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The great Skene mystery
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In: Crime, Thrillers and Mystery·Novels·British Literature
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I
Forty-Five years ago, one February evening, the fog lay thick over Clapham suburb. Generated in the fat sink of Lambeth, it had come sweltering up by way of the Westminster Bridge and Kennington Roads; had poured, like smoke from a range, through the bars of the pike-gate by the church; had pressed on, rolling up the last levels of twilight in front of it, past the “Swan,” at Stockwell, and the “Bedford Arms” beyond--before each of which popular hostelries it had deployed, in order to post its pickets in a dozen of fuddled brains--and, thence shouldering its passage densely through the main channel of the High Street, had flowed out and camped itself sluggishly among the gorse bushes of the open common to the south.
Incidentally, amongst other obscene “flushings” by the way, it had entered and packed to the throat a certain White Square, which already, in that stronghold of Evangelicalism, was of sufficiently bad odour to need no reinforcement of supplementary brimstone to prove itself. Like the fisherman’s bottle, this White Square was entered by a narrow neck or gullet, through which the genie of viciousness could compress itself into an inadequate house room, or thence issue to expand into proportions which were a menace to its neighbourhood. Thieves, harlots, and low Irish rapparees formed the bulk of its population: costers, and a drunken washerwoman or two, were its élite. How Mother Carey, with at least her better traditions, had drifted into its fastnesses, let the recording angel note. It was sacred from the police.
Mother Carey was certainly White Square’s most respectable unit--a one-eyed queen among the blind. She rented an entire tenement, in place of the fraction with which the most of her compeers must be content; she enjoyed an “independence” (paid, quarterly, through a lawyer, for value received); she had descended, in a cloud, from the hallowed mysteries of the tu-tu and the dancing sandal. She was a superannuated coryphée, in fact, and, save for the redeeming grace of that allowance, had long since sunk into squalider depths than her present.
The fog made her eyes smart on this February evening, sootily exaggerating on their rims the work of the “make-up” pencil, which had not ceased to be a cherished equipment of her ignoble maturity. It imparted, moreover, a sort of livid iridescence to the pearl powder smearing her haggard cheeks, which suggested, in their unwholesome “fishiness,” the under parts of a dead and stale mackerel. Her “front” was false, her---- Sha! the horrible, sick old spectre of vanity!
But if a spectre, she was by no means dead to her own worldly interests. Those possessed her, in exact proportion as her watching and waiting at this moment were turned to the possession of the soul of another, the latest, and not the least difficult, subject of her ancient lures. Reversing the accepted ghostly procedure, she was intent on procuring, instead of revealing, a treasure. Her persistency, in matters of mean acquisition and blackmailing, was great for so frail a creature. It had triumphed over decay, infirmities, disenchantment in the past; yet, after all, she had withdrawn from public life at a late hour, with a competence which--to be properly in keeping with her long self-exposure--was only a bare one. That she resented, of course. Her days were all punctuated with petty resentments and malevolences, the fruits of a small, greedy vanity which had been pensioned to retire--through a conspiracy of jealousies, she would have told you. Wherefore she had since sought to augment her pittance by a vicious exploiting--at second-hand--of the arts which had procured it for her.
The rumble of distant omnibuses vibrated in her ears and in the walls, from which latter gloomed down, dingy and faded, old daguerreotypes of herself, smirking and ogling in the tights and kid boots and wreaths of a vanished era--rosy, immoral young life of twenty years past, of which this dry, stark immortelle was the spectre. As she sat waiting, she leaned her elbows on the table, and stared at the solitary candle alight before her, like an old, sharp-eyed hen half hypnotised by the glow. Yet, if she were asleep, she talked in her sleep, small and chuckling, as anyone, stooping his head, might have detected.
“Mark! Mark Dalston, O, Mark! O, my dear!” ran the thin strain. “Are you going to think well of it, Mark--think well of it, Mark Dalston? Have you started on your way to come and compound with Mother Carey, Mark, my love? You’ve answered Yes to her message, haven’t you?--but you aren’t always a gentleman of your word, you know, Mark. Best to be it in this case, O, my dear, my dear! I could get my teeth into you here, nicely, now--couldn’t I?”
Suddenly she came alert, pricking her ears to the sound of a quick, soft footstep outside.
Ii
Mr Mark Dalston, a young man of particular ambitions and passions, had also that hospitability of conscience which can welcome and reconcile the most antagonistic emotions. He never suffered material self-interests and moral scruples to fall at odds within himself, but was the tactful and charming host to all that came to be entertained within his breast. There one might see grossness and reason, sensualism and intellectuality, the virtuoso and the Vandal, all table couples at once, and at perfectly harmonious discourse. They met on the common ground of sociability, and forbore all destructive criticism of one another so long as Mark’s lights shone upon their differences. He was extraordinarily popular with quite a number of divergent familiars--a man without prejudices, and always ready to entertain a new emotion.
Mark was of that good nature, in short, that he could never say No to himself, however much the interests of other people might be affected by the partiality. His sympathies were wide, but their application was close. Like the centre of a venous system, he was all heart, and gave nothing but what he was sure to receive back at compound interest. Fortune having condemned him, for a brief period, to an ushership at a suburban grammar school, he had not repined over his lot, but had sought, quite naturally and amiably, an amelioration of its prosy conditions in the pursuit of such supernumerary pleasures and self-indulgences as its off hours could be made to yield. It was always his principle to eschew consequences until they were upon him, and insistent. And then he would set his fine wits and intellect at work to neutralise them.
The young master was well destined, and more than physically, for the success of his qualities. He was emphatically, according to the feminine standard of fitness, a “ladies’ man.” His self-assurance, his ready tongue (or tongues, for he commanded many), his easy subscription to the correct fashions in dress, assumed in defiance of the proverbial slovenliness of scholars, his whiskers, his quick intelligence and his soft impertinences, were all so many visés to the passport to woman’s favour of which his handsome face and person were the text. He might have wasted this text upon quite inconsiderable issues, if Fortune, jealous for his capacities, had not invited him to contests more worthy of his mettle. The post of travelling “coach” to a young gentleman of fortune timely offering itself, he had seized the opportunity to cut some connections, of which the one which turned upon the training of the young idea had come to figure as the least undesirable; and, at the present date, Clapham had not seen him for six months or more.
It is not the purpose of the moment to recount how, once abroad, Mr Dalston had lost his pupil and married “money”; nor even much to dwell upon how, returning home a man of substance and position, he had been brought, at once and sharply, to realise that “of our pleasant vices the gods make instruments to plague us.” But he was a man of swift comprehension, resource, and decision; and his brows had hardly drawn to a pucker over a difficulty suddenly confronting him, before a way out of it, and a very daring one, had occurred to him.
The message--Mother Carey’s--referring to this difficulty, had reached him at the house, his wife’s, in Eaton Square, whither he, it was understood, had, on business grounds, preceded his lady’s return from abroad by a few weeks. That was, actually, a mystification, a suppressio veri; for Mrs Dalston was at the moment installed in comfortable but obscure rooms at Kennington, where she was scarcely arrived before she was delivered, a little prematurely, of a male child. But so far was this fact from being allowed to interfere with the fiction of her absence, that particular pains had been taken by Mark to procure his wife’s confinement in the house of a doctor, a friend of his, who could be fee’d into any silence, or bought into any intrigue where irregular services were required. To all practical and moral intents, Mr Dalston was never so remote from his lately wedded bride as at the moment when he stepped from her bedside to do an infamous act upon her child. But even then there was enough sentiment in his gaze to make the fortune of a mid-Victorian picture.
The young mother’s reason had never fully returned to her since that poignant grapple, four nights ago, with the great and astonishing secret. She was sound, unhurt from the contest; but her faculties slept in a sort of exhausted abeyance. She was very white and still--incurious--not greatly troubled: so far things were fortunate. And here was the enwrapping fog for a final cloak, or pall.
As Mark stepped softly from the room, closing the door, a rather livid-faced, stale-smelling young man in a black frock coat and black peg-top trousers, revealing frowzy white socks beneath, accosted him whisperingly.
“Well, sir; all in train?”
Mark nodded, smiling.
“All in train, Blague. It’s really a providence, and your conscience may sleep sound to-night--as sound as she’s sleeping in there. Don’t wake her--don’t let her wake, rather--to a sense of her loss, you comprehend, till I return.”
“Quite so. The _vis inertiæ_--the vegetation of a sensitive plant, no more; we will see to it. The business shall not miscarry through us, sir, depend upon it.”
“That’s right. You sha’n’t lose by this little divagation in our plans, rest sure of that.”
He put his finger to his lips, and tiptoed down to the hall, where stood a pallid-faced young woman in a shawl and poke bonnet, gently rocking a bundle in her arms. She looked at the husband gravely, questioningly; but she was silent. The poor thing, in fact, was helpless under his dominion. Those dark eyes and ambrosial whiskers, with the cleft chin between, had, in a few days, brimmed the measure of her romance. Engaged for nurse to Mrs Dalston, she was fallen a slave to the lamp of a brighter magician than duty.
The two entered a “growler” of the ancient dimensions, and the fog lapped them up. Jogging its apathetic course through the smoke, as it seemed, of a vast glimmering conflagration, the squalid vehicle gained at length the Clapham Road, and drew near its destination. Then the pale little nurse spoke for the first time.
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