The Stillwater Tragedy

The Stillwater Tragedy

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Stillwater Tragedy, by Thomas
Bailey Aldrich (#8 in our series by Thomas Bailey Aldrich)
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Title: The Stillwater Tragedy
Author: Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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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