PS 
 
 1025 
 S7 
 
 1886 
 v. 1 
 
 B 
 

 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 FREDERIC THOMAS BLANCHARD 
 
 FOR THE 
 ENGLISH READING ROOM
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY.
 
 THE STILLWATER 
 TRAGEDY 
 
 THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'THE QUEEN OF SHKBA,' 'MARJORIE 
 DAW,' ' PRUDENCE PALFREY,' ETC. 
 
 Author's Edition 
 VOL. I. 
 
 EDINBURGH 
 
 DAVID DOUGLAS, CASTLE STREET 
 1886
 
 (JFtuntmrgJ) Elmbersitg $hess : 
 
 T. AND A. CONSTABLE, PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY.
 
 Jrr* tew (Jrnrtit
 
 THE STILL WATEE TEAGEDY. 
 
 I. 
 
 IT is close upon daybreak. The great wall 
 of pines and hemlocks that keep off the 
 east wind from Stillwater stretches black 
 and indeterminate against the sky. At in- 
 tervals a dull, metallic sound, like the gut- 
 tural twang of a violin string, rises from the 
 frog-infested 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 !
 
 6 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 till 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 dis- 
 cernible behind the ragged line of the tree- 
 tops. The deluge of 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 
 headstones ? No, that is only Slocum's 
 Marble Yard, with the finished and unfin- 
 ished work heaped up like snowdrifts, a 
 cemetery in embryo. Here and there in 
 an outlying farm a lantern glimmers in
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 7 
 
 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 grey 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-coloured 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 sur- 
 rounded on three sides by a platform, one 
 of seven or eight similar stations strung like
 
 8 THE STILLWATEB TRAGEDY. 
 
 Indian beads 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 house- 
 wife 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 desper-
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 9 
 
 ately and successfully barricaded itself 
 against the approach of morning ; yet if one 
 were standing in the room that leads from 
 the bedchamber 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. Lenrnel 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.
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 
 an 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 grey 
 crepuscular light within. As the girl ap- 
 proached the table, on which a plate with
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. II 
 
 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 instinc- 
 tively 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 ri veted upon 
 some object in the next room, the girl re- 
 treated backward slowly and heavily drag- 
 ging one foot after the other, until she 
 reached the scullery door ; then she turned 
 swiftly, and plunged irito 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,
 
 12 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 agoing 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
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 13 
 
 clay pipes. Not an urchin put in an ap- 
 pearance 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. 
 
 Draggled-looking women, with dishcloth 
 or dust-pan in hand, stood in doorways or 
 leaned from windows, talking in subdued 
 voices with neighbours 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 
 
 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 perspir- 
 ing, to the scene of his perfunctory duties. 
 
 The result of the investigation was awaited
 
 14 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 with feverish impatience by the people out- 
 side. Mr. Shackf ord had not been a popular 
 man; he had been a hard, avaricious, passion- 
 ate man, holding his own way remorselessly. 
 He had been the reverse of popular, but he 
 had long been a prominent character in Still- 
 water, because of his wealth, his endless law- 
 suits, and his eccentricity, an illustration 
 of which was his persistence in living en- 
 tirely alone in the isolated and dreary old 
 house, that was henceforth to be inhabited 
 by his shadow. Not his shadow alone, how- 
 ever, for it was now remembered that the 
 premises were already held in fee by another 
 phantasmal tenant. At a period long ante- 
 rior 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 Still water. "The 
 widow Sloper and old Shackford have made 
 a match of it," remarked a local humourist, 
 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 spec- 
 tral progeny ! 
 
 It appeared to the crowd in the lane that 
 the jury were unconscionably long in arriv-
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 15 
 
 ing at a decision ; and when the decision was 
 at length reached, it gave but moderate satis- 
 faction. 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 in- 
 strument 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 sus- 
 pense, Lawyer Perkins a long, lank man, 
 with stringy black hair announced the ver- 
 dict 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 characterises persons who en- 
 tertain few ideas. To accept this theory 
 it was necessary to believe that Mr. Shack- 
 ford 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. Shack- 
 ford, it appeared, had made rather careful 
 preparations to live that day. The break- 
 fast table had been laid overnight, the 
 coals left ready for kindling in the Franklin 
 stove, and a kettle, filled with water to be
 
 1 6 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 heated for his tea or coffee, stood on the 
 hearth. 
 
 Two facts had sharply demonstrated them- 
 selves : 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 memo- 
 randum among the papers seemed to specify 
 the respective sums in notes and gold that 
 had been deposited in the box. A docu- 
 ment 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
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. IJ 
 
 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 pack- 
 ing-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. More- 
 over, 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 im- 
 possible accurately to measure them. A half- 
 
 VOL. I. B
 
 1 8 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 civilisation 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 neighbours ; but 
 Mr. Shackford had never been victorious in
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 19 
 
 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 Shack- 
 ford house had reduced itself to half a dozen 
 idlers, and the less frequented streets had 
 resumed their normal aspect of dulness, 
 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, in- 
 deed, 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-pedlar, 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 deep- 
 ened in intensity, though the expression of 
 it became nearly reticent. It was noticed 
 that the lamps throughout the village were
 
 20 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 lighted an hour earlier than usual. A sense 
 of insecurity settled upon Stillwater with 
 the falling twilight, that nameless appre- 
 hension 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 paralysing 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 ? Per- 
 haps 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 im- 
 mortal 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
 
 THE STILLWATEB TRAGEDY. 21 
 
 was unconsciously projected upon the pre- 
 sent 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 nightfall he had 
 crawled, in his bewildered, wheezy fashion, 
 down to the tavern, where he found a 
 sombre 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 the 
 zenith hung serenely above the world, as if 
 there were never a crime, or a tear, or a 
 heart-break in it all.
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 23 
 
 man his career is ended. But Mr. Shack- 
 ford 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 memor- 
 able day a reward of one hundred dollars 
 afterwards increased to five hundred, at 
 the instance of Mr. Shackford's cousin 
 had been offered by the board of select- 
 men for the arrest and conviction of the 
 guilty party. Beyond this and the unsatis- 
 factory 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 ap- 
 peared 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 
 south-west of Stillwater. Mr. Taggett's
 
 24 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 moustache, sparse side-whiskers, eyes 
 of no definite colour, 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 defalca- 
 tion. 
 
 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 despatched on 
 secret missions, and within an hour it was 
 ferreted out that a man in a cart had been
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 2$ 
 
 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 ex- 
 ception : 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 men- 
 tion the circumstance before. 
 
 "Taggett has got a clue," 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 popula- 
 tion much," said Blufton, with his whole- 
 some laugh. 
 
 Thomas Blufton was well known and 
 esteemed in Stillwater, but if the crime had
 
 26 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 neighbourhood 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 pre- 
 vious ; 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 centre 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.
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 2/ 
 
 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 
 saloon. 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 cara- 
 vans of lager-beer glasses. Directly behind 
 that end of the counter stood a Gothic 
 brass-mounted beer-pump, at whose faucets 
 Mr. Snelliiig, 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 the gaily- coloured 
 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 south-east storm caused 
 an unusual influx of idlers in both rooms. 
 With the rain splashing against the case- 
 ments and the wind slamming the blinds, 
 the respective groups sat discussing in a
 
 28 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 desultory way the only topic which could 
 be discussed at present. There had been a 
 general strike among the workmen a fort- 
 night 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 set down his beer- 
 mug with an air of argumentative disgust, 
 and drew one sleeve across his glistening 
 beard. 
 
 " Stavens, 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, 
 Bluf ton's brother-in-law. " The boy hasn't 
 a bad streak in him. It was an outrage.
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 29 
 
 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 respect- 
 ability ! He's joking." 
 
 "Look here, Dexter," said Durgin, turn- 
 ing 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." 
 
 " Still water '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
 
 30 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 
 Still water. "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," inter- 
 posed Bishop, the veterinary surgeon. 
 
 " No 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 dis- 
 covered." 
 
 " I shouldn't like to go quite so far as 
 that, sir," answered Mr. Craggie, with that
 
 THE STILLWATER, TRAGEDY. 3! 
 
 diplomatic suavity which leads to post- 
 masterships 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 for- 
 ward 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 temp- 
 tations to the lawless. But we are a limited
 
 32 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 community. We have no professional mur- 
 derers among us. The deed which has stirred 
 society to its utmost depths was plainly done 
 by some wayfaring amateur. Remorse has 
 already seized 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 my- 
 self 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 not wishing to say too 
 much, " the bottom would drop out of every- 
 thing." 
 
 Mr. Pinkham shrunk from commenting on 
 a disaster like that, and relapsed into silence. 
 Mr. Craggie, with his thumbs in the arm-
 
 THE STILLWATEK TRAGEDY. 33 
 
 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. Willson 
 was a local humourist of the Falstaffian 
 stripe, though not so much witty in himself 
 as the cause of wit in others. 
 
 " No, Jemmy, 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 
 
 VOL. i. c
 
 34 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 far from wounding Dexter that he replied 
 
 " Well, only so so. The old woman com- 
 plains 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 read- 
 ing-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 frag- 
 ments 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 ques- 
 tion whether the document is valid or not. " 
 
 "That is a masterly exposition of the 
 dilemma, Mr. Perkins," said the school- 
 master warmly.
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 35 
 
 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. Piiikham. 
 
 " 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."
 
 36 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 "If Mr. Lemuel Shackford," remarked 
 Coroner Whidden, softly joining the con- 
 versation, 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, with- 
 out having his reputation filched away from 
 him." 
 
 "I I will explain ! I was merely sup- 
 posing " 
 
 " 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
 
 THE STILLWATEB TRAGEDY. 37 
 
 a glass of lemonade at his elbow in the read- 
 ing-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 morn- 
 ing 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 cousins, weren't they?" Mr. Ward 
 was a comparatively new resident in Still- 
 water. 
 
 " 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.
 
 38 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 \vas 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 Durgiu, 
 turning round on his stool and sending ujp 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, some- 
 thing 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 '11 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.
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 39 
 
 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 ? " in- 
 quired Stevens gravely. "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 io the school- 
 master 
 
 ' ' I must really take issue with you there,
 
 40 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 Mr. Pinkliam. 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 at- 
 tached to the bosom of speculation. It is a 
 beautiful science, that of psychological phe- 
 nomena, and the spiritualists will yet be- 
 come an influential class of " Mr. Craggie 
 was going to say voters, but glided over it 
 " persons. I believe in clairvoyance my- 
 self to a large extent. Before my appoint- 
 ment 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 schoolmaster 
 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 Per- 
 kins, " that clairvoyants may eventually be 
 introduced into cases in our courts ? " 
 
 " They are now," said Mr. Perkins, with 
 a snort, " the police bring 'em in." 
 
 Mr. Craggie finished the remainder of his 
 glass of sherry in silence, and presently rose
 
 THE STILLWATEB TRAGEDY. 4! 
 
 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.
 
 42 THE STILLWATEK TRAGEDY. 
 
 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, pre- 
 ferring 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 de- 
 clined to be interviewed by the local editor. 
 To the outside eye that weatherstained,
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 43 
 
 faded old house appeared a throbbing seat 
 of esoteric intelligence. It was as if a hun- 
 dred 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. As nothing came of it all, this se- 
 crecy grew exasperating. The pile of letters 
 which the mail brought to Mr. Taggett every 
 morning chiefly anonymous suggestions, 
 and offers of assistance from lunatics in re- 
 mote cities was enough in itself to exasper- 
 ate a community. 
 
 Covertly at first, and then openly, Still- 
 water 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 in- 
 ducement offered had been more substantial. 
 A singer of Mr. Taggett's plumage was not to 
 be caught 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,
 
 44 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 Mr. Taggett, after keeping the public in sus- 
 pense 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 
 hands of the county constabulary. " With- 
 in 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 any- 
 thing occur to ruffle 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 night-
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 45 
 
 fall. It would appear that the late Mr. 
 Shackford had acquired a habit of lingering 
 around wood -piles after dark, and also of 
 stealing into bedchambers, 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 his tramps over again. . 
 
 Another week dragged by, and the edi- 
 torial prediction seemed as far as ever from 
 fulfilment. 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."
 
 46 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 ! "
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 47 
 
 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 of choos- 
 ing their own landscape. In the present 
 instance it is reluctantly conceded that 
 there are few uglier or more commonplace 
 towns in New England than Still water, a 
 straggling, overgrown village, with whose 
 rural aspects are curiously blended some- 
 thing of the grimness and squalor of certain 
 shabby city neighbourhoods. Being of com- 
 paratively 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 her-
 
 48 THE STILLWATEB TRAGEDY. 
 
 self 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 domin- 
 ate the village. The sidewalks in the more 
 aristocratic quarter are covered with a thin 
 elastic paste of asphalte, worn down to the 
 gravel in patches, and emitting in the heat 
 of the day an astringent, bituminous odour. 
 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 re- 
 spective 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 an- 
 tiquity ; but it is neither ancient nor pic- 
 turesque. 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. Roland Slocum, a man
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 49 
 
 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 pro- 
 spective partner in the business, and the 
 betrothed of Mr. Slocum's daughter Mar- 
 garet. 
 
 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 wej*e 
 Lemuel Shackford, then about forty-six, 
 and Richard Shackford, aged four. Lemuel 
 Shackford had laid up a competency as 
 shipmaster 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 
 
 VOL. I. D
 
 50 THE STTLLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 of humanity, by some strange miscalcula- 
 tion of nature, was his cousin. 
 
 The strict devotion to his personal in- 
 terests which had enabled Mr. Shackford 
 to acquire a fortune thus early caused him 
 to look askance at a penniless young kins- 
 man with stockings down at heel, and a 
 straw hat three sizes too large for him set 
 on the back of his head. But Mr. Shack- 
 ford 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 or 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 inno- 
 cent 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 51 
 
 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 bis 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 his 
 eyes that Mr. Shackford drew back aghast. 
 
 " Why, it 's a little devil ! " 
 
 While Shackford junior was amusing him- 
 self 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. Shack- 
 ford 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 under- 
 stood to have a perpetual case in equity 
 before the Marine Court in New York, to
 
 52 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 which city he made frequent and unan- 
 nounced journeys. His immediate neigh- 
 bours stood in terror of him. He was like a 
 duellist, 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 rumour had been 
 blown to Dick of a practice of hanging up 
 stockings at Christmas. It struck his mate- 
 rialistic mind as rather a senseless thing to 
 do ; but nevertheless he resolved to try it one 
 Christmas Eve. He lay awake a long while 
 in the frosty darkness, sceptically 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 53 
 
 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 trans- 
 muted 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 mouth- 
 ing his contracts and mortgages, and weaving 
 his webs like a great, lean, grey 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 tempta-
 
 54 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 tions 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 ven- 
 tured the question. Few persons dared to
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 55 
 
 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," re- 
 sponded 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 conde- 
 scends 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
 
 56 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 appearance of a miniature harp, "I shall 
 make a lawyer of him." 
 
 It had long been settled in Mr. Shack- 
 ford's mind that Richard, as soon as he had 
 finished his studies, should enter the law- 
 ofiice of Brandmann & Sharpe, a firm of 
 rather sinister reputation in South Millville. 
 
 At fourteen Eichard's eyes had begun to 
 open on the situation ; at fifteen he saw very 
 clearly ; and one day, without much pre- 
 liminary 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 the family. 
 
 A friendship had sprung up between 
 Eichard 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, intelli- 
 gence, and social standing ; for though 
 Eichard 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
 
 THE STILLWATEB TRAGEDY. 57 
 
 of Richard's personal memory, he acknow- 
 ledged the debt by rather insisting on Dur- 
 gin'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 un- 
 precedented occurrence, Richard had slept 
 out of the house the previous night. 
 
 Durgin was the bearer of a note which 
 Mr. Shackford received in some astonish- 
 ment, and read deliberately, blinking with 
 weak eyes behind his 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 fore- 
 finger. Then his face relaxed, and an odd 
 grin diffused a kind of wintry glow over it. 
 
 Richard had run away to sea.
 
 58 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 housework, was 
 busy in the extension. Without announcing 
 himself, Richard stalked upstairs 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 59 
 
 bottom, and threw the fragments into the 
 fire-place. 
 
 A moment later, on the way downstairs, 
 he encountered his kinsman ascending. 
 
 "Ah, you have come back!" was Mr. 
 Shackford's grim greeting after a second's 
 hesitation. 
 
 "Yes," said Richard, with embarrass- 
 ment, 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 ? " de- 
 manded 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
 
 60 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 forget- 
 ting all the dreariness of his uncared-for 
 childhood. He had been out hi the world, 
 and had found it even harder-hearted than 
 his own home, which now he idealised 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 grey belf rey 
 and slim red chimneys of the humble New
 
 THE STILIAVATER TRAGEDY. 6 1 
 
 England village where he was born. He 
 had learned to love it after losing it ; and 
 now he had struggled back through count- 
 less 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 saying so much as thank *e." 
 
 " I was all wrong ! " 
 
 " That 's what folks always say, with the 
 delusion that it makes everything all right." 
 
 " Surely it helps, 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."
 
 62 THE STILLWATEB TRAGEDY. 
 
 "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 Robin- 
 son 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 
 ready boiled, I Ve no doubt crawled up 
 the beach, and begged him to eat them ; but 
 / nearly starved to death." 
 
 " Of course. You will always be ship- 
 wrecked, 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 hands 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 staircase. This 
 was the counterfeit presentiment of Lemuel
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 63 
 
 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 direc- 
 tion. " But what are you going to do for 
 yourself? You can't start a subscription 
 paper, and play the 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 unsophis- 
 ticated 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
 
 64 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 Mianto- 
 wona Iron -Works ; but the rascally direc- 
 tors 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 65 
 
 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 re- 
 sumed 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 machin- 
 ist, or a mechanic, or a day labourer might 
 have found a foothold. 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, con- 
 fidently and cheerfully at first, whistling 
 softly between whiles ; but at every turn the 
 question confronted him. In some places, 
 where he was recognised with thinly veiled 
 
 VOL. I. E
 
 66 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 Still- 
 water. 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 caudle. 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 67 
 
 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 
 fraud, 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 in- 
 stead of a living fiction, and out of this ani- 
 mosity grew a dream so fantastic and comical 
 that Richard awoke himself with a bewil- 
 dered laugh just as the sunrise reddened the 
 panes of his 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
 
 68 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 Friday was not a man Friday at all, but a 
 light-minded young princess from one of the 
 neighbouring islands who had fallen in love 
 with Robinson. Her real name was Satur- 
 day." 
 
 "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 ex- 
 ploded,'' 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 the bed, 
 pulling himself together in the broad day- 
 light. 
 
 "Well," he muttered at length, "I 
 shouldn't wonder ! There 's nothing too 
 bad to be believed of that man."
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 69 
 
 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
 
 7O THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 rough deal fence which enclosed 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, 
 eyeing them curiously as possible comrades. 
 Suddenly a slim dark fellow, who had re- 
 tained 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
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. Jl 
 
 you about it some day. If I have a limb to 
 my name and a breath left in 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 ex- 
 periencing that nameless, shadowy satisfac- 
 tion 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 an- 
 other ? He might. " 
 
 " The Association wouldn't allow it." 
 
 " What association ? "
 
 72 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 "The Marble Workers' Association, of 
 course." 
 
 " They wouldn't allow it ! How is that ? : ' 
 
 " This is 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 work- 
 men ; but not apprentices. " 
 
 "And Mr. Slocum agrees to that?" in- 
 quired 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," re- 
 turned Durgin, glancing at the town clock, 
 which marked seven minutes past the hour.
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 73 
 
 " 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 Associa- 
 tion 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 to-night, at the tavern ? " 
 
 " The tavern ? That didn't use to be a 
 quiet place." 
 
 ' ' It isn't quiet now, but there 's nowhere 
 else to go of a night. It 's a comfortable
 
 74 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 'ye 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 tnelan-
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 75 
 
 choly 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 gummed 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 favour as working men 
 of the era of Jacquard looked upon the in- 
 troduction 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 open- 
 ings each year for a dozen learners, had the 
 matter been under his control ; but it was 
 not. "I am the master of each man indi- 
 vidually," he declared, "but collectively
 
 76 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 they are my master." So his business, in- 
 stead of naturally spreading and becoming 
 a benefit to the many, was kept carefully 
 pruned down for 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 recognised 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 de- 
 sirous, 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
 
 THE STILLWATEK TRAGEDY. 77 
 
 Richard would have been well satisfied 
 with it, if he could have divined it. He 
 did divine that Mr. Slocum was favourably 
 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 carv- 
 ing, 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 ! '
 
 78 THE STILLWATEK, TRAGEDY. 
 
 cried Richard, " in a rough fashion, of 
 course," he added, fearing he had over- 
 stated 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 recol- 
 lect 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 par- 
 tially 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 79 
 
 drawn, and full of facility. " Why, that is 
 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 book-keeper, 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
 
 8O THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 8 1 
 
 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 inclina- 
 tion 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."
 
 82 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 The old man laid down his knife and fork. 
 
 " With Slocum ! A Shackford a miser- 
 able marble-chipper ! " 
 
 There was so little hint of the aristocrat 
 in Lemuel Shackford's sordid life and per- 
 son that no one suspected him of even self- 
 esteem. He went as meanly dressed as a 
 tramp, and as careless of contemporary criti- 
 cism ; yet clear down in his liver, or some- 
 where 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 virtu- 
 ous, and its men, if not always virtuous, 
 had always been ship-captains. But be- 
 yond 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 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?"
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 83 
 
 "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." 
 
 " Still water 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 dis- 
 dainfully. 
 
 " 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 honourable. You might 
 have gone down in a gale, you probably 
 would, and that would have been fortu- 
 nate. But a stone-cutter ! You can under- 
 stand," 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
 
 84 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 
 hand 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 revolved 
 in his mind several questions as to his future 
 abode. He could not reconcile his thought
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 85 
 
 to any of the working-men'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 woollen 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 neighbourhood. 
 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. This 
 idea smiled so pleasantly in Richard's fancy 
 that he pushed the plate away from him im- 
 patiently, and picked up his hat which lay 
 on the floor beside the chair. 
 
 That evening he moved from the Shack- 
 ford 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.
 
 86 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE six months which followed Richard's 
 instalment in the office at Slocum's 
 Yard were so crowded with novel experience 
 that he scarcely noted their flight. The room 
 at the Durgin's, 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 compli- 
 cated account to keep, involving as it did 
 a separate record of each employee's time 
 and special work. An ancient book-keeper 
 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 green- 
 backs lying in front of him.
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 87 
 
 "I suppose you'll be proprietor next," 
 remarked Durgin, that evening, at the 
 supper table. 
 
 "When I am, Will," answered Richard 
 cheerily, ' ' you shall be on the road to fore- 
 man of the finishing shop." 
 
 "Thank you," said Durgin, not too gra- 
 ciously. 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 
 before, he had given elementary instruction 
 on the Marble Workers' Association. 
 
 Richard did not find his old schoolmate 
 so companionable as memory and anticipa- 
 tion 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 colour ; 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 ex- 
 tended no appreciable distance in any direc- 
 tion from the Stillwater hotel. He spent 
 his evenings chiefly there, returning home
 
 88 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 late at night, and often in so noisy a mood 
 as to disturb Richard, who slept in an ad- 
 joining 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 dis- 
 posed at times to be sarcastic on these 
 changes, but always stopped short of actual 
 offence ; 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 89 
 
 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 plain- 
 tively, " 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 '11 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 '11 get drunk 
 to-night." 
 
 " No, no ! " cried Mrs. Durgin plead- 
 ingly, "I didn't mean you, William, but 
 Peters and that set. "
 
 90 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 " I thought you couldn't mean me," said 
 William, thrusting his hands into the 
 pockets of his monkey-jacket, and saunter- 
 ing 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 organ- 
 ising a shop for his experiment in orna- 
 mental 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 goodwill 
 which at first had been withheld, for they 
 had not quite liked being under the super- 
 vision 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. Ql 
 
 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 Septimus 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 pro- 
 vincial village looms a great deal taller than 
 your mighty genius in a city. Richard 
 Shackford working for Rowland Slocum at 
 Stillwater was happier than Michael Angelo 
 in Rome with Pope Julius n. at his back. 
 And Richard was the better paid, too !
 
 92 THE STILLWATEB TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 labori- 
 ously 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 draw 
 capitally ; but Nature beats you out and out 
 at designing ferns. Just ask her to make 
 you a facsimile 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 mould ; remove 
 the leaf, oil the matrix, and pour in fresh 
 plaster. When that is set, cut away the
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 93 
 
 mould 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 subse- 
 quently took place in his feeling, Richard 
 was desirous of establishing friendly rela- 
 tions 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-moulds 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
 
 94 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 colour 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 blonde mistresses ; he 
 took a fearful joy in listening to their rus- 
 tling, muffled 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 with- 
 ered 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.
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 95 
 
 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 out- 
 side by a flight of steps leading to a veranda. 
 To this room Richard and his traps were re- 
 moved. With a round table standing in the 
 centre, 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
 
 g6 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 atelier. An open fire-place, with a brace of 
 antiquated iron-dogs straddling the red brick 
 hearth, gave the finishing touch. The oc- 
 cupant was in easy communication with the 
 yard, from which the busy din of clinking 
 chisels came up 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 from 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, Mar- 
 garet, 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,
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 97 
 
 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 Thanks- 
 giving 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 suf- 
 ficed for the chamber, but the passage-way 
 seemed in quite an irreclaimable state, judg- 
 ing 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.
 
 98 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 Richard opened the door, and smiled 
 pleasantly at Margaret standing on the 
 threshold with an expression of demure de- 
 fiance 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 his craft. Margaret, of whom 
 he was a trifle afraid at first, amused him 
 with her candour and sedateness, seeming 
 now a mere child, and now an elderly per- 
 son gravely inspecting matters. The frank- 
 ness and simplicity were hers by nature, and 
 the oldish ways notably her self-posses- 
 sion, so quick to assert itself after an instant's 
 forgetfulness came perhaps of losing her 
 mother in early childhood, and the pre- 
 mature duties which that misfortune en- 
 tailed. She amused him, for she was only 
 fourteen ; but she impressed him also, for 
 she was Mr. Slocum's daughter. Yet it was
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 99 
 
 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 moulds to harden. I can- 
 not do anything until then. " 
 
 ' ' Papa says you are very clever, " re- 
 marked 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 posi- 
 tively. 
 
 " I don't understand what you mean by 
 cleverness, Miss Margaret. There are a 
 great many kinds and degrees. I can make
 
 100 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 ? " 
 
 " Xot 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. IOI 
 
 manner, caused Margaret at once to with- 
 draw 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 colourless 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 strange 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 be- 
 hind ; 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 inac- 
 curate 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
 
 102 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 studio, at first with some pretext or other, 
 and then with no pretence whatever. When 
 Margaret had disburdened herself of ex- 
 cuses for dropping in to watch Richard mould 
 his leaves and flowers, she came oftener, and 
 Richard insensibly drifted into the habit of 
 expecting her on certain days, and was dis- 
 appointed 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 ser- 
 vants, and an episodical aunt. The mother 
 was long ago dead ; Margaret could not 
 recollect when that grey head-stone, with 
 blotches of rusty-green moss breaking out 
 over the lettering, was not in the church- 
 yard ; and there never had been any brothers 
 or sisters. 
 
 To Margaret Richard's installation in the 
 empty room, where as a child she had al- 
 ways been afraid to go, was the single im- 
 portant 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-
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 10$ 
 
 hour often lengthened to an hour. Some- 
 times 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 suc- 
 cessfully. 
 
 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 sombre colouring. 
 
 If there was a latent spark of sentiment
 
 IO4 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 com- 
 rades. He liked to have Margaret sitting 
 there, with her needle flashing in the sun- 
 light, 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 watcli 
 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 him-
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 105 
 
 dred feminine things in the room. Some- 
 times 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 sew- 
 ing, as usual. The papers on the round 
 table had been neatly cleared away, and 
 Richard was standing by the window, in- 
 dolently 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
 
 106 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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-coloured 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 em- 
 phasised 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
 
 THE STILIAVATER TRAGEDY. 1 07 
 
 nothing more to do for the yard. I am go- 
 ing 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."
 
 I08 THE STILIAVATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 "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 any- 
 body 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 set-
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. ICQ 
 
 tied 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 Mar- 
 garet, 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, care- 
 fully. 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. 
 
 " Xo, 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 ex- 
 plain the matter to you easily enough. When 
 the water evaporates a kind of congealing
 
 1 10 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 process sets in, a sort of atmospherical 
 change, don't you know ? The sudden pre- 
 cipitation 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 congeal- 
 ing process sets 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. " 
 
 "0 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." 
 
 4 'Not a bit."
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. Ill 
 
 ' ' You are showing your true colours. 
 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, con- 
 sidering. " 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 think- 
 ing it over, "I would like to be as old as 
 the youngest Mrs. Methuselah." 
 
 "That was probably the last one," re- 
 marked 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, Mar- 
 garet, or even eighty." 
 
 ' ' On the whole, perhaps, I shouldn't f ancy 
 it myself. Do you approve of persons marry- 
 ing twice ? "
 
 112 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 " N o, not at the same time." 
 
 " Of course I didn't mean that," said Mar- 
 garet, 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 iu 
 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 char- 
 acter." 
 
 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 shrivelled 
 and colourless with the cold. 
 
 " There isn't any feeling in it whatever," 
 said Margaret, holding up her hand help- 
 lessly, like a wounded wing. 
 
 Richard took the fingers between his 
 palms, and chafed them smartly for a
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 113 
 
 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, smil- 
 ing, " I suppose a scientific fellow could ex- 
 plain 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 
 mould 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 w r ould 
 not have exchanged it for the Venus of 
 Milo. 
 
 But as yet Richard was far enough from 
 all that. 
 
 VOL. I. H
 
 114 THB STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 fllHREE years glided by with Richard 
 -L Shackford as swiftly as those periods 
 of time which are imagined to elapse be- 
 tween the acts of a play. They were event- 
 less, untroubled years, and have no history. 
 Nevertheless, certain changes had taken 
 place. Little by little Mr. Slocum had 
 relinquished the supervision of the work- 
 shops 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 115 
 
 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 natu- 
 rally fits fine manners ; and when chance 
 takes one of these maidens from her inland 
 country home or from some sleepy town on
 
 Il6 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 the seaboard, and sets her amid the com- 
 plications of city existence, she is an un- 
 abashed 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 transplant- 
 ings befall her, she always merits them by 
 adorning with grace and industry and intel- 
 ligence 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 friend- 
 ship, 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 senti- 
 ment in the respect ; there was something 
 at once gentle and virile in his character 
 which she admired and leaned upon ; in his
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 1 17 
 
 presence the small housekeeping troubles al- 
 ways slipped from her ; but her heart, to 
 use a pretty French phrase, had not con- 
 sciously 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 con- 
 spired to prolong this mutual lack of per- 
 ception. 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 lead- 
 ing to his studio in the extension, the ser- 
 vant-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
 
 IlS THE STILL WATER TEAGEDY. 
 
 occasions when she missed the appoint- 
 ment ; but he had thought little of the cir- 
 cumstance. 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 to- 
 wards the window went out instantly on 
 his lip. 
 
 " Dr. Weld was up with her until five 
 o'clock this morning," said the girl, finger- 
 ing 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 1 19 
 
 in the middle of the workshop. "Margaret 
 is going to die," he said to himself, giving 
 voice to the dark foreboding that had in- 
 stantly seized upon him, and in a swift 
 vision he saw the end of all that simple, 
 fortunate existence which he had lived with- 
 out 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 favourite 
 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 pre- 
 cious quality of things irrevocably lost. 
 
 The clamour of the bell in the South 
 Church striking noon, and the shrilling of 
 the steam- whistles softened by the thick - 
 falling snow, roused Richard from his ab- 
 straction. He was surprised that it was 
 noon. He rose from the bench and went 
 home through the storm, scarcely heeding
 
 120 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 lodg- 
 ings 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 121 
 
 fingers lay locked on her lap, and the sun- 
 light showed through the narrow transparent 
 palms. 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 it- 
 self 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 sacri- 
 fice to its delicacy. The spring air was fill- 
 ing 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
 
 122 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 escape Margaret. She watched him, and 
 wondered at his inexplicable depression 
 when every one in the household was re- 
 joicing 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 needlework. 
 
 " 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 had 
 ceased 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 
 question suddenly, like that." 
 
 "I didn't intend to be abrupt. I was 
 curious to know. And then the charge it- 
 self 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."
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 123 
 
 "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 suc- 
 cessful. Richard, I am 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 re- 
 member "where the young daguerreo- 
 typist, what 's-his-name, took up his resi- 
 dence 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 Hepzibah's manner. 
 ' If you begin to love me, I am glad.' " 
 
 " There, sir ! what do you say to that ? "
 
 124 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 so- 
 berly, 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. Fre- 
 quently, 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," ob-
 
 THE STILL WATER TKAGEDY. 125 
 
 served 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 oracular 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 Tittered, 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
 
 126 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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, unembar- 
 rassed intercourse, perhaps an end to all 
 intercourse. By keeping his secret locked 
 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. With- 
 in 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 assidu- 
 ous 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 mould in front
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 127 
 
 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 indiffer- 
 ence, 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 
 sat. 
 
 "You are as wrong as you can be," he 
 said, looking down on her half-lifted face, 
 from which a quick wave of colour was 
 subsiding ; for the abruptness of Richard's 
 movement had startled her. 
 
 "I am glad if I am wrong."
 
 128 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 " It is nearly an unforgivable thing to be 
 as wide of the mark as you are. O Mar- 
 garet, 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 every- 
 thing 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 bear- 
 ing your anxiety, that I had been dis-
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 129 
 
 tressed 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 some- 
 thing 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 ; and 
 now you have lost her ! ' " 
 
 As she leaned forward listening, with her 
 lips slightly parted, Margaret gave an un- 
 
 VOL. I. I
 
 I3O THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 conscious little approbative nod of the 
 head. Richard's fanciful accusation of him- 
 self caused her a singular thrill of pleasure. 
 He had never before spoken to her in just 
 this fashion ; the subterfuge which his ten- 
 derness had employed, the little detour it 
 had made in order to get at her, was a novel 
 species of flattery. She recognised the ring 
 of a distinctly new note in his voice ; but, 
 strangely enough, the note lost its unfamili- 
 arity in an instant. Margaret recognised 
 that fact also, and as she swiftly speculated 
 on the phenomenon her pulse went one or 
 two strokes faster. 
 
 "0 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 be- 
 yond 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.
 
 THE STILLWATEB TRAGEDY. 131 
 
 " But it haunts me that thought. Some- 
 times of a morning, after I unlock the work- 
 shop 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." 
 
 " Richard ! " 
 
 " If you only knew what a life I led as a 
 boy in my cousin's house, and what a dole- 
 ful 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 dis- 
 covery." 
 
 " What was that, Richard ? "
 
 132 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 "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 eye- 
 lashes. 
 
 But it was only for an instant. She re- 
 fused to take her happiness shyly or insin- 
 cerely ; 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 conval- 
 escence, 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
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 133 
 
 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 motion- 
 less, 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.
 
 134 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 He did not reply immediately, but let his 
 glance wander from Margaret to Richard, 
 and back again to Margaret, slowly digest- 
 ing 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 so near 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."
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 135 
 
 ' ' There appears to be an amazing diffu- 
 sion of ignorance here ! " 
 
 Margaret bit her lip, and kept still. Her 
 father was taking it a great deal more seri- 
 ously 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 Mar- 
 garet would have told you all I Ve said to 
 her." 
 
 ' * You should have consulted with me be- 
 fore 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 dis- 
 approval on entirely different ground. 
 Margaret is too young. A girl of seventeen 
 or eighteen " 
 
 " Nineteen," said Margaret parentheti- 
 cally. 
 
 "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
 
 136 THE STILLWATEB TRAGEDY. 
 
 endeavoured 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 '11 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 fire- 
 side, of an evening. I don't think the con- 
 ditions hard." 
 
 Mr. Slocum had dictated terms, but it was 
 virtually a surrender. Margaret listened to 
 him with her cheek resting against his arm,
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 137 
 
 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' Associa- 
 tion runs 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 demoralises 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
 
 138 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 no- 
 body 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 mis- 
 chief, 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
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 139 
 
 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 meet- 
 ings. " 
 
 " 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-sawyers 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 
 rumour ; but I am sure there is something 
 in it." 
 
 "Confound the whole lot! If we cant 
 discharge a drunken hand without raising 
 the pay of all the rest, we had better turn
 
 140 THE STILLWATEB TRAGEDY. 
 
 over the entire business to the Association. 
 But do as you like, Richard. You see how 
 I am bullied, Margaret. He runs every- 
 thing ! Come, dear." 
 
 And Mr. Slocum quitted the workshop, 
 taking Margaret with him. Richard re- 
 mained standing a while by the table, in a 
 deep study, with his eyes fixed on the floor. 
 He thought of his early days in the sepul- 
 chral house in Welch's Court, of his wander- 
 ings abroad, his long years of toil since then, 
 of 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 kind- 
 ness for all the world.
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 14! 
 
 XI. 
 
 IN spite of Mr. Slocum's stipulations re- 
 specting 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 im- 
 possible 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 explana- 
 tion of itself. Mr. Slocum did not escape 
 this, but he managed, nevertheless, to ac- 
 cept 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 to- 
 gether as they had been, should end by
 
 142 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 re- 
 putable people in the village, down to 
 Lemuel Shackford, who of course was an 
 old musk-rat. The family attributes of ami- 
 ability 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 pro- 
 verb. Richard certainly had plenty of back-
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 143 
 
 bone ; 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 sur- 
 viving 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, " con- 
 tinued 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 Charles- 
 ton with a cargo of cotton that netted the 
 shareholders upwards of two hundred thou- 
 sand dollars. He denies it now, but every- 
 body knows Shackford. He 'd betray his 
 country for fifty cents in postage-stamps." 
 
 " papa ! you are too hard on him."
 
 144 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 re- 
 volted 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 domes- 
 tic 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 see- 
 ing 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. "
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 145 
 
 " 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 favour ! 
 
 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 
 
 VOL. I. K
 
 146 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 over- 
 took 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. Shack - 
 ford, with one foot on the lower stair. 
 "Time is valuable. What do you want? 
 You want something." 
 
 " Certainly, or I wouldn't think of tres- 
 passing on your time." 
 
 "Has Slocum thrown you over?" in- 
 quired the old man, turning quickly. A 
 straw which he held between his thin lips 
 helped to give him a singularly alert expres- 
 sion. 
 
 "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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 147 
 
 brutal directness disconcerted a little, 
 " money on satisfactory security." 
 
 " You can get it anywhere with that." 
 
 " So I might, and be asking no favour ; 
 but I would rather get it of you, and con- 
 sider 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 rather a 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."
 
 I4 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 "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. Shack- 
 ford 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, per- 
 haps 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 interrogations and his 
 more than usual conciliatory manner had 
 lighted a hope which Richard had not 
 brought with him. Its sudden extinguish- 
 ment was in consequence doubly aggravat- 
 ing.
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 149 
 
 " Slocum's daughter!" repeated Mr. 
 Shackford. " I 'd as soon you would marry 
 Crazy Nan up at the workhouse." 
 
 The association of Crazy Nan with Mar- 
 garet sent a red flush into Richard's cheek. 
 He turned angrily towards the door, and 
 then halted, recollecting the resolves 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 ques- 
 tion ; it shouldn't have come up between 
 us. I want you to aid me, not by lending 
 me money, but by giving me your counten- 
 ance as the head of the family, by show- 
 ing 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
 
 150 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 business relations with you, under the cir- 
 cumstances." 
 
 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 re 
 build the sheds." 
 
 " Bother Slocum and his sheds ! I under- 
 stand 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
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 151 
 
 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 com- 
 prehend 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 authorised 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
 
 152 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 humour. 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 transforma- 
 tion, 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 153 
 
 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 flat- 
 tering 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,
 
 154 TH E STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 go by in that blind, excited fashion, strik- 
 ing one fist into the palm of the other hand, 
 and talking to his own self ! Mary Hen- 
 nessey 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.
 
 THE ST1LLWATER TRAGEDY. 155 
 
 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 hand- 
 kerchief. It was an English stone-dresser 
 named Denyveu. Richard did not recognise 
 him at first. 
 
 " That you, Denyven ! . . . what has 
 
 " 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.
 
 I$6 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 This thing has got to stop in Slocum's 
 Yard." 
 
 "The way of it was this, sir: Torrini 
 wasn't at the shop the 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 humour 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 '11 tell you the same 
 within. "
 
 THE STILLWATEB TRAGEDY. 157 
 
 " 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 working men like 
 you, have permitted such a quarrelsome and 
 irresponsible fellow to become a leader in 
 the Association ? He 's secretary, or some- 
 thing, 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 horganising 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.
 
 1 58 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 under- 
 stand, 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 it 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,
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 1 59 
 
 Denyven. Every soul of us has the privi- 
 lege of bettering our 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 skilful workman 
 gets double the pay of a bungler, and de- 
 serves 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 secre- 
 tary 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 confu- 
 sion, just as pickpockets do. Nobody can 
 play the tyrant or the bully in this country, 
 not even a working man. 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 As- 
 sociation has prevented this employer from 
 training more than two apprentices annu- 
 ally. The result is, eighty hands find work,
 
 160 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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
 
 THE STILIAVATER TRAGEDY. l6l 
 
 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 this 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 
 crystallisation of Italy, or so much of that 
 Italy as Richard had caught a glimpse of 
 
 VOL. I. L
 
 1 62 THE STILLWATEE, TRAGEDY. 
 
 at Genoa. To the town-folks Torrini per- 
 haps vaguely suggested hand-organs and 
 eleemosynary pennies j 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 
 skilful 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 ascendency by his daring, 
 were producing the worst effects. 
 
 At another hour Richard might have been 
 inclined to condone this last offence, as he 
 had condoned others ; but when he parted
 
 THE STILL WATER, TRAGEDY. 163 
 
 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 hap- 
 pen that the pretence fell through. They re- 
 mained motionless, resting on their mallets, 
 with their eyes turned towards Richard. 
 Torrini followed the general glance, and 
 paused in 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 Tor- 
 rini gravely. He was drunk, but the intoxi- 
 cation was not in his tongue. His head, as
 
 164 THE STILL WATER, TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 straight- 
 ening 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 Associa- 
 tion, 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
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 165 
 
 Richard had recognised 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 under- 
 stand ? " 
 
 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
 
 1 66 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 his breath. His face was colourless, 
 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 Deny- 
 ven ; " 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.
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 167 
 
 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, hesi- 
 tated perhaps a dozen seconds, and turning 
 abruptly on his heel w r alked down the street 
 without a stagger. 
 
 "I think his legs is shut off from the 
 rest of his body by water-tight compart- 
 ments," remarked Denyven, regarding Tor- 
 rini's steady gait with mingled amusement 
 and envy. " Are you hurt, sir ? " 
 
 "Only a bit of a scratch over the heye," 
 replied Richard, with a laugh. 
 
 " As I hobserved just now to Mr. Stevens, 
 sir, there 's a pair of us ! "
 
 1 68 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 AFTER a turn through the shops to 
 assure himself that order was re- 
 stored, 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. 
 
 " O 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
 
 THE STILIAVATER TRAGEDY. 169 
 
 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 dis- 
 tracted 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
 
 1 70 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 sup- 
 pose. Things had gone wrong generally. 
 But if you are going to scold me, Mar- 
 garet, I would rather have some more 
 arnica." 
 
 " I am not going to scold ; but while you 
 stood there, so white and terrible, so un- 
 like yourself, I felt that I did not know 
 you, Richard. Of course you had to defend
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 171 
 
 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 con- 
 stable, 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 dis- 
 charge 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 ex- 
 ample, 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 Mar- 
 garet. l( The judgment of these rough, un-
 
 1J2 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 instructed 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 under- 
 stand 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 humi- 
 lity, and then the conversation drifted off 
 into half-breathed nothings, which, though 
 they were satisfactory enough to these two, 
 would have made a third person yawn. 
 
 The occurrence at Slocum's Yard was 
 hotly discussed that night at the Stillwater
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 173 
 
 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 direct- 
 ness 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 favour. 
 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 Shack - 
 ford 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," de- 
 clared Dexter. 
 
 " Well, ye might," replied Michael Hen- 
 nessey. "Look at the lad's eye, and the 
 muscles of him. He stands on his two legs 
 like a monumint, so he does."
 
 174 TH E STILLWATEB TRAGEDY. 
 
 "Never saw a monument with two legs, 
 Mike." 
 
 ' Didn't ye ? Wait till ye 're layin' at the 
 foot of one. But ye '11 wait many a day, 
 me boy. Ye '11 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 on 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 Tor- 
 rini had a weapon, and that mad strength
 
 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 175 
 
 that comes to some folks with drink. If 
 Shackford hadn't taken a neat twist on the 
 neckcloth, 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. Shack- 
 ford spoke to him fair, and told him to go, 
 and when he didn't go Shackford put him 
 out; and he put him out handsomely, 
 'with neatness and despatch,' 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 change 
 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 Benyven. 
 
 "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."
 
 176 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 " 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 Dur- 
 gin. "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 '11 
 find yourself some day henlarging your busi- 
 ness." 
 
 Durgin pushed back his stool. 
 
 " Gentlemen ! gentlemen ! " interposed 
 Mr. Snelling, appearing from behind the 
 bar with a lemon-squeezer in his hand, 
 " we '11 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 coloured, "to be drunk at 
 the expense of the house. Name your taps, 
 gentlemen."
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 177 
 
 " 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 '11 take a sup out of 
 that high-showldered bottle which you kape 
 under the counter for the gentlefolks 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 after- 
 noon 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 '11 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 
 
 VOL. I. M
 
 178 THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 
 
 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 felspar. " 
 
 " You are like the most of us, not the
 
 THE STILL WATER TRAGEDY. 179 
 
 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 diffi- 
 culty," said Dexter, "except Peters. Tor- 
 rini 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 com-
 
 l8o THE STILLWATEB TRAGEDY. 
 
 ment, 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. 
 
 END OF VOL. I. 
 
 Sm&ersttg IBress : 
 
 u CONSTABLE, PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY.
 
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