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But what with her engagements and theirs, nothing that she suggested could be done. "Ah! well, after Whitsuntide," she said, smiling, to Letty one evening that they had interchanged a few words of polite regret on the stairs at some official party. "I will write to you in the country, if I may. Ferth Place, is it not?"
He vowed to himself once more, as he had vowed at Ferth, that his mind was a chaos, without convictions, either intellectual or moral; that he had begun what he was not able to finish; and that he was doomed to make a failure of his parliamentary career, as he was already making a failure of coal-owning and a failure He curbed something bitter and springing that haunted his most inmost mind.
The Indian climate might have somehow affected him. An English winter is soon forgotten, and has to be re-learnt like a distasteful lesson. About a week after their arrival at Ferth George was sitting at his solitary breakfast when his mother came floating into the room, preceded by a rattle of bangles, a flutter of streamers, and the barking of little dogs.
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 circumstances of Tressady's long absence concern his later story, and were on this wise. His father, Sir William, the owner of Ferth Place, in West Mercia, died in the year that George, his only surviving child and the son of his old age, left college.
Maxwell found her in her own little sitting-room almost in the dark. He sat down by her and took her hand. "You couldn't make any impression on him as to Parliament?" she asked him, almost whispering. "No. He persists that he must go. I think his private circumstances at Ferth have a great deal to do with it." She shook her head.
His reports from Ferth were steadily more discouraging; his attempts to sell his land made no way; and he saw plainly that, if he was to keep their London life going, to provide for Shapetsky's claims, and to give Letty what she wanted for renovations at Ferth, he would have to sell some of the very small list of good securities left him by his father.
She defiantly watched the face in the glass grow red, the eyelids quiver. Then, like the tremor from some volcanic fire far within, a shudder ran through her. She dropped her head on her hands. She hated hated him! Was it to-morrow evening she had told him he might come? She would go down to Ferth. Wheels in the quiet street!
Moreover, economy was absolutely necessary. During his absence the London house could be let, and Lady Tressady could live quietly at Ferth upon an allowance, while his uncles looked after the colliery property. Lady Tressady made no difficulty, except as to the figure first named for the proposed allowance, which she declared was absurd.
Well, after all, darling you see, you don't have to live in those houses, nice as they are and you don't have to do your own scrubbing. Ferth may be a vile hole, but I suppose you could put a score of these houses inside it and I'm a pauper, but I can provide you with two housemaids. I say, why do you walk so far away from me?"
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