The Stillwater Tragedy (Mystery Classics Series). Thomas Bailey Aldrich
he met William Durgin returning to work. The steam-whistle had sounded the call, and there was no time for exchange of words; so Richard gave his comrade a bright nod and passed by. Durgin turned and stared after him.
"Looks as if Slocum had taken him on; but it never can be as apprentice; he wouldn't dare do it."
Mr. Shackford had nearly finished his frugal dinner when Richard entered. "If you can't hit it to be in at your meals," said Mr. Shackford, helping himself absently to the remaining chop, "perhaps you had better stop away altogether."
"I can do that now, cousin," replied Richard sunnily. "I have engaged with Slocum."
The old man laid down his knife and fork.
"With Slocum! A Shackford a miserable marble-chipper!"
There was so little hint of the aristocrat in Lemuel Shackford's sordid life and person that no one suspected him of even self-esteem. He went as meanly dressed as a tramp, and as careless of contemporary criticism; yet clear down in his liver, or somewhere in his anatomy, he nourished an odd abstract pride in the family Shackford. Heaven knows why! To be sure, it dated far back; its women had always been virtuous, and its men, if not always virtuous, had always been ship-captains. But beyond this the family had never amounted to anything, and now there was so very little left of it. For Richard as Richard Lemuel cared nothing; for Richard as a Shackford he had a chaotic feeling that defied analysis and had never before risen to the surface. It was therefore with a disgust entirely apart from the hatred of Slocum or regard for Richard that the old man exclaimed, "A Shackford a miserable marble-chipper!"
"That is better than hanging around the village with my hands in my pockets. Isn't it?"
"I don't know that anybody has demanded that you should hang around the village."
"I ought to go away, you mean? But I have found work here, and I might not find it elsewhere."
"Stillwater is not the place to begin life in. It's the place to go away from, and come back to."
"Well, I have come back."
"And how? With one shirt and a lot of bad sailor habits."
"My one shirt is my only very bad habit," said Richard, with a laugh,--he could laugh now,--"and I mean to get rid of that."
Mr. Shackford snapped his fingers disdainfully.
"You ought to have stuck to the sea; that's respectable. In ten years you might have risen to be master of a bark; that would have been honorable. You might have gone down in a gale,--you probably would,--and that would have been fortunate. But a stone-cutter! You can understand," growled Mr. Shackford, reaching out for his straw hat, which he put on and crushed over his brows, "I don't keep a boarding-house for Slocum's hands."
"Oh, I'm far from asking it!" cried Richard. "I am thankful for the two nights' shelter I have had."
"That's some of your sarcasm, I suppose," said Mr. Shackford, half turning, with his hands on the door-knob.
"No, it is some of my sincerity. I am really obliged to you. You weren't very cordial, to be sure, but I did not deserve cordiality."
"You have figured that out correctly."
"I want to begin over again, you see, and start fair."
"Then begin by dropping Slocum."
"You have not given me a chance to tell you what the arrangement is. However, it's irrevocable."
"I don't want to hear. I don't care a curse, so long as it is an arrangement," and Mr. Shackford hurried out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
Then Richard, quite undisturbed by his cousin's unreasonableness, sat himself down to eat the last meal he was ever to eat under that roof,--a feat which his cousin's appetite had rendered comparatively easy.
While engaged in this, Richard resolved in his mind several questions as to his future abode. He could not reconcile his thought to any of the workingmen's boarding-houses, of which there were five or six in the slums of the village, where the doorways were greasy, and women flitted about in the hottest weather with thick woolen shawls over their heads. Yet his finances did not permit him to aspire to lodgings much more decent. If he could only secure a small room somewhere in a quiet neighborhood. Possibly Mrs. Durgin would let him have a chamber in her cottage. He was beginning life over again, and it struck him as nearly an ideal plan to begin it on the identical spot where he had, in a manner, made his first start. Besides, there was William Durgin for company, when the long nights of the New England winter set in. The idea smiled so pleasantly in Richard's fancy that he pushed the plate away from him impatiently, and picked up his hat which lay on the floor beside the chair.
That evening he moved from the Shackford house to Mrs. Durgin's cottage in Cross Street. It was not an imposing ceremony. With a small brown-paper parcel under his arm, he walked from one threshold to the other, and the thing was done.
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