I hope he will not quarrel with Petsy. Petsy does not like other dogs."The day had been very hot, and Lord Ashbridge, not having taken any exercise, went off to have a round of golf with the professional of the links that lay not half a mile from the house. He considered exercise an essential part of the true Englishman's daily curriculum, and as necessary a contribution to the traditional mode of life which made them all what they were--or should be--as a bath in the morning or attendance at church on Sunday. He did not care so much about playing golf with a casual friend, because the casual friend, as a rule, casually beat him--thus putting him in an un-English position--and preferred a game with this first-class professional whose duty it was--in complete violation of his capacities--to play just badly enough to be beaten towards the end of the round after an exciting match. It required a good deal of cleverness and self-control to accomplish this, for Lord Ashbridge was a notably puerile performer, but he generally managed it with tact and success, by dint of missing absurdly easy putts, and (here his skill came in) by pulling and slicing his ball into far-distant bunkers. Throughout the game it was his business to keep up a running fire of admiring ejaculations such as "Well driven, my lord," or "A fine putt, my lord. Ah! dear me, I wish I could putt like that," though occasionally his chorus of praise betrayed him into error, and from habit he found himself saying: "Good shot, my lord," when my lord had just made an egregious mess of things. But on the whole he devised so pleasantly sycophantic an atmosphere as to procure a substantial tip for himself, and to make Lord Ashbridge conscious of being a very superior performer. Whether at the bottom of his heart he knew he could not play at all, he probably did not inquire; the result of his matches and his opponent's skilfully-showered praise was sufficient for him. So now he left the discouraging companionship of his wife and Petsy and walked swingingly across the garden and the park to the links, there to seek in Macpherson's applause the self-confidence that would enable him to encounter his republican sister and his musical son with an unyielding front.
His spirits mounted rapidly as he went. It pleased him to go jauntily across the lawn and reflect that all this smooth turf was his, to look at the wealth of well-tended flowers in his garden and know that all this polychromatic loveliness was bred in Lord Ashbridge's borders (and was graciously thrown open to the gaze of the admiring public on Sunday afternoon, when they were begged to keep off the grass), and that Lord Ashbridge was himself. He liked reminding himself that the towering elms drew their leafy verdure from Lord Ashbridge's soil; that the rows of hen-coops in the park, populous and cheeping with infant pheasants, belonged to the same fortunate gentleman who in November would so unerringly shoot them down as they rocketted swiftly over the highest of his tree-tops;that to him also appertained the long-fronted Jacobean house which stood so commandingly upon the hill-top, and glowed with all the mellowness of its three-hundred-years-old bricks. And his satisfaction was not wholly fatuous nor entirely personal; all these spacious dignities were insignia (temporarily conferred on him, like some order, and permanently conferred on his family) of the splendid political constitution under which England had made herself mistress of an empire and the seas that guarded it.
Probably he would have been proud of belonging to that even if he had not been "one of us"; as it was, the high position which he occupied in it caused that pride to be slightly mixed with the pride that was concerned with the notion of the Empire belonging to him and his peers.
But though he was the most profound of Tories, he would truthfully have professed (as indeed he practised in the management of his estates) the most Liberal opinions as to schemes for the amelioration of the lower classes. Only, just as the music he was good enough to listen to had to be played for him, so the tenants and farmers had to be his dependents. He looked after them very well indeed, conceiving this to be the prime duty of a great landlord, but his interest in them was really proprietary. It was of his bounty, and of his complete knowledge of what his duties as "one of us" were, that he did so, and any legislation which compelled him to part with one pennyworth of his property for the sake of others less fortunate he resisted to the best of his ability as a theft of what was his. The country, in fact, if it went to the dogs (and certain recent legislation distinctly seemed to point kennelwards), would go to the dogs because ignorant politicians, who were most emphatically not "of us," forced him and others like him to recognise the rights of dependents instead of trusting to their instinctive fitness to dispense benefits not as rights but as acts of grace. If England trusted to her aristocracy (to put the matter in a nutshell) all would be well with her in the future even as it had been in the past, but any attempt to curtail their splendours must inevitably detract from the prestige and magnificence of the Empire. . . . And he responded suitably to the obsequious salute of the professional, and remembered that the entire golf links were his property, and that the Club paid a merely nominal rental to him, just the tribute money of a penny which was due to Caesar.
For the next hour or two after her husband had left her, Lady Ashbridge occupied herself in the thoroughly lady-like pursuit of doing nothing whatever; she just existed in her comfortable chair, since Barbara might come any moment, and she would have to entertain her, which she frequently did unawares. But as Barbara continued not to come, she took up her perennial piece of needlework, feeling rather busy and pressed, and had hardly done so when her sister-in-law arrived.
