Sir George Tressady Volume I Part 19

What days of joy those Sat.u.r.days were for mother and child! All the morning and till about four o'clock, he and she would be inseparable, trailing about together over field and wood, she one of the handsomest of women, he one of the plainest of children--a little square-faced chubby fellow, with eyes monstrously black and big, fat cheeks that hung a little over the firm chin, a sallow complexion, and a large humorous mouth.

But in the late afternoon, alas! Hallin was apt to find the world grow tiresome. For against all his advice "mummy" would allow herself to be clad by Annette, the maid, in a frock of state; carriages would drive up from the 5.10 train; and presently in the lengthening evening the great lawns of the Court would be dotted with strolling groups, or the red drawing-room, with its Romneys and Gainsboroughs, would be filled with talk and laughter circling round mummy at the tea-table; so that all that was left to Hallin was that seat on mummy's knee--his big, dark head pressed disconsolately against her breast, his thumb in his mouth for comfort--which no boy of any spirit would ever consent to occupy, so long as there was any chance of goading a slack companion into things better worth while.

Marcella herself was no less rebellious at heart, and would have asked nothing better than to be left free to spend her weekly holiday in roaming an April world with Hallin. But our country being what it is, the plans that are made in Mile End or Sh.o.r.editch have to be adopted by Mayfair or Mayfair's equivalent; otherwise they are apt to find an inglorious tomb in the portfolios that bred them. We have still, it seems, a "ruling cla.s.s"; and in spite of democracy it is still this "ruling cla.s.s" that matters. Maxwell was perfectly aware of it; and these Sundays to him were the mere complements of the Mile End weekdays.

Marcella ruefully admitted that English life was so, and she did her best. But on Monday mornings she was generally left protesting in her inmost soul against half the women whom these peers and politicians, these administrators and journalists, brought with them, or wondering anxiously whether her particular share in the social effort just over might not have done Aldous more harm than good. She understood vaguely, without vanity, that she was a power in this English society, that she had many warm friends, especially among men of the finer and abler sort.

But when a woman loved her, and insisted, as it were, on making her know it--and, after all, the experience was not a rare one--Marcella received the overture with a kind of grateful surprise. She was accustomed, without knowing why, to feel herself ill at ease with certain types of women; even in her own house she was often aware of being furtively watched by hostile eyes; or she found herself suddenly the goal of some sharp little pleasantry that p.r.i.c.ked like a stiletto. She supposed that she was often forgetful and indiscreet. Perhaps the large court she held so easily on these occasions beneath the trees or in the great drawing-rooms of the old house had more to do with the matter. If so, she never guessed the riddle. In society she was conscious of one aim, and one aim only. Its very simplicity made other women incredulous, while it kept herself in the dark.

However, by dint of great pains, she had not yet done Aldous any harm that counted. During all the time of their East End sojourn, a Liberal government, embarra.s.sed by large schemes it had not force enough to carry, was sinking towards inevitable collapse. When the crash came, a weak Conservative government, in which Aldous Maxwell occupied a prominent post, accepted office for a time without a dissolution. They came in on a cry of "industrial reform," and, by way of testing their own party and the country, adopted the Factory Bill for East London, which had now, by the common consent of all the workers upon it, pa.s.sed into Maxwell's hands. The Bill rent the party in twain; but the Ministry had the courage to go to the country with a programme in which the Maxwell Bill held a prominent place. Trade-unionism rallied to their support; the forces both of reaction and of progress fought for them, in strangely mingled ways; and they were returned with a sufficient, though not large, majority. Lord Ardagh, the veteran leader of the party, became Premier.

Maxwell was made President of the Council, while his old friend and a.s.sociate, Henry Dowson, became Home Secretary, and thereby responsible for the conduct of the long-expected Bill through the Commons.

When Maxwell came back to her on the afternoon of his decisive interview with Lord Ardagh, she was waiting for him in that same inner room where Tressady paid his first visit. At the sound of her husband's step outside, she sprang up, and they met half-way, her hands clasped in his, against his breast, her face looking up at him.

"Dear wife! at last we have our chance--our real chance," he said to her.

She clung to him, and there was a moment of high emotion, in which thoughts of the past and of the dead mingled with the natural ambition of two people in the prime of life and power. Then Maxwell laughed and drew a long breath.

"The eggs have been all put into my basket in the most generous manner.

We stand or fall by the Bill. But it will be a hard fight."

And, in his acute, deliberate way, he began to sum up the forces against him--to speculate on the action of this group and that--Fontenoy's group first and foremost.

Marcella listened, her beautiful hand pensive against her cheek, her eyes on his. Half trembling, she realised what failure, if after all failure should come, would mean to him. Something infinitely tender and maternal spoke in her, pledging her to the utmost help that love and a woman could give.

Such for Maxwell and his wife had been the antecedents of a memorable session.

And now the session was here--was in full stream, indeed, rus.h.i.+ng towards the main battle still to come. On the second night of Fontenoy's debate, George Tressady duly caught the Speaker's eye, and made a very fair maiden speech, which earned him a good deal more praise, both from his party and the press, than he--in a disgusted mood--thought at all reasonable. He had misplaced half his notes, and, in his own opinion, made a mess of his main argument. He remarked to Fontenoy afterwards that he had better hang himself, and stalked home after the division pleased with one thing only--that he had not allowed Letty to come.

In reality he had done nothing to mar the reputation that was beginning to attach to him. Fontenoy was content; and the scantiness of the majority by which the Resolution was defeated served at once to make the prospects of the Maxwell Bill, which was to be brought in after Easter, more doubtful, and to sharpen the temper of its foes.

CHAPTER VIII

"Goodness!--what an ugly place it is! It wants five thousand spent on it at once to make it tolerable!"

The remark was Letty Tressady's. She was standing disconsolate on the lawn at Ferth, scanning the old-fas.h.i.+oned house to which George had brought her just five days before. They had been married a fortnight, and were still to spend another week in the country before going back to London and to Parliament. But already Letty had made up her mind that Ferth _must_ be rebuilt and refurnished, or she could never endure it.

She threw herself down on a garden seat with a sigh, still studying the house. It was a straight barrack-like building, very high for its breadth, erected early in the last century by an architect who, finding that he was to be allowed but a very scanty sum for his performance, determined with considerable strength of mind to spend all that he had for decoration upon the inside rather than the outside of his mansion.

Accordingly the inside had charm--though even so much Letty could not now be got to confess; panellings, mantelpieces, and doorways showed the work of a man of taste. But outside all that had been aimed at was the provision of a central block of building carried up to a considerable height so as to give the rooms demanded, while it economised in foundations and general s.p.a.ce; an outer wall pierced with the plainest openings possible at regular intervals; a high-pitched roof to keep out the rain, whereof the original warm tiles had been long since replaced by the chilliest Welsh slates; and two low and disfiguring wings which held the servants and the kitchens. The stucco with which the house had been originally covered had blackened under the influence of time, weather, and the smoke from the Tressady coalpits. Altogether, what with its pitchy colour, its mean windows, its factory-like plainness and height, Ferth Place had no doubt a cheerless and repellent air, which was increased by its immediate surroundings. For it stood on the very summit of a high hill, whereon the trees were few and windbeaten; while the carriage drives and the paths that climbed the hill were all of them a coaly black. The flower garden behind the house was small and neglected; neither shrubberies nor kitchen garden, nor the small park, had any character or stateliness; everything bore the stamp of bygone possessors who had been rich neither in money nor in fancy; who had been quite content to live small lives in a small way.

Ferth's new mistress thought bitterly of them, as she sat looking at their handiwork. What could be done with such a place? How could she have London people to stay there? Why, their very maids would strike! And, pray, what was a country house worth, without the usual country-house amenities and accessories?

Yet she already began to feel fretted and hampered about money. The inside of the house had been to some extent renovated. She had helped George to choose papers and curtains for the rooms that were to be her special domain, while they were in London together before Easter. But she knew that George had at one time meant to do much more than had actually been done; and he had been in a mood of lover-like apology on the first day of their arrival. "Darling, I had hoped to buy you a hundred pretty things!--but times is bad--dreadful bad!" he had said to her with a laugh. "We will do it by degrees--you won't mind?"

Then she had tried to make him tell her why it was that he had abandoned some of the schemes of improvement that had certainly been in his mind during the first weeks of their engagement. But he had not been very communicative, and had put the blame mostly, as she understood him, on the "beastly pits" and the very low dividends they had been earning during the past six months.

Letty, however, did not in the least believe that the comparatively pinched state of their finances, which, bride as she was, she was already brooding over, was wholly or even mainly due to the pits. She set her little white teeth in sudden anger as she said to herself that it was _not_ the pits--it was Lady Tressady! George was crippled now because of the large sums his mother had not been ashamed to wring from him during the last six months. Letty--George's wife--was to go without comforts and conveniences, without the means of seeing her friends and taking her proper position in the world, because George's mother--a ridiculous, painted old woman, who went in for flirtations and French gowns, when she ought to be subsiding quietly into caps and Bath chairs--would sponge upon his very moderate income, and take what did not belong to her.

"I am _certain_ there is something in the background!" said Letty to herself, as she sat looking at the ugly house--"something that she is ashamed of, and that she doesn't tell George. She _couldn't_ spend all that money on dress! I believe she is a wicked old woman--she has the most extraordinary creatures at her parties."

The girl's delicate face stiffened vindictively as she fell brooding for the hundredth time over Lady Tressady's enormities.

Then suddenly the garden door opened, and Letty, looking up, saw that George was on the threshold, waving his hand to her. He had left her that morning--almost for the first time since their marriage--to go and see his princ.i.p.al agent and discuss the position of affairs.

As he approached her, she noticed instantly that he was looking tired and ruffled. But the sight of her smoothed his brow. He threw himself down on the gra.s.s at her feet, and pressed his lips to the delicately tended hand that lay upon her lap.

"Have you missed me, madame?" he said, peremptorily.

Preoccupied as she was, Letty must needs flush and smile, so well she knew from his eager eye that she pleased him, that he noticed the pretty gown she had put on for luncheon, and that all the petting his absence had withdrawn from her for an hour or two had come back to her. Other women--more or less of her type--had found his ways beguiling before now. He took courts.h.i.+p as an art, and had his own rooted ideas as to how women should be treated. Neither too gingerly nor too sentimentally--but, above all, with variety!

He repeated his question insistently; whereupon Letty said, with her pert brightness, thinking all the time of the house, "I'm _not_ going to make you vain. Besides, I have been frightfully busy."

"You're not going to make me vain? But I choose to be vain. I'll go away for the whole afternoon if I'm not made vain this instant. Ah! that's better. Do you know that you have the softest little curl on your soft little neck, and that your hair has caught the sun on it this morning?"

Letty instinctively put up a hand to tuck away the curl. But he seized the hand. "Little vandal!--What have you been busy with?"

"Oh! I have been over the house with Mrs. Matthews," said Letty, in another tone. "George, it's _dreadful_--the number of things that want doing. Do you know, _positively_, we could not put up more than two couples, if we tried ever so. And as for the state of the attics! Now do listen, George!"

And, holding his hand tight in her eagerness, she went through a vehement catalogue of all that was wanted--new furniture, new decoration, new grates, a new hot-water system, the raising of the wings, and so on to the alteration of the stables and the replanning of the garden. She had no sooner begun upon her list than George's look of worry returned. He got up from the gra.s.s, and sat on the bench beside her.

"Well, I'm sorry you dislike the place so much," he said, when her breath failed her, staring rather gloomily at his despised mansion. "Of course, it's quite true--it is an ugly hole. But the worst of it is, darling, I don't quite see how we're to do all this you talk about. I don't bring any good news from the pits, alas!"

He turned quickly towards her. The thought flashed through his mind--could he be justly charged with having married her on false pretences as to his affairs? No! There had been no misrepresentation of his income or his risks. Everything had been plainly and honestly stated to her father, and therefore to her. For Letty knew all that she wanted to know, and had managed her family since she was a baby.

Letty flushed at his last words.

"Do you mean to say," she said with emphasis, "that those men are really going to strike?"

"I am afraid so. We _must_ enforce a reduction, to avoid working at sheer loss, and the men vow they'll come out."

"They want you to make them a present of the mines, I suppose!" said Letty, bitterly. "Why, the tales I hear of their extravagance and laziness! Mrs. Matthews says they'll have none but the best cuts of meat, that they all of them have an harmonium or a piano in the house, that their houses are _stuffed_ with furniture--and the amount of money they spend in betting on their dogs and their football matches is perfectly sickening. And now, I suppose they'll ruin themselves and us, rather than allow you to make a decent profit!"

"That's about it," said George, flinging himself back on the bench.

"That's about it."

There was a pause of silence. The eyes of both were turned to the colliery village far below, at the foot of the hill. From this high stretch of garden one looked across the valley and its straggling line of houses, to the pits on the further hillside, the straight black line of the "bank," the pulley wheels, and tall chimneys against the sky. To the left, along the ascending valley, similar chimneys and "banks" were scattered at long intervals, while to the right the valley dipped in sharp wooded undulations to a blue plain bounded by far Welsh hills. The immediate neighbourhood of Ferth, for a coal country, had a woodland charm and wildness which often surprised a stranger. There were untouched copses, and little rivers and fern-covered hills, which still held their own against the ever-encroaching mounds of "spoil" thrown out by the mines. Only the villages were invariably ugly. They were the modern creations of the coal, and had therefore no history and no originality.

Their monotonous rows of red cottages were like fragments from some dingy town suburb, and the brick meeting-houses in which they abounded did nothing to abate the general unloveliness.

This view from the Ferth hill was one which had great familiarity for Tressady, and yet no charm. As a boy he had had no love for his home and very few acquaintances in the village. His mother hated the place and the people. She had married very young--for the sake of money and position--to his dull old father, who nevertheless managed to keep his flighty wife in order by dint of a dumb, continuous stubbornness and tyranny, which would have overborne a stronger nature than Lady Tressady's. She was always struggling to get away from Ferth; he to keep her tied there. He was never at ease away from his estate and his pits; she felt herself ten years younger as soon as she had lost sight of the grim black house on its hilltop.

And this one opinion of hers she was able to impress upon her son--George, too, was always glad to turn his back on Ferth and its people. The colliers seemed to him a brutal crew, given over to coa.r.s.e sports, coa.r.s.e pleasures, and an odious religion. As to their supposed grievances and hards.h.i.+ps, his intimate conviction as a boy had always been that the miner got the utmost both out of his employers and out of society that he was worth.

"Upon my word, I often think," he said at last, his inward reverie finding speech, "I often think it was a great pity my grandfather discovered the coal at all! In the long run I believe we should have done better without it. We should not at any rate have been bound up with these hordes, with whom you can no more reason than with so many blocks of their own coal!"