The Mark Of Cain Part 4

Maitland was an orphan, and rich. He had been an unpopular lonely boy at a public school, where he was known as a "sap," or a.s.siduous student, and was remarked for an almost unnatural indifference to cricket and rowing. At Oxford, as he had plenty of money, he had been rather less unpopular. His studies ultimately won him a Fellowship at St. Gatien's, where his services as a tutor were not needed. Maitland now developed a great desire to improve his own culture by acquaintance with humanity, and to improve humanity by acquaintance with himself. This view of life and duty had been urged on him by his college "coach," philosopher, and friend, Mr. Joseph Bielby. A man of some energy of character, Bielby had made Maitland leave his desultory reading and dull hospitalities at St.

Gatien's and betake himself to practical philanthropy.

"You tell me you don't see much in life," Bielby had said. "Throw yourself into the life of others, who have not much to live on."

Maitland made a few practical experiments in philanthropy at Oxford. He once subsidized a number of glaziers out on strike, and thereon had his own windows broken by conservative undergraduates. He urged on the citizens the desirability of running a steam tramway for the people from the station to Cowley, through Worcester, John's, Baliol, and Wadham Gardens and Magdalene. His signature headed a pet.i.tion in favor of having three "devils," or steam-whoopers, yelling in different quarters of the town between five and six o'clock every morning, that the artisans might be awakened in time for the labors of the day.

As Maitland's schemes made more noise than progress at Oxford, Bielby urged him to come out of his Alma Mater and practise benevolence in town. He had a great scheme for building over Hyde Park, and creating a Palace of Art in Poplar with the rents of the new streets. While pushing this ingenious idea in the columns of the _Daily Trumpet_, Maitland looked out for some humbler field of personal usefulness. The happy notion of taking a philanthropic public-house occurred to him, and was acted upon at the first opportunity. Maitland calculated that in his own bar-room he could acquire an intimate knowledge of humanity in its least sophisticated aspects. He would sell good beer, instead of drugged and adulterated stuff He would raise the tone of his customers, while he would insensibly gain some of their exuberant vitality. He would shake off the prig (which he knew to be a strong element in his nature), and would, at the same time, encourage temperance by providing good malt liquor.

The scheme seemed feasible, and the next thing to do was to acquire a tavern. Now, Maitland had been in the Oxford movement just when aestheticism was fading out, like a lovely sun-stricken lily, while philanthropy and political economy and Mr. Henry George were coming in, like roaring lions. Thus in Maitland there survived a little of the old leaven of the student of Renaissance, a touch of the amateur of "impressions" and of antiquated furniture. He was always struggling against this "side," as he called it, of his "culture," and in his hours of reaction he was all for steam tramways, "devils," and Kindergartens standing where they ought not. But there were moments when his old innocent craving for the picturesque got the upper hand; and in one of those moments Maitland had come across the chance of acquiring the lease of the _Hit or Miss_.

That ancient bridge-house pleased him, and he closed with his opportunity. The _Hit or Miss_ was as attractive to an artistic as most public-houses are to a thirsty soul When the Embankment was made, the bridge-house had been one of a street of similar quaint and many-gabled old buildings that leaned up against each other for mutual support near the rivers edge. But the Embankment slowly brought civilization that way: the dirty rickety old houses were both condemned and demolished, till at last only the tavern remained, with h.o.a.rdings and empty s.p.a.ces, and a dust-yard round it.

The house stood at what had been a corner. The red-tiled roof was so high-pitched as to be almost perpendicular. The dormer windows of the attics were as picturesque as anything in Nuremberg. The side-walls were broken in their surface by little odd red-tiled roofs covering projecting cas.e.m.e.nts, and the house was sh.o.r.ed up and supported by huge wooden beams. You entered (supposing you to enter a public-house) by a low-browed door in front, if you pa.s.sed in as ordinary customers did. At one corner was an odd little board, with the old-fashioned sign:

"Jack's Bridge House.

"_Hit or Miss_--Luck's All."

But there was a side-door, reached by walking down a covered way, over which the strong oaken rafters (revealed by the unflaking of the plaster) lay bent and warped by years and the weight of the building.

From this door you saw the side, or rather the back, which the house kept for its intimates; a side even more picturesque with red-tiled roofs and dormer windows than that which faced the street. The pa.s.sage led down to a slum, and on the left hand, as you entered, lay the empty s.p.a.ce and the dust-yard where the carts were sheltered in sheds, or left beneath the sky, behind the ruinous h.o.a.rding.

Within, the _Hit or Miss_ looked cosey enough to persons entering out of the cold and dark. There was heat, light, and a bar-parlor with a wide old-fashioned chimney-place, provided with seats within the ingle.

On these little benches did Tommy and his friends make haste to place themselves, comfortably disposed, and thawing rapidly, in a room within a room, as it were; for the big chimney-place was like a little chamber by itself. Not on an ordinary night could such a party have gained admittance to the bar-parlor, where Maitland himself was wont to appear, now and then, when he visited the tavern, and to produce by his mere presence, and without in the least intending it, an Early Closing Movement.

But to-night was no common night, and Mrs. Gullick, the widowed landlady, or rather manager, was as eager to hear all the story of the finding of poor d.i.c.ky Shields as any of the crowd outside had been.

Again and again the narrative was repeated, till conjecture once more began to take the place of a.s.sertion.

"I wonder," asked one of the men, "how old d.i.c.ky got the money for a boose?"

"The money, ay, and the chance," said another. "That daughter of his--a nice-looking girl she is--kept poor d.i.c.ky pretty tight."

"Didn't let him get--" the epigrammatist of the company was just beginning to put in, when the brilliant witticism he was about to utter burst at once on the intellect of all his friends.

"Didn't let him _get_ tight, you was a-goin' to say, Tommy," howled three or four at once, and there ensued a great noise of the slapping of thighs, followed by chuckles which exploded, at intervals, like crackers.

"d.i.c.ky 'ad been 'avin' bad times for long," the first speaker went on.

"I guess he 'ad about tattooed all the parish as would stand a pint for tattooing. There was hardly a square inch of skin not made beautiful forever about here."

"Ah! and there was no sale for his beastesses and bird-ses nuther; or else he was clean sold out, and hadn't no capital to renew his stock of hairy cats and young parrots."

"The very stuffed beasts, perched above old d.i.c.ky's shop, had got to look real mangey and mouldy. I think I see them now: the fox in the middle, the long-legged moulting foreign bird at one end, and that 'ere shiny old rhinoceros in the porch under them picters of the dying deer and t'other deer swimming. Poor old d.i.c.ky! Where he raised the price o'

a drain, let alone a booze, beats me, it does."

"Why," said Mrs. Gullick, who had been in the outer room during the conversation, "why, it was a sailor gentleman that stood d.i.c.ky treat A most pleasant-spoken man for a sailor, with a big black beard He used to meet d.i.c.ky here, in the private room up-stairs, and there d.i.c.ky used to do him a turn of his trade--tattooing him, like. 'I'm doing him to pattern, mum,' d.i.c.ky sez, sez he: 'a _facsimile_ o' myself, mum.' It wasn't much they drank neither--just a couple of pints; for sez the sailor gentleman, he sez, 'I'm afeared, mum, our friend here can't carry much even of _your_ capital stuff. We must excuse' sez he, 'the failings of an artis'; but I doesn't want his hand to shake or slip when he's a doin' _me_,' sez he. 'Might > spile the pattern,' he sez, 'also hurt'

And I wouldn't have served old d.i.c.ky with more than was good for him, myself, not if it was ever so, I wouldn't I promised that poor daughter of his, before Mr. Maitland sent her to school--years ago now--I promised as I would keep an eye on her father, and speak of--A hangel, if here isn't Mr. Maitland his very self!"

And Mrs. Gullick arose, with bustling courtesy, to welcome her landlord, the Fellow of St. Gatien's.

Immediately there was a stir among the men seated in the ingle. One by one--some with a muttered pretence at excuse, others with shame-faced awkwardness--they shouldered and shuffled out of the room. Maitland's appearance had produced its usual effect, and he was left alone with his tenant.

"Well, Mrs. Gullick," said poor Maitland, ruefully, "I came here for a chat with our friends--a little social relaxation--on economic questions, and I seem to have frightened them all away."

"Oh, sir, they're a rough lot, and don't think themselves company for the likes of you. But," said Mrs. Gullick, eagerly--with the delight of the oldest aunt in telling the saddest tale--"you 've heard this hawful story? Poor Miss Margaret, sir! It makes my blood--"

What physiological effect on the circulation Mrs. Gullick was about to ascribe to alarming intelligence will never be known; for Maitland, growing a little more pallid than usual, interrupted her:

"What has happened to Miss Margaret? Tell me, quick!"

"Nothing to _herself_, poor lamb, but her poor father, sir."

Maitland seemed sensibly relieved.

"Well, what about her father?"

"Gone, sir--gone! In a cartload o' snow, this very evening, he was found, just outside o* this very door."

"In a cartload of snow!" cried Maitland. "Do you mean that he went away in it, or that he was found in it dead?"

"Yes, indeed, sir; dead for many hours, the doctor said; and in this very house he had been no later than last night, and quite steady, sir, I do a.s.sure you. He had been steady--oh, steady for weeks."

Maitland a.s.sumed an expression of regret, which no doubt he felt to a certain extent But in his sorrow there could not but have been some relief. For Maitland, in the course of his philanthropic labors, had known old d.i.c.ky Shields, the naturalist and professional tattooer, as a hopeless _mauvais sujet_. But d.i.c.ky's daughter, Margaret, had been a daisy flourishing by the grimy waterside, till the young social reformer transplanted her to a school in the purer air of Devonshire. He was having her educated there, and after she was educated--why, then, Maitland had at one time entertained his own projects or dreams. In the way of their accomplishment d.i.c.ky Shields had been felt as an obstacle; not that he objected--on the other hand, he had made Maitland put his views in writing. There were times--there had lately, above all, been times--when Maitland reflected uneasily on the conditional promises in this doc.u.ment d.i.c.ky was not an eligible father-in-law, however good and pretty a girl his daughter might be. But now d.i.c.ky had ceased to be an obstacle; he was no longer (as he certainly had been) in any man's way; he was n.o.body's enemy now, not even his own.

The vision of all these circ.u.mstances pa.s.sed rapidly, like a sensation rather than a set of coherent thoughts, through Maitland's consciousness.

"Tell me everything you know of this wretched business," he said, rising and closing the door which led into the outer room.

"Well, sir, you have not been here for some weeks, or you would know that d.i.c.ky had found a friend lately--an old shipmate, or petty-officer, he called him--a sailor-man. Well-to-do, he seemed; the mate of a merchant vessel he might be. He had known d.i.c.ky, I think, long ago at sea, and he'd bring him here 'to yarn with him,' he said, once or twice it might be in this room, but mainly in the parlor up-stairs. He let old d.i.c.ky tattoo him a bit, up there, to put him in the way of earning an honest penny by his trade--a queer trade it was. Never more than a pint, or a gla.s.s of hot rum and water, would he give the old man. Most considerate and careful, sir, he ever was. Well, last night he brought him in about nine, and they sat rather late; and about twelve the sailor comes in, rubbing his eyes, and 'Good-night, mum,' sez he. 'My friend's been gone for an hour. An early bird he is, and I've been asleep by myself. If you please, I'll just settle our little score. It's the last for a long time, for I'm bound to-morrow for the China Seas, eastward.

Oh, mum, a sailor's life!' So he pays, changing a half-sovereign, like a gentleman, and out he goes, and that's the last I ever see o' poor d.i.c.ky Shields till he was brought in this afternoon, out of the snow-cart, cold and stiff, sir."

"And how do you suppose all this happened? How did Shields get _into_ the cart?"

"Well, that's just what they've been wondering at, though the cart was handy and uncommon convenient for a man as 'ad too much, if 'ad he '_ad_; as believe it I cannot, seeing a gla.s.s of hot rum and water would not intoxicate a babe. May be he felt faint, and laid down a bit, and never wakened. But, Lord a mercy, what's _that_?" screamed Mrs. Gullick, leaping to her feet in terror.

The latched door which communicated with the staircase had been burst open, and a small brown bear had rushed erect into the room, and, with a cry, had thrown itself on Mrs. Gullick's bosom.

"Well, if ever I '_ad_ a fright!" that worthy lady exclaimed, turning toward the startled Maitland, and embracing at the same time the little animal in an affectionate clasp. "Well, if _ever_ there was such a child as you, Lizer! What is the matter with you _now_?"

"Oh, mother," cried the bear, "I dreamed of that big Bird I saw on the roof, and I ran down-stairs before I was 'arf awake, I was that horful frightened."

"Well, you just go up-stairs again--and here's a sweet-cake for you--and you take this night-light," said Mrs. Gullick, producing the articles she mentioned, "and put it in the basin careful, and knock on the floor with the poker if you want me. If it wasn't for that bearskin Mr. Toopny was kind enough to let you keep, you'd get your death o' cold, you would, running about in the night. And look 'ere, Lizer," she added, patting the child affectionately on the shoulder, "do get that there Bird out o' your head. It's just nothing but indigestion comes o' you and the other children--himps they may well call you, and himps I'm sure you are--always wasting your screws on pasty and lemonade and raspberry vinegar. Just-nothing but indigestion."

Thus admonished, the bear once more threw its arms, in a tight embrace, about Mrs. Gullick's neck; and then, without lavishing attention on Maitland, pa.s.sed out of the door, and could be heard skipping up-stairs.

"I'm sure, sir, I ask your pardon," exclaimed poor Mrs. Gullick; "but Lizer's far from well just now, and she did have a scare last night, or else, which is more likely, her little inside (saving your presence) has been upset with a supper the Manager gave all them pantermime himps."

"But, Mrs. Gullick, why is she dressed like a bear?"

"She's such a favorite with the Manager, sir, and the Property Man, and all of them at the _Hilarity_, you can't _think_, sir," said Mrs.

Gullick, not in the least meaning to impugn Maitland's general capacity for abstract speculation. "A regular little genius that child is, though I says it as shouldn't. Ah, sir, she takes it from her poor father, sir." And Mrs. Gullick raised her ap.r.o.n to her eyes.