There was not a cloud in the heavens. The sun lay low in the west. The eastern sky of a May evening was growing from blue to a violet dusk. Not a breath of wind stirred. It was long past the end of the workman's day.
A group of miserably clad men lounged on Welford Bridge, some gazing vacantly into the empty sky, and some gazing vacantly into the turbid water of the South London Canal, crawling beneath the bridge at the rate of a foot a minute towards its outlet in the Mercantile Docks, on the Surrey shore between Greenwich and the Pool.
The men were all on the southern side of the bridge: they were loafers and long-shoremen. Most of them had pipes in their mouths. They were a disreputable-looking group, belonging to that section of the residuum which is the despair of philanthropists-the man who has nothing before him but work or crime, and can hardly be got to work.
One of them was leaning against the parapet with his face turned in mere idleness up the canal. He was not looking at anything: his full, prominent, meaningless blue eyes were fixed on nothing. Directly in the line of his vision, and between him and Camberwell, were Crawford's Bay and Boland's Ait. The ait, so called by some derisive humourist, lay in the mouth of the bay, the outer side of it forming one bank of the canal, and the inner side corresponding with the sweep of Crawford's Bay, formed forty feet of canal water.
The man looking south was low-sized, red-bearded, red-whiskered, red-haired, with a battered brown felt hat, a neckerchief of no determinable colour, a torn check shirt, a dark blue ragged pea-jacket of pilot cloth, no waistcoat, a pair of brown stained trousers, and boots several sizes too large for him, turned up at the toes, and so bagged and battered and worn that they looked as though they could not be moved another step without falling asunder. This man would have told a mere acquaintance that his name was Jim Ford, but he was called by those who knew him Red Jim.
All at once he uttered a strong exclamation of surprise without shifting his position.
"What is it, Jim?" asked a tall, lank, dark man by his side.
The others of the group turned and looked in the direction in which Jim's eyes were fixed.
"Why," said Red Jim, in a tone of incredulity and indignation, "there's some one in Crawford's House!"
"Of course there is, you fool! Why, where have you been? Haven't you heard? Have you been with the Salvation Army, or only doing a stretch?"
"Fool yourself!" said Red Jim. "Mind what you're saying, or perhaps I'll stretch you a bit, long as you are already." The other men laughed at this personal sally. It reduced long Ned Bayliss to sullen silence, and restored Red Jim to his condition of objectless vacuity.
"I hear," said a man who had not yet spoken, "that Crawford's House is let."
"Let!" cried another, as though anyone who mentioned the matter as news must be ages behind the times. "Let! I should think it is!"
"And yet it isn't so much let, after all," said Ned Bayliss, turning round in a captious manner. "You can't exactly say a place is let when a man goes to live in his own house."
"Why, Crawford's dead this long and merry," objected a voice.
"Well," said Ned Bayliss, "and if he is, and if he left all to his wife for as long as she kept his name, and if she married a second time and got her new husband to change his name instead of her changing hers-how is that, do you think, Matt Jordan?"
It was plain by Ned Bayliss's manner and by the way in which this speech was received by the listeners that he was looked up to as a being of extraordinary mental endowment, and possessed preëminently of the power of lucid exposition.
"True enough," said Matt Jordan humbly, as he hitched up his trousers and shifted his pipe from one side of his mouth to the other, and coughed a self-deprecatory cough. "And a snug property he has come into, I say. I only wish I was in his place."
Jordan was a squat, ill-favoured man of forty.
"Why," said Bayliss derisively, "a man with your points wouldn't throw himself away on a sickly widow with only a matter of a thousand a-year or thereabouts out of a lot of ramshackle tenement-houses and canal wharfs. You'd look higher, Matt. Why, you'd want a titled lady, any way. With your face and figure, you ought to be able to do a great deal better than an elderly sickly widow, even if she is rich."
Jordan shifted his felt hat, made no reply, and for a while there was silence.
Crawford's House, of which the loungers on Welford Bridge were speaking, stood a few feet back from the inner edge of Crawford's Bay, about three hundred yards from the bridge. Jim Ford, the first speaker, had concluded, from seeing all the sashes of the house open, and a woman cleaning a window, and a strip of carpet hanging out of another, that a tenant had been found for this lonely and isolated dwelling, which had been standing idle for years.
"Have you seen this turncoat Crawford?" asked a man after a pause.
No one had seen him.
