The Mark Of Cain

“By gad, I can see every pip on the cards!” cried Martin.

“Of course you can; and if you had the art of correcting fortune, you could make use of what you see. At the least you would know whether to take a card or stand.”

“I didn’t,” said the wretched Cranley. “How on earth was I to know that the infernal fool of a waiter would spill the liquor there, and give you a chance against me?”

“You spilt the liquor yourself,” Barton answered coolly, “when I took away your cigarette-case. I saw you passing the cards over the surface of it, which anyone can see for himself is a perfect mirror. I tried to warn you – for I did not want a row – when I said the case ‘seemed to bring you luck.’ But you would not be warned; and when the cigarette-case trick was played out, you fell back on the old dodge with the drop of water. Will anyone else convince himself that I am right before I let Mr. Cranley go?”

One or two men passed the cards, as they had seen the Banker do, over the spilt soda water.

“It’s a clear case,” they said. “Leave him alone.”

Barton slackened his grip of Cranley’s hands, and for some seconds they lay as if paralyzed on the table before him, white and cold, with livid circles round the wrists. The man’s face was deadly pale, and wet with perspiration. He put out a trembling hand to the glass of brandy-and-water that stood beside him; the class rattled against his teeth as he drained all the contents at a gulp.

“You shall hear from me,” he grumbled, and, with an inarticulate muttering of threats he made his way, stumbling and catching at chairs, to the door. When he had got outside, he leaned against the wall, like a drunken man, and then shambled across the landing into a reading-room. It was empty, and Cranley fell into a large easy-chair, where he lay crumpled up, rather than sat, for perhaps ten minutes, holding his hand against his heart.

“They talk about having the courage of one’s opinions. Confound it! Why haven’t I the nerve for my character? Hang this heart of mine! Will it never stop thumping?”

He sat up and looked about him, then rose and walked toward the table; but his head began to swim, and his eyes to darken; so he fell back again in his seat, feeling drowsy and beaten. Mechanically he began to move the hand that hung over the arm of his low chair, and it encountered a newspaper which had fallen on the floor. He lifted it automatically and without thought: it was the Times. Perhaps to try his eyes, and see if they served him again after his collapse, he ran them down the columns of the advertisements.

Suddenly something caught his attention; his whole lax figure grew braced again as he read a passage steadily through more than twice or thrice. When he had quite mastered this, he threw down the paper and gave a low whistle.

“So the old boy’s dead,” he reflected; “and that drunken tattooed ass and his daughter are to come in for the money and the mines! They’ll be clever that find him, and I shan’t give them his address! What luck some men have!”

Here he fell into deep thought, his brows and lips working eagerly.

“I’ll do it,” he said at last, cutting the advertisement out of the paper with a penknife. “It isn’t often a man has a chance to star in this game of existence. I’ve lost all my own social Lives: one in that business at Oxford, one in the row at Ali Musjid, and the third went – to-night. But I’ll star. Every sinner should desire a new Life,” he added with a sneer.*

* “Starring” is paying for a new “Life” at Pool.

He rose, steady enough now, walked to the door, paused and listened, heard the excited voices in the card-room still discussing him, slunk down-stairs, took his hat and greatcoat, and swaggered past the porter. Mechanically he felt in his pocket, as he went out of the porch, for his cigarette-case; and he paused at the little fount of fire at the door.

He was thinking that he would never light a cigarette there again.

Presently he remembered, and swore. He had left his case on the table of the card-room, where Barton had laid it down, and he had not the impudence to send back for it.

“Vile damnum!” he muttered (for he had enjoyed a classical education), and so disappeared in the frosty night.

CHAPTER II. – In the Snow

The foul and foggy night of early February was descending, some weeks after the scene in the Cockpit, on the river and the town. Night was falling from the heavens; or rather, night seemed to be rising from the earth – steamed up, black, from the dingy trampled snow of the streets, and from the vapors that swam above the squalid houses. There was coal-smoke and a taste of lucifer matches in the air. In the previous night there had been such a storm as London seldom sees; the powdery, flying snow had been blown for many hours before a tyrannous northeast gale, and had settled down, like dust in a neglected chamber, over every surface of the city. Drifts and “snow-wreathes,” as northern folk say, were lying in exposed places, in squares and streets, as deep as they lie when sheep are “smoored” on the sides of Sundhope or Penchrist in the desolate Border-land. All day London had been struggling under her cold winding-sheet, like a feeble, feverish patient trying to throw off a heavy white counterpane. Now the counterpane was dirty enough. The pavements were three inches deep in a rich greasy deposit of mud and molten ice. Above the round glass or iron coverings of coal-cellars the foot-passengers slipped, “ricked” their backs, and swore as they stumbled, if they did not actually fall down, in the filth. Those who were in haste, and could afford it, travelled, at fancy prices, in hansoms with two horses driven tandem. The snow still lay comparatively white on the surface of the less-frequented thoroughfares, with straight shining black marks where wheels had cut their way.

At intervals in the day the fog had fallen blacker than night. Down by the waterside the roads were deep in a mixture of a weak gray-brown or coffee color. Beside one of the bridges in Chelsea, an open slope leads straight to the stream, and here, in the afternoon – for a late start was made – the carts of the Vestry had been led, and loads of slush that had choked up the streets in the more fashionable parts of the town had been unladen into the river. This may not be the most; scientific of sanitary modes of clearing the streets and squares, but it was the way that recommended itself to the wisdom of the Contractor. In the early evening the fog had lightened a little, but it fell sadly again, and grew so thick that the bridge was lost in mist half-way across the river, like the arches of that fatal bridge beheld by Mirza in his Vision. The masts of the vessels moored on the near bank disappeared from view, and only a red lamp or two shone against the blackness of the hulks. From the public-house at the corner – the Hit or Miss– streamed a fan-shaped flood of light, soon choked by the fog.

Out of the muddy twilight of a street that runs at right angles to the river, a cart came crawling; its high-piled white load of snow was faintly visible before the brown horses (they were yoked tandem) came into view. This cart was driven down to the water-edge, and was there upturned, with much shouting and cracking of whips on the part of the men engaged, and with a good deal of straining, slipping, and stumbling on the side of the horses.

One of the men jumped down, and fumbled at the iron pins which kept the backboard of the cart in its place.

“Blarmme, Bill,” he grumbled, “if the blessed pins ain’t froze.”

Here he put his wet fingers in his mouth, blowing on them afterward, and smacking his arms across his breast to restore the circulation.

The comrade addressed as Bill merely stared speechlessly as he stood at the smoking head of the leader, and the other man tugged again at the pin.

“It won’t budge,” he cried at last. “Just run into the Hit or Miss at the corner, mate, and borrow a hammer; and you might get a pint o’ hot beer when ye’re at it. Here’s fourpence. I was with three that found a quid in the Mac,[1 - A quid in the Mac– a sovereign in the street-scrapings. called Mac from Macadam, and employed as mortar in building eligible freehold tenements.] end of last week; here’s the last of it.”

He fumbled in his pocket, but his hands were so numb that he could scarcely capture the nimble fourpence. Why should the “nimble fourpence” have the monopoly of agility?

“I’m Blue Ribbon, Tommy, don’t yer know,” said Bill, with regretful sullenness. His ragged great-coat, indeed, was decorated with the azure badge of avowed and total abstinence.

“Blow yer blue ribbon! Hold on where ye are, and I’ll bring the bloomin’ hammer myself.”

Thus growling, Tommy strode indifferent through the snow, his legs protected by bandages of straw ropes. Presently he reappeared in the warmer yellow of the light that poured through the windows of the old public-house. He was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, which he then thrust into the deeps of his pockets, hugging a hammer to his body under his armpit.

“A little hot beer would do yer bloomin’ temper a deal more good than ten yards o’ blue ribbon at sixpence. Blue ruin’s more in my line,” observed Thomas, epigram-matically, much comforted by his refreshment. Aid with two well-directed taps he knocked the pins out of their sockets, and let down the backboard of the cart.

Bill, uncomforted by ale, sulkily jerked the horses forward; the cart was tilted up, and the snow tumbled out, partly into the shallow shore-water, partly on to the edge of the slope.

“Ullo!” cried Tommy suddenly. “E’re’s an old coat-sleeve a sticking out o’ the snow.”

“‘Alves!” exclaimed Bill, with a noble eye on the main chance.

“‘Alves! of course, ‘alves. Ain’t we on the same lay,” replied the chivalrous Tommy. Then he cried, “Lord preserve us, mate; there’s a cove in the coat!”

He ran forward, and clutched the elbow of the sleeve which stood up stiffly above the frozen mound of lumpy snow. He might well have thought at first that the sleeve was empty, such a very stick of bone and skin was the arm he grasped within it.

“Here, Bill, help us to dig him out, poor chap!”

“Is he dead?” asked Bill, leaving the horses’ heads.

“Dead! he’s bound to be dead, under all that weight. But how the dickens did he get into the cart? Guess we didn’t shovel him in, eh; we’d have seen him?”

By this time the two men had dragged a meagre corpse out of the snow heap. A rough worn old pilot-coat, a shabby pair of corduroy trousers, and two broken boots through which the toes could be seen peeping ruefully, were all the visible raiment of the body. The clothes lay in heavy swathes and folds over the miserable bag of bones that had once been a tall man. The peaked blue face was half hidden by a fell of iron-gray hair, and a grizzled beard hung over the breast.

The two men stood for some moments staring at the corpse. A wretched woman in a thin gray cotton dress had come down from the bridge, and shivered beside the body for a moment.

“He’s a goner,” was her criticism. “I wish I was.”

With this aspiration she shivered back into the fog again, walking on her unknown way. By this time a dozen people had started up from nowhere, and were standing in a tight ring round the body. The behavior of the people was typical of London gazers. No one made any remark, or offered any suggestion; they simply stared with all their eyes and souls, absorbed in the unbought excitement of the spectacle. They were helpless, idealess, interested and unconcerned.

“Run and fetch a peeler, Bill,” said Tommy at last.

“Peeler be hanged! Bloomin’ likely I am to find a peeler. Fetch him yourself.”

“Sulky devil you are,” answered Tommy, who was certainly of milder mood; whereas Bill seemed a most unalluring example of the virtue of Temperance. It is true that he had only been “Blue Ribbon” since the end of his Christmas bout – that is, for nearly a fortnight – and Virtue, a precarious tenant, was not yet comfortable in her new lodgings.

Before Tommy returned from his quest the dusk had deepened into night The crowd round the body in the pea-coat had grown denser, and it might truly be said that “the more part knew not wherefore they had come together.” The centre of interest was not a fight, they were sure, otherwise the ring would have been swaying this way and that. Neither was it a dispute between a cabman and his fare: there was no sound of angry repartees. It might be a drunken woman, or a man in a fit, or a lost child. So the outer circle of spectators, who saw nothing, waited, and patiently endured till the moment of revelation should arrive. Respectable people who passed only glanced at the gathering; respectable people may wonder, but they never do find out the mystery within a London crowd. On the extreme fringe of the mob were some amateurs who had just been drinking in the Hit or Miss. They were noisy, curious, and impatient.

At last Tommy arrived with two policeman, who, acting on his warning, had brought with them a stretcher. He had told them briefly how the dead man was found in the cart-load of snow.