The great Skene mystery

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.