Oswald Cray: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

Oh, those ifs, those ifs! how they haunt us through life! How many of us are perpetually giving up the substance for the shadow!

[CHAPTER LVII.]

DREADFUL TREACHERY.

Mr. Mark Cray stood on the little bit of low stony ground that bordered the coast at Honfleur, just outside the entrance of the harbour. Mr. Mark was kicking pebbles into the water. Being in a remarkably miserable and indecisive state of mind, having nothing on earth to do, he had strolled out of his lodgings anywhere that his legs chose to carry him; and there he was, looking into the water on that gloomy winter's evening.

But pray don't fear that he had any ulterior designs of making himself better acquainted with its chilly depths. Men in the extremity of despair have been known to entertain such; Mark Cray never would have dreamt of it. There was an elasticity in Mark's spirit, a shallowness of feeling quite incompatible with that sad state of mind hinted at, and the most prominent question pervading Mark, even now was, how long it would be before something "turned up."

Not but that Mark Cray was miserable enough; in a bodily sense, however, rather than a mental. It was not an agreeable state of things by any means to have no money to go on with; to be wanting it in a hundred odd ways; to be told that if he did not pay up at his lodgings that week he must turn out of them--and the French have an inconvenient way of not allowing you to evade such mandates. It was not pleasant to be reduced to a meal or so a day, and that not a sumptuous one; it was not convenient to be restricted to the pair of boots he had on, and to know that the soles were letting in the wet; it was not cheery to be out of charcoal for the cooking réchauds, or to have but a shovelful of coals left for the parlour; moreover and above all, it was most especially annoying and unbearable not to have had the money to pay for a letter that morning, and which, in consequence of that failure, the inexorable postman had carried away with him.

Mrs. Cray's assertion--that her husband never would be got over to London so long as the formidable Wheal Bang threatened danger--proved to be a correct one. Mark had declined the invitation to go. News had been conveyed to him in an unmistakably impressive manner of the state his wife was in, and an urgent mandate sent that he should join her. Oswald only waited his consent to forward him funds for the journey; and poor Caroline hinted in a few private lines that he could choose a steamer which would not make the port of London until after dark, and could wear his spectacles in landing. All in vain. Mark Cray had somehow contrived to acquire a wholesome terror of the British shores, and to them he would not be enticed.

But--has it ever struck you in your passage through life how wonderfully things work round? Caroline Cray was dying; was wanting her husband to be by her side and see the last of her, as it was only right and natural she should; but he--looking at things as he looked at them--was debarred from going to her; it was--judging as he judged--a simple impossibility that he should go. And this great barrier was turning her mind to frenzy, was making a havoc of her dying hours, and increasing her bodily sufferings in an alarming degree.

It did seem an impossibility. If Mark Cray refused to venture to his own land so long as the Wheal Bang held its rod over him, it was next door to certain that he could not come at all. The Wheal Bang's shareholders would not relax their threats except on the payment of certain claims, and who would be sufficiently philanthropic to pay them? Nobody in the wide world. So there appeared to be no hope of Mark's return; and the knowledge that there was not was entirely taking from Caroline Cray that tranquillity of mind and body which ought if possible to attend the last passage to the tomb: nay, it was keeping her in a state of excitement that was pitiable for herself and for all who beheld her. "If Mark could but come!" was the incessant cry night and day. "I can't die unless Mark comes."

You have heard that beautiful phrase, "Man's extremity is God's opportunity," and though it may strike you as almost irreverent to introduce any matter connected with Mark Cray as an exemplification of it, what came to pass was surely very like a proof of the truth of that phrase. Poor, erring, shallow-pated Mark! even he was remembered, neglectful as he had been of the Great Remembrancer.