Sir George Tressady Volume I Part 26

"Let's walk on, then," said George.

And they walked past the gate of Ferth, towards the railway-station, which was some two miles off.

About an hour later the two men returned along the same road. Both had an air of tension; both were rather pale.

"Well, it comes to this," said George, as he stopped beside his own gate, "you believe our case--the badness of trade, the disappearance of profits, pressure of contracts, and all the rest of it--and you still refuse on your part to bear the smallest fraction of the burden? You will claim all you can get in good times--you will give back nothing in bad?"

"That is so," said Burrows, deliberately; "that is so, _precisely_. We will take no risks; we give our labour and in return the workman must live. Make the consumer pay, or pay yourselves out of your good years"--he turned imperceptibly towards the barrack-like house on the hill. "We don't care a ha'porth which it is!--only don't you come on the man who risks his life, and works like a galley-slave five days a week for a pittance of five-and-twenty shillings, or thereabouts, to pay--for he _won't_. He's tired of it. Not till you starve him into it, at any rate!"

George laughed.

"One of the best men in the village has been giving me his opinion this afternoon that there isn't a man in that place"--he pointed to it--"that couldn't live, and live well--aye, and take the masters' terms to-morrow--but for the drink!"

His keen look ran over Burrows from head to foot.

"And I know who _that_ is," said Burrows, with a sneer. "Well, I can tell you what the rest of the men in that place think, and it's this: that the man in that village who _doesn't_ drink is a mean skunk, who's betraying his own flesh and blood to the capitalists! Oh! you may preach at us till you're black in the face, but drink we _shall_ till we get the control of our own labour. For, look here! Directly we cease to drink--directly we become good boys on your precious terms--the standard of life falls, down come wages, and _you_ sweep off our beer-money to spend on your champagne. Thank you, Sir George! but we're not such fools as we look--and that don't suit us! Good-day to you."

And he haughtily touched his hat in response to George's movement, and walked quickly away.

George slowly mounted his own hill. The chequered April day was declining, and the dipping sun was flooding the western plain with quiet light. Rooks were circling round the hill, filling the air with long-drawn sound. A cuckoo was calling on a tree near at hand, and the evening was charged with spring scents--scents of leaf and gra.s.s, of earth and rain. Below, in an oak copse across the road, a stream rushed; and from a distance came the familiar rattle and thud of the pits.

George stood still a moment under a ragged group of Scotch firs--one of the few things at Ferth that he loved--and gazed across the Cheshire border to the distant lines of Welsh hills. The excitement of his talk with Burrows was subsiding, leaving behind it the obstinate resolve of the natural man. He should tell his uncles there was nothing for it but to fight it out. Some blood must be let; somebody must be master.

What poor limited fools, after all, were the best of the working men--how incapable of working out any serious problem, of looking beyond their own noses and the next meal! Was he to spend his life in chronic battle with them--a set of semi-civilised barbarians--his countrymen in nothing but the name? And for what cause--to what cry? That he might defend against the toilers of this wide valley a certain elegant house in Brook Street, and find the means to go on paying his mother's debts?--such debts as he carried the evidence of, at that moment, in his pocket.

Suddenly there swept over his mind with p.r.i.c.king force the thought of Mary Batchelor at her door, blind with weeping and pain--of the poor boy, dead in his prime. Did those two figures stand for the _realities_ at the base of things--the common labours, affections, agonies, which uphold the world?

His own life looked somehow poor and mean to him as he turned back to it.

The Socialist of course--Burrows--would say that he and Letty and his mother were merely living, and dressing, and enjoying themselves, paying butlers, and starting carriages out of the labour and pain of others--that Jamie Batchelor and his like risked and brutalised their strong young lives that Lady Tressady and her like might "jig and amble"

through theirs.

Pure ignorant fanaticism, no doubt! But he was not so ready as usual to shelter himself under the big words of controversy. Fontenoy's favourite arguments had momentarily no savour for a kind of moral nausea.

"I begin to see it was a 'cursed spite' that drove me into the business at all," he said to himself, as he stood under the trees.

What he was really suffering from was an impatience of new conditions--perhaps surprise that he was not more equal to them. Till his return home--till now, almost--he had been an employer and a coal-owner by proxy. Other people had worked for him, had solved his problems for him. Then a transient impulse had driven him home--made him accept Fontenoy's offer--worse luck!--at least, Letty apart! The hopefulness and elation about himself, his new activities, and his Parliamentary prospects, that had been his predominant mood in London seemed to him at this moment of depression mere folly. What he really felt, he declared to himself, was a sort of cowardly shrinking from life and its tests--the recognition that at bottom he was a weakling, without faiths, without true ident.i.ty.

Then the quick thought-process, as it flowed on, told him that there are two things that protect men of his stamp from their own lack of moral stamina: perpetual change of scene, that turns the world into a spectacle--and love. He thought with hunger of his travel-years; holding away from him, as it were, for a moment the thought of his marriage.

But only for a moment. It was but a few weeks since a woman's life had given itself wholly into his hands. He was still thrilling under the emotion and astonishment of it. Tender, melting thoughts flowed upon him.

His little Letty! Had he ever thought her perfect, free from natural covetousness and weaknesses? What folly! _He_ to ask for the grand style in character!

He looked at his watch. How long he had left her! Let him hurry, and make his peace.

However, just as he was turning, his attention was caught by something that was pa.s.sing on the opposite hillside. The light from the west was shining full on a white cottage with a sloping garden. The cottage belonged to the Wesleyan minister of the place, and had been rented by Burrows for the last six months. And just as George was turning away he saw Burrows come out of the door with a burden--a child, or a woman little larger than a child--in his arms. He carried her to an armchair which had been placed on the little gra.s.s-plat. The figure was almost lost in the chair, and sat motionless while Burrows brought cushions and a stool. Then a baby came to play on the gra.s.s, and Burrows hung over the back of the chair, bending so as to talk to the person in it.

"Dying?" said George to himself. "Poor devil! he must hate something."

He sped up the hill, and found Letty still on the sofa and in the last pages of her novel. She did not resent his absence apparently,--a freedom, so far, from small exaction for which he inwardly thanked her.

Still, from the moment that she raised her eyes as he came in, he saw that if she was not angry with him for leaving her alone, her mind was still as sore as ever against him and fortune on other accounts--and his revived ardour drooped. He gave her an account of his adventures, but she was neither inquiring nor sympathetic; and her manner all the evening had a nervous dryness that took away the pleasure of their _tete-a-tete._ Any old friend of Letty's, indeed, could hardly have failed to ask what had become of that small tinkling charm of manner, that girlish flippancy and repartee, that had counted for so much in George's first impressions of her? They were no sooner engaged than it had begun to wane. Was it like the bird or the flower, that adorns itself only for the wooing time, and sinks into relative dinginess when the mating effort is over?

On this particular evening, indeed, she was really absorbed half the time in gloomy thoughts of Lady Tressady's behaviour and the poorness of her own prospects. She lay on the sofa again after dinner--her white slimness and bright hair showing delicately against the cushions--playing still with her novel, while George read the newspapers. Sometimes she glanced at him unsteadily, with a pinching of the lips. But it was not her way to invite a scene.

Late at night he went up to his dressing-room.

As he entered it Letty was talking to her maid. He stopped involuntarily in the darkness of his own room, and listened. What a contrast between this Letty and the Letty of the drawing-room! They were chattering fast, discussing Lady Tressady, and Lady Tressady's gowns, and Lady Tressady's affairs. What eagerness, what malice, what feminine subtlety and acuteuess! After listening for a few seconds, it seemed to him as though a score of new and ugly lights had been thrown alike upon his mother and on human nature. He stole away again without revealing himself.

When he returned the room was nearly dark, and Letty was lying high against her pillows, waiting for him. Suddenly, after she had sent her maid away, she had felt depressed and miserable, and had begun to cry.

And for some reason hardly clear to herself she had lain pining for George's footstep. When he came in she looked at him with eyes still wet, reproaching him gently for being late.

In the dim light, surrounded with lace and whiteness, she was a pretty vision; and George stood beside her, responding and caressing.

But that black depth in his nature, of which he had spoken to her--which he had married to forget--was, none the less, all ruffled and vocal. For the first time since Letty had consented to marry him he did not think or say to himself, as he looked at her, that he was a lucky man, and had done everything for the best.

CHAPTER X

Thus, with the end of the honeymoon, whatever hopes or illusions George Tressady had allowed himself in marrying, were already much bedimmed. His love-dream had been meagre and ordinary enough. But even so, it had not maintained itself.

Nevertheless, such impressions and emotions pa.s.s. The iron fact of marriage outstays them, tends always to modify, and, at first, to conquer them.

Upon the Tressadys' return to London, Letty, at any rate, endeavoured to forget her great defeat of the honeymoon in the excitement of furnishing the house in Brook Street. Certainly there could be no question, in spite of all her high speech to Miss Tulloch and others, that in her first encounter with Lady Tressady, Lady Tressady had won easily. Letty had forgotten to reckon on the hard realities of the filial relation, and could only think of them now, partly with exasperation, partly with despair.

Lady Tressady, however, was for the moment somewhat subdued, and on the return of the young people to town she did her best to propitiate Letty.

In Letty's eyes, indeed, her offence was beyond reparation. But, for the moment, there was outward amity at least between them; which for Letty meant chiefly that she was conscious of making all her purchases for the house and planning all her housekeeping arrangements under a constant critical inspection; and, moreover, that she was liable to find all her afternoon-teas with particular friends, or those persons of whom she wished to make particular friends, broken up by the advent of the overdressed and be-rouged lady, who first put the guests to flight, and was then out of temper because they fled.

Meanwhile George found the Shapetsky matter extremely hara.s.sing. He put on a clever lawyer; but the Shapetsky would have scorned to be overmatched by anybody else's abilities, and very little abatement could be obtained. Moreover, the creditor's temper had been roughened by a somewhat unfortunate letter George had written in a hurry from Perth, and he showed every sign of carrying matters with as high a hand as possible.

Meanwhile, George was discovering, like any other landowner, how easy it is to talk of selling land, how difficult to sell it. The buyer who would once have bought was not now forthcoming; the few people who nibbled were, naturally, thinking more of their own purses than Tressady's; and George grew red with indignation over some of the offers submitted to him by his country solicitor. With the payment of a first large instalment to Shapetsky out of his ordinary account, he began to be really pressed for money, just as the expenses of the Brook Street settling-in were at their height. This pecuniary strain had a marked effect upon him. It brought out certain features of character which he no doubt inherited from his father. Old Sir William had always shown a scrupulous and petty temper in money matters. He could not increase his possessions: for that he had apparently neither brains nor judgment; nor could he even protect himself from the more serious losses of business, for George found heavy debts in existence--mortgages on the pits and so forth--when he succeeded. But as the head of a household Sir William showed extraordinary tenacity and spirit in the defence of his petty cash; and the exasperating extravagance of the wife whom, in a moment of infatuation, he had been cajoled into marrying, intensified and embittered a natural characteristic.

George so far resembled him that both at school and college he had been a rather careful and abstemious boy. Probably the spectacle of his mother's adventures had revealed to him very early the humiliations of the debtor.

At any rate, during his four years abroad he had never exceeded the modest yearly sum he had reserved for himself on leaving England; and the frugality of his personal expenditure had counted for something in the estimates formed of him during his travels by competent persons.

Nevertheless, at this beginning of household life he was still young and callow in all that concerned the management of money; and it had never occurred to him that his somewhat uncertain income of about four thousand a year would not be amply sufficient for anything that he and Letty might need; for housekeeping, for children--if children came--for political expenses, and even for those supplementary presents to his mother which he had all along recognised as inevitable. Now, however, what with the difficulty he found in settling the Shapetsky affair, what with Letty's demands for the house, and his revived dread of what his mother might be doing, together with his overdrawn account and the position of his colliery property, a secret fear of embarra.s.sment and disaster began to torment him, the offspring of a temperament which had never perhaps possessed any real buoyancy.

Occasionally, under the stimulus of this fear, he would leave the House of Commons on a Wednesday or Sat.u.r.day afternoon, walk to Warwick Square, and appear precipitately in his mother's drawing-room, for the purpose of examining the guests--or possible harpies--who might be gathered there.

He did his best once or twice to dislodge the "singer-fellow"--an elderly gentleman with a flabby face and long hair, who seemed to George to be equally boneless, physically and morally. Nevertheless, he was not to be dislodged. The singer, indeed, treated the young legislator with a mixture of deference and artistic; condescension, which was amusing or enraging as you chose to take it. And once, when George attempted very plain language with his mother, Lady Tressady went into hysterics, and vowed that she would not be parted from her friends, not even by the brutality of young married people who had everything they wanted, while she was a poor lone widow, whose life was not worth living. The whole affair was, so to speak, sordidly innocent. Mr. Fullerton--such was the gentleman's name--wanted creature-comforts and occasional loans; Lady Tressady wanted company, compliments, and "musical sketches'" for her little tea-parties. Mrs. Fullerton was as ready as her husband to supply the two former; and even the children, a fair-haired, lethargic crew, painfully like their boneless father in Tressady's opinion, took their share in the general exploitation of Tressady's mamma. Lady Tressady meanwhile posed as the benefactor of genius in distress; and vowed, moreover, that "poor dear Fullertori" was in no way responsible for her recent misfortunes. The "reptile," and the "reptile" only, was to blame.

After one of these skirmishes with his mother, George, ruffled and disgusted, took his way home, to find Letty eagerly engaged in choosing silk curtains for the drawing-room.

"Oh! how lucky!" she cried, when she saw him. "Now you can help me decide--_such_ a business!"