WEARY DAYS.
The cold, bitter, biting winter passed away, and when the lovely
spring came round again little trace was left of its effects, save in
the remembrance of those in whose homes sickness, or privation, or
death, had been busy.
_Two_ of those visitations had been rife in the poor house of Caroline
Cray: sickness and privation. Perhaps you noticed Caroline's reply to
Dick's question of whether Mark had no money: there was a little left,
she said, not much. Left from what? Dick did not ask.
If ever an unfortunate company had come to grief more completely than
other unfortunate companies, it was surely that noted one, the Great
Wheal Bang. Sympathising friends--Barker's and Mark's--were wont to
assure those gentlemen that they had "managed wretchedly:" and if we
may dare to assume that the reproach was levelled at the fact of
having secured nothing for themselves, it was a right one. On the day
that Mark Cray went up to the offices for the last time he had but a
trifling sum of money about him: Caroline had even less in her own
purse; and that was all. Barker's word of precaution had secured the
diamond ring and studs, and these were converted into money, Mark and
Barker equally dividing the spoil. Barker, with his share, took a
little tour abroad while the cloud blew over; Mark, as you have seen,
went into hiding, and lived upon his part as long as it held out.
Yes, it was an unhappy fact, very debasing indeed after all the glory
of Grosvenor Place, lowering as you may feel it to be to this history,
Mr. Mark Cray hid himself by day, and slipped out to take the air at
dusk in a moustache and blue spectacles. Mark Cray could but be a
coward in the hour of trial; he ran from the danger instead of
facing it. Had Mark but looked the angry shareholders and the trouble
in the face, he need not have been so very fearful; but to look a
difficulty in the face was not in the nature of Mark Cray. He scarcely
understood what he was afraid of; he did not know what they could do
to him--whether imprison him, or make him a bankrupt, or what; and
Mark would rather have jumped into the sea than ascertain. He was
exactly like a child who runs away screaming from a dark closet, and
dare not look to see whether cause for terror is there. Some of us, my
friends, have been sadly frightened at shadows.
When this state of affairs was to end, and what was to get Mark out of
his difficulty, he did not at present see. As long as the money lasted
he was not unduly anxious. He had great faith in something "turning
up," he had unlimited faith in Barker; and Barker's letters were
pretty frequent, and in the highest degree cheering. Barker happened
to have a cousin, about the nineteenth remove, settled at Honfleur, in
Normandie, and Barker had steered for the same port, and seemed to be
living at ease there. Towards the close of the winter he wrote word to
Mark that he had something good in contemplation, connected with
Paris, and if it came to anything Mark should share in it.
But when Mark's money was gone things changed. He grew restless and
gloomy. He could not starve, he could not go to the workhouse: he must
do something. Miss Bettina Davenal would not help them: she said she
could not--perhaps with justice. Leopold Davenal had been an expense
to her, and was still; he went back to school after the Christmas
holidays with Dick, but he was not strong yet, and sundry expensive
extras were provided for him out of her pocket. That was not much: but
a heavier expense had fallen upon her: for she had repaid Mr. Wheatley
the two hundred pounds borrowed by Sara. Sara had disclosed to her
aunt the fact of borrowing it, and in her pride Miss Bettina had made
a sacrifice and repaid the sum. She had none left to bestow on Mark;
there was clearly no help to be had from her.
And Caroline? You can take a look at her as she sat in the sun, which
was shining into the room this bright day in early April. Perhaps you
remember a remark Dr. Davenal once made--that Caroline was not one, as
he believed, to bear well the adversities of life. Dr. Davenal was
quite right: neither physically nor mentally did they agree with poor
Caroline.
I don't know whether anybody gets ill at once under a great shock.
Caroline had not. When it fell upon her she was too stunned, too
entirely surprised, to be anything but bewildered. It may be
questioned if a change so sudden--from seemingly assured prosperity to
hiding and disgrace and poverty--has ever fallen. You may feel
inclined to question it in this instance; nevertheless, I repeat that
I am telling you the simple truth. The reaction had come now, and
Caroline Cray gave way sadly. Her cough, that Dick remarked upon, had
got well; but she would lie back in her chair all day, and it seemed
next to impossible to get her out of it.
But if the body was at rest the mind was only the more active.
Caroline's hours, in point of fact, were pretty equally divided
between outward complaining and inward lamentation. Such lamentation
is nearly always rebellious, and so was hers. The blow had been so
complete; the change was so very great! All that pomp and vanity, all
the luxuries, the carelessness, the pleasure attendant on that one
past sunshiny wave in life's current, to have given place to this!
Perhaps the worst mortification, looking back, was that the play now
seemed to have been so _unreal_; as if they had had no right to
indulge in it, were such fools to have embarked in it, worse than
fools to have believed in it. Mortified, fretful, miserable, Caroline
Cray seemed to live but in repining and repentance. Mark was different
He neither repined nor repented; he was always restless, always
expecting something to turn up; and he would stalk up and down the
room, giving tongue to all sorts of wild visions of what he would do
were he but clear of the world and the Great Wheal Bang.
As he was doing now. While Caroline sat listless and inert in her
chair, Mark was indulging a dream of the future, sanguine as a child.
He had lately taken to consult the newspapers, and one tempting
advertisement in particular had attracted him. Mark Cray was getting
that experience which comes inevitably in a life of vicissitude; he
had yet to learn how many of these advertisements are but traps for
the unwary, how next to impossible to be the one successful applicant,
if they are genuine. But ever and anon Mark's dream was brought
unpleasantly to a break, as the recollection intruded itself that he
was not a free man.
"You see, Carine, if I were but clear of that resentful company, there
are a hundred good things to be picked up. I'm sure there's a dozen at
least in the paper every day. That's a splendid thing, I know, that
one advertisement of this morning; any fellow securing that----"
"Where's the use of talking of it?" interrupted Carine. "It all comes
to nothing. You know you are not clear of the company."
She spoke in a fretful, peevish tone. Just at first, Mark's sanguine
visions of rising again more gloriously than ever, like a phoenix from
its ashes, had somewhat infected her, but she was learning what they
were worth: as she had just said, "it all came to nothing." Utterly
weary was her spirit. Hope deferred making the heart sick; but hope
destroyed--and it had come to that with Caroline Cray--maketh it die.
Physical privation tells terribly on the mind as well as the body, and
it was telling upon her. They were next door to starving. What made it
worse for Caroline was, that hers was a constitution _requiring_ the
best of nourishment. The Davenals were a healthy family, but there had
been a taint in her mother's blood. These physical privations would
alone have made Caroline fretful: and she could not help it.
"I shall be clear of it soon," said Mark.
"But how?"
Even sanguine Mark could not detail the precise means by which the
emancipation was to be accomplished. "Oh, somehow," said he, in his
careless way. "The company must wind itself up."
"Why can't you apply to Oswald?"
He shook his head very decisively. "I can't face _him_. And if I did,
he'd not assist me. He has lost too much, and is sure to bear malice."
"Are we to go on like this for ever?"
"I hope we shan't go on so for a month. I wish you'd not talk so,
Caroline."
"How am I to talk? You have been saying the same all along?"
"Well it's of no good your looking on the dark side of things. You are
always doing it now." Caroline was silent for a few moments, when she
suddenly lifted up her hands, and her voice broke into a passionate
wail.
"Oh, if that money had been but settled on me, as Uncle Richard
wished! This must be a judgment upon us for defying his last
commands."
"Rubbish!" said Mark.
"Are we to go out in the street and beg?" she plaintively asked.
"Are you going to be a child? One must get a rub or two through life;
Caroline. Barker has been down upon his beam-ends five or six times,
just as much as we are, but it has always come right again."
She relapsed into a fit of weeping; half her hours, abed and up, were
so spent. Mark had ceased either to soothe or reproach; he had tried
both, but ineffectually; and now was fain to let her weep simply
because he was helpless to prevent it. Mark Cray could not be unkind;
he was not that; but he was hardly the right sort of husband for
adversity. Shallow-minded, shallow-hearted, possessed of no depth of
feeling, there seemed something wanting in him now. He did his best to
cheer his wife; but the result was not satisfactory.
The fits of weeping would sometimes go on to hysterics; sometimes
stopped just short of it. As this one stopped. Caroline suddenly
roused herself and looked round wearily at the mantelpiece, as if
there were a timepiece there, perhaps in momentary forgetfulness.
Grosvenor Place had been rich in such; elegant bijoux, worth no end of
money.
"I wish Sara would come!"
"Sara?" repeated Mark, halting in his monotonous promenade.
"I wrote to her to come."
She spoke the words half defiantly. Sara, in consequence of the
discovery of Mr. Dick Davenal, had come to see them once; but she was
not encouraged to repeat the visit. Mark especially was against it.
"If we have them coming here, we may get dropped upon," he had said to
his wife; "it would never do." But poor Caroline, wearied out with the
wretched loneliness that seemed to continue month after month, and to
have no end, had at length written to her cousin.
"Why did you not tell me, Caroline?"
"You might have forbidden me."
"It's just what I should have done. We don't want her here. What good
will she do?"
"What good will anything in the world do? I wish I was out of it!"
Mark Cray began to ask himself the question whether the expected visit
could be stopped now. He had an intense dislike to meet Sara Davenal;
we all shrink from meeting those whom we have injured directly or
indirectly. But the question was set at rest by Sara's entrance, and
Mark, after a short greeting, disappeared.
All Caroline did for the first quarter of an hour was to sob
hysterically. Sara, in slighter mourning now, unfastened the white
crape strings of her straw bonnet, and sat over her in dismay, her
sweet face full of compassion for the change she saw.
"I want to know how it is all to end," were the first distinct words
Caroline uttered. "Am I to stop here till I die?"
A question difficult for Sara to answer. "Is Mark doing nothing?" she
asked.
"He is doing nothing. He can't do anything while that business of the
Wheal Bang hangs over him. If that were settled, there are fifty
things he might get into. And if it can't be settled, we may both of
us as well die at once as be famished to death. For that's what it
would come to. Those poor creatures that shut themselves up with the
fumes of charcoal are not so much to blame, after all."
"Caroline!"
"Well, I mean it," returned Caroline, a sullen tone beginning to
mingle with her sobs. "It is all very well for you to exclaim
'Caroline!' as if I were mad; but you don't know what sorrow is.
Nobody does until poverty comes."
Sara thought that there were worse sorrows to be borne in the world
than poverty. And she was right; bad as poverty, to those unaccustomed
to it, undoubtedly is. "What can I do for you?" she gently asked.
"Here we are, buried alive, and nobody comes near us! Sara, if you
only knew how I yearn for a home face!--how I lie and cry for it!"
"Mark--and you also--said I must not come, lest it might lead to
discovery."
"Neither must you, I suppose. At least, not often. But sometimes I
think it would be well if discovery happened. There'd be an end to
this uncertainty at any rate. What is Mark to do if the thing can't
get settled?"
She asked the question in strange earnestness, and Sara was struck
with the yearning beauty of the lifted face, of the wasting form. The
violet eyes were larger than of yore, the cheeks were of a delicate
crimson, and the hands were long and white and thin.
"But can it not get settled?" returned Sara.
"We have nothing to eat, you know. That is, there's bread, and
suchlike; but I can't eat it. Mark will dine on bread and cheese, or
a thick slice of bread and butter; and he really does not seem to
mind; but I can't. O Sara! if I could but have a good dinner!"
Sara caught up her breath. What comfort could she give?
"Sometimes, when I am sick with hunger I lie and imagine the dinners
we used to sit down to in Grosvenor Place. I _imagine_ it, you know;
that they are before me now, and I am eating them. Turkey and bread
sauce, or salmon and lobster sauce--it's nearly always substantial
things I think of, I suppose because of my hunger--and I quite seem to
taste them, to eat through a whole plateful Sara, it is true."
Sara Davenal had heard the doctor speak of some kinds of hunger as a
disease, and could only suppose this must be one. "I wish--I wish I
could help you," she murmured.
"You can't, I know. You have it not in your power, and Aunt Bettina
won't; she's implacable. I did not send for you to ask it. But, Sara,
there's Oswald Cray. If you would ask him perhaps he might do
something for Mark."
The words startled her. "Ask Oswald Cray!"
"I think if he would listen to any one, it is you. I don't forget
how fond he used to be of you in the days gone by. Indeed, I got to
think--but I was wrong, I suppose, so let it pass. O Sara, you'll ask
him for my sake! Don't abandon us quite. I think he might help Mark
out of this difficulty. Perhaps he might see the company, and get them
to be friendly with Mark; or perhaps he'd pay a few of Mark's pressing
debts. It might not take much money?"
"But why cannot Mark ask him?"
"He won't. Mark would rather it came to the charcoal--not that
anything of that sort would ever be in _his_ line--than apply to
Oswald. There was some trouble between them about the money Oswald put
into the mine, and Mark has kept away from him since. That is just why
I have sent for you. Mark will not apply to Oswald; no, not if it were
to save him from prison; and I don't feel well enough to go, and my
bonnet's shabby. O Sara, when a recollection comes over me--and it is
always coming--of the nice clothes I had, and how foolishly they were
abandoned, I feel fit to go mad. Anyway, unless a change takes place,
I shan't want clothes long. Sara, surely you will do for us so
trifling a thing as this!"
To pursue the interview would be waste of time. When Sara Davenal
quitted her cousin it was with a given promise to see Oswald Cray.
Very much indeed did she shrink from it; as much as she had shrunk
from those interviews with Mr. Alfred King: but she saw no other means
to help them; and in truth she did not anticipate much would come of
this.
Money seemed to be wanted everywhere. Miss Bettina complained sadly of
shortness; the repaid money to Mr. Wheatley had crippled her: and
Captain Davenal's letters to Sara dwelt on his embarrassments. They
told her privately how "hard up" he was, and in his random meaningless
way said he should have to run away to Australia and dig for gold,
unless some dropped shortly from the clouds. Captain Davenal's wife,
as it turned out, was only an heiress in prospective; but he appeared
excessively fond of her, anxious to supply her with every luxury: and
we all know that a married captain's pay, without other means, does
not accord with luxuries in India.
_His wife!_ Over and over again Sara asked herself how it was possible
Edward could have married her, how he could speak of her in the fond
manner that he did, if there really existed that impediment. All the
trouble and the care seemed to fall upon herself individually--upon
her own hidden heart. So long as there existed a grain of doubt, she
could not speak of this to Edward; and, besides, the letter might fall
into the hands of his young wife.
Personally, Sara had not been annoyed by Catherine Wentworth.
Occasionally through the winter and spring she had seen this young
woman hovering outside waiting for Neal; twice she had come boldly to
the house, knocked, and asked for him. Miss Bettina's keen eyes had
seen her once. "Is it one of your nieces, Neal?" she graciously asked;
"pray, invite her in." "Oh no, ma'am, she is no relative of mine,"
returned Neal, with pointed emphasis. Sara's breath had quickened at
the colloquy, but it ended there. She was surprised at this immunity
from personal annoyance, and wondered how long it would be hers.
It was a coincidence rather remarkable that Oswald Cray should be at
the door when Sara returned home from the visit to Caroline. About
once in three months he made a call of politeness on Miss Davenal.
Sara met him turning away: Miss Davenal was out, and he had left his
card. He would have passed her after shaking hands--his visit was not
to her--but Sara detained him, her cheeks in a glow at having to do
it.
"It is very strange," she exclaimed. "I was but now thinking how I
could best get to see you. Do you mind coming in with me for five
minutes?"
He returned with her, perhaps all too willingly. A great many of us
are tempted to stray from the strict line of duty marked out in our
own minds. Sara led the way to the drawing-room, and told him where
she had been, and what Caroline said. The declining sun--for the
afternoon was drawing towards its close--fell on Oswald as he sat
listening to her. It was the same noble face that she had so loved to
look upon--calm, still, _good_; but somehow all its youth seemed to
have passed away. The eyes had a look of habitual sadness; some silver
threads mingled with the dark chestnut hair. She simply repeated Mrs.
Cray's words, almost as a child repeats a lesson; throwing no
persuasive tone, no pleading of her own into it, for she felt that she
had no right to do so.
"Did Mark Cray wish you to ask me this?" he inquired, as she ceased
the tale.
"Not Mark; only Caroline. By what she said, I fancy Mark Cray
feels--feels ashamed to ask you anything."
"And he well may," answered Oswald, the old look of pride unpleasingly
crossing his face. "I could have borne almost anything from Mark
better than deliberate deceit. I cannot, no I cannot forgive it."
Neither spoke for a few moments. Sara had untied her bonnet-strings,
and sat with her face a little bent, the eyes raised straight to him
in their simple trust. He had one glove off; it was a black one; and
he was gently swaying it as his elbow rested on the arm of the chair.
"I cannot quite understand what it is that Mrs. Cray would ask me. She
cannot seriously expect that I should pay Mark's debts. His personal
debts alone would take, I imagine, a far deeper purse than mine. I am
but making my way upwards, and Mark has taken care to put me back to
an extent I shall not readily recover. Pay Marcus Cray's debts! It is
not within my power, any more than it would be within my will."
Sara was silent, save for a glance. It said how foolish she herself
had thought the demand.
"I very much fear that Mark Cray is one of those men who want others
to 'pay their debts' throughout life," he resumed. "There are such.
Were he free tomorrow he would be embarrassed again in a year. To
assist such men is no charity."
"Do you think anything can be done to clear him of the company?"
"Not while he keeps aloof. Mark himself must know it to be impossible,
or ought to know it. The only chance for these affairs to be wound up
is for him and Barker to come forward."
"Yes, I thought so," she answered. "But--Caroline tells me--they are
near upon starving!"
"More shame to Mark!" exclaimed Oswald. "I cannot _describe_ to you
how this affair has pained me. Mark is my father's son, and his
disgrace seems to be reflected upon me. His hiding himself is the
worst part of it all. While he does so he is only prolonging the
trouble and the ill. Believe me, it would not be a kindness to help
Mark. Let him come forward as a man and a gentleman ought; that would
be the best help to him."
Sara felt that he was right; but she felt also that Mark would _not_
come forward; and what was to be the ending?
"They are living in only one room; it is at--."
"Don't tell it me?" impulsively interrupted Oswald, something like
anger in his tone. "I would not for the world be made cognisant of
Marcus Cray's hiding-place. People have come to me for it times and
again; and I am thankful to assure them in all truth that I know it
not."
He rose, as if wishing to put an end to the subject, and held out his
hand to Sara.
"At least you will forgive me for presuming to trouble you so far,"
she murmured. "I could not help it: Caroline besought me very
piteously."
His dark blue eyes, so earnestly bent on her, gave sufficient answer,
even without the pressure of the hand, the tender tone of the low
words.
"You should not speak of it in that light. If you knew how great a
pleasure it is to me for you to ask me anything! I had almost said it
is the only one left to me in my matter-of-fact working life. You and
I have none too much of such: it seems to me that we both have to
suffer for the wrong-doing of others."