The Stillwater Tragedy by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

T >> Thomas Bailey Aldrich >> The Stillwater Tragedy

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

This eBook was created by Charles Aldarondo (pg@aldarondo.net).

The Stillwater Tragedy

By Thomas Bailey Aldrich

I

It is close upon daybreak. The great wall of pines and hemlocks
that keep off the west wind from Stillwater stretches black and
indeterminate against the sky. At intervals a dull, metallic sound,
like the guttural twang of a violin string, rises form the
frog-invested swamp skirting the highway. Suddenly the birds stir in
their nests over there in the woodland, and break into that wild
jargoning chorus with which they herald the advent of a new day. In
the apple-orchards and among the plum-trees of the few gardens in
Stillwater, the wrens and the robins and the blue-jays catch up the
crystal crescendo, and what a melodious racket they make of it with
their fifes and flutes and flageolets!

The village lies in a trance like death. Possibly not a soul hears
this music, unless it is the watchers at the bedside of Mr. Leonard
Tappleton, the richest man in town, who has lain dying these three
days, and cannot last until sunrise. Or perhaps some mother, drowsily
hushing her wakeful baby, pauses a moment and listens vacantly to the
birds singing. But who else?

The hubbub suddenly ceases,--ceases as suddenly as it began,--and
all is still again in the woodland. But it is not so dark as before.
A faint glow of white light is discernible behind the ragged line of
the tree-tops. The deluge of the darkness is receding from the face
of the earth, as the mighty waters receded of old.

The roofs and tall factory chimneys of Stillwater are slowly
taking shape in the gloom. Is that a cemetery coming into view
yonder, with its ghostly architecture of obelisks and broken columns
and huddled head-stones? No, that is only Slocum's Marble Yard, with
the finished and unfinished work heaped up like snowdrifts,--a
cemetery in embryo. Here and there in an outlying farm a lantern
glimmers in the barn-yard: the cattle are having their fodder
betimes. Scarlet-capped chanticleer gets himself on the nearest
rail-fence and lifts up his rancorous voice like some irate old
cardinal launching the curse of Rome. Something crawls swiftly along
the gray of the serpentine turnpike,--a cart, with the driver lashing
a jaded horse. A quick wind goes shivering by, and is lost in the
forest.

Now a narrow strip of two-colored gold stretches along the
horizon.

Stillwater is gradually coming to its senses. The sun has begun to
twinkle on the gilt cross of the Catholic chapel and make itself
known to the doves in the stone belfry of the South Church. The
patches of cobweb that here and there cling tremulously to the coarse
grass of the inundated meadows have turned into silver nets, and the
mill-pond--it will be steel-blue later--is as smooth and white as if
it had been paved with one vast unbroken slab out of Slocum's Marble
Yard. Through a row of button-woods on the northern skirt of the
village is seen a square, lap-streaked building, painted a
disagreeable brown, and surrounded on three sides by a platform,--one
of seven or eight similar stations strung like Indian heads on a
branch thread of the Great Sagamore Railway.

Listen! That is the jingle of the bells on the baker's cart as it
begins its rounds. From innumerable chimneys the curdled smoke gives
evidence that the thrifty housewife--or, what is rarer in Stillwater,
the hired girl--has lighted the kitchen fire.

The chimney-stack of one house at the end of a small court--the
last house on the easterly edge of the village, and standing quite
alone--sends up no smoke. Yet the carefully trained ivy over the
porch, and the lemon verbena in a tub at the foot of the steps,
intimate that the place is not unoccupied. Moreover, the little
schooner which acts as weather-cock on one of the gables, and is now
heading due west, has a new top-sail. It is a story-and-a-half
cottage, with a large expanse of roof, which, covered with porous,
unpainted shingles, seems to repel the sunshine that now strikes full
upon it. The upper and lower blinds on the main building, as well as
those on the extensions, are tightly closed. The sun appears to beat
in vain at the casement sof this silent house, which has a curiously
sullen and defiant air, as if it had desperately and successfully
barricaded itself against the approach of morning; yet if one were
standing in the room that leads from the bed-chamber on the
ground-floor--the room with the latticed window--one would see a ray
of light thrust through a chink of the shutters, and pointing like a
human finger at an object which lies by the hearth.

This finger, gleaming, motionless, and awful in its precision,
points to the body of old Mr. Lemuel Shackford, who lies there dead
in his night-dress, with a gash across his forehead.

In the darkness of that summer night a deed darker than the night
itself had been done in Stillwater.

II

That morning, when Michael Hennessey's girl Mary--a girl sixteen
years old--carried the can of milk to the rear door of the silent
house, she was nearly a quarter of hour later than usual, and looked
forward to being soundly rated.

"He's up and been waiting for it," she said to herself, observing
the scullery door ajar. "Won't I ketch it! It's him for growling and
snapping at a body, and it's me for always being before or behind
time, bad luck to me. There's no plazing him."

Mary pushed back the door and passed through the kitchen, serving
herself all the while to meet the objurgations which she supposed
were lying in wait for her. The sunshine was blinding without, but
sifted through the green jalousies, it made a gray, crepuscular light
within. As the girl approached the table, on which a plate with knife
and fork had been laid for breakfast, she noticed, somewhat
indistinctly at first, a thin red line running obliquely across the
floor from the direction of the sitting-room and ending near the
stove, where it had formed a small pool. Mary stopped short, scarcely
conscious why, and peered instinctively into the adjoining apartment.
Then, with a smothered cry, she let fall the milk-can, and a dozen
white rivulets, in strange contrast to that one dark red line which
first startled her, went meandering over the kitchen floor. With her
eyes riveted upon some object in the next room, the girl retreated
backward slowly and heavily dragging one foot after the other, until
she reached the gallery door; then she turned swiftly, and plunged
into the street.

Twenty minutes later, every man, woman, and child in Stillwater
knew that old Mr. Shackford had been murdered.

Mary Hennessey had to tell her story a hundred times during the
morning, for each minute brought to Michael's tenement a fresh
listener hungry for the details at first hand.

"How was it, Molly? Tell a body, dear!"

"Don't be asking me!" cried Molly, pressing her palms to her eyes
as if to shut out the sight, but taking all the while a secret creepy
satisfaction in living the scene over again. "It was kinder dark in
the other room, and there he was, laying in his night-gownd, with his
face turned towards me, so, looking mighty severe-like, jest as if he
was a-going to say, 'It's late with the milk ye are, ye hussy!'--a
way he had of spaking."

"But he didn't spake, Molly darlin'?"

"Niver a word. He was stone dead, don't you see. It was that still
you could hear me heart beat, saving there wasn't a drop of beat in
it. I let go the can, sure, and then I backed out, with me eye on 'im
all the while, afeard to death that he would up and spake them
words."

"The pore child! for the likes of her to be wakin' up a murthered
man in the mornin'!"

There was little or no work done that day in Stillwater outside
the mills, and they were not running full handed. A number of men
from the Miantowona Iron Works and Slocum's Yard--Slocum employed
some seventy or eighty hands--lounged about the streets in their
blouses, or stood in knots in front of the tavern, smoking short clay
pipes. Not an urchin put in an appearance at the small red brick
building on the turnpike. Mr. Pinkham, the school-master, waited an
hour for the recusants, then turned the key in the lock and went
home.

Dragged-looking women, with dishcloth or dustpan in hand, stood in
door-ways or leaned from windows, talking in subdued voices with
neighbors on the curb-stone. In a hundred far-away cities the news of
the suburban tragedy had already been read and forgotten; but here
the horror stayed.

There was a constantly changing crowd gathered in front of the
house in Welch's Court. An inquest was being held in the room
adjoining the kitchen. The court, which ended at the gate of the
cottage, was fringed for several yards on each side by rows of
squalid, wondering children, who understood it that Coroner Whidden
was literally to sit on the dead body,--Mr. Whidden, a limp,
inoffensive little man, who would not have dared to sit down on a
fly. He had passed, pallid and perspiring, to the scene of his
perfunctory duties.

The result of the investigation was awaited with feverish
impatience by the people outside. Mr. Shackford had not been a
popular man; he had been a hard, avaricious, passionate man, holding
his own way remorselessly. He had been the reverse of popular, but he
had long been a prominent character in Stillwater, because of his
wealth, his endless lawsuits, and his eccentricity, an illustration
of which was his persistence in living entirely alone in the isolated
and dreary old house, that was henceforth to be inhabited by his
shadow. Not his shadow alone, however, for it was now remembered that
the premises were already held in fee by another phantasmal tenant.
At a period long anterior to this, one Lydia Sloper, a widow, had
died an unexplained death under that same roof. The coincidence
struck deeply into the imaginative portion of Stillwater. "The Widow
Sloper and old Shackford have made a match of it," remarked a local
humorist, in a grimmer vain than customary. Two ghosts had now set up
housekeeping, as it were, in the stricken mansion, and what might not
be looked for in the way of spectral progeny!

It appeared to the crowd in the lane that the jury were
unconscionably long in arriving at a decision, and when the decision
was at length reached it gave but moderate satisfaction. After a
spendthrift waste of judicial mind the jury had decided that "the
death of Lemuel Shackford was caused by a blow on the left temple,
inflicted with some instrument not discoverable, in the hands of some
person or persons unknown."

"We knew that before," grumbled a voice in the crowd, when, to
relieve public suspense, Lawyer Perkins--a long, lank man, with
stringy black hair--announced the verdict from the doorstep.

The theory of suicide had obtained momentary credence early in the
morning, and one or two still clung to it with the tenacity that
characterizes persons who entertain few ideas. To accept this theory
it was necessary to believe that Mr. Shackford had ingeniously hidden
the weapon after striking himself dead with a single blow. No, it was
not suicide. So far from intending to take his own life, Mr.
Shackford, it appeared, had made rather careful preparations to live
that day. The breakfast-table had been laid over night, the coals
left ready for kindling in the Franklin stove, and a kettle, filled
with water to be heated for his tea or coffee, stood on the hearth.

Two facts had sharply demonstrated themselves: first, that Mr.
Shackford had been murdered; and, second, that the spur to the crime
had been the possession of a sum of money, which the deceased was
supposed to keep in a strong-box in his bedroom. The padlock had been
wrenched open, and the less valuable contents of the chest, chiefly
papers, scattered over the carpet. A memorandum among the papers
seemed to specify the respective sums in notes and gold that had been
deposited in the box. A document of some kind had been torn into
minute pieces and thrown into the waste-basket. On close scrutiny a
word or two here and there revealed the fact that the document was of
a legal character. The fragments were put into an envelope and given
in charge of Mr. Shackford's lawyer, who placed seals on that and on
the drawers of an escritoire which stood in the corner and contained
other manuscript.

The instrument with which the fatal blow had been dealt--for the
autopsy showed that there had been but one blow--was not only not
discoverable, but the fashion of it defied conjecture. The shape of
the wound did not indicate the use of any implement known to the
jurors, several of whom were skilled machinists. The wound was an
inch and three quarters in length and very deep at the extremities;
in the middle in scarcely penetrated to the cranium. So peculiar a
cut could not have been produced with the claw part of a hammer,
because the claw is always curved, and the incision was straight. A
flat claw, such as is used in opening packing-cases, was suggested. A
collection of the several sizes manufactured was procured, but none
corresponded with the wound; they were either too wide or too narrow.
Moreover, the cut was as thin as the blade of a case-knife.

"That was never done by any tool in these parts," declared
Stevens, the foreman of the finishing shop at Slocum's.

The assassin or assassins had entered by the scullery door, the
simple fastening of which, a hook and staple, had been broken. There
were footprints in the soft clay path leading from the side gate to
the stone step; but Mary Hennessey had so confused and obliterated
the outlines that now it was impossible accurately to measure them. A
half-burned match was found under the sink,--evidently thrown there
by the burglars. It was of a kind known as the safety-match, which
can be ignited only by friction on a strip of chemically prepared
paper glued to the box. As no box of this description was discovered,
and as all the other matches in the house were of a different make,
the charred splinter was preserved. The most minute examination
failed to show more than this. The last time Mr. Shackford had been
seen alive was at six o'clock the previous evening.

Who had done the deed?

Tramps! answered Stillwater, with one voice, though Stillwater lay
somewhat out of the natural highway, and the tramp--that bitter
blossom of civilization whose seed was blown to us from over
seas--was not then so common by the New England roadsides as he
became five or six years later. But it was intolerable not to have a
theory; it was that or none, for conjecture turned to no one in the
village. To be sure, Mr. Shackford had been in litigation with
several of the corporations, and had had legal quarrels with more
than one of his neighbors; but Mr. Shackford had never been
victorious in any of these contests, and the incentive of revenge was
wanting to explain the crime. Besides, it was so clearly robbery.

Though the gathering around the Shackford house had reduced itself
to half a dozen idlers, and the less frequented streets had resumed
their normal aspect of dullness, there was a strange, electric
quality in the atmosphere. The community was in that state of
suppressed agitation and suspicion which no word adequately
describes. The slightest circumstance would have swayed it to the
belief in any man's guilt; and, indeed, there were men in Stillwater
quite capable of disposing of a fellow-creature for a much smaller
reward than Mr. Shackford had held out. In spite of the tramp theory,
a harmless tin-peddler, who had not passed through the place for
weeks, was dragged from his glittering cart that afternoon, as he
drove smilingly into town, and would have been roughly handled if Mr.
Richard Shackford, a cousin of the deceased, had not interfered.

As the day wore on, the excitement deepened in intensity, though
the expression of it became nearly reticent. It was noticed that the
lamps throughout the village were lighted an hour earlier than usual.
A sense of insecurity settled upon Stillwater with the falling
twilight,--that nameless apprehension which is possibly more trying
to the nerves than tangible danger. When a man is smitten
inexplicably, as if by a bodiless hand stretched out of a
cloud,--when the red slayer vanishes like a mist and leaves no
faintest trace of his identity,--the mystery shrouding the deed
presently becomes more appalling than the deed itself. There is
something paralyzing in the thought of an invisible hand somewhere
ready to strike at your life, or at some life dearer than your own.
Whose hand, and where is it? Perhaps it passes you your coffee at
breakfast; perhaps you have hired it to shovel the snow off your
sidewalk; perhaps it has brushed against you in the crowd; or may be
you have dropped a coin into the fearful palm at a street corner. Ah,
the terrible unseen hand that stabs your imagination,--this immortal
part of you which is a hundred times more sensitive than your poor
perishable body!

In the midst of situations the most solemn and tragic there often
falls a light purely farcical in its incongruity. Such a gleam was
unconsciously projected upon the present crisis by Mr. Bodge, better
known in the village as Father Bodge. Mr. Bodge was stone deaf,
naturally stupid, and had been nearly moribund for thirty years with
asthma. Just before night-fall he had crawled, in his bewildered,
wheezy fashion, down to the tavern, where he found a somber crowd in
the bar-room. Mr. Bodge ordered his mug of beer, and sat sipping it,
glancing meditatively from time to time over the pewter rim at the
mute assembly. Suddenly he broke out: "S'pose you've heerd that old
Shackford's ben murdered."

So the sun went down on Stillwater. Again the great wall of pines
and hemlocks made a gloom against the sky. The moon rose from behind
the tree-tops, frosting their ragged edges, and then sweeping up to
the zenith hung serenely above the world, as if there were never a
crime, or a tear, or a heart-break in it all.

III

On the afternoon of the following day Mr. Shackford was duly
buried. The funeral, under the direction of Mr. Richard Shackford,
who acted as chief mourner and was sole mourner by right of kinship,
took place in profound silence. The carpenters, who had lost a day on
Bishop's new stables, intermitted their sawing and hammering while
the services were in progress; the steam was shut off in the
iron-mills, and no clinking of the chisel was heard in the marble
yard for an hour, during which many of the shops had their shutters
up. Then, when all was over, the imprisoned fiend in the boilers gave
a piercing shriek; the leather bands slipped on the revolving drums,
the spindles leaped into life again, and the old order of things was
reinstated,--outwardly, but not in effect.

In general, when the grave closes over a man his career is ended.
But Mr. Shackford was never so much alive as after they had buried
him. Never before had he filled so large a place in the public eye.
Though invisible, he sat at every fireside. Until the manner of his
death had been made clear, his ubiquitous presence was not to be
exorcised. On the morning of the memorable day a reward of one
hundred dollars--afterwards increased to five hundred, at the
insistence of Mr. Shackford's cousin--had been offered by the board
of selectmen for the arrest and conviction of the guilty party.
Beyond this and the unsatisfactory inquest, the authorities had done
nothing, and were plainly not equal to the situation.

When it was stated, the night of the funeral, that a professional
person was coming to Stillwater to look into the case, the
announcement was received with a breath of relief.

The person thus vaguely described appeared on the spot the next
morning. To mention the name of Edward Taggett is to mention a name
well known to the detective force of the great city lying sixty miles
southwest of Stillwater. Mr. Taggett's arrival sent such a thrill of
expectancy through the village that Mr. Leonard Tappleton, whose
obsequies occurred this day, made his exit nearly unobserved. Yet
there was little in Mr. Taggett's physical aspect calculated to stir
either expectation or enthusiasm: a slender man of about twenty-six,
but not looking it, with overhanging brown mustache, sparse
side-whiskers, eyes of no definite color, and faintly accentuated
eyebrows. He spoke precisely, and with a certain unembarrassed
hesitation, as persons do who have two thoughts to one word,--if
there are such persons. You might have taken him for a physician, or
a journalist, or the secretary of an insurance company; but you would
never have supposed him the man who had disentangled the complicated
threads of the great Barnabee Bank defalcation.

Stillwater's confidence, which had risen into the nineties, fell
to zero at sight of him. "Is _that_ Taggett?" they asked. That
was Taggett; and presently his influence began to be felt like a
sea-turn. The three Dogberrys of the watch were dispatched on secret
missions, and within an hour it was ferreted out that a man in a cart
had been seen driving furiously up the turnpike the morning after the
murder. This was an agricultural district, the road led to a market
town, and teams going by in the early dawn were the rule and not the
exception; but on that especial morning a furiously driven cart was
significant. Jonathan Beers, who farmed the Jenks land, had heard the
wheels and caught an indistinct glimpse of the vehicle as he was
feeding the cattle, but with a reticence purely rustic had not been
moved to mention the circumstance before.

"Taggett has got a clew," said Stillwater under its breath.

By noon Taggett had got the man, cart and all. But it was only
Blufton's son Tom, of South Millville, who had started in hot haste
that particular morning to secure medical service for his wife, of
which she had sorely stood in need, as two tiny girls in a willow
cradle in South Millville now bore testimony.

"I haven't been cutting down the population _much,"_ said
Blufton, with his wholesome laugh.

Thomas Blufton was well known and esteemed in Stillwater, but if
the crime had fastened itself upon him it would have given something
like popular satisfaction.

In the course of the ensuing forty-eight hours four or five tramps
were overhauled as having been in the neighborhood at the time of the
tragedy; but they each had a clean story, and were let go. Then one
Durgin, a workman at Slocum's Yard, was called upon to explain some
half-washed-out red stains on his overalls, which he did. He had
tightened the hoops on a salt-pork barrel for Mr. Shackford several
days previous; the red paint on the head of the barrel was fresh, and
had come off on his clothes. Dr. Weld examined the spots under a
microscope, and pronounced them paint. It was manifest that Mr.
Taggett meant to go to the bottom of things.

The bar-room of the Stillwater hotel was a center of interest
these nights; not only the bar-room proper, but the adjoining
apartment, where the more exclusive guests took their seltzer-water
and looked over the metropolitan newspapers. Twice a week a social
club met here, having among its members Mr. Craggie, the postmaster,
who was supposed to have a great political future, Mr. Pinkham,
Lawyer Perkins, Mr. Whidden, and other respectable persons. The room
was at all times in some sense private, with a separate entrance from
the street, though another door, which usually stood open, connected
it with the main salon. In this was a long mahogany counter, one
section of which was covered with a sheet of zinc perforated like a
sieve, and kept constantly bright by restless caravans of lager-beer
glasses. Directly behind that end of the counter stood a Gothic
brass-mounted beer-pump, at whose faucets Mr. Snelling, the landlord,
flooded you five or six mugs in the twinkling of an eye, and raised
the vague expectation that he was about to grind out some popular
operatic air. At the left of the pump stretched a narrow mirror,
reflecting he gaily-colored wine-glasses and decanters which stood on
each other's shoulders, and held up lemons, and performed various
acrobatic feats on a shelf in front of it.

The fourth night after the funeral of Mr. Shackford, a dismal
southeast storm caused an unusual influx of idlers in both rooms.
With the rain splashing against the casements and the wind slamming
the blinds, the respective groups sat discussing in a desultory way
the only topic which could be discussed at present. There had been a
general strike among the workmen a fortnight before; but even that
had grown cold as a topic.

"That was hard on Tom Blufton," said Stevens, emptying the ashes
out of his long-stemmed clay pipe, and refilling the bowl with cut
cavendish from a jar on a shelf over his head.

Michael Hennessey sat down his beer-mug with an air of
argumentative disgust, and drew one sleeve across his glistening
beard.

"Stevens, you've as many minds as a weather-cock, jist! Didn't ye
say yerself it looked mighty black for the lad when he was took?"

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15