+chain, and, smiling, put the question by.
+
+"Drat the man!" muttered Mr. Craggie, "does he want to blast my
+whole political career! _I_ can't pitch into our adopted
+countrymen."
+
+There was a blot on the escutcheon of Mr. Craggie which he was
+very anxious not to have uncovered by any chance in these latter
+days,--his ancient affiliation with the deceased native American
+party.
+
+The mob dispersed without doing damage, but the fact that it had
+collected and had shown an ugly temper sent a thrill of apprehension
+through the village. Mr. Slocum came in a great flurry to Richard.
+
+"This thing ought to be stopped," said Mr. Slocum.
+
+"I agree to that," replied Richard, bracing himself not to agree
+to anything else.
+
+"If we were to drop that stipulation as to the increase of
+apprentices, no doubt many of the men would give over insisting on an
+advance."
+
+"Our only salvation is to stick to our right to train as many
+workmen as we choose. The question of wages is of no account compared
+with that; the rate of wages will adjust itself."
+
+"If we could manage it somehow with the marble workers," suggested
+Mr. Slocum, "that would demoralize the other trades, and they'd be
+obliged to fall in."
+
+"I don't see that they lack demoralization."
+
+"If something isn't done, they'll end up by knocking in our front
+doors or burning us all up."
+
+"Let them."
+
+"It's very well to say let them," exclaimed Mr. Slocum,
+petulantly, "when you haven't any front door to be knocked in!"
+
+"But I have you and Margaret to consider, if there were actual
+danger. When anything like violence threatens, there's an honest
+shoulder for every one of the hundred and fifty muskets in the
+armory."
+
+"Those muskets might get on the wrong shoulders."
+
+"That isn't likely. You do not seem to know, sir, that there is a
+strong guard at the armory day and night."
+
+"I was not aware of that."
+
+"It is a fact all the same," said Richard; and Mr. Slocum went
+away easier in his mind, and remained so--two or three hours.
+
+On the eighth, ninth, and tenth days the clouds lay very black
+along the horizon. The marble workers, who began to see their
+mistake, were reproaching the foundry men with enticing them into a
+coalition, and the spinners were hot in their denunciations of the
+molders. Ancient personal antagonisms that had been slumbering
+started to their feet. Torrini fell out of favor, and in the midst of
+one of his finest perorations uncomplimentary missiles, selected from
+the animal kingdom, had been thrown at him. The grand torchlight
+procession on the night of the ninth culminated in a disturbance, in
+which many men got injured, several badly, and the windows of
+Brackett's bakery were stove in. A point of light had pierced the
+darkness,--the trades were quarreling among themselves!
+
+The selectmen had sworn in special constables among the citizens,
+and some of the more retired streets were now patrolled after dark,
+for there had been threats of incendiarism.
+
+Bishop's stables burst into flames one midnight,--whether fired
+intentionally or accidentally was not known; but the giant bellows at
+Dana's Mills was slit and two belts were cut at the Miantowona Iron
+Works that same night.
+
+At this juncture a report that out-of-town hands were coming to
+replace the strikers acted on the public mind like petroleum on fire.
+A large body of workmen assembled near the railway station,--to
+welcome them. There was another rumor which caused the marble workers
+to stare at each other aghast. It was to the effect that Mr. Slocum,
+having long meditated retiring from business, had now decided to do
+so, and was consulting with Wyndham, the keeper of the green-house,
+about removing the division wall and turning the marble yard into a
+peach garden. This was an unlooked-for solution of the difficulty.
+Stillwater without any Slocum's Marble Yard was chaos come again.
+
+"Good Lord, boys!" cried Piggott, "if Slocum should do that!"
+
+Meanwhile, Snelling's bar had been suppressed by the authorities,
+and a posse of policemen, borrowed from South Millville, occupied the
+premises. Knots of beetle-browed men, no longer in holiday gear, but
+chiefly in their shirt-sleeves, collected from time to time at the
+head of the main street, and glowered threateningly at the single
+policeman pacing the porch of the tavern. The Stillwater Grays were
+under arms in the armory over Dundon's drugstore. The thoroughfare
+had ceased to be safe for any one, and Margaret's merciful errands
+were necessarily brought to an end. How the poor creatures who had
+depended on her bounty now continued to exist was a sorrowful
+problem.
+
+Matters were at this point, when on the morning of the thirteenth
+day Richard noticed the cadaverous face of a man peering into the
+yard through the slats of the main gate. Richard sauntered down
+there, with his hands in his pockets. The man was old Giles, and with
+him stood Lumley and Peterson, gazing thoughtfully at the sign
+outside,--
+
+NO ADMITTANCE EXCEPT ON BUSINESS.
+
+The roughly lettered clapboard, which they had heedlessly passed a
+thousand times, seemed to have taken a novel significance to them.
+
+_Richard_. What's wanted there?
+
+_Giles. [Very affably.]_ We was lookin' round for a job, Mr.
+Shackford.
+
+_Richard_. We are not taking on any hands at present.
+
+_Giles_. Didn't know but you was. Somebody said you was.
+
+_Richard_. Somebody is mistaken.
+
+_Giles_. P'rhaps to-morrow, or nex' day?
+
+_Richard_. Rather doubtful, Giles.
+
+_Giles. [Uneasily.]_ Mr. Slocum ain't goin' to give up
+business, is he?
+
+_Richard_. Why shouldn't he, if it doesn't pay? The business
+is carried on for his amusement and profit; when the profit stops it
+won't be amusing any longer. Mr. Slocum is not going to run the yard
+for the sake of the Marble Workers' Association. He would rather
+drive a junk-cart. He might be allowed to steer that himself.
+
+_Giles_. Oh!
+
+_Richard_. Good-morning, Giles.
+
+_Gikles_. 'Mornin', Mr. Shackford.
+
+Richard rushed back to Mr. Slocum.
+
+"The strike is broken, sir!"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"The thing has collapsed! The tide is turning, _and has washed
+in a lot of dead wood!"_
+
+"Thank God!" cried Mr. Slocum.
+
+An hour or so later a deputation of four, consisting of Stevens,
+Denyven, Durgin, and Piggott, waited upon Mr. Slocum in his private
+office, and offered, on behalf of all the departments, to resume work
+at the old rates.
+
+Mr. Slocum replied that he had not objected to the old rates, but
+the new, and that he accepted their offer--conditionally.
+
+"You have overlooked one point, Mr. Stevens."
+
+"Which one, sir?"
+
+"The apprentices."
+
+"We thought you might not insist there, sir."
+
+"I insist on conducting my own business in my own way."
+
+The voice was the voice of Slocum, but the backbone was Richard's.
+
+"Then, sir, the Association don't object to a reasonable number of
+apprentices."
+
+"How many is that?"
+
+"As many as you want, I expect, sir," said Stevens, shuffling his
+feet.
+
+"Very well, Stevens. Go round to the front gate and Mr. Shackford
+will let you in."
+
+There were two doors to the office, one leading into the yard, and
+the other, by which the deputation had entered and was now making its
+exit, opened upon the street.
+
+Richard heaved a vast sigh of relief as he took down the beam
+securing the principal entrance.
+
+"Good-morning, boys," he chirped, with a smile as bright as newly
+minted gold. "I hope you enjoyed yourselves."
+
+The quartet ducked their heads bashfully, and Stevens replied,
+"Can't speak for the others, Mr. Shackford, but I never enjoyed
+myself worse."
+
+Piggott lingered a moment behind the rest, and looking back over
+his shoulder said, "That peach garden was what fetched us!"
+
+Richard gave a loud laugh, for the peach garden had been a
+horticultural invention of his own.
+
+In the course of the forenoon the majority of the hands presented
+themselves at the office, dropping into the yard in gangs of five or
+six, and nearly all were taken on. To dispose definitely of Lumley,
+Giles, and Peterson, they were not taken on at Slocum's Yard, though
+they continued to be, directly or indirectly, Slocum's pensioners,
+even after they were retired to the town farm.
+
+Once more the chisels sounded merrily under the long shed. That
+same morning the spinners went back to the mules, but the molders
+held out until nightfall, when it was signified to them that their
+demands would be complied with.
+
+The next day the steam-whistles of the Miantowona Iron Works and
+Dana's Mills sent the echoes flying beyond that undulating line of
+pines and hemlocks which half encircles Stillwater, and falls away
+loosely on either side, like an unclasped girdle.
+
+A calm, as if from out the cloudless blue sky that arched it day
+after day, seemed to drift down upon the village. Han-Lin, with no
+more facial expression than an orange, suddenly reappeared on the
+streets, and went about repairing his laundry, unmolested. The
+children were playing in the sunny lanes again, unafraid, and mothers
+sat on doorsteps in the summer twilights, singing softly to the baby
+in arm. There was meat on the table, and the tea-kettle hummed
+comfortably at the back of the stove. The very winds that rustled
+through the fragrant pines, and wandered fitfully across the vivid
+green of the salt marshes, breathed peace and repose.
+
+Then, one morning, this blissful tranquility was rudely shattered.
+Old Mr. Lemuel Shackford had been found murdered in his own house in
+Welch's Court.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+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 facade 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."
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+Mr. Slocum, who had partly risen from the chair, sank back into
+his seat. "Good God!" he said, turning very pale. "Are you mad?"
+
+Mr. Taggett realized the cruel shock which the pronouncing of that
+name must have caused Mr. Slocum. Mr. Taggett had meditated his line
+of action, and had decided that the most merciful course was
+brusquely to charge young Shackford with the crime, and allow Mr.
+Slocum to sustain himself for a while with the indignant disbelief
+which would be natural to him, situated as he was. He would then in a
+manner be prepared for the revelations which, if suddenly presented,
+would crush him.
+
+If Mr. Taggett was without imagination, as he claimed, he was not
+without a certain feminine quickness of sympathy often found in
+persons engaged in professions calculated to blunt the finer
+sensibilities. In his intercourse with Mr. Slocum at the Shackford
+house, Mr. Taggett had been won by the singular gentleness and
+simplicity of the man, and was touched by his misfortune.
+
+After his exclamation, Mr. Slocum did not speak for a moment or
+two, but with his elbows resting on the edge of the desk sat
+motionless, like a person stunned. Then he slowly lifted his face, to
+which the color had returned, and making a movement with his right
+hand as if he were sweeping away cobwebs in front of him rose from
+the chair.
+
+"You are simply mad," he said, looking Mr. Taggett squarely and
+calmly in the eyes. "Are you aware of Mr. Richard Shackford's
+character and his position here?"
+
+"Precisely."
+
+"Do you know that he is to marry my daughter?"
+
+"I am very sorry for you, sir."
+
+"You may spare me that. It is quite unnecessary. You have fallen
+into some horrible delusion. I hope you will be able to explain it."
+
+"I am prepared to do so, sir."
+
+"Are you serious?"
+
+"Very serious, Mr. Slocum."
+
+"You actually imagine that Richard Shackford--Pshaw! It's simply
+impossible!"
+
+"I am too young a man to wish even to seem wiser than you, but my
+experience has taught me that nothing is impossible."
+
+"I begin to believe so myself. I suppose you have grounds, or
+something you consider grounds, for your monstrous suspicion. What
+are they? I demand to be fully informed of what you have been doing
+in the yard, before you bring disgrace upon me and my family by
+inconsiderately acting on some wild theory which perhaps ten words
+can refute."
+
+"I should be in the highest degree criminal, Mr. Slocum, if I were
+to make so fearful an accusation against any man unless I had the
+most incontestable evidence in my hands."
+
+Mr. Taggett spoke with such cold-blooded conviction that a chill
+crept over Mr. Slocum, in spite of him.
+
+"What is the nature of this evidence?"
+
+"Up to the present stage, purely circumstantial."
+
+"I can imagine that," said Mr. Slocum, with a slight smile.
+
+"But so conclusive as to require no collateral evidence. The
+testimony of an eye-witness of the crime could scarcely add to my
+knowledge of what occurred that Tuesday night in Lemuel Shackford's
+house."
+
+"Indeed, it is all so clear! But of course a few eye-witnesses
+will turn up eventually," said Mr. Slocum, whose whiteness about the
+lips discounted the assurance of his sarcasm.
+
+"That is not improbable," returned Mr. Taggett.
+
+"And meanwhile what are the facts?"
+
+"They are not easily stated. I have kept a record of my work day
+by day, since the morning I entered the yard. The memoranda are
+necessarily confused, the important and the unimportant being jumbled
+together; but the record as it stands will answer your question more
+fully than I could, even if I had the time--which I have not--to go
+over the case with you. I can leave these notes in your hands, if you
+desire it. When I return from New York"--
+
+"You are going to New York!" exclaimed Mr. Slocum, with a start.
+"When?"
+
+"This evening."
+
+"If you lay a finger on Richard Shackford, you will make the
+mistake of your life, Mr. Taggett!"
+
+"I have other business there. Mr. Shackford will be in Stillwater
+to-morrow night. He engaged a state-room on the Fall River boat this
+morning."
+
+"How can you know that?"
+
+"Since last Tuesday none of his movements have been unknown to
+me."
+
+"Do you mean to say that you have set your miserable spies upon
+him?" cried Mr. Slocum.
+
+"I should not state the fact in just those words," Mr. Taggett
+answered. "The fact remains."
+
+"Pardon me," said Mr. Slocum. "I am not quite myself. Can you
+wonder at it?"
+
+"I do not wonder."
+
+"Give me those papers you speak of, Mr. Taggett. I would like to
+look through them. I see that you are a very obstinate person when
+you have once got a notion into your head. Perhaps I can help you out
+of your error before it is irreparable." Then, after hesitating a
+second, Mr. Slocum added, "I may speak of this to my daughter?
+Indeed, I could scarcely keep it from her."
+
+"Perhaps it is better she should be informed."
+
+"And Mr. Shackford, when he returns to-morrow?"
+
+"If he broaches the subject of his cousin's death, I advise you to
+avoid it."
+
+"Why should I?"
+
+"It might save you or Miss Slocum some awkwardness,--but you must
+use your own discretion. As the matter stands it makes no difference
+whether Mr. Shackford knows his position to-day or to-morrow. It is
+too late for him to avail himself of the knowledge. Otherwise, of
+course, I should not have given myself away in this fashion."
+
+"Very well," said Mr. Slocum, with an impatient movement of his
+shoulders; "neither I nor my daughter will open our lips on this
+topic. In the mean while you are to take no further steps without
+advising me. That is understood?"
+
+"That is perfectly understood," returned Mr. Taggett, drawing a
+narrow red note-book from the inner pocket of his workman's blouse,
+and producing at the same time a small nickel-plated door-key. "This
+is the key of Mr. Shackford's private workshop in the extension. I
+have not been able to replace it on the mantel-shelf of his
+sitting-room in Lime Street. Will you have the kindness to see that
+it is done at once?"
+
+A moment later Mr. Slocum stood alone in the office, with Mr.
+Taggett's diary in his hand. It was one of those costly little
+volumes--gilt-edged and bound in fragrant crushed Levant
+morocco--with which city officials are annually supplied by a
+community of grateful taxpayers.
+
+The dark crimson of the flexible covers, as soft and slippery to
+the touch as a snake's skin, was perhaps the fitting symbol of the
+darker story that lay coiled within. With a gesture of repulsion, as
+if some such fancy had flitted through his mind, Mr. Slocum tossed
+the note-book on the desk in front of him, and stood a few minutes
+moodily watching the _reflets_ of the crinkled leather as the
+afternoon sunshine struck across it. Beneath his amazement and
+indignation he had been chilled to the bone by Mr. Taggett's brutal
+confidence. It was enough to chill one, surely; and in spite of
+himself Mr. Slocum began to feel a certain indefinable dread of that
+little crimson-bound book.
+
+Whatever it contained, the reading of those pages was to be a
+repellent task to him; it was a task to which he could not bring
+himself at the moment; to-night, in the privacy of his own chamber,
+he would sift Mr. Taggett's baleful fancies. Thus temporizing, Mr.
+Slocum dropped the volume into his pocket, locked the office door
+behind him, and wandered down to Dundon's drug-store to kill the
+intervening hour before supper-time. Dundon's was the aristocratic
+lounging place of the village,--the place where the only genuine
+Havana cigars in Stillwater were to be had, and where the favored
+few, the initiated, could get a dash of hochheimer or cognac with
+their soda-water.
+
+At supper, that evening, Mr. Slocum addressed scarcely a word to
+Margaret, and Margaret was also silent. The days were dragging
+heavily with her; she was missing Richard. Her own daring travels had
+never extended beyond Boston or Providence; and New York, with
+Richard in it, seemed drearily far away. Mr. Slocum withdrew to his
+chamber shortly after nine o'clock, and, lighting the pair of candles
+on the dressing-table, began his examination of Mr. Taggett's
+memoranda.
+
+At midnight the watchman on his lonely beat saw those two candles
+still burning.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+Mr. Taggett's diary was precisely a diary,--disjoined, full of
+curt, obscure phrases and irrelevant reflections,--for which reason
+it will not be reproduced here. Though Mr. Slocum pondered every
+syllable, and now and then turned back painfully to reconsider some
+doubtful passage, it is not presumed that the reader will care to do
+so. An abstract of the journal, with occasional quotation where the
+writer's words seem to demand it, will be sufficient for the
+narrative.
+
+In the opening pages Mr. Taggett described his novel surroundings
+with a minuteness which contrasted oddly with the brief, hurried
+entries further on. He found himself, as he had anticipated, in a
+society composed of some of the most heterogeneous elements.
+Stillwater, viewed from a certain point, was a sort of microcosm, a
+little international rag-fair to which nearly every country on earth
+had contributed one of its shabby human products. "I am moving,"
+wrote Mr. Taggett, "in an atmosphere in which any crime is possible.
+I give myself seven days at the outside to light upon the traces of
+Shackford's murder. I feel him in the air." The writer's theory was
+that the man would betray his identity in one of two ways: either by
+talking unguardedly, or by indulging in expenditures not warranted by
+his means and position. If several persons had been concerned in the
+crime, nothing was more likely than a disagreement over the spoil,
+and consequent treachery on the part of one of them. Or, again, some
+of the confederates might become alarmed, and attempt to save
+themselves by giving away their comrades. Mr. Taggett, however,
+leaned to the belief that the assassin had had no accomplices.
+
+The sum taken from Mr. Shackford's safe was a comparatively large
+one,--five hundred dollars in gold and nearly double that amount in
+bank-notes. Neither the gold nor the paper bore any known mark by
+which it could be recognized; the burglar had doubtless assured
+himself of this, and would not hesitate to disburse the money. That
+was even a safer course, judiciously worked, than to secrete it. The
+point was, Would he have sufficient self-control to get rid of it by
+degrees? The chances, Mr. Taggett argued, were ten to one he would
+not.
+
+A few pages further on Mr. Taggett compliments the Unknown on the
+adroit manner in which he is conducting himself. He has neither let
+slip a suspicious word, nor made an incautious display of his booty.
+Snelling's bar was doing an unusually light business. No one appeared
+to have any money. Many of the men had run deeply into debt during
+the late strike, and were now drinking moderately. In the paragraph
+which closes the week's record Mr. Taggett's chagrin is evident. He
+confesses that he is at fault. "My invisible friend does not
+_materialize_ so successfully as I expected," is Mr. Taggett's
+comment.
+
+His faith in the correctness of his theory had not abated; but he
+continued his observation in a less sanguine spirit. These
+observations were not limited to the bar-room or the workshop; he
+informed himself of the domestic surroundings of his comrades. Where
+his own scrutiny could not penetrate, he employed the aid of
+correspondents. He knew what workmen had money in the local
+savings-bank, and the amount of each deposit. In the course of his
+explorations of the shady side of Stillwater life, Mr. Taggett
+unearthed many amusing and many pathetic histories, but nothing that
+served his end. Finally, he began to be discouraged.
+
+Returning home from the tavern, one night, in a rather desponding
+mood, he found the man Wollaston smoking his pipe in bed. Wollaston
+was a taciturn man generally, but this night he was conversational,
+and Mr. Taggett, too restless to sleep, fell to chatting with him.
+Did he know much about the late Mr. Shackford? Yes, he had known him
+well enough, in an off way,--not to speak of him; everybody knew him
+in Stillwater; he was a sort of miser, hated everybody, and bullied
+everybody. It was a wonder somebody didn't knock the old silvertop on
+the head years ago.
+
+Thus Mr. Wollaston grimly, with his pores stopped up with
+iron-fillings,--a person to whom it would come quite easy to knock
+any one on the head for a slight difference of opinion. He amused Mr.
+Taggett in his present humor.
+
+No, he wasn't aware that Shackford had had trouble with any
+particular individual; believed he did have a difficulty once with
+Slocum, the marble man; but he was always fetching suits against the
+town and shying lawyers at the mill directors,--a disagreeable old
+cuss altogether. Adopted his cousin, one time, but made the house so
+hot for him that the lad ran off to sea, and since then had had
+nothing to do with the old bilk.
+
+Indeed! What sort of fellow was young Shackford? Mr. Wollaston
+could not say of his own knowledge; thought him a plucky chap; he had
+put a big Italian named Torrini out of the yard, one day, for talking
+back. Who was Torrini? The man that got hurt last week in the Dana
+Mill. Who were Richard Shackford's intimates? Couldn't say; had seen
+him with Mr. Pinkham, the school-master, and Mr. Craggie,--went with
+the upper crust generally. Was going to be partner in the marble yard
+and marry Slocum's daughter. Will Durgin knew him. They lived
+together one time. He, Wollaston, was going to turn in now.
+
+Several of these facts were not new to Mr. Taggett, but Mr.
+Wollaston's presentation of them threw Mr. Taggett into a reverie.
+
+The next evening he got Durgin alone in a corner of the bar-room.
+With two or three potations Durgin became autobiographical. Was he
+acquainted with Mr. Shackford outside the yard? Rather. Dick
+Shackford? His (Durgin's) mother had kept Dick from starving when he
+was a baby,--and no thanks for it. Went to school with him, and knew
+all about his running off to sea. Was near going with him. Old man
+Shackford never liked Dick, who was a proud beggar; they couldn't
+pull together, down to the last,--both of a piece. They had a jolly
+rumpus a little while before the old man was fixed.
+
+Mr. Taggett pricked up his ears at this.
+
+A rumpus? How did Durgin know that? A girl told him. What girl? A
+girl he was sweet on. What was her name? Well, he didn't mind telling
+her name; it was Molly Hennessey. She was going through Welch's Court
+one forenoon,--may be it was three days before the strike,--and saw
+Dick Shackford bolt out of the house, swinging his arms and swearing
+to himself at an awful rate. Was Durgin certain that Molly Hennessey
+had told him this? Yes, he was ready to take his oath on it.
+
+Here, at last, was something that looked like a glimmer of
+daylight.
+
+It was possible that Durgin or the girl had lied; but the story
+had an air of truth to it. If it were a fact that there had recently
+been a quarrel between these cousins, whose uncousinly attitude
+towards each other was fast becoming clear to Mr. Taggett, then here
+was a conceivable key to an enigma which had puzzled him.
+
+The conjecture that Lemuel Shackford had himself torn up the
+will--if it was a will, for this still remained in dispute--had never
+been satisfactory to Mr. Taggett. He had accepted it because he was
+unable to imagine an ordinary burglar pausing in the midst of his
+work to destroy a paper in which he could have no concern. But
+Richard Shackford would have the liveliest possible interest in the
+destruction of a document that placed a vast estate beyond his reach.
+Here was a motive on a level with the crime. That money had been
+taken, and that the fragments of the will had been carelessly thrown
+into a waste-paper basket, just as if the old man himself had thrown
+them there, was a stroke of art which Mr. Taggett admired more and
+more as he reflected upon it.
+
+He did not, however, allow himself to lay too much stress on these
+points; for the paper might turn out to be merely an expired lease,
+and the girl might have been quizzing Durgin. Mr. Taggett would have
+given one of his eye-teeth just then for ten minutes with Mary
+Hennessey. But an interview with her at this stage was neither
+prudent nor easily compassed.
+
+"If I have not struck a trail," writes Mr. Taggett, "I have come
+upon what strongly resembles one; the least I can do is to follow it.
+My first move must be to inspect that private workshop in the rear of
+Mr. Slocum's house. How shall I accomplish it? I cannot apply to him
+for permission, for that would provoke questions which I am not ready
+to answer. Moreover, I have yet to assure myself that Mr. Slocum is
+not implicated. There seems to have been also a hostile feeling
+existing between him and the deceased. Why didn't some one tell me
+these things at the start! If young Shackford is the person, there is
+a tangled story to be unraveled. _Mem:_ Young Shackford is Miss
+Slocum's lover."
+
+Mr. Slocum read this passage twice without drawing breath, and
+then laid down the book an instant to wipe the sudden perspiration
+from his forehead.
+
+In the note which followed, Mr. Taggett described the difficulty
+he met with in procuring a key to fit the wall-door at the rear of
+the marble yard, and gave an account of his failure to effect an
+entrance into the studio. He had hoped to find a window unfastened;
+but the window, as well as the door opening upon the veranda, was
+locked, and in the midst of his operations, which were conducted at
+noon-time, the approach of a servant had obliged him to retreat.
+
+Forced to lay aside, at least temporarily, his designs on the
+workshop, he turned his attention to Richard's lodgings in Lime
+Street. Here Mr. Taggett was more successful. On the pretext that he
+had been sent for certain drawings which were to be found on the
+table or in a writing-desk, he was permitted by Mrs. Spooner to
+ascend to the bedroom, where she obligingly insisted on helping him
+search for the apocryphal plans, and seriously interfered with his
+purpose, which was to find the key of the studio. While Mr. Taggett
+was turning over the pages of a large dictionary, in order to gain
+time, and was wondering how he could rid himself of the old lady's
+importunities, he came upon a half-folded note-sheet, at the bottom
+of which his eye caught the name of Lemuel Shackford. It was in the
+handwriting of the dead man. Mr. Taggett was very familiar with that
+handwriting. He secured the paper at a venture, and put it in his
+pocket without examination.
+
+A few minutes later, it being impossible to prolong the pretended
+quest for the drawings, Mr. Taggett was obliged to follow Mrs.
+Spooner from the apartment. As he did so he noticed a bright object
+lying on the corner of the mantel-shelf,--a small nickel-plated key.
+In order to take it he had only to reach out his hand in passing. It
+was, as Mr. Taggett had instantly surmised, the key of Richard's
+workshop.
+
+If it had been gold, instead of brass or iron, that bit of metal
+would have taken no additional value in Mr. Taggett's eyes. On
+leaving Mrs. Spooner's he held it tightly clasped in his fingers
+until he reached an unfrequented street, where he halted a moment in
+the shadow of a building to inspect the paper, which he had half
+forgotten in his satisfaction at having obtained the key. A stifled
+cry rose to Mr. Taggett's lips as he glanced over the crumpled
+note-sheet.
+
+It contained three lines, hastily scrawled in lead-pencil,
+requesting Richard Shackford to call at the house in Welch's Court at
+eight o'clock on a certain Tuesday night. The note had been written,
+as the date showed, on the day preceding the Tuesday night in
+question--the night of the murder!
+
+For a second or two Mr. Taggett stood paralyzed. Ten minutes
+afterwards a message in cipher was pulsing along the wires to New
+York, and before the sun went down that evening Richard Shackford was
+under the surveillance of the police.
+
+The doubtful, unknown ground upon which Mr. Taggett had been
+floundering was now firm under his feet,--unexpected ground, but
+solid. Meeting Mary Hennessey in the street, on his way to the marble
+yard, Mr. Taggett no longer hesitated to accost her, and question her
+as to the story she had told William Durgin. The girl's story was
+undoubtedly true, and as a piece of circumstantial evidence was only
+less important than the elder Shackford's note. The two cousins had
+been for years on the worst of terms. At every step Mr. Taggett had
+found corroboration of Wollaston's statement to that effect.
+
+"Where were Coroner Whidden's eyes and ears," wrote Mr.
+Taggett,--the words were dashed down impatiently on the page, as if
+he had sworn a little internally while writing them,--"when he
+conducted that inquest! In all my experience there was never a thing
+so stupidly managed."
+
+A thorough and immediate examination of Richard Shackford's
+private workshop was now so imperative that Mr. Taggett resolved to
+make it even if he had to do so under the authority of a
+search-warrant. But he desired as yet to avoid publicity.
+
+A secret visit to the studio seemed equally difficult by day and
+night. In the former case he was nearly certain to be deranged by the
+servants, and in the latter a light in the unoccupied room would
+alarm any of the household who might chance to awaken. From the
+watchman no danger was to be apprehended, as the windows of the
+extension were not visible from the street.
+
+Mr. Taggett finally decided on the night as the more propitious
+time for his attempt,--a decision which his success justified. A
+brilliant moon favored the in-door part of the enterprise, though it
+exposed him to observation in his approach from the marble yard to
+the veranda.
+
+With the dense moonlight streaming outside against the
+window-shades, he could safely have used a candle in the studio
+instead of the screened lantern which he had provided. Mr. Taggett
+passed three hours in the workshop,--the last hour in waiting for the
+moon to go down. Then he stole through the marble yard into the
+silent street, and hurried home, carrying two small articles
+concealed under his blouse. The first was a chisel with a triangular
+piece broken out of the centre of the bevel, and the other was a box
+of safety-matches. The peculiarity of this box of matches was--that
+just one match had been used from it.
+
+Mr. Taggett's work was done.
+
+The last seven pages of the diary were devoted to a review of the
+case, every detail of which was held up in various lights, and
+examined with the conscientious pains of a lapidary deciding on the
+value of a rare stone. The concluding entries ran as follow:--
+
+_"Tuesday Night_. Here the case passes into other hands. I
+have been fortunate rather than skillful in unmasking the chief actor
+in one of the most singular crimes that ever came under my
+investigation. By destroying three objects, very easily destroyed,
+Richard Shackford would have put himself beyond the dream of
+suspicion. He neglected to remove these dumb witnesses, and now the
+dumb witnesses speak! If it could be shown that he was a hundred
+miles from Stillwater at the time of the murder, instead of in the
+village, as he was, he must still be held, in the face of the proofs
+against him, accessory to the deed. These proofs, roughly summarized,
+are:--
+
+_"First_. The fact that he had had an altercation with his
+cousin a short time previous to the date of the murder,--a murder
+which may be regarded not as the result of a chance disagreement, but
+of long years of bitter enmity between the two men.
+
+_"Secondly_. The fact that Richard Shackford had had an
+appointment with his cousin on the night the crime was committed, and
+had concealed that fact from the authorities at the time of the
+coroner's inquest.
+
+_"Thirdly_. That the broken chisel found in the private
+workshop of the accused explains the peculiar shape of the wound
+which caused Lemuel Shackford's death, and corresponds in every
+particular with the plaster impression taken of that wound.
+
+_"Fourthly_. That the partially consumed match found on the
+scullery floor when the body was discovered (a style of match not
+used in the house in Welch's Court) completes the complement of a box
+of safety-matches belonging to Richard Shackford, and hidden in a
+closet in his workshop.
+
+"Whether Shackford had an accomplice or not is yet to be
+ascertained. There is nothing whatever to implicate Mr. Rowland
+Slocum. I make the statement because his intimate association with
+one party and his deep dislike of the other invited inquiry, and at
+first raised an unjust suspicion in my mind."
+
+The little red book slipped from Mr. Slocum's grasp and fell at
+his feet. As he rose from the chair, the reflection which he caught
+of himself in the dressing-table mirror was that of a wrinkled, white
+old man.
+
+Mr. Slocum did not believe, and no human evidence could have
+convinced him, that Richard had deliberately killed Lemuel Shackford;
+but as Mr. Slocum reached the final pages of the diary, a horrible
+probability insinuated itself in his mind. Could Richard have done it
+accidentally? Could he--in an instant of passion, stung to sudden
+madness by that venomous old man--have struck him involuntarily, and
+killed him? A certain speech which Richard had made in Mr. Slocum's
+presence not long before came back to him now with fearful
+emphasis:--
+
+_"Three or four times in my life I have been carried away by a
+devil of a temper which I couldn't control, it seized me so
+unawares."_
+
+"It seized me so unawares!" repeated Mr. Slocum, half aloud; and
+then with a swift, unconscious gesture, he pressed his hands over his
+ears, as if to shut out the words.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+Margaret must be told. It would be like stabbing her to tell her
+all this. Mr. Slocum had lain awake long after midnight, appalled by
+the calamity that was about to engulf them. At moments, as his
+thought reverted to Margaret's illness early in the spring, he felt
+that perhaps it would have been a mercy if she had died then. He had
+left the candles burning; it was not until the wicks sunk down in the
+sockets and went softly out that slumber fell upon him.
+
+He was now sitting at the breakfast-table, absently crumbling bits
+of bread beside his plate and leaving his coffee untouched. Margaret
+glanced at him wistfully from time to time, and detected the restless
+night in the deepened lines of his face.
+
+The house had not been the same since Lemuel Shackford's death; he
+had never crossed its threshold; Margaret had scarcely known him by
+sight, and Mr. Slocum had not spoken to him for years; but Richard's
+connection with the unfortunate old man had brought the tragic event
+very close to Margaret and her father. Mr. Slocum was a person easily
+depressed, but his depression this morning was so greatly in excess
+of the presumable cause that Margaret began to be troubled.
+
+"Papa, has anything happened?"
+
+"No, nothing new has happened; but I am dreadfully disturbed by
+some things which Mr. Taggett has been doing here in the village."
+
+"I thought Mr. Taggett had gone."
+
+"He did go; but he came back very quietly without anybody's
+knowledge. I knew it, of course; but no one else, to speak of."
+
+"What has he done to disturb you?"
+
+"I want you to be a brave girl, Margaret,--will you promise that?"
+
+"Why, yes," said Margaret, with an anxious look. "You frighten me
+with your mysteriousness."
+
+"I do not mean to be mysterious, but I don't quite know how to
+tell you about Mr. Taggett. He has been working underground in this
+matter of poor Shackford's death,--boring in the dark like a
+mole,--and thinks he has discovered some strange things."
+
+"Do you mean he thinks he has found out who killed Mr.
+Shackford?"
+
+"He believes he has fallen upon clews which will lead to that. The
+strange things I alluded to are things which Richard will have to
+explain."
+
+"Richard? What has he to do with it?"
+
+"Not much, I hope; but there are several matters which he will be
+obliged to clear up in order to save himself from very great
+annoyance. Mr. Taggett seems to think that--that"--
+
+"Good heavens, papa! What does he think?"
+
+"Margaret, he thinks that Richard knew something about the murder,
+and has not told it."
+
+"What could he know? Is that all?"
+
+"No, that is not all. I am keeping the full truth from you, and it
+is useless to do so. You must face it like a brave girl. Mr. Taggett
+suspects Richard of being concerned, directly or indirectly, with the
+crime."
+
+The color went from Margaret's cheek for an instant. The statement
+was too horrible and sudden not to startle her, but it was also too
+absurd to have more than an instant's effect. Her quick recovery of
+herself reassured Mr. Slocum. Would she meet Mr. Taggett's specific
+charges with the like fortitude? Mr. Slocum himself had been
+prostrated by them; he prayed to Heaven that Margaret might have more
+strength than he, as indeed she had.
+
+"The man has got together a lot of circumstantial evidence,"
+continued Mr. Slocum cautiously; "some of it amounts to nothing,
+being mere conjecture; but some of it will look badly for Richard, to
+outsiders."
+
+"Of course it is all a mistake," said Margaret, in nearly her
+natural voice. "It ought to be easy to convince Mr. Taggett of that."
+
+"I have not been able to convince him."
+
+"But you will. What has possessed him to fall into such a
+ridiculous error?"
+
+"Mr. Taggett has written out everything at length in this
+memorandum-book, and you must read it for yourself. There are
+expressions and statements in these pages, Margaret, that will
+necessarily shock you very much; but you should remember, as I tried
+to while reading them, that Mr. Taggett has a heart of steel; without
+it he would be unable to do his distressing work. The cold
+impartiality with which he sifts and heaps up circumstances involving
+the doom of a fellow-creature appears almost inhuman; but it is his
+business. No, don't look at it here!" said Mr. Slocum, recoiling; he
+had given the book to Margaret. "Take it into the other room, and
+read it carefully by yourself. When you have finished, come back and
+tell me what you think."
+
+"But, papa, surely you"--
+
+"I don't believe anything, Margaret! I don't know the true from
+the false any more! I want you to help me out of my confusion, and
+you cannot do it until you have read that book."
+
+Margaret made no response, but passed into the parlor and closed
+the folding-doors behind her.
+
+After an absence of half an hour she reentered the breakfast room,
+and laid Mr. Taggett's diary on the table beside her father, who had
+not moved from his place during the interval. Margaret's manner was
+collected, but it was evident, by the dark circles under her eyes,
+and the set, colorless lips, that that half hour had been a cruel
+thirty minutes to her. In Margaret's self-possession Mr. Slocum
+recognized, not for the first time, the cropping out of an ancestral
+trait which had somehow managed to avoid him in its wayward descent.
+
+"Well?" he questioned, looking earnestly at Margaret, and catching
+a kind of comfort from her confident bearing.
+
+"It is Mr. Taggett's trade to find somebody guilty," said
+Margaret, "and he has been very ingenious and very merciless. He was
+plainly at his wits' ends to sustain his reputation, and would not
+have hesitated to sacrifice any one rather than wholly fail."
+
+"But you have been crying, Margaret."
+
+"How could I see Richard dragged down in the dust in this fashion,
+and not be mortified and indignant?"
+
+"You don't believe anything at all of this?"
+
+"Do _you?"_ asked Margaret, looking through and through him.
+
+"I confess I am troubled."
+
+"If you doubt Richard for a second," said Margaret, with a slight
+quiver of her lip, "that will be the bitterest part of it to me."
+
+"I don't give any more credit to Mr. Taggett's general charges
+than you do, Margaret; but I understand their gravity better. A
+perfectly guiltless man, one able with a single word to establish his
+innocence, is necessarily crushed at first by an accusation of this
+kind. Now, can Richard set these matters right with a single word? I
+am afraid he has a world of difficulty before him."
+
+"When he returns he will explain everything. How can you question
+it?"
+
+"I do not wish to; but there are two things in Mr. Taggett's story
+which stagger me. The motive for the destruction of Shackford's
+papers,--that's not plain; the box of matches is a puerility unworthy
+of a clever man like Mr. Taggett, and as to the chisel he found, why,
+there are a hundred broken chisels in the village, and probably a
+score of them broken in precisely the same manner; but, Margaret, did
+Richard ever breathe a word to you of that quarrel with his cousin?"
+
+"No."
+
+"He never mentioned it to me either. As matters stood between you
+and him, nothing was more natural than that he should have spoken of
+it to you,--so natural that his silence is positively strange."
+
+"He may have considered it too unimportant. Mr. Shackford always
+abused Richard; it was nothing new. Then, again, Richard is very
+proud, and perhaps he did not care to come to us just at that time
+with family grievances. Besides, how do we know they quarreled? The
+village is full of gossip."
+
+"I am certain there was a quarrel; it was only necessary for those
+two to meet to insure that. I distinctly remember the forenoon when
+Richard went to Welch's Court; it was the day he discharged Torrini."
+
+A little cloud passed over Margaret's countenance.
+
+"They undoubtedly had angry words together," continued Mr. Slocum,
+"and we are forced to accept the Hennessey girl's statement. The
+reason you suggest for Richard's not saying anything on the subject
+may suffice for us, but it will scarcely satisfy disinterested
+persons, and doesn't at all cover another circumstance which must be
+taken in the same connection."
+
+"What circumstance?"
+
+"His silence in regard to Lemuel Shackford's note,--a note written
+the day before the murder, and making an appointment for the very
+night of it."
+
+The girl looked steadily at her father.
+
+"Margaret!" exclaimed Mr. Slocum, his face illuminated with a
+flickering hope as he met her untroubled gaze, "did Richard tell
+_you?"_
+
+"No," replied Margaret.
+
+"Then he told no one," said Mr. Slocum, with the light fading out
+of his features again. "It was madness in him to conceal the fact. He
+should not have lost a moment, after the death of his cousin, in
+making that letter public. It ought instantly to have been placed in
+Coroner Whidden's hands. Richard's action is inconceivable,
+unless--unless"--
+
+"Do not say it!" cried Margaret. "I should never forgive you!"
+
+In recapitulating the points of Mr. Taggett's accusation, Mr.
+Slocum had treated most of them as trivial; but he had not been
+sincere. He knew that that broken chisel had no duplicate in
+Stillwater, and that the finding of it in Richard's closet was a
+black fact. Mr. Slocum had also glossed over the quarrel; but that
+letter!--the likelihood that Richard kept the appointment, and his
+absolute silence concerning it,--here was a grim thing which no
+sophistry could dispose of. It would be wronging Margaret to deceive
+her as to the vital seriousness of Richard's position.
+
+"Why, why did he hide it!" Mr. Slocum persisted.
+
+"I do not see that he really hid it, papa. He shut the note in a
+book lying openly on the table,--a dictionary, to which any one in
+the household was likely to go. You think Mr. Taggett a person of
+great acuteness."
+
+"He is a very intelligent person, Margaret."
+
+"He appears to me very short-sighted. If Richard were the dreadful
+man Mr. Taggett supposes, that paper would have been burnt, and not
+left for the first comer to pick up. I scorn myself for stooping to
+the suggestion!"
+
+"There is something in the idea," said Mr. Slocum slowly. "But why
+did Richard never mention the note,--to you, or to me, or to
+anybody?"
+
+"He had a sufficient reason, you may be sure. Oh, papa, how ready
+you are to believe evil of him!"
+
+"I am not, God knows!"
+
+"How you cling to this story of the letter! Suppose it turns out
+to be some old letter, written two or three years ago? You could
+never look Richard in the face again."
+
+"Unfortunately, Shackford dated it. It is useless for us to
+blindfold ourselves, Margaret. Richard has managed in some way to get
+himself into a very perilous situation, and we cannot help him by
+shutting our eyes. You misconceive me if you imagine I think him
+capable of coolly plotting his cousin's death; but it is not outside
+the limits of the possible that what has happened a thousand times
+may have happened once more. Men less impulsive than Richard"--
+
+"I will not listen to it!" interrupted Margaret, drawing herself
+up. "When Richard returns he will explain the matter to you,--not to
+me. If I required a word of denial from him, I should care very
+little whether he was innocent or not."
+
+Mr. Slocum threw a terrified glance at his daughter. Her lofty
+faith sent a chill to his heart. What would be the result of a fall
+from such a height? He almost wished Margaret had something less of
+that ancestral confidence and obstinacy the lack of which in his own
+composition he had so often deplored.
+
+"We are not to speak of this to Richard," he said, after a
+protracted pause; "at least not until Mr. Taggett considers it best.
+I have pledged myself to something like that."
+
+"Has Richard been informed of Mr. Taggett's singular proceeding?"
+asked Margaret, freezingly.
+
+"Not yet; nothing is to be done until Mr. Taggett returns from New
+York, and then Richard will at once have an opportunity of clearing
+himself."
+
+"It would have spared us all much pain and misunderstanding if he
+had been sent for in the first instance. Did he know that this person
+was here in the yard?"
+
+"The plan was talked over before Richard left; the details were
+arranged afterwards. He heartily approved of the plan."
+
+A leisurely and not altogether saint-like smile crept into the
+corners of Margaret's mouth.
+
+"Yes, he approved of the plan," repeated Mr. Slocum. "Perhaps
+he"--Here Mr. Slocum checked himself, and left the sentence flying at
+loose ends. Perhaps Richard had looked with favor upon a method of
+inquiry which was so likely to lead to no result. But Mr. Slocum did
+not venture to finish the suggestion. He had never seen Margaret so
+imperious and intractable; it was impossible to reason or to talk
+frankly with her. He remained silent, sitting with one arm thrown
+dejectedly across the back of the chair.
+
+Presently his abject attitude and expression began to touch
+Margaret; there was something that appealed to her in the thin gray
+hair fallowing over his forehead. Her eyes softened as they rested
+upon him, and a pitying little tremor came to her under lip.
+
+"Papa," she said, stooping to his side, with a sudden rosy bloom
+in her cheeks, "I have all the proof I want that Richard knew nothing
+of this dreadful business."
+
+"You have proof!" exclaimed Mr. Slocum, starting from his seat.
+
+"Yes. The morning Richard went to New York"--Margaret hesitated.
+
+"Well!"
+
+"He put his arm around me and kissed me."
+
+"Well!"
+
+"Well?" repeated Margaret. "Could Richard have done that,--could
+he have so much as laid his hand upon me--if--if"--
+
+ Mr. Slocum sunk back in the chair with a kind of groan.
+
+"Papa, you do not know him!"
+
+"Oh, Margaret, I am afraid that that is not the kind of evidence
+to clear Richard in Mr. Taggett's eyes."
+
+"Then Richard's word must do it," she said haughtily. "He will be
+home to-night."
+
+"Yes, he is to return to-night," said Mr. Slocum, looking away
+from her.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+During the rest of the day the name of Richard Shackford was not
+mentioned again by either Margaret or her father. It was a day of
+suspense to both, and long before night-fall Margaret's impatience
+for Richard to come had resolved itself into a pain as keen as that
+with which Mr. Slocum contemplated the coming; for every hour
+augmented his dread of the events that would necessarily follow the
+reappearance of young Shackford in Stillwater.
+
+On reaching his office, after the conversation with Margaret, Mr.
+Slocum found Lawyer Perkins waiting for him. Lawyer Perkins, who was
+as yet in ignorance of the late developments, had brought information
+of his own. The mutilated document which had so grimly clung to its
+secret was at last deciphered. It proved to be a recently executed
+will, in which the greater part of Lemuel Shackford's estate, real
+and personal, was left unconditionally to his cousin.
+
+"That disposes of one of Mr. Taggett's theories," was Mr. Slocum's
+unspoken reflection. Certainly Richard had not destroyed the will;
+the old man himself had destroyed it, probably in some fit of pique.
+Yet, after all, the vital question was in no way affected by this
+fact; the motive for the crime remained, and the fearful evidence
+against Richard still held.
+
+After the departure of Lawyer Perkins, who had been struck by the
+singular perturbation of his old friend, Mr. Slocum drew forth Mt.
+Taggett's journal, and re-read it from beginning to end. Margaret's
+unquestioning faith in Richard, her prompt and indignant rejection of
+the whole story, had shaken her father at moments that morning; but
+now his paralyzing doubts returned. This second perusal of the diary
+impressed him even more strongly than the first. Richard had killed
+Lemuel Shackford,--in self-defense, may be, or perhaps accidentally;
+but he had killed him! As Mr. Slocum passed from page to page,
+following the dark thread of narrative that darkened at each remove,
+he lapsed into that illogical frame of mind when one looks half
+expectantly for some providential interposition to avert the calamity
+against which human means are impotent. If Richard were to drop dead
+in the street! If he were to fall overboard off Point Judith in the
+night! If only anything would happen to prevent his coming back! Thus
+the ultimate disgrace might be spared them. But the ill thing is the
+sure thing; the letter with the black seal never miscarries, and
+Richard was bound to come! "There is no escape for him or for us,"
+murmured Mr. Slocum, closing his finger in the book.
+
+It was in a different mood that Margaret said to herself, "It is
+nearly four o'clock; he will be here at eight!" As she stood at the
+parlor window and watched the waning afternoon light making its
+farewells to the flower-beds in the little square front-gardens of
+the houses opposite, Margaret's heart was filled with the tenderness
+of the greeting she intended to give Richard. She had never been cold
+or shy in her demeanor with him, nor had she ever been quite
+demonstrative; but now she meant to put her arms around his neck in a
+wifely fashion, and recompense him so far as she could for all the
+injustice he was to suffer. When he came to learn of the hateful
+slander that had lifted its head during his absence, he should
+already be in possession of the assurance of her faith.
+
+In the mean while the hands in Slocum's Yard were much exercised
+over the unaccountable disappearance of Blake. Stevens reported the
+matter to Mr. Slocum.
+
+"Ah, yes," said Mr. Slocum, who had not provided himself with an
+explanation, and was puzzled to improvise one. "I discharged
+him,--that is to say, I let him go. I forgot to mention it. He didn't
+take to the trade."
+
+"But he showed a good fist for a beginner," said Stevens. "He was
+head and shoulders the best of the new lot. Shall I put Stebbins in
+his place?"
+
+"You needn't do anything until Mr. Shackford gets back."
+
+"When will that be, sir?"
+
+"To-night, probably."
+
+The unceremonious departure of Blake formed the theme of endless
+speculation at the tavern that evening, and for the moment obscured
+the general interest in old Shackford's murder.
+
+"Never to let on he was goin'!" said one.
+
+"Didn't say good-by to nobody," remarked a second.
+
+"It was devilish uncivil," added a third.
+
+"It is kind of mysterious," said Mr. Peters.
+
+"Some girl," suggested Mr. Willson, with an air of tender
+sentiment, which he attempted further to emphasize by a capricious
+wink.
+
+"No," observed Dexter. "When a man vanishes in that sudden way his
+body is generally found in a clump of blackberry bushes, months
+afterwards, or left somewhere on the flats by an ebb tide."
+
+"Two murders in Stillwater in one month would be rather crowding
+it, wouldn't it?" inquired Piggott.
+
+"Bosh!" said Durgin. "There was always something shady about
+Blake. We didn't know where he hailed from, and we don't know where
+he's gone to. He'll take care of himself; that kind of fellow never
+lets anybody play any points on him." With this Durgin threw away the
+stump of his cigar, and lounged out at the street door.
+
+"I couldn't get anything out of the proprietor," said Stevens;
+"but he never talks. May be Shackford when he"--Stevens stopped short
+to listen to a low, rumbling sound like distant thunder, followed
+almost instantly by two quick faint whistles. "He's aboard the train
+to-night."
+
+Mr. Peters quietly rose from his seat and left the bar-room.
+
+The evening express, due at eight, was only a few seconds behind
+time. As the screech of the approaching engine rung out from the dark
+wood-land, Margaret and her father exchanged rapid glances. It would
+take Richard ten minutes to walk from the railway station to the
+house,--for of course he would come there directly after sending his
+valise to Lime Street.
+
+The ten minutes went by, and then twenty. Margaret bent steadily
+over her work, listening with covert intentness for the click of the
+street gate. Likely enough Richard had been unable to find any one to
+take charge of his hand-baggage. Presently Mr. Slocum could not
+resist the impulse to look at his watch. It was half past eight. He
+nervously unfolded The Stillwater Gazette, and sat with his eyes
+fastened on the paper.
+
+After a seemingly interminable period the heavy bell of the South
+Church sounded nine, and then tolled for a few minutes, as the dismal
+custom is in New England country towns.
+
+A long silence followed, unrelieved by any word between father and
+daughter,--a silence so profound that the heart of the old-fashioned
+time-piece, throbbing monotonously in its dusky case at the foot of
+the stairs, made itself audible through the room. Mr. Slocum's gaze
+continued fixed on the newspaper which he was not reading. Margaret's
+hands lay crossed over the work on her lap.
+
+Ten o'clock.
+
+"What can have kept him?" murmured Margaret.
+
+"There was only that way out of it," reflected Mr. Slocum,
+pursuing his own line of thought.
+
+Margaret's cheeks were flushed and hot, and her eyes dulled with
+disappointment, as she rose from the low rocking-chair and crossed
+over to kiss her father good-night. Mr. Slocum drew the girl gently
+towards him, and held her for a moment in silence. But Margaret,
+detecting the subtile commiseration in his manner, resented it, and
+released herself coldly.
+
+"He has been detained, papa."
+
+"Yes, something must have detained him!"
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+When the down express arrived at Stillwater, that night, two
+passengers stepped from the rear car to the platform: one was Richard
+Shackford, and the other a commercial traveler, whose acquaintance
+Richard had made the previous evening on the Fall River boat.
+
+There were no hacks in waiting at the station, and Richard found
+his politeness put to a severe test when he saw himself obliged to
+pilot his companion part of the way to the hotel, which lay--it
+seemed almost maliciously--in a section of the town remote from the
+Slocums'. Curbing his impatience, Richard led the stranger through
+several crooked, unlighted streets, and finally left him at the
+corner of the main thoroughfare, within pistol-shot of the red glass
+lantern which hung over the door of the tavern. This cost Richard ten
+good minutes. As he hurriedly turned into a cross-street on the left,
+he fancied that he heard his name called several times from somewhere
+in the darkness. A man came running towards him. It was Mr. Peters.
+
+"Can I say a word to you, Mr. Shackford?"
+
+"If it isn't a long one. I am rather pressed."
+
+"It is about Torrini, sir."
+
+"What of him?"
+
+"He's mighty bad, sir."
+
+"Oh, I can't stop to hear that," and Richard quickened his pace.
+
+"The doctor took off his hand last Wednesday," said Peters,
+keeping alongside, "and he's been getting worse and worse."
+
+Richard halted. "Took off his hand?"
+
+"Didn't you know he was caught in the rolling-machine at Dana's?
+Well, it was after you went away."
+
+"This is the first I've heard of it."
+
+"It was hard lines for him, sir, with the woman and the two
+children, and nothing to eat in the house. The boys in the yard have
+done what they could, but with the things from the drug-store, and so
+on, we couldn't hold up our end. Mr. Dana paid the doctor's bill,
+but if it hadn't been for Miss Slocum I don't know what would have
+happened. I thought may be if I spoke to you, and told you how it
+was"--
+
+"Did Torrini send you?"
+
+"Lord, no! He's too proud to send to anybody. He's been so proud
+since they took off his hand that there has been no doing anything
+with him. If they was to take off his leg, he would turn into one
+mass of pride. No, Mr. Shackford, I came of myself."
+
+"Where does Torrini live, now?"
+
+"In Mitchell's Alley."
+
+"I will go along with you," said Richard, with a dogged air. It
+seemed as if the fates were determined to keep him from seeing
+Margaret that night. Peters reached out a hand to take Richard's
+leather bag. "No, thank you, I can carry it very well." In a small
+morocco case in one of the pockets was a heavy plain gold ring for
+Margaret, and not for anything in the world would Richard have
+allowed any one else to carry the bag.
+
+After a brisk five minutes' walk the two emerged upon a broad
+street crossing their path at right angles. All the shops were closed
+except Stubbs the provision dealer's and Dundon's drug-store. In the
+window of the apothecary a great purple jar, with a spray of gas jets
+behind it, was flaring on the darkness like a Bengal light. Richard
+stopped at the provision store and made some purchases; a little
+further on he halted at a fruit stand, kept by an old crone, who had
+supplemented the feeble flicker of the corner street lamp with a
+pitch-pine torch, which cast a yellow bloom over her apples and
+turned them all into oranges. She had real oranges, however, and
+Richard selected half a dozen, with a confused idea of providing the
+little Italians with some national fruit, though both children had
+been born in Stillwater.
+
+Then the pair resumed their way, Peters acting as pioneer. They
+soon passed beyond the region of sidewalks and curbstones, and began
+picking their steps through a narrow, humid lane, where the water lay
+in slimy pools, and the tenement houses on each side blotted out the
+faint starlight. The night was sultry, and door and casement stood
+wide, making pits of darkness. Few lights were visible, but a
+continuous hum of voices issued from the human hives, and now and
+then a transient red glow at an upper window showed that some one was
+smoking a pipe. This was Mitchell's Alley.
+
+The shadows closed behind the two men as they moved forward, and
+neither was aware of the figure which had been discreetly following
+them for the last ten minutes. If Richard had suddenly wheeled and
+gone back a dozen paces, he would have come face to face with the
+commercial traveler.
+
+Mr. Peters paused in front of one of the tenement houses, and
+motioned with his thumb over his shoulder for Richard to follow him
+through a yawning doorway. The hall was as dark as a cave, and full
+of stale, moldy odors. Peters shuffled cautiously along the bare
+boards until he kicked his toe against the first step of the
+staircase.
+
+"Keep close to the wall, Mr. Shackford, and feel your way up.
+They've used the banisters for kindling, and the landlord says he
+shan't put in any more. I went over here the other night," added Mr.
+Peters reminiscentially.
+
+After fumbling several seconds for the latch, Mr. Peters pushed
+open a door, and ushered Richard into a large, gloomy rear room. A
+kerosene lamp was burning dimly on the mantel-shelf, over which hung
+a coarsely-colored lithograph of the Virgin in a pine frame. Under
+the picture stood a small black crucifix. There was little
+furniture,--a cooking-stove, two or three stools, a broken table, and
+a chest of drawers. On an iron bedstead in the corner lay Torrini,
+muffled to the chin in a blanket, despite the hot midsummer night.
+His right arm, as if it were wholly disconnected with his body,
+rested in a splint on the outside of the covering. As the visitors
+entered, a tall dusky woman with blurred eyes rose from a low bench
+at the foot of the bed.
+
+"Is he awake?" asked Peters.
+
+The woman, comprehending the glance which accompanied the words,
+though not the words themselves, nodded yes.
+
+"Here is Mr. Shackford come to see you, Torrini," Peters said.
+
+The man slowly unclosed his eyes; they were unnaturally brilliant
+and dilated, and seemed to absorb the rest of his features.
+
+"I didn't want him."
+
+"Let by-gones be by-gones, Torrini," said Richard, approaching the
+bedside. "I am sorry about this."
+
+"You are very good; I don't understand. I ask nothing of Slocum;
+but the signorina comes every day, and I cannot help it. What would
+you have? I'm a dead man," and he turned away his face.
+
+"It is not so bad as that," said Richard.
+
+Torrini looked up with a ghastly smile. "They have cut off the
+hand that struck you, Mr. Shackford."
+
+"I suppose it was necessary. I am very sorry. In a little while
+you will be on your feet again."
+
+"It is too late. They might have saved me by taking the arm, but I
+would not allow them. I may last three or four days. The doctor says
+it."
+
+Peters, standing in the shadow, jerked his head affirmatively.
+
+"I do not care for myself," the man continued,--"but she and the
+little ones--That is what maddens me. They will starve."
+
+"They will not be let starve in Stillwater," said Richard.
+
+Torrini turned his eyes upon him wistfully and doubtfully. "You
+will help them?"
+
+"Yes, I and others."
+
+"If they could be got to Italy," said Torrini, after meditating,
+"it would be well. Her farther," giving a side look at the woman, "is
+a fisherman of Capri." At the word Capri the woman lifted her head
+quickly. "He is not rich, but he's not poor; he would take her."
+
+"You would wish her sent to Naples?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"If you do not pull through, she and the children shall go there."
+
+"Brigida!" called Torrini; then he said something rapidly in
+Italian to the woman, who buried her face in both hands, and did not
+reply.
+
+"She has no words to thank you. See, she is tired to death, with
+the children all day and me all night,--these many nights."
+
+"Tell her to go to bed in the other room," said Richard. "There's
+another room, isn't there? I'll sit with you."
+
+"You?"
+
+"Your wife is fagged out,--that is plain. Send her to bed, and
+don't talk any more. Peters, I wish you'd run and get a piece of ice
+somewhere; there's no drinking-water here. Come, now, Torrini, I
+can't speak Italian. Oh, I don't mind your scowling; I intend to
+stay."
+
+Torrini slowly unknitted his brows, and an irresolute expression
+stole across his face; then he called Brigida, and bade her go in
+with the children. She bowed her head submissively, and fixing her
+melting eyes on Richard for an instant passed into the adjoining
+chamber.
+
+Peters shortly reappeared with the ice, and after setting a jug of
+water on the table departed. Richard turned up the wick of the
+kerosene lamp, which was sending forth a disagreeable odor, and
+pinned an old newspaper around the chimney to screen the flame. He
+had, by an odd chance, made his lampshade out of a copy of The
+Stillwater Gazette containing the announcement of his cousin's death.
+Richard gave a quick start as his eye caught the illuminated
+head-lines,--Mysterious Murder of Lemuel Shackford! Perhaps a slight
+exclamation escaped Richard's lips at the same time, for Torrini
+turned and asked what was the matter. "Nothing at all," said Richard,
+removing the paper, and placing another in its stead. Then he threw
+open the blinds of the window looking on the back yard, and set his
+hand-bag against the door to prevent it being blown to by the
+draught. Torrini, without altering the rigid position of his head on
+the pillow, followed every movement with a look of curious
+insistence, like that of the eyes in a portrait. His preparations
+completed for the night, Richard seated himself on a stool at the
+foot of the bed.
+
+The obscurity and stillness of the room had their effect upon the
+sick man, who presently dropped into a light sleep. Richard sat
+thinking of Margaret, and began to be troubled because he had
+neglected to send her word of his detention, which he might have done
+by Peters. It was now too l ate. The town clock struck ten in the
+midst of his self-reproaches. At the first clang of the bell, Torrini
+awoke with a start, and asked for water.
+
+"If anybody comes," he said, glancing in a bewildered, anxious way
+at the shadows huddled about the door, "you are not to leave me alone
+with him."
+
+"Him? Whom? Are you expecting any one?"
+
+"No; but who knows? one might come. Then, you are not to go; you
+are not to leave me for a second."
+
+"I've no thought of it," replied Richard; "you may rest easy....
+He's a trifle light in the head," was Richard's reflection.
+
+After that Torrini dozed rather than slumbered, rousing at brief
+intervals; and whenever he awoke the feverish activity of his brain
+incited him to talk,--now of Italy, and now of matters connected
+with his experiences in this country.
+
+"Naples is a pleasant place!" he broke out in the hush of the
+midnight, just as Richard was dropping off. "The band plays every
+afternoon on the Chiaia. And then the _festas,_--every third day
+a festa. The devil was in my body when I left there and dragged
+little Brigida into all this misery. We used to walk of an evening
+along the Marinella,--that's a strip of beach just beyond the Molo
+Piccolo. You were never in Naples?"
+
+"Not I," said Richard. "Here, wet your lips, and try to go to
+sleep again."
+
+"No, I can't sleep for thinking. When the Signorina came to see
+me, the other day, her heart was pierced with pity. Like the blessed
+Madonna's, her bosom bleeds for all! You will let her come
+to-morrow?"
+
+"Yes, yes! If you will only keep quiet, Margaret shall come."
+
+"Margherita, we say. You are to wed her,--is it not so?"
+
+Richard turned down the wick of the lamp, which was blazing and
+spluttering, and did not answer. Then Torrini lay silent a long
+while, apparently listening to the hum of the telegraph wires
+attached to one end of the roof. At odd intervals the freshening
+breeze swept these wires, and awoke a low aeolian murmur. The moon
+rose in the mean time, and painted on the uncarpeted floor the shape
+of the cherry bough that stretched across the window. It was two
+o'clock; Richard sat with his head bent forward, in a drowse.
+
+"Now the cousin is dead, you are as rich as a prince,--are you
+not?" inquired Torrini, who had lain for the last half hour with his
+eyes wide open in the moonlight.
+
+Richard straightened himself with a jerk.
+
+"Torrini, I positively forbid you to talk any more!"
+
+"I remember you said that one day, somewhere. Where was it? Ah, in
+the yard! 'You can't be allowed to speak here, you know.' And then I
+struck at you,--with that hand they've taken away! See how I remember
+it!"
+
+"Why do you bother your mind with such things? Think of just
+nothing at all, and rest. Perhaps a wet cloth on your forehead will
+refresh you. I wish you had a little of my genius for not keeping
+awake."
+
+"You are tired, you?"
+
+"I have had two broken nights, traveling."
+
+"And I give you no peace?"
+
+"Well, no," returned Richard bluntly, hoping the admission would
+induce Torrini to tranquilize himself, "you don't give me much."
+
+"Has any one been here?" demanded Torrini abruptly.
+
+"Not a soul. Good Heaven, man, do you know what time it is?"
+
+"I know,--I know. It's very late. I ought to keep quiet; but, the
+devil! with this fever in my brain!... Mr. Shackford!" and
+Torrini, in spite of his imprisoned limb, suddenly half raised
+himself from the mattress. "I--I"--
+
+Richard sprung to his feet. "What is it,--what do you want?"
+
+"Nothing," said Torrini, falling back on the pillow.
+
+Richard brought him a glass of water, which he refused. He lay
+motionless, with his eyes shut, as if composing himself, and Richard
+returned on tiptoe to his bench. A moment or two afterwards Torrini
+stirred the blanket with his foot.
+
+"Mr. Shackford!"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I am as grateful--as a dog."
+
+Torrini did not speak again. This expression of his gratitude
+appeared to ease him. His respiration grew lighter and more regular,
+and by and by he fell into a profound sleep. Richard watched awhile
+expectantly, with his head resting against the rail of the bedstead;
+then his eyelids drooped, and he too slumbered. But once or twice,
+before he quite lost himself, he was conscious of Brigida's thin face
+thrust like a silver wedge through the half-open door of the hall
+bedroom. It was the last thing he remembered,--that sharp, pale face
+peering out from the blackness of the inner chamber as his grasp
+loosened on the world and he drifted off on the tide of a dream. A
+narrow white hand, like a child's, seemed to be laid against his
+breast. It was not Margaret's hand, and yet it was hers. No, it was
+the plaster model he had made that idle summer afternoon, years and
+years before he had ever thought of loving her. Strange for it to be
+there! Then Richard began wondering how the gold ring would look in
+the slender forefinger. He unfastened the leather bag and took out
+the ring. He was vainly trying to pass it over the first joint of the
+dead white finger, when the cast slipped from his hold and fell with
+a crash to the floor. Richard gave a shudder, and opened his eyes.
+Brigida was noiselessly approaching Torrini's bedside. Torrini still
+slept. It was broad day. Through the uncurtained window Richard saw
+the blue sky barred with crimson.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+"Richard did come home last night, after all," said Mr. Slocum,
+with a flustered air, seating himself at the breakfast table.
+
+Margaret looked up quickly.
+
+"I just met Peters on the street, and he told me," added Mr.
+Slocum.
+
+"Richard returned last night, and did not come to us!"
+
+"It seems that he watched with Torrini,--the man is going to die."
+
+"Oh," said Margaret, cooling instantly. "That was like Richard; he
+never thinks of himself first. I would not have had him do
+differently. Last evening you were filled with I don't know what
+horrible suspicions, yet see how simply everything explains itself."
+
+"If I could speak candidly, Margaret, if I could express myself
+without putting you into a passion, I would tell you that Richard's
+passing the night with that man has given me two or three ugly
+ideas."
+
+"Positively, papa, you are worse than Mr. Taggett."
+
+"I shall not say another word," replied Mr. Slocum. Then he
+unfolded the newspaper lying beside him, and constructed a barrier
+against further colloquy.
+
+An hour afterwards, when Richard threw open the door of his
+private workshop, Margaret was standing in the middle of the room
+waiting for him. She turned with a little cry of pleasure, and
+allowed Richard to take her in his arms, and kept to the spirit and
+the letter of the promise she had made to herself. If there was an
+unwonted gravity in Margaret's manner, young Shackford was not keen
+enough to perceive it. All that morning, wherever he went, he carried
+with him a sense of Margaret's face resting for a moment against his
+shoulder, and the happiness of it rendered him wholly oblivious to
+the constrained and chilly demeanor of her father when they met. The
+interview was purposely cut short by Mr. Slocum, who avoided Richard
+the rest of the day with a persistency that must have ended in
+forcing itself upon his notice, had he not been so engrossed by the
+work which had accumulated during his absence.
+
+Mr. Slocum had let the correspondence go to the winds, and a
+formidable collection of unanswered letters lay on Shackford's desk.
+The forenoon was consumed in reducing the pile and settling the
+questions that had risen in the shops, for Mr. Slocum had neglected
+everything. Richard was speedily advised of Blake's dismissal from
+the yard, but, not knowing what explanation had been offered, was
+unable to satisfy Stevens' curiosity on the subject. "I must see
+Slocum about that at once," reflected Richard; but the opportunity
+did not occur, and he was too much pressed to make a special business
+of it.
+
+Mr. Slocum, meanwhile, was in a wretched state of suspense and
+apprehension. Justice Beemis's clerk had served some sort of legal
+paper--presumably a subpoena--on Richard, who had coolly read it in
+the yard under the gaze of all, and given no sign of discomposure
+beyond a momentary lifting of the eyebrows. Then he had carelessly
+thrust the paper into one of his pockets and continued his directions
+to the men. Clearly he had as yet no suspicion of the mine that was
+ready to be sprung under his feet.
+
+Shortly after this little incident, which Mr. Slocum had witnessed
+from the window of the counting-room, Richard spoke a word or two to
+Stevens, and quitted the yard. Mr. Slocum dropped into the carving
+department.
+
+"Where is Mr. Shackford, Stevens?"
+
+"He has gone to Mitchell's Alley, sir. Said he'd be away an hour.
+Am I to say he was wanted?"
+
+"No," replied Mr. Slocum, hastily; "any time will do. You needn't
+mention that I inquired for him," and Mr. Slocum returned to the
+counting-room.
+
+Before the hour expired he again distinguished Richard's voice in
+the workshops, and the cheery tone of it was a positive affront to
+Mr. Slocum. Looking back to the week prior to the tragedy in Welch's
+Court, he recollected Richard's unaccountable dejection; he had had
+the air of a person meditating some momentous step,--the pallor, the
+set face, and the introspective eyes. Then came the murder, and
+Richard's complete prostration. Mr. Slocum in his own excitement had
+noted it superficially at the time, but now he recalled the young
+man's inordinate sorrow, and it seemed rather like remorse. Was his
+present immobile serenity the natural expression of a man whose heart
+had suddenly ossified, and was no longer capable of throbbing with
+its guilt? Richard Shackford was rapidly becoming an awful problem to
+Mr. Slocum.
+
+Since the death of his cousin, Richard had not been so much like
+his former self. He appeared to have taken up his cheerfulness at the
+point where he had dropped it three weeks before. If there were any
+weight resting on his mind, he bore it lightly, with a kind of
+careless defiance.
+
+In his visit that forenoon to Mitchell's Alley he had arranged for
+Mrs. Morganson, his cousin's old housekeeper, to watch with Torrini
+the ensuing night. This left Richard at liberty to spend the evening
+with Margaret, and finish his correspondence. Directly after tea he
+repaired to the studio, and, lighting the German student-lamp, fell
+to work on the letters. Margaret came in shortly with a magazine, and
+seated herself near the round table at which he was writing. She had
+dreaded this evening; it could scarcely pass without some mention of
+Mr. Taggett, and she had resolved not to speak of him. If Richard
+questioned her it would be very distressing. How could she tell
+Richard that Mr. Taggett accused him of the murder of his cousin, and
+that her own father half believed the accusation? No, she could never
+acknowledge that.
+
+For nearly an hour the silence of the room was interrupted only by
+the scratching of Richard's pen and the rustling of the magazine as
+Margaret turned the leaf. Now and then he looked up and caught her
+eye, and smiled, and went on with his task. It was a veritable return
+of the old times. Margaret became absorbed in the story she was
+reading and forgot her uneasiness. Her left hand rested on the pile
+of answered letters, to which Richard added one at intervals, she
+mechanically lifting her palm and replacing it on the fresh
+manuscript. Presently Richard observed this movement and smiled in
+secret at the slim white hand unconsciously making a paper-weight of
+itself. He regarded it covertly for a moment, and then his disastrous
+dream occurred to him. There should be no mistake this time. He drew
+the small morocco case from his pocket, and leaning across the table
+slipped the ring on Margaret's finger.
+
+Margaret gave a bewildered start, and then seeing what Richard had
+done held out her hand to him with a gracious, impetuous little
+gesture.
+
+"I meant to give it you this morning," he said, pressing his lip to
+the ring, "but the daylight did not seem fine enough for it."
+
+"I thought you had forgotten," said Margaret, slowly turning the
+band on her finger.
+
+"The first thing I did in New York was to go to a jeweler's for
+this ring, and since then I have guarded it day and night as
+dragonishly as if it had been the Koh-i-Noor diamond, or some
+inestimable gem which hundreds of envious persons were lying in wait
+to wrest from me. Walking the streets with this trinket in my
+possession, I have actually had a sense of personal insecurity. I
+seemed to invite general assault. That was being very sentimental,
+was it not?"
+
+"Yes, perhaps."
+
+"That small piece of gold meant so much to me."
+
+"And to me," said Margaret. "Have you finished your letters?"
+
+"Not yet. I shall be through in ten minutes, and then we'll have
+the evening to ourselves."
+
+Richard hurriedly resumed his writing and Margaret turned to her
+novel again; but the interest had faded out of it; the figures had
+grown threadbare and indistinct, like the figures in a piece of old
+tapestry, and after a moment or two the magazine glided with an
+unnoticed flutter into the girl's lap. She sat absently twirling the
+gold loop on her finger.
+
+Richard added the address to the final envelope, dried it with the
+blotter, and abruptly shut down the lid of the inkstand with an air
+of as great satisfaction as if he had been the fisherman in the
+Arabian story corking up the wicked afrite. With his finger still
+pressing the leaden cover, as though he were afraid the imp of toil
+would get out again, he was suddenly impressed by the fact that he
+had seen very little of Mr. Slocum that day.
+
+"I have hardly spoken to him," he reflected. "Where is your
+father, to-night?"
+
+"He has a headache," said Margaret. "He went to his room
+immediately after supper."
+
+"It is nothing serious, of course."
+
+"I fancy not; papa is easily excited, and he had had a great deal
+to trouble him lately,--the strike, and all that."
+
+"I wonder if Mr. Taggett has been bothering him."
+
+"I dare say Mr. Taggett has bothered him."
+
+"You knew of his being in the yard?"
+
+"Not while he was here. Papa told me yesterday. I think Mr.
+Taggett was scarcely the person to render much assistance."
+
+"Then he has found nothing whatever?"
+
+"Nothing important."
+
+"But anything? Trifles are of importance in a matter like this.
+Your father never wrote me a word about Taggett."
+
+"Mr. Taggett has made a failure of it, Richard."
+
+"If nothing new has transpired, then I do not understand the
+summons I received to-day."
+
+"A summons!"
+
+"I've the paper somewhere. No, it is in the pocket of my other
+coat. I take it there is to be a consultation of some kind at Justice
+Beemis's office to-morrow."
+
+"I am very glad," said Margaret, with her face brightening.
+To-morrow would lift the cloud which had spread itself over them all,
+and was pressing down so heavily on one unconscious head. To-morrow
+Richard's innocence should shine forth and confound Mr. Taggett. A
+vague bitterness rose in Margaret's heart as she thought of her
+father. "Let us talk of something else," she said, brusquely breaking
+her pause; "let us talk of something pleasant."
+
+"Of ourselves, then," suggested Richard, banishing the shadow
+which had gathered in his eyes at his first mention of Mr. Taggett's
+name.
+
+"Of ourselves," repeated Margaret gayly.
+
+"Then you must give me your hand," stipulated Richard, drawing his
+chair closer to hers.
+
+"There!" said Margaret.
+
+While this was passing, Mr. Slocum, in the solitude of his
+chamber, was vainly attempting to solve the question whether he had
+not disregarded all the dictates of duty and common sense in allowing
+Margaret to spend the evening alone with Richard Shackford. Mr.
+Slocum saw one thing with painful distinctness--that he could not
+help himself.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+The next morning Mr. Slocum did not make his appearance in the
+marble yard. His half-simulated indisposition of the previous night
+had turned into a genuine headache, of which he perhaps willingly
+availed himself to remain in his room, for he had no desire to see
+Richard Shackford that day.
+
+It was an hour before noon. Up to that moment Richard had been
+engaged in reading and replying to the letters received by the
+morning's mail, a duty which usually fell to Mr. Slocum. As Richard
+stepped from the office into the yard a small boy thrust a note into
+his hand, and then stood off a short distance tranquilly boring with
+one toe in the loose gravel, and apparently waiting for an answer.
+Shackford hastily ran his eye over the paper, and turning towards the
+boy said, a little impatiently:
+
+"Tell him I will come at once."
+
+There was another person in Stillwater that forenoon whose
+agitation was scarcely less than Mr. Slocum's, though it greatly
+differed from it in quality. Mr. Slocum was alive to his finger-tips
+with dismay; Lawyer Perkins was boiling over with indignation. It was
+a complex indignation, in which astonishment and incredulity were
+nicely blended with a cordial detestation of Mr. Taggett and vague
+promptings to inflict some physical injury on Justice Beemis. That
+he, Melanchthon Perkins, the confidential legal adviser and personal
+friend of the late Lemuel Shackford, should have been kept for two
+weeks in profound ignorance of proceedings so nearly touching his
+lamented client! The explosion of the old lawyer's wrath was so
+unexpected that Justice Beemis, who had dropped in to make the
+disclosures and talk the matter over informally, clutched at his
+broad-brimmed Panama hat and precipitately retreated from the office.
+Mr. Perkins walked up and down the worn green drugget of his private
+room for half an hour afterwards, collecting himself, and then
+dispatched a hurried note to Richard Shackford, requesting an instant
+interview with him at his, Lawyer Perkins's, chambers.
+
+When, some ten minutes subsequently, Richard entered the
+low-studded square room, darkened with faded moreen curtains and
+filled with a stale odor of law-calf, Mr. Perkins was seated at his
+desk and engaged in transferring certain imposing red-sealed
+documents to a green baize satchel which he held between his knees.
+He had regained his equanimity; his features wore their usual
+expression of judicial severity; nothing denoted his recent
+discomposure, except perhaps an additional wantonness in the stringy
+black hair falling over the high forehead,--that pallid high forehead
+which always wore the look of being covered with cold perspiration.
+
+"Mr. Shackford," said Lawyer Perkins, suspending his operations a
+second, as he saluted the young man, "I suppose I have done an
+irregular thing in sending for you, but I did not see any other
+course open to me. I have been your cousin's attorney for over
+twenty-five years, and I've a great regard for you personally. That
+must justify the step I am taking."
+
+"The regard is mutual, I am sure," returned Richard, rather
+surprised by this friendly overture, for his acquaintance with the
+lawyer had been of the slightest, though it had extended over many
+years. "My cousin had very few friends, and I earnestly desire to
+have them mine. If I were in any trouble, there is no one to whom I
+would come as unhesitatingly as to you."
+
+"But you are in trouble."
+
+"Yes, my cousin's death was very distressing."
+
+"I do not mean that." Mr. Perkins paused a full moment. "The
+district attorney has suddenly taken a deep interest in the case, and
+there is to be a rigorous overhauling of the facts. I am afraid it is
+going to be very unpleasant for you, Mr. Shackford."
+
+"How could it be otherwise?" asked Richard, tranquilly.
+
+Lawyer Perkins fixed his black eyes on him. "Then you fully
+understand the situation, and can explain everything?"
+
+"I wish I could. Unfortunately, I can explain nothing. I don't
+clearly see why I have been summoned to attend as a witness at the
+investigation to be held to-day in Justice Beemis's office."
+
+"You are unacquainted with any special reason why your testimony
+is wanted?"
+
+"I cannot conceive why it should be required. I gave my evidence
+at the time of the inquest, and have nothing to add to it. Strictly
+speaking, I have had of late years no relations with my cousin.
+During the last eighteen months we have spoken together but once."
+
+"Have you had any conversation on this subject with Mr. Slocum
+since your return from New York?"
+
+"No, I have had no opportunity. I was busy all day yesterday; he
+was ill in the evening, and is still confined to his room."
+
+Mr. Perkins was manifestly embarrassed.
+
+"That is unfortunate," he said, laying the bag on the desk. "I
+wish you had talked with Mr. Slocum. Of course you were taken into
+the secret of Taggett's presence in the marble yard?"
+
+"Oh, yes; that was all arranged before I left home."
+
+"You don't know the results of that manoeuvre?"
+
+"There were no results."
+
+"On the contrary, Taggett claims to have made very important
+discoveries."
+
+"Indeed! Why was I not told!"
+
+"I can't quite comprehend Mr. Slocum's silence."
+
+"What has Taggett discovered?"
+
+"Several things, upon which he builds the gravest suspicions."
+
+"Against whom?"
+
+"Against you."
+
+"Against me!" cried Richard, recoiling. The action was one
+altogether of natural amazement, and convinced Mr. Perkins, who had
+keenly watched the effect of his announcement, that young Shackford
+was being very hardly used.
+
+Justice Beemis had given Mr. Perkins only a brief outline of the
+facts, and had barely touched on details when the old lawyer's anger
+had put an end to the conversation. His disgust at having been left
+out in the cold, though he was in no professional way concerned in
+the task of discovering the murderer of Lemuel Shackford, had caused
+Lawyer Perkins instantly to repudiate Mr. Taggett's action. "Taggett
+is a low, intriguing fellow," he had said to Justice Beemis; "Taggett
+is a fraud." Young Shackford's ingenuous manner now confirmed Mr.
+Perkins in that belief.
+
+Richard recovered himself in a second or two. "Why did not Mr.
+Slocum mention these suspicions to me?" he demanded.
+
+"Perhaps he found it difficult to do so."
+
+"Why should he find it difficult?"
+
+"Suppose he believed them."
+
+"But he could not believe them, whatever they are."
+
+"Well, then, suppose he was not at liberty to speak."
+
+"It seems that you are, Mr. Perkins, and you owe it to me to be
+explicit. What does Taggett suspect?"
+
+Lawyer Perkins brooded a while before replying. His practice was
+of a miscellaneous sort, confined in the main to what is technically
+termed office practice. Though he was frequently engaged in small
+cases of assault and battery,--he could scarcely escape that in
+Stillwater,--he had never conducted an important criminal case; but
+when Lawyer Perkins looked up from his brief reverie, he had fully
+resolved to undertake the defense of Richard Shackford.
+
+"I will tell you what Taggett suspects," he said slowly, "if you
+will allow me to tell you in my own way. I must ask a number of
+questions."
+
+Richard gave a half-impatient nod of assent.
+
+"Where were you on the night of the murder?" inquired Lawyer
+Perkins, after a slight pause.
+
+"I spent the evening at the Slocums', until ten o'clock; then I
+went home,--but not directly. It was moonlight, and I walked about,
+perhaps for an hour."
+
+"Did you meet any one?"
+
+"Not that I recollect. I walked out of town, on the turnpike."
+
+"When you returned to your boarding-house, did you meet any one?"
+
+"No, I let myself in with a pass-key. The family had retired, with
+the exception of Mr. Pinkham."
+
+"Then you saw him?"
+
+"No, but I heard him; he was playing on the flute at his chamber
+window, or near it. He always plays on the flute when he can't
+sleep."
+
+"What o'clock was that?"
+
+"It must have been after eleven."
+
+"Your stroll was confined to the end of the town most remote from
+Welch's Court?"
+
+"Yes, I just cruised around on the outskirts."
+
+"I wish you had spoken with somebody that night."
+
+"The streets were deserted. I wasn't likely to meet persons on the
+turnpike."
+
+"However, some one may have seen you without your knowing it?"
+
+"Yes," said Richard curtly. He was growing restive under these
+interrogations, the drift of which was plain enough to be
+disagreeable. Moreover, Mr. Perkins had insensibly assumed the tone
+and air of a counsel cross-examining a witness on the other side.
+This nocturnal cruise, whose direction and duration were known only
+to young Shackford, struck Lawyer Perkins unpleasantly. He meditated
+a moment before putting the next question.
+
+"Were you on good terms--I mean fairly good terms--with your
+cousin?"
+
+"No," said Richard; "but the fault was not mine. He never liked
+me. As a child I annoyed him, I suppose, and when I grew up I
+offended him by running away to sea. My mortal offense, however, was
+accepting a situation in Slocum's Yard. I have been in my cousin's
+house only twice in three years."
+
+"When was the last time?"
+
+"A day or two previous to the strike."
+
+"As you were not in the habit of visiting the house, you must have
+had some purpose in going there. What was the occasion?"
+
+Richard hung his head thoughtfully. "I went there to talk over
+family matters,--to inform him of my intended marriage to Margaret
+Slocum. I wanted his good-will and support. Mr. Slocum had offered to
+take me into the business. I thought perhaps my cousin Lemuel, seeing
+how prosperous I was, would be more friendly to me."
+
+"Did you wish him to lend you capital?"
+
+"I didn't expect or wish him to; but there was some question of
+that."
+
+"And he refused?"
+
+"Rather brutally, if I may say so now."
+
+"Was there a quarrel?"
+
+Richard hesitated.
+
+"Of course I don't press you," said Mr. Perkins, with some
+stiffness. "You are not on the witness stand."
+
+"I began to think I was--in the prisoner's dock," answered
+Richard, smiling ruefully. "However, I have nothing to conceal. I
+hesitated to reply to you because it was painful for me to reflect
+that the last time I saw my cousin we parted in anger. He charge me
+with attempting to overreach him, and I left the house in
+indignation."
+
+"That was the last time you saw him?"
+
+"The last time I saw him alive."
+
+"Was there any communication between you two after that?"
+
+"No."
+
+"None whatever?"
+
+"None."
+
+"Are you quite positive?"
+
+"As positive as I can be that I live and have my senses."
+
+Lawyer Perkins pulled a black strand of hair over his forehead,
+and remained silent for nearly a minute.
+
+"Mr. Shackford, are you sure that your cousin did not write a note
+to you on the Monday preceding the night of his death?"
+
+"He may have written a dozen, for all I know. I only know that I
+never received a note or a letter from him in the whole course of my
+life."
+
+"Then how do you account for the letter which has been found in
+your rooms in Lime Street,--a letter addressed to you by Lemuel
+Shackford, and requesting you to call at his house on that fatal
+Tuesday night?"
+
+"I--I know nothing about it," stammered Richard. "There is no such
+paper!"
+
+"It was in this office less than one hour ago," said Lawyer
+Perkins sternly. "It was brought here for me to identify Lemuel
+Shackford's handwriting. Justice Beemis has that paper!"
+
+"Justice Beemis has it!" exclaimed Richard.
+
+"I have nothing more to say," observed Lawyer Perkins, reaching
+out his hand towards the green bag, as a sign that the interview was
+ended. "There were other points I wished to have some light thrown
+on; but I have gone far enough to see that it is useless."
+
+"What more is there?" demanded Richard in a voice that seemed to
+come through a fog. "I insist on knowing! You suspect me of my
+cousin's murder?"
+
+"Mr. Taggett does."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I am speaking of Mr. Taggett."
+
+"Well, go on, speak of him," said Richard desperately. "What else
+has he discovered?"
+
+Mr. Perkins wheeled his chair round until he faced the young man.
+
+"He has discovered in your workshop a chisel with a peculiar break
+in the edge,--a deep notch in the middle of the bevel. With that
+chisel Lemuel Shackford was killed."
+
+Richard gave a perceptible start, and put his hand to his head, as
+if a sudden confused memory had set the temples throbbing.
+
+"A full box of safety matches," continued Mr. Perkins, in a cold,
+measured voice, as though he were demonstrating a mathematical
+problem, "contains one hundred matches. Mr. Taggett has discovered a
+box that contains only ninety-nine. The missing match was used that
+night in Welch's Court."
+
+Richard stared at him blankly. "What can I say?" he gasped.
+
+"Say nothing to me," returned Lawyer Perkins, hastily thrusting a
+handful of loose papers into the open throat of the green bag, which
+he garroted an instant afterwards with a thick black cord. Then he
+rose flurriedly from the chair. "I shall have to leave you," he said;
+"I've an appointment at the surrogate's."
+
+And Lawyer Perkins passed stiffly from the apartment.
+
+Richard lingered a moment alone in the room with his chin resting
+on his breast.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+There was a fire in Richard's temples as he reeled out of Lawyer
+Perkins's office. It was now twelve o'clock, and the streets were
+thronged with the motley population disgorged by the various mills
+and workshops. Richard felt that every eye was upon him; he was
+conscious of something wild in his aspect that must needs attract the
+attention of the passers-by. At each step he half expected the
+leveling of some accusing finger. The pitiless sunshine seemed to
+single him out and stream upon him like a calcium light. It was
+intolerable. He must get away from this jostling crowd, this babel of
+voices. What should he do, where should he go? To return to the yard
+and face the workmen was not to be thought of; if he went to his
+lodgings he would be called to dinner, and have to listen to the
+inane prattle of the school-master. That would be even more
+intolerable than this garish daylight, and these careless squads of
+men and women who paused in the midst of their laugh to turn and
+stare. Was there no spot in Stillwater where a broken man could hide
+himself long enough to collect his senses?
+
+With his hands thrust convulsively into the pockets of his
+sack-coat, Richard turned down a narrow passage-way fringing the rear
+of some warehouses. As he hurried along aimlessly his fingers
+encountered something in one of his pockets. It was the key of a new
+lock which had been put on the scullery door of the house in Welch's
+Court. Richard's heart gave a quick throb. There at least was a
+temporary refuge; he would go there and wait until it was time for
+him to surrender himself to the officers.
+
+It appeared to Richard that he was nearly a year reaching the
+little back yard of the lonely house. He slipped into the scullery
+and locked the door, wondering if his movements had been observed
+since he quitted the main street. Here he drew a long breath and
+looked around him; then he began wandering restlessly through the
+rooms, of which there were five or six on the ground-floor. The
+furniture, the carpets, and all the sordid fixtures of the house were
+just as Richard had known them in his childhood. Everything was
+unchanged, even to the faded peacock-feather stuck over the parlor
+looking-glass. As he regarded the familiar objects and breathed the
+snuffy atmosphere peculiar to the place, the past rose so vividly
+before him that he would scarcely have been startled if a lean, gray
+old man had suddenly appeared in one of the doorways. On a peg in the
+front hall hung his cousin's napless beaver hat, satirically ready to
+be put on; in the kitchen closet a pair of ancient shoes, worn down
+at the heel and with taps on the toe, had all the air of intending to
+step forth. The shoes had been carefully blacked, but a thin skin of
+mould had gathered over them. They looked like Lemuel Shackford. They
+had taken a position habitual with him. Richard was struck by the
+subtile irony which lay in these inanimate things. That a man's hat
+should outlast the man, and have a jaunty expression of triumph! That
+a dead man's shoes should mimic him!
+
+The tall eight-day clock on the landing had run down. It had
+stopped at twelve, and it now stood with solemnly uplifted finger, as
+if imposing silence on those small, unconsidered noises which
+commonly creep out, like mice, only at midnight. The house was full
+of such stealthy sounds. The stairs creaked at intervals,
+mysteriously, as if under the weight of some heavy person ascending.
+Now and then the woodwork stretched itself with a snap, as though it
+had grown stiff in the joints with remaining so long in one position.
+At times there were muffled reverberations of footfalls on the
+flooring overhead. Richard had a curious consciousness of not being
+alone, but of moving in the midst of an invisible throng of persons
+who elbowed him softly and breathed in his face, and vaguely
+impressed themselves upon him as being former occupants of the
+premises. This populous solitude, this silence with its busy
+interruptions, grew insupportable as he passed from room to room.
+
+One chamber he did not enter,--the chamber in which his cousin's
+body was found that Wednesday morning. In Richard's imagination it
+was still lying there, white and piteous, by the hearth. He paused at
+the threshold and glanced in; then turned abruptly and mounted the
+staircase.
+
+On gaining his old apartment in the gable, Richard seated himself
+on the edge of the cot-bed. His shoulders sagged down and a stupefied
+expression settled upon his face, but his brain was in a tumult. His
+own identity was become a matter of doubt to him. Was he the same
+Richard Shackford who had found life so sweet when he awoke that
+morning? IT must have been some other person who had sat by a window
+in the sunrise thinking of Margaret Slocum's love,--some Richard
+Shackford with unstained hands! This one was accused of murdering his
+kinsman; the weapon with which he had done it, the very match he had
+used to light him in the deed, were known! The victim himself had
+written out the accusation in black and white. Richard's brain reeled
+as he tried to fix his thought on Lemuel Shackford's letter. That
+letter!--where had it been all this while, and how did it come into
+Taggett's possession? Only one thing was clear to Richard in his
+inextricable confusion,--he was not going to be able to prove his
+innocence; he was a doomed man, and within the hour his shame would
+be published to the world. Rowland Slocum and Lawyer Perkins had
+already condemned him, and Margaret would condemn him when she knew
+all; for it was evident that up to last evening she had not been
+told. How did it happen that these overwhelming proofs had rolled
+themselves up against him? What malign influences were these at work,
+hurrying him on to destruction, and not leaving a single loophole of
+escape? Who would believe the story of his innocent ramble on the
+turnpike that Tuesday night? Who could doubt that he had gone
+directly from the Slocums' to Welch's Court, and then crept home
+red-handed through the deserted streets?
+
+Richard heard the steam-whistles recalling the operatives to work,
+and dimly understood it was one o'clock; but after that he paid no
+attention to the lapse of time. It was an hour later, perhaps two
+hours,--Richard could not tell,--when he roused himself from his
+stupor, and descending the stairs passed through the kitchen into the
+scullery. There he halted and leaned against the sink, irresolute, as
+though his purpose, if he had had a purpose, were escaping him. He
+stood with his eyes resting listlessly on a barrel in the further
+corner of the apartment. It was a heavy-hooped wine-cask, in which
+Lemuel Shackford had been wont to keep his winter's supply of salted
+meat. Suddenly Richard started forward with an inarticulate cry, and
+at the same instant there came a loud knocking at the door behind
+him. The sound reverberated through the empty house, filling the
+place with awful echoes,--like those knocks at the gate of Macbeth's
+castle the night of Duncan's murder. Richard stood petrified for a
+second; then he hastily turned the key in the lock, and Mr. Taggett
+stepped into the scullery.
+
+The two men exchanged swift glances. The bewildered air of a
+moment before had passed from Richard; the dullness had faded out of
+his eyes, leaving them the clear, alert expression they ordinarily
+wore. He was self-possessed, but the effort his self-possession cost
+him was obvious. There was a something in his face--a dilation of the
+nostril, a curve of the under lip--which put Mr. Taggett very much on
+his guard. Mr. Taggett was the first to speak.
+
+"I've a disagreeable mission here," he said slowly, with his hand
+remaining on the latch of the door, which he had closed on entering.
+"I have a warrant for your arrest, Mr. Shackford."
+
+"Stop a moment!" said Richard, with a glow in his eyes. "I have
+something to say."
+
+"I advise you not to make any statement."
+
+"I understand my position perfectly, Mr. Taggett, and I shall
+disregard the advice. After you have answered me one or two
+questions, I shall be quite at your service."
+
+"If you insist, then."
+
+"You were present at the examination of Thomas Blufton and William
+Durgin, were you not?"
+
+"I was."
+
+"You recollect William Durgin's testimony?"
+
+"Most distinctly."
+
+"He stated that the stains on his clothes were from a certain
+barrel, the head of which had been freshly painted red."
+
+"I remember."
+
+"Mr. Taggett, _the head of that barrel was painted blue!"_
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+Mr. Taggett, in spite of the excellent subjection under which he
+held his nerves, caught his breath at these words, and a transient
+pallor overspread his face as he followed the pointing of Richard's
+finger. If William Durgin had testified falsely on that point, if he
+had swerved a hair's-breadth from the truth in that matter, then
+there was but one conclusion to be drawn from his perjury. A flash of
+lightning is not swifter than was Mr. Taggett's thought in grasping
+the situation. In an instant he saw all his carefully articulated
+case fall to pieces in his hands. Richard crossed the narrow room,
+and stood in front of him.
+
+"Mr. Taggett, do you know why William Durgin lied? He lied because
+it was life or death with him! In a moment of confusion he had
+committed one of those simple, fatal blunders which men in his
+circumstances always commit. He had obliterated the spots on his
+clothes with red paint, when he ought to have used blue!"
+
+"That is a very grave supposition."
+
+"It is not a supposition," cried Richard. "The daylight is not a
+plainer fact."
+
+"You are assuming too much, Mr. Shackford."
+
+"I am assuming nothing. Durgin has convicted himself; he has
+fallen into a trap of his own devising. I charge him with the murder
+of Lemuel Shackford; I charge him with taking the chisel and the
+matches from my workshop, to which he had free access; and I charge
+him with replacing those articles in order to divert suspicion upon
+me. My unfortunate relations with my cousin gave color to this
+suspicion. The plan was an adroit plan, and has succeeded, it seems."
+
+Mr. Taggett did not reply at once, and then very coldly: "You will
+pardon me for suggesting it, but it will be necessary to ascertain if
+this is the cask which Durgin hoped, and also if the head has not
+been repainted since."
+
+"I understand what your doubt implies. It is your duty to assure
+yourself of these facts, and nothing can be easier. The person who
+packed the meat--it was probably a provision dealer named
+Stubbs--will of course be able to recognize his own work. The other
+question you can settle with a scratch of your penknife. You see.
+There has been only one thin coat of paint laid on,--the grain of the
+wood is nearly distinguishable through it. The head is evidently new;
+but the cask itself is an old one. It has stood here these ten
+years."
+
+Mr. Taggett bent a penetrating look on Richard. "Why did you
+refuse to answer the subpoena, Mr. Shackford?"
+
+"But I haven't refused. I was on my way to Justice Beemis's office
+when you knocked. Perhaps I am a trifle late," added Richard,
+catching Mr. Taggett's distrustful glance.
+
+"The summons said two o'clock," remarked Mr. Taggett, pressing the
+spring of his watch. "It is now after three."
+
+"After three!"
+
+"How could you neglect it,--with evidence of such presumable
+importance in your hands?"
+
+"It was only a moment ago that I discovered this. I had come here
+from Mr. Perkins's office. Mr. Perkins had informed me of the
+horrible charge which was to be laid at my door. The intelligence
+fell upon me like a thunder-clap. I think it unsettled my reason for
+a while. I was unable to put two ideas together. At first he didn't
+believe I had killed my cousin, and presently he seemed to believe
+it. When I got out in the street the sidewalk lurched under my feet
+like the deck of a ship; everything swam before me. I don't know how
+I managed to reach this house, and I don't know how long I had been
+sitting in a room up-stairs when the recollection of the subpoena
+occurred to me. I was standing here dazed with despair; I saw that I
+was somehow caught in the toils, and that it was going to be
+impossible to prove my innocence. If another man had been in my
+position, I should have believed him guilty. I stood looking at the
+cask in the corner there, scarcely conscious of it; then I noticed
+the blue paint on the head, and then William Durgin's testimony
+flashed across my mind. Where is he?" cried Richard, turning swiftly.
+"That man should be arrested!"
+
+"I am afraid he is gone," said Mr. Taggett, biting his lip.
+
+"Do you mean he has fled?"
+
+"If you are correct--he has fled. He failed to answer the summons
+to-day, and the constable sent to look him up has been unable to find
+him. Durgin was in the bar-room of the tavern at eight o'clock last
+night; he has not been seen since."
+
+"He was not in the yard this morning. You have let him slip
+through your fingers."
+
+"So it appears, for the moment."
+
+"You still doubt me, Mr. Taggett?"
+
+"I don't let persons slip through my fingers."
+
+Richard curbed an impatient rejoinder, and said quietly, "William
+Durgin had an accomplice."
+
+Mr. Taggett flushed, as if Richard had read his secret thought.
+Durgin's flight, if he really had fled, had suggested a fresh
+possibility to Mr. Taggett. What if Durgin were merely the pliant
+instrument of the cleverer man who was now using him as a shield?
+This reflection was precisely in Mr. Taggett's line. In absconding
+Durgin had not only secured his own personal safety, but had
+exonerated his accomplice. It was a desperate step to take, but it
+was a skillful one.
+
+"He had an accomplice?" repeated Mr. Taggett, after a moment. "Who
+was it?"
+
+"Torrini!"
+
+"The man who was hurt the other day?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You have grounds for your assertion?"
+
+"He and Durgin were intimate, and have been much together lately.
+I sat up with Torrini the night before last; he acted and talked very
+strangely; the man was out of his head part of the time, but now, as
+I think it over, I am convinced that he had this matter on his mind,
+and was hinting at it. I believe he would have made disclosures if I
+had urged him a little. He was evidently in great dread of a visit
+from some person, and that person was Durgin. Torrini ought to be
+questioned without delay; he is very low, and may die at any moment.
+He is lying in a house at the further end of the town. If it is not
+imperative that I should report myself to Justice Beemis, we had
+better go there at once."
+
+Mr. Taggett, who had been standing with his head half bowed,
+lifted it quickly as he asked the question, "Why did you withhold
+Lemuel Shackford's letter?"
+
+"It was never in my possession, Mr. Taggett," said Richard,
+starting. "That paper is something I cannot explain at present. I can
+hardly believe in its existence, though Mr. Perkins declares that he
+has had it in his hands, and it would be impossible for him to make a
+mistake in my cousin's writing."
+
+"The letter was found in your lodgings."
+
+"So I was told. I don't understand it."
+
+"That explanation will not satisfy the prosecuting attorney."
+
+"I have only one theory about it," said Richard slowly.
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"I prefer not to state it now. I wish to stop at my boarding-house
+on the way to Torrini's; it will not be out of our course."
+
+Mr. Taggett gave silent acquiescence to this. Richard opened the
+scullery door, and the two passed into the court. Neither spoke until
+they reached Lime Street. Mrs. Spooner herself answered Richard's
+ring, for he had purposely dispensed with the use of his pass-key.
+
+"I wanted to see you a moment, Mrs. Spooner," said Richard, making
+no motion to enter the hall. "Thanks, we will not come in. I merely
+desire to ask you a question. Were you at home all day on that Monday
+immediately preceding my cousin's death?"
+
+"No," replied Mrs. Spooner wonderingly, with her hand still resting
+on the knob. "I wasn't at home at all. I spent the day and part of the
+night with my daughter Maria Ann at South Millville. It was a boy,"
+added Mrs. Spooner, quite irrelevantly, smoothing her ample apron with
+the disengaged hand.
+
+"Then Janet was at home," said Richard. "Call Janet."
+
+A trim, intelligent-looking Nova Scotia girl was summoned from the
+basement kitchen.
+
+"Janet," said Richard, "do you remember the day, about three weeks
+ago, that Mrs. Spooner was absent at South Millville?"
+
+"Yes," replied the girl, without hesitation. "It was the day
+before"--and then she stopped.
+
+"Exactly; it was the day before my cousin was killed. Now I want
+you to recollect whether any letter or note or written message of any
+description was left for me at this house on that day."
+
+Janet reflected. "I think there was, Mr. Richard,--a bit of paper
+like."
+
+Mr. Taggett riveted his eyes on the girl.
+
+"Who brought the paper?" demanded Richard.
+
+"It was one of the Murphy boys, I think."
+
+"Did you hand it to me?"
+
+"No, Mr. Richard, you had gone out. It was just after breakfast."
+
+"You gave it to me when I came home to dinner, then?"
+
+"No," returned Janet, becoming confused with a dim perception that
+something had gone wrong and she was committing herself.
+
+"I remember, I didn't come home. I dined at the Slocums'. What did
+you do with that paper?"
+
+"I put it on the table in your room up-stairs."
+
+Mr. Taggett's eyes gleamed a little at this.
+
+"And that is all you can say about it?" inquired Richard, with a
+fallen countenance.
+
+Janet reflected. She reflected a long while this time. "No, Mr.
+Shackford: an hour or so afterwards, when I went up to do the
+chamber-work, I saw that the wind had blow the paper off of the
+table. I picked up the note and put it back; but the wind blew it off
+again."
+
+"What then?"
+
+"Then I shut up the note in one of the big books, meaning to tell
+you of it, and--and I forgot it! Oh, Mr. Richard, have I done
+something dreadful?"
+
+"Dreadful!" cried Richard. "Janet, I could hug you!"
+
+"Oh, Mr. Richard," said Janet with a little coquettish movement
+natural to every feminine thing, bird, flower, or human being,
+"you've always such a pleasant way with you."
+
+Then there was a moment of dead silence. Mrs. Spooner saw that the
+matter, whatever it was, was settled.
+
+"You needn't wait, Janet!" she said, with a severe, mystified air.
+
+"We are greatly obliged to you, Mrs. Spooner, not to mention
+Janet," said Richard; "and if Mr. Taggett has no questions to ask we
+will not detain you."
+
+Mrs. Spooner turned her small amiable orbs on Richard's companion.
+That silent little man Mr. Taggett! "He doesn't look like much," was
+the landlady's unuttered reflection; and indeed he did not present a
+spirited appearance. Nevertheless Mrs. Spooner followed him down the
+street with her curious gaze until he and Richard passed out of
+sight.
+
+Neither Richard nor Mr. Taggett was disposed to converse as they
+wended their way to Mitchell's Alley. Richard's ire was slowly
+kindling at the shameful light in which he had been placed by Mr.
+Taggett, and Mr. Taggett was striving with only partial success to
+reconcile himself to the idea of young Shackford's innocence. Young
+Shackford's innocence was a very awkward thing for Mr. Taggett, for
+he had irretrievably committed himself at head-quarters. With
+Richard's latent ire was mingled a feeling of profound gratitude.
+
+"The Lord was on my side," he said presently.
+
+"He was on your side, as you remark; and when the Lord is on a
+man's side a detective necessarily comes out second best."
+
+"Really, Mr. Taggett," said Richard, smiling, "that is a handsome
+admission on your part."
+
+"I mean, sir," replied the latter, slightly nettled, "that it
+sometimes seems as if the Lord himself took charge of a case."
+
+"Certainly you are entitled to the credit of going to the bottom
+of this one."
+
+"I have skillfully and laboriously damaged my reputation, Mr.
+Shackford."
+
+Mr. Taggett said this with so heavy an air that Richard felt a
+stir of sympathy in his bosom.
+
+"I am very sorry," he said good-naturedly.
+
+"No, I beg of you!" exclaimed Mr. Taggett. "Any expression of
+friendliness from you would finish me! For nearly ten days I have
+looked upon you as a most cruel and consummate villain."
+
+"I know," said Richard. "I must be quite a disappointment to you,
+in a small way."
+
+Mr. Taggett laughed in spite of himself. "I hope I don't take a
+morbid view of it," he said. A few steps further on he relaxed his
+gait. "We have taken the Hennessey girl into custody. Do you imagine
+she was concerned?"
+
+"Have you questioned her?"
+
+"Yes; she denies everything, except that she told Durgin you had
+quarreled with the old gentleman."
+
+"I think Mary Hennessey an honest girl. She's little more than a
+child. I doubt if she knew anything whatever. Durgin was much too
+shrewd to trust her, I fancy."
+
+As the speakers struck into the principal street, through the
+lower and busier end of which they were obliged to pass, Mr. Taggett
+caused a sensation. The drivers of carts and the pedestrians on both
+sidewalks stopped and looked at him. The part he had played in
+Slocum's Yard was now an open secret, and had produced an excitement
+that was not confined to the clientele of Snelling's bar-room. It was
+known that William Durgin had disappeared, and that the constables
+were searching for him. The air was thick with flying projectures,
+but none of them precisely hit the mark. One rumor there was which
+seemed almost like a piece of poetical justice,--a whisper to the
+effect that Rowland Slocum was suspected of being in some way mixed
+up with the murder. The fact that Lawyer Perkins, with his green bag
+streaming in the wind, so to speak, had been seen darting into Mr.
+Slocum's private residence at two o'clock that afternoon was
+sufficient to give birth to the horrible legend.
+
+"Mitchell's Alley," said Mr. Taggett, thrusting his arm through
+Richard's, and hurrying on the escape the Stillwater gaze. "You went
+there directly from the station the night you got home."
+
+"How did you know that?"
+
+"I was told by a fellow-traveler of yours,--and a friend of mine."
+
+"By Jove! Did it ever strike you, Mr. Taggett, that there is such
+a thing as being too clever?"
+
+"It has occurred to me recently."
+
+"Here is the house."
+
+Two sallow-skinned children, with wide, wistful black eyes, who
+were sitting on the stone step, shyly crowded themselves together
+against the door-jamb to make passage-way for Richard and Mr.
+Taggett. Then the two pairs of eyes veered round inquiringly, and
+followed the strangers up the broken staircase and saw one of them
+knock at the door which faced the building.
+
+Richard's hasty tap bringing no response, he lifted the latch
+without further ceremony and stepped into the chamber, Mr. Taggett a
+pace or two behind him. The figure of Father O'Meara slowly rising
+from a kneeling posture at the bedside was the first object that met
+their eyes; the second was Torrini's placid face, turned a little on
+the pillow; the third was Brigida sitting at the foot of the bed,
+motionless, with her arms wrapped in her apron.
+
+"He is dead," said the priest softly, advancing a step towards
+Richard. "You are too late. He wanted to see you, Mr. Shackford, but
+you were not to be found."
+
+Richard sent a swift glance over the priest's shoulder. "He wanted
+to tell me what part he had played in my cousin's murder?" said
+Richard.
+
+"God forbid! the wretched man had many a sin on his soul, but not
+that."
+
+"Not that!"
+
+"No; he had no hand in it,--no more than you or I. His fault was
+that he concealed his knowledge of the deed after it was done. He did
+not even suspect who committed the crime until two days' afterwards,
+when William Durgin"--
+
+Richard's eyes lighted up as they encountered Mr. Taggett's. The
+priest mistook the significance of the glances.
+
+
+"No," said Father O'Meara, indicating Brigida with a quick motion
+of his head, "the poor soul does not understand a word. But even if
+she did, I should have to speak of these matters here and now, while
+they are fresh in my mind. I am obeying the solemn injunctions of the
+dead. Two days after the murder William Durgin came to Torrini and
+confessed the deed, offering to share with him a large sum in gold
+and notes if he would hide the money temporarily. Torrini agreed to
+do so. Later Durgin confided to him his plan of turning suspicion
+upon you, Mr. Shackford; indeed, of directly charging you with the
+murder, if the worst came to the worst. Torrini agreed to that also,
+because of some real or fancied injury at your hands. It seems that
+the implement which Durgin had employed in forcing the scullery
+door--the implement which he afterwards used so mercilessly--had been
+stolen from your workshop. The next morning Durgin put the tool back
+in its place, not knowing what other disposition to make of it, and
+it was then that the idea of shouldering the crime upon you entered
+his wicked heart. According to Torrini, Durgin did not intend to harm
+the old gentleman, but simply to rob him. The unfortunate man was
+awakened by the noise Durgin made in breaking open the safe, and
+rushed in to his doom. Having then no fear of interruption, Durgin
+leisurely ransacked the house. How he came across the will, and
+destroyed it with the idea that he was putting the estate out of your
+possession--this and other details I shall give you by and by."
+
+Father O'Meara paused a moment. "After the accident at the mill
+and the conviction that he was not to recover, Torrini's conscience
+began to prick him. When he reflected on Miss Slocum's kindness to
+his family during the strike, when he now saw her saving his wife and
+children from absolute starvation, he was nearly ready to break the
+oath with which he had bound himself to William Durgin. Curiously
+enough, this man, so reckless in many things, held his pledged word
+sacred. Meanwhile his wavering condition became apparent to Durgin,
+who grew alarmed, and demanded the stolen property. Torrini refused
+to give it up; even his own bitter necessities had not tempted him to
+touch a penny of it. For the last three days he was in deadly terror
+lest Durgin should wrest the money from him by force. The poor woman,
+here, knows nothing of all this. It was her presence, however, which
+probably prevented Durgin from proceeding to extremities with
+Torrini, who took care never to be left alone."
+
+"I recollect," said Richard, "the night I watched with him he was
+constantly expecting some one. I supposed him to be wandering in his
+mind."
+
+"He was expecting Durgin, though Torrini had every reason for
+believing that he had fled."
+
+Mr. Taggett leaned forward, and asked, "When did he go,--and
+where?"
+
+"He was too cunning to confide his plans to Torrini. Three nights
+ago Durgin came here and begged for a portion of the bank-note;
+previously he had reclaimed the whole sum; he said the place was
+growing too warm for him, and that he had made up his mind to leave.
+But Torrini held on to the money, having resolved that it should be
+restored intact to you. He promised Durgin, however, to keep his
+flight secret for three or four days, at the end of which time
+Torrini meant to reveal all to me at confession. The night you sat
+with him, Mr. Shackford, he was near breaking his promise; your
+kindness was coals of fire on his head. His agony, lest he should die
+or lose his senses before he could make known the full depth of
+Durgin's villainy, must have been something terrible. This is the
+substance of what the poor creature begged me to say to you with his
+dying regrets. The money is hidden somewhere under the mattress, I
+believe. A better man than Torrini would have spent some of it,"
+added Father O'Meara, waving a sort of benediction in the direction
+of the bed.
+
+Richard did not speak for a moment or two. The wretchedness and
+grimness of it all smote him to the heart. When he looked up Mr.
+Taggett was gone, and the priest was gently drawing the coverlet over
+Torrini's face.
+
+Richard approached Father O'Meara and said: "When the money is
+found, please take charge of it, and see that every decent
+arrangement is made. I mean, spare nothing. I am a Protestant, but I
+believe in any man's prayers when they are not addressed to a heathen
+image. I promised Torrini to send his wife and children to Italy.
+This pitiful, miserable gold, which cost so dear and is worth so
+little, shall be made to do that much good, at least."
+
+As Richard was speaking, a light footfall sounded on the staircase
+outside; then the door, which stood ajar, was softly pushed open, and
+Margaret paused on the threshold. At the rustle of her dress Richard
+turned, and hastened towards her.
+
+"It is all over," he said softly, laying his finger on his lip.
+Father O'Meara was again kneeling by the bedside.
+
+"Let us go now," whispered Richard to Margaret. It seemed fit that
+they should leave the living and the dead to the murmured prayers and
+solemn ministration of the kindly priest. Such later services as
+Margaret could render to the bereaved woman were not to be wanting.
+
+At the foot of the stairs Richard Shackford halted abruptly, and,
+oblivious of the two children who were softly chattering together in
+the doorway, caught Margaret's hand in his.
+
+"Margaret, Torrini has made a confession that sets at rest all
+question of my cousin's death."
+
+"Do you mean that he"--Margaret faltered, and left the sentence
+unfinished.
+
+"No; it was William Durgin, God forgive him!"
+
+"William Durgin!" The young girl's fingers closed nervously on
+Richard's as she echoed the name, and she began trembling.
+"That--that is stranger yet!"
+
+"I will tell you everything when we get home; this is no time or
+place; but one thing I must ask you now and here. When you sat with
+me last night were you aware that Mr. Taggett firmly believed it was
+I who had killed Lemuel Shackford?"
+
+"Yes," said Margaret.
+
+"That is all I care to know!" cried Richard; "that consoles me!"
+and the two pairs of great inquisitive eyes looking up from the stone
+step saw the signorina standing quite mute and colorless with the
+strange gentleman's arms around her. And the signorina was smiling!
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+One June Morning, precisely a year from that morning when the
+reader first saw the daylight breaking upon Stillwater, several
+workmen with ladders and hammers were putting up a freshly painted
+sign over the gate of the marble yard. Mr. Slocum and Richard stood
+on the opposite curbstone, to which they had retired in order to take
+in the general effect. The new sign read,--Slocum & Shackford.
+Richard protested against the displacement of its weather-stained
+predecessor; it seemed to him an act little short of vandalism; but
+Mr. Slocum was obstinate, and would have it done. He was secretly
+atoning for a deep injustice, into which Richard had been at once too
+sensitive and too wise closely to inquire. If Mr. Slocum had harbored
+a temporary doubt of him Richard did not care to know it; it was
+quite enough to suspect the fact. His sufficient recompense was that
+Margaret had not doubted. They had now been married six months. The
+shadow of the tragedy in Welch's Court had long ceased to oppress
+them; it had vanished with the hasty departure of Mr. Taggett.
+Neither he nor William Durgin was ever seen again in the flesh in
+Stillwater; but they both still led, and will probably continue for
+years to lead, a sort of phantasmal, legendary life in Snelling's
+bar-room. Durgin in his flight had left no traces. From time to time,
+as the months rolled on, a misty rumor was blown to the town of his
+having been seen in some remote foreign city,--now in one place, and
+now in another, always on the point of departing, self-pursued like
+the Wandering Jew; but nothing authentic. His after-fate was to be a
+sealed book in Stillwater.
+
+"I really wish you had let the old sign stand," said Richard, as
+the carpenters removed the ladders. "The yard can never be anything
+but Slocum's Yard."
+
+"It looks remarkably well up there," replied Mr. Slocum, shading
+his eyes critically with one hand. "You object to the change, but for
+my part I don't object to changes. I trust I may live to see the day
+when even this sign will have to be altered to--Slocum, Shackford &
+Son. How would you like that?"
+
+"I can't say," returned Richard laughing, as they passed into the
+yard together. "I should first have to talk it over--with the son!"
+
+The End
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Stillwater Tragedy, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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