Sir George Tressady — Volume I

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

"Why are you so depressed to-night? Is there any fresh news?"

"Yes. And, altogether, things look increasingly bad for us, and increasingly well for them. It will be extraordinarily close anyway—probably a matter of a vote or two." And he gave her a summary of his after-dinner conversation with Lord Cathedine, a keen ally of Fontenoy's in the Lords, and none the less a shrewd fellow because he happened to be also a detestable person.

Marcella heard the news of one or two fresh defections from the Government with amazement and indignation. She stood there in the darkness, leaning against the man she loved, her heart beating fast and stormily. How could the world thus misconceive and thwart him? And what could she do? Her mind ran passionately through a hundred schemes, refusing to submit—to see him baffled and defeated.

CHAPTER XII

To Lord Ancoats himself this party of his mother's was an oppression and a nuisance. He had only been induced to preside over it with difficulty; and his mother had been both hurt and puzzled by his reluctance to play the host.

If you had asked Maxwell's opinion on the point, he would have told you that Ancoats's bringing up had a good deal to do with the present anxieties of Ancoats's mother. He—Maxwell—had done his best, but he had been overmatched.

First and foremost, Ancoats had been to no public school. It was not the custom of the family; and Mrs. Allison could not be induced to break the tradition. There was accordingly a succession of tutors, whose Church-principles at least were sound. And Ancoats showed himself for a time an impressionable, mystical boy, entirely in sympathy with his mother. His confirmation was a great family emotion, and when he was seventeen Mrs. Allison had difficulty in making him take food enough in Lent to keep him in health. Maxwell was beginning to wonder where it would end, when the lad was sent to Cambridge, and the transformation scene that might always perhaps have been expected, began.

He had been two years at Trinity when he went to pay the Maxwells a visit at the Court. Maxwell could hardly believe his eyes or ears. The boy who at nineteen was an authority on church music and ancient "uses," by twenty-one talked and thought of nothing in heaven or earth but the stage and French bric-à-brac. His conversation swarmed with the names of actors, singers, and dancers; but they were names that meant nothing except to the initiated. They were the small people of the small theatres; and Ancoats was a Triton among them, not at all, so he carefully informed his kindred, because of his wealth and title, but because he too was an artist, and could sing, revel, write, and dance with the best of them.

For some time Maxwell was able to console Mrs. Allison with the historical reflection that more than one son of the Oxford Movement had found in a passion for the stage a ready means of annoying the English Puritan. When it came, however, to the young man's producing risky plays of his own composing at extremely costly matinées, there was nothing for it but to interfere. Maxwell at last persuaded him to give up the farce of Cambridge and go abroad. But Ancoats would only go with a man of his own sort; and their time was mostly spent in Paris, where Ancoats divided his hard-spent existence between the furious pursuit of Louis Quinze bibelots and the patronage of two or three minor theatres. To be the king of a first night, raining applause and bouquets from his stage-box, seemed to give him infinite content; but his vanity was hardly less flattered by the compliments say of M. Tournonville, the well-known dealer on the Quai Voltaire, who would bow himself before the young Englishman with the admiring cry, "Mon Dieu! milord, que vous êtes fin connoisseur!" while the dealer's assistant grinned among the shadows of the back-shop.

At last, at twenty-four, he must needs return to England for his coming of age under his grandfather's will and the taking over of his estate. Under the sobering influence of these events, his class and his mother seemed for a time to recover him. He refurnished a certain number of rooms at Castle Luton, and made a special marvel of his own room, which was hung thick with Boucher, Greuze, and Watteau engravings, littered with miniatures and trinkets, and encumbered here and there with portfolios of drawings which he was not anxious to unlock in his mother's presence.