Sir George Tressady — Volume I

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

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 pass. 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 harassing. 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 embarrassment 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 Saturday 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.