by Ellen Wood
“Shall I get well?” she asked, when his examination was over.
“I will do what I can for you. The pain I think can be very considerably alleviated.”
It was not a satisfactory answer. To most ears it might have savoured of considerate evasion, but it did not to Caroline’s. “Must there be an operation?” she resumed.
“No.”
She looked up at him from the depths of her violet eyes, pausing before she spoke again. “ Monsieur Le Bleu said there must be an operation, if it could be performed. If, he said; he did not seem sure. It was the only chance, he said.”
The surgeon met the remark jokingly. “ Monsieur Le Bleu’s very clever — as he no doubt thinks. I will see you again to-morrow, Mrs. Cray.”
“But — stay a moment. Tell me at least by which day I shall be ready to go back. You can put me in the proper way of treatment, and I will pursue it over there.”
“Not by any day. You must not think of returning to France.”
She looked puzzled: there was a wild expression in her eyes. “Do you mean that I shall not be able to return at all?”
“Yes, I do. I say that you must not venture upon the shores of France again. We can’t think of trusting you to the care of that clever French doctor, you know.”
And before Caroline had recovered her surprise sufficiently to rejoin, Mr. Welch had left the chamber and was down in the drawing-room with Miss Davenal. She bent her head as she waited for his opinion.
“Do you wish for the truth, ma’am?” he asked.
“Wish for what?” repeated Miss Bettina, putting her hand to her ear.
“The truth.”
“Do I wish for the truth?” she retorted, affronted at the question. “Sir, I am the daughter of one surgeon and the sister of another; I don’t know to whom the truth may be told if not to me. It is necessary that I should know it.”
Mr. Welch gave her the truth: that there was no hope whatever. At least, what he said was equivalent to that “And the operation that she talks of?”
“It cannot be performed. The case is not an ordinary one.”
Miss Bettina was for a minute silent. “My brother, Dr. Davenal, always said Caroline had no constitution.”
“Dr. Davenal was right,” returned the surgeon. “Mrs. Cray is one — if I may form a judgment upon so short an acquaintance — who could never, even under the most auspicious surroundings, have lived to grow old.”
“I remember a remark he made to me after Caroline’s marriage with Mark Cray was fixed — that it was well she should marry a doctor, for she’d need watching. A fine doctor, indeed!” continued Miss Bettina, irascibly, as she recalled Mark’s later career. “If my poor brother had but known! I suppose it is all this disgrace that has brought it on!”
“It may have hastened it,” said the surgeon. “But this, or some other disease, would inevitably have developed itself sooner or later. The germs were within her.”
“And now what can be done for her?”
“Nothing in the world can be done for her, as regards a cure. We must try and alleviate the pain. That she will now grow worse rapidly there’s not a doubt. Miss Davenal, she must be kept tranquil.”
It was all very well for Mr. Welch to say she must be kept tranquil; but Caroline Cray was one who had had an absolute spirit of her own all her life, and an excitable one. When Miss Bettina went up to her room after the departure of the surgeon she found her in a wild state. Her cheeks were crimson with incipient fever, her eyes glistening. Sara, terrified, was holding her down in bed, begging her to be reasonable.
“I want to go back at once, Aunt Bettina,” she exclaimed, throwing out her arms in a sort of frenzy. “He says I can’t go back to France, but I will go. What does he know about it, I wonder! I was well enough to come, and I am well enough to go back! Be quiet, Sara! Why do you wish to prevent my speaking? You’ll send me back to-day, won’t you, Aunt Bettina?”
“I’ll send for a strait waistcoat and put you into that,” shrilly cried Miss Bettina in her vexation. “This is a repetition of the childishness of the old days.”
“I won’t be separated from Mark. Though he has been mistaken and imprudent, he is still my husband. It’s a shame that Mr. Welch should want to keep me here! Don’t you be so cruel as to side with him, Aunt Bettina.”
For once in her life Miss Bettina Davenal lent herself to an evasive compromise. She promised Caroline that she should go back when she was a little stronger, perhaps in two or three days, she said. And it had the desired effect. It soothed away the invalid’s dangerous excitement, and she turned round on her pillow and went to sleep quietly.
But as the days went on, and the disease — as the surgeon had foretold — rapidly developed itself, it became plain to Mrs. Cray herself that returning to France was out of the question. And then her tone changed. She no longer prayed in impatient words to be sent: she bewailed in impassioned tones that she must die away from her husband. One day, towards the end of December, it almost seemed that her brain was slightly affected, perhaps from weakness. She started suddenly from the sofa in the drawing-room, where she was reclining, and seized hold of the hands of her aunt in a wild manner.
“O Aunt Bettina! Aunt Bettina! if I had not to go over there to die!”
“Over where?” cried Miss Bettina. “What are you talking of, child?”
“There. Honfleur. If I had not to go! If I could but stop in my own land, among you to the last! It may not be for long!”
Miss Bettina, what with the suddenness of the attack and her own deafness, was bewildered. “I don’t hear,” she helplessly said.
“They have got two cemeteries, but I’d not like to lie in either,” went on Caroline. “Mark won’t stop in the town for ever, and there’d be nobody to look at my grave. Aunt, aunt, I can’t go over there to die!”
“But you are not going there,” returned Miss Bettina, catching the sense of the words. “You must be dreaming, Caroline. You are not going back to Honfleur.”
“I must go. I can’t die away from Mark. Aunt, listen!” she passionately continued, clasping the wrist of Miss Bettina until that lady felt the pain. “It is one of two things: either I must go to Honfleur, or Mark must come here. I cannot die away from him.”
The cry was reiterated until it grew into a wail of agony. She was suffering herself to fall into that excess of nervous agitation so difficult to soothe, so pernicious to the sick frame. Sara came in alarmed, and learned the nature of the excitement. She leaned over the sofa with a soothing whisper.
“Dear Carine! only be quiet: only be comforted! We will manage to get Mark here.”
The low tone, the gentle words, seemed partially to allay the storm of the working brain. Caroline turned to Sara.
“What do you say you’ll do?”
“Get Mark over to London.”
She thought for a moment, and then shook her head and spoke wearily, a wailing plaint in her tone.
“You will never get him over. He is not to be got over. I know Mark better than you, Sara. So long as that miserable Wheal Bang hangs over his head he will not set his foot on English ground. I have heard him say so times upon times since he left these shores, and he will not break his word. He is afraid, you see. O Aunt Bettina!” throwing up her arms again in renewed excitement—” what an awful mistake it was!”
“What was a mistake?” returned Miss Bettina, catching the last word and no other.
“What!” echoed the unhappy invalid in irritation. “The quitting Hallingham; the past altogether. It was giving up the substance for the shadow. If we had but listened to you! If Mark had never heard of the Great Wheal Bang!”
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 th
e 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.
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, irritated, 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 more. 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 fellow’s, 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.”
Grumbling, however, would not bring him the letter, neither would kicking pebbles into the manche: Mr. Mark Gray grew tired of his pastime, and turned finally away from it. He sauntered through the waste ground underneath the side windows of the hotel, his ears nearly deafened by the noise of the rough boys who were quarrelling in groups over their marbles, made a détour across the bridge, glanced askance at the slip of building grandly designated Bureau des Postes, and turned off towards his home. It was a soft, calm evening in January, gloomy enough overhead, but in the west the sky was clearing, and a solitary star came peeping out, imbedded like a diamond in its grey setting. To a mind less matter-of-fact than Mark Cray’s that star might have seemed as a ray of hope; an earnest that skies do not remain gloomy for ever.
Mark turned in at his little garden, and was about to ring gingerly at the house door; as one, not upon the most cordial terms with a frowning landlady, likes to ring; when a voice in the road greeted him.
“Bon soir!”
“Bon soir,” returned Mark, supposing it was but the courteous salutation of some chance passer-by, and not troubling himself to turn his head.