"Women have no feeling," he growls, as he walks about the gardens. "If they think they can make a point they'll make it, let it hurt you how it may."
He strolls down between two high yew walls with his hands in his pockets, and feels injured and aggrieved. He ought to be a very happy person; he is still rich despite the troubles of the times, he has fine estates, fair rents, handsome children, and a life of continual change, and yet he is bored and doesn't like anything, and this peaceful, green garden, with its innumerable memories and its delicious, dreamful solitudes, says nothing at all to him. Is it his own fault or the fault of his world? He doesn't know. He supposes it is the fault of his liver. His father was always contented, and jolly as a sand-boy; but then in his father's time there was no grouse-disease, no row about rents, no wire fencing to lame your horses, no Ground Game Bill to corrupt your farmers, no Leaseholder's Bills hanging over your London houses, no corn imported from Arkansas and California, no Joe Chamberlain. When poor Boom's turn comes, how will things be? Joe Chamberlain President, perhaps, and Surrenden cut up into allotment-grounds.
He possesses two other very big places in adjacent counties, Orme Castle and Denton Abbey, but they are ponderous, vast, gorgeous, ceremonious, ugly: he detests both of them. Of Surrenden he is, on the contrary, as fond as he can be of anything except the lost Achnalorrie and a little cosey house that he has at Newmarket where the shadow of Lady Usk has never fallen.
He hears the noise of wheels on gravel. It comes from the other side of the house; it is his brake and his omnibus going down the avenue on their way to the nearest railway-station, four miles off, to meet some of his coming guests there. Well, there'll be nothing seen of them till two o'clock at luncheon. They are all people he hates, or thinks he hates, for that best of all possible reasons, that his wife likes them. Why can't Dulcia Waverley come before the 20th? Lady Waverley always amuses him, and agrees with him. It is so pleasant to be agreed with, only when one's own people do so it makes one almost more angry than when one is contradicted. When his wife agrees with him it leaves him nothing to say. When Dulcia Waverley agrees with him it leaves him with a soothing sense of being sympathized with and appreciated. Dulcia Waverley always tells him that he might have been a great statesman if he had chosen: as he always thinks so himself, the echo of his thoughts is agreeable.
He sits down in one of the clipped-yew-tree arbors to light a new cigar and smoke it peaceably. A peacock goes past him, drawing its beautiful train over the smooth-shaven grass. A mavis is singing on a rose-bough. The babble of a stream hidden under adjacent trees is pleasant on the morning silence. He doesn't notice any of it; he thinks it odiously hot, and what fools they were who clipped a yew-tree into the shape of a periwig, and what a beast of a row that trout-stream makes. Why don't they turn it, and send it farther from the house? He's got no money to do anything, or he would have it done to-morrow.
A peacock begins to scream. The noise of a peacock cannot be said to be melodious or soothing at any time.
"Why don't you wring that bird's neck?" he says savagely to a gardener's boy who is gathering up fallen rose-leaves.
The boy gapes and touches his hair, his hat being already on the ground in sign of respect. The peacocks have been at Surrenden ever since Warren Hastings sent the first pair as a present to the Lady Usk of that generation, and they are regarded with a superstitious admiration by all the good Hampshire people who walk in the gardens of Surrenden or visit them on the public day. The Surrenden peacocks are as sacred to the neighborhood and the workpeople as ever was the green ibis in old Egypt.
"How long will they touch their caps or pull their forelocks to us?" thinks Lord Usk; "though I don't see why they can reasonably object to do it as long as we take off our hats to Wales and say 'Sir' to him."
This political problem suggests the coming elections to his mind: the coming elections are a disagreeable subject for meditation: why wasn't he born in his grandfather's time, when there were pocket boroughs as handy and portable as snuff-boxes, and the county returned Lord Usk's nominee as a matter of course without question?