Sir George Tressady — Volume I

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

"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-fashioned 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 space; 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 principal agent and discuss the position of affairs.