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The Stillwater Tragedy
By Thomas Bailey Aldrich
I
It is close upon daybreak. The great wall of pines and hemlocksthat keep off the west wind from Stillwater stretches black andindeterminate against the sky. At intervals a dull, metallic sound,like the guttural twang of a violin string, rises form thefrog-invested swamp skirting the highway. Suddenly the birds stir intheir nests over there in the woodland, and break into that wildjargoning chorus with which they herald the advent of a new day. Inthe apple-orchards and among the plum-trees of the few gardens inStillwater, the wrens and the robins and the blue-jays catch up thecrystal crescendo, and what a melodious racket they make of it withtheir fifes and flutes and flageolets!
The village lies in a trance like death. Possibly not a soul hearsthis music, unless it is the watchers at the bedside of Mr. LeonardTappleton, the richest man in town, who has lain dying these threedays, and cannot last until sunrise. Or perhaps some mother, drowsilyhushing her wakeful baby, pauses a moment and listens vacantly to thebirds singing. But who else?
The hubbub suddenly ceases,--ceases as suddenly as it began,--andall 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 ofthe tree-tops. The deluge of the darkness is receding from the faceof the earth, as the mighty waters receded of old.
The roofs and tall factory chimneys of Stillwater are slowlytaking shape in the gloom. Is that a cemetery coming into viewyonder, with its ghostly architecture of obelisks and broken columnsand huddled head-stones? No, that is only Slocum's Marble Yard, withthe finished and unfinished work heaped up like snowdrifts,--acemetery in embryo. Here and there in an outlying farm a lanternglimmers in the barn-yard: the cattle are having their fodderbetimes. Scarlet-capped chanticleer gets himself on the nearestrail-fence and lifts up his rancorous voice like some irate oldcardinal launching the curse of Rome. Something crawls swiftly alongthe gray of the serpentine turnpike,--a cart, with the driver lashinga jaded horse. A quick wind goes shivering by, and is lost in theforest.
Now a narrow strip of two-colored gold stretches along thehorizon.
Stillwater is gradually coming to its senses. The sun has begun totwinkle on the gilt cross of the Catholic chapel and make itselfknown to the doves in the stone belfry of the South Church. Thepatches of cobweb that here and there cling tremulously to the coarsegrass of the inundated meadows have turned into silver nets, and themill-pond--it will be steel-blue later--is as smooth and white as ifit had been paved with one vast unbroken slab out of Slocum's MarbleYard. Through a row of button-woods on the northern skirt of thevillage is seen a square, lap-streaked building, painted adisagreeable brown, and surrounded on three sides by a platform,--oneof seven or eight similar stations strung like Indian heads on abranch thread of the Great Sagamore Railway.
Listen! That is the jingle of the bells on the baker's cart as itbegins its rounds. From innumerable chimneys the curdled smoke givesevidence 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--thelast house on the easterly edge of the village, and standing quitealone--sends up no smoke. Yet the carefully trained ivy over theporch, and the lemon verbena in a tub at the foot of the steps,intimate that the place is not unoccupied. Moreover, the littleschooner which acts as weather-cock on one of the gables, and is nowheading due west, has a new top-sail. It is a story-and-a-halfcottage, with a large expanse of roof, which, covered with porous,unpainted shingles, seems to repel the sunshine that now strikes fullupon it. The upper and lower blinds on the main building, as well asthose on the extensions, are tightly closed. The sun appears to beatin vain at the casements of this silent house, which has a curiouslysullen and defiant air, as if it had desperately and successfullybarricaded itself against the approach of morning; yet if one werestanding in the room that leads from the bed-chamber on theground-floor--the room with the latticed window--one would see a rayof light thrust through a chink of the shutters, and pointing like ahuman 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 deadin his night-dress, with a gash across his forehead.
In the darkness of that summer night a deed darker than the nightitself had been done in Stillwater.