The Mark of Cain
1886
The novel opens at a London club where Maitland, proprietor of a working-class tavern called the 'Hit or Miss,' finds himself strangely isolated among his own guests. Around the dinner table, conversation drifts and reveals: Barton is present, and Cranley carries a questionable past that hint at darker depths beneath polished surfaces. Then comes the news that cuts through the evening like a blade: Dicky Shields, a former acquaintance of Maitland's, has been found dead in a snowcart. The discovery fractures the comfortable assumptions of the gathering and sets in motion an investigation that will expose the fault lines between classes, the weight of old loyalties, and the question of what responsibility any of us truly bears for those we leave behind. Lang constructs his novel as both social portraiture and slow-burning mystery. The atmospheric tension builds not from dramatic violence but from the quiet revelations of character, the way past actions cast long shadows into the present. Maitland's position, straddling different social worlds, makes him uniquely positioned to see both the cruelty and the compassion that class distinctions breed. The Mark of Cain examines how guilt accumulates across generations, how the choices of the past determine the fates of the present, and whether redemption is possible when the mark of wrongdoing has already been stamped. For readers who appreciate Victorian novels that refuse easy answers, this is a portrait of consequence and connection, of lives interlocked in ways that cannot be undone.
Editions
X-Ray
“But the wood has endured. In splinters and shavings, gorgeously encased, it has traveled the world over and found a joyous welcome among every race. For it states a fact. Hounds are checked, hunting wild. A horn calls clear through the covert. Helena casts them back on the scent. Above all the babble of her age and ours, she makes one blunt assertion. And there alone lies Hope.””
— Andrew Lang
“He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric. Words could do anything except generate their own meaning.””
— Andrew Lang
“The way ran zigzag through a forest of pine which the bitter wind, still that morning, had turned to ice; every bough was adorned with lines of stalactite which shivered and glittered in the morning sun; every needle had a brilliant, vitreous case and when she flicked her whip at a wayside shrub she brought down a tinkling shower of ice-leaves, each the veined impression of its crisp, green counterpart.””
— Andrew Lang
“Above all the babble of her age and ours, she makes one blunt assertion. And there alone lies Hope.””
— Andrew Lang
“Sometimes," Helena continued, "I have a terrible dream of the future. Not now, but presently, people may forget their loyalty to their kings and emperors and take power for themselves. Instead of letting one victim bear this frightful curse they will take it all on themselves, each one of them. Think of the misery of a whole world possessed of Power without Grace.””
— Andrew Lang
“But how do you know He *doesn't* want us to have it”
— Andrew Lang
“We look back already to the time of the persecution as though it were the heroic age, but have you ever thought how awfully few martyrs there were, compared with how many there ought to have been?””
— Andrew Lang
“A little murmur of admiration greeted this neat reply and on the crest of it the hostess rose to dismiss the meeting. The ladies rustled forward towards the lecturer but he, deprecating their flattery, came to greet Helena. "I was told your Majesty might do me the honor of coming.""I scarcely hoped you had recognized me. I am afraid the lecture was far above my head. But I am delighted to see you have prospered. Are you . . . are you able to travel as you wish?""Yes, I was given my freedom many years ago by a kind, foolish old woman who took a fancy for my verses.""Did you get to Alexandria?""Not yet, but I found what I wanted. Did you reach Troy, Highness?""No, oh no." "Or Rome?""Not even there.""But you found what you wanted?""I have accepted what I found. Is that the same?""For most people. I think you wanted more.""Once. Now I am past my youth.""But your question just now. 'When? Where? How do you know?'--was a child's question.""That is why your religion would never do for me, Marcias. If I ever found a teacher it would have to be one who called little children to him.""That, alas, is not the spirit of the time. We live in a very old world today. We know too much. We should have to forget everything and be born again to answer your question.””
— Andrew Lang
![XXXII Ballades in Blue China [1885]](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fd3b2n8gj62qnwr.cloudfront.net%2FCOVERS%2Fgutenberg_covers75k%2Febook-51160.png&w=3840&q=75)
