Oswald Cray: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

Mark Cray touched his horse, and the cab and its freight bounded off. Mark did not draw rein again until Grosvenor Place was reached.

[CHAPTER XLI.]

A SLIGHT CHECK.

The house was blazing with light, every window bright with it. Mrs. Cray loved pomp and vanity in all their forms, and she generally caused her rooms to be lighted with the first glimmer of twilight. Mark Cray stepped into his handsome hall and was received by a couple of footmen. Flinging his hat to one, his gloves to another, he bounded upstairs to his dressing-room, conscious that he was keeping the dinner and his guests waiting.

Did Mark Cray ever cast a sigh of regret to the simple life at Hallingham, when he and his wife used to sit down to mutton cutlets and a pudding, and think the fare good enough? Did she regret it at any odd moment? Not yet. Dress and dinners, with expense of other sorts, bring a fascination with them all too enthralling to the senses. How they pall upon the wearied spirit in time, how they deaden the heart and debase the intellect, let those answer who have become their slaves; but Mark Cray and his wife had not reached that period of weariness yet. You may be very sure, knowing what you do know of the world and the generality of people who populate it, that Mr. and Mrs. Cray wanted not for what is called society. The great projector of the great Wheal Bang Company, holding in his own hands the power to make others rich, was not likely to lack adulation in his private capacity any more than in his public one, and he and his wife drank their fill of it. Mark's mind was shallow, and his head tolerably empty, but he was sufficiently attractive in manners to win his way in society, even without the adjunct just mentioned. Mark was looked upon as of good connections also; for it had somehow got reported that he was a nephew of the proud Baronet of Thorndyke. Perhaps it may be forgiven to poor empty-headed Mark that he held his tongue from contradicting it, and suffered the world to think he was of the family of that great man. As to Caroline, people were in love with her beauty and her youth; and the costly extravagances of the house in Grosvenor Place bore their own charm. Altogether, more guests crowded the doors of Mr. and Mrs. Cray than the doors could always hold. Many satellites of the great world, of a position far above the real one of Mark Cray and his wife, flocked to pay them court; and neither of them was wise enough to see how unsuitable are extremes, or to discern that the acquaintance would never have been condescended to but that Mark was the Great Wheal Bang's powerful chieftain. Therefore it was nothing unusual for Mark Cray to receive dinner guests at his board; on the contrary, it would have been a marked circumstance now, had he and his wife dined alone.

Mark washed his hands and hurried on his coat, and in a few minutes was at his dinner-table, his guests on either side of him. One guest at it Mark could only regard with astonishment, and that was Miss Davenal. Not that Miss Davenal was not fitted to grace a dinner-table; no lady more so at her age in the three kingdoms; but she had so resolutely abstained from honouring Mark's house with her presence that he had never expected to see her in it again. Caroline said she should invite her and Sara to meet their old friends the Fords, and Mark had laughed when he heard it. "She'll never come," he said; "you might as well invite the lioness from the Zoological Gardens." However, here she was: she had chosen to come. She sat on Mark's left hand, her delicate features quite beautiful in their refinement; Miss Ford was on his right, a shrinking little woman of forty years; Miss Mary Ford and Sara Davenal were lower down; and the physician, a short, red-faced, shrivelled man, who talked incessantly and wore nankeen pantaloons, was next to Caroline. "Put a knife and fork for Mr. Barker," Mark had said to his servants: but Mr. Barker had not made his appearance yet. Those were all the guests.

There is something false about Caroline today. Look at her dress! It is white watered silk, gleaming with richness, as the dewdrops are gleaming in the white crape flowers in her hair; and it, the white silk, is elaborately trimmed with black ruchings and ribbons. That black, put on by her maid, taking the girl a whole afternoon to do it, has been added with a motive. Caroline, in her evening dress, has long put off the mourning for her good uncle, her more than father, dead though he has been but four months yet; but she is today a little ashamed of her haste, and she has assumed these black ribbons before these Hallingham friends and her aunt Bettina, to make believe that she still wears it. Her violet eyes are intensely bright, and her cheeks glow with their sweetest and softest carmine. Sara wears a black crape robe, a little edging of white net only on its low body and sleeves, and she wears no ornament, except the jet beads on her neck and arms. The two Miss Fords are in copper-coloured silks made high: when they saw Mrs. Cray's white silk, fit for the court of our gracious Queen, they felt uncomfortable, and attempted a sort of apology that they had brought no evening dress with them to town.

And the dinner is in accordance with Caroline's attire. Soup, and fish, and entrées, and roasts, and jellies, and sweets, and fal-lals; and more sorts of wine than the Miss Fords, simple and plain, could remember afterwards to count; and flowers, and plate, and servants in abundance: and grandeur enough altogether for the dining-room of England's Premier.

It was this state, this show, this expense, that so offended the good sense (very good always, though sometimes over severe) of Miss Bettina Davenal, and kept her aloof from Mr. and Mrs. Cray's house. If Mark really was making the vast amount of money (but it would have taken a wiser tongue than Mark's to convince her that that usually assumed fact was not a fallacy), then they ought to be putting it by, she argued: if they were not making it, if all this was but specious wealth, soon to pass away and leave only ashes and ruin behind it, then Mark and Caroline were fit only for a lunatic asylum. In any point of view, the luxurious appointments of the dinner she saw before her were entirely out of place for middle-class life: and Miss Bettina felt an irrepressible prevision that their folly would come home to them.

But she knew better than to mar the meeting with any unpleasant reproaches or forebodings then, and she was as cordial and chatty as her deafness allowed. It was a real pleasure to meet Hallingham friends, and Miss Bettina enjoyed herself more than she had ever done since the doctor's death.