Oswald Cray: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

While Caroline was lifting her hands to heaven with a vain cry in which there was no trust; while it seemed to all that there was no human feasibility of bringing Mark to England, that feat was accomplished in the easiest and most unexpected manner. Is it too much to say that a Higher Power was at work in answer to that poor woman's despairing cry?--though the human agencies employed were of the least exalted.

Mr. Barker, who was doing something grand and good (good in his sense) in Paris, found it necessary for his own plans to pay a visit to London. And when there, he, to use his own phrase got "dropped upon;" in other words he fell into the still outstretched hands of the Great Wheal Bang. That it was unexpected to himself there's no doubt; for he was one of those men who believe implicitly in their own luck. Once in the mesh, Barker resolved to make the best of it. He had done nothing wrong, nothing that he could be punished for, and he carelessly told them that his only motive in not surrendering beforehand was the bother of having the accounts to go over. Perhaps it really was so.

Mr. Barker's usual luck attended him now. After he was arrested and had been kept in durance for four days, the shareholders released him. The very shareholders themselves released him; the wronged, imitated, angry shareholders! Surely there was some charm in Barker's tongue! He talked them over to the most miraculous degree; and they took him out of prison, somebody going bail for the single debt on which he had been taken. Now that the thing had come to a crisis Barker was as eager as they were to get it to a settlement, and he went to work with a will. A settlement, however, could not be come to without the presence of Mark Cray; Mark and Barker were both made bankrupts, and it was necessary that Mark should come over--or else never come over any shore. So Barker wrote for him.

We left Mark standing on the water's edge. He was all unconscious of these doings at home which so nearly affected him; and he stood there speculating as to what news the letter, refused to him in the morning, contained. By some mischance Barker had neglected fully to prepay it; he had put on a fourpenny stamp, but the letter turned out to be over weight by a hair's breadth, and of course the Honfleur postal authorities declined to give it up.

"What he's doing in London puzzles me," cogitated Mark,--for he had recognised the writing on the letter as Barker's. "He told me he should not show himself there until the bother was over. What took him there now, I wonder?"

He stopped to single out a particularly shiny stone imbedded in the mud, lifted it up with his toe, and kicked it into the water. A little shrimping-boat was making towards him, for it was low tide, laden with its spoils of the day. But it was not very near yet.

"It's well that she should have gone over as she did," he resumed, his thoughts reverting to his wife. "Heaven knows I should like to be with her; but she has all she wants there, and here she'd have nothing. I wish I could be with her! As to their saying--that Welch, or whatever his name is: I don't remember any great light of that name--that she's incurable, I don't believe it. That old Blue said the same, or wanted to say it--such jargon as the fellow talked to be sure!--but Blue's nothing better than an old woman. By the way, I wonder how long Blue intends to stop away! It's fine for these French fellows, taking a holiday when they choose, and leaving their patients to a confrère! I wish he had left me the confrère on the occasion, t'would have been a few francs, at any rate, in my pocket. The French wouldn't have had that, I suppose! their envious laws won't permit an Englishman to practice on them. Oh, if some rich countryman of one's own would but get ill!"

Mark Cray strolled a few steps either way, and halted again in the same place as before; he kicked six stones into the water, one after the other, the seventh was an obstinate one, and would not come out. Dull and dreary did the waves look that evening, under the grey and leaden sky. That's speaking rather metaphorically, you know, for in point of fact there are no waves off Honfleur, except in the stormiest of weather.

That Mark Cray's condition was a forlorn one nobody can dispute. He had no friends or acquaintance in the town; a latent, ever-present consciousness of their straits, their position and its secrets, had caused him and his wife to abstain from making any, And one or two English residents who had shown themselves disposed to be friendly were repulsed at the onset. Not a single person within reach could Mark Cray apply to with the slightest justifiable plea of acquaintanceship and say, Lend me sixteen sous; that I may pay for a letter! Even Monsieur Le Bleu, as you have gathered from his soliloquy, was away. But Mark wished much to get that letter, and he was thinking how he could get it at this very moment as he looked out across the water to the opposite coast, to the dark cloud that hung over Harfleur.

"'Twould be of no use going to the post-office unless I took the money," he soliloquised. "They'd never let me have it without. Stingy old frogs! What's sixteen sous that they can't trust a fellow? Help must come to me soon from some quarter or other; things can't stand in their present plight. That very, letter may have money in it."