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Lord Ashbridge had just telephoned that he was coming round to see Michael, a message that considerably astonished him, since it would have been more in his manner, in the unlikely event of his wishing to see his son, to have summoned him to the house in Curzon Street.
Lady Ashbridge was pathetically eager to be what she called "good." Michael had made it clear to her that it was his wish that Miss Falbe should not be embarrassed, and any wish just now expressed by Michael was of the nature of a divine command to her. "Well, this is a pleasure," she said, looking across to Michael with the eyes of a dog on a beloved master.
And if when you are down at Ashbridge at Christmas you find strangers hanging about the deep-water reach, you might just let me know. It's no use telling your father, because he will certainly think they have come to get a glimpse of him as he plays golf. But I expect you'll be too busy thinking about that new friend of yours, and perhaps his sister. What did she tell me we had got to do?
A year before the flame of war went roaring through Europe in unquenchable conflagration it would have seemed that nothing could possibly rouse Ashbridge from its red-brick Georgian repose. There was never a town so inimitably drowsy or so sternly uncompetitive.
To let you into a secret, young madam was in horror at one time that Dick Ashbridge was wavering in his allegiance to her white rosebud, Fiddy; so enthralling was this scarlet pomegranate, this purple vine. But one evening Mrs.
"There was an awfully nice girl down at Ashbridge at Easter when I was there, who was simply pining to take you. I've forgotten her name." Michael clicked his fingers in a summary manner. "There you are!" he said. "You and she flirted all the time, and three months afterwards you don't even remember her name. If you had only been me, you would have married her.
Lord Ashbridge got up and began walking across the terrace opposite the tea-table with his elbows stuck out and his feet lifted rather high. "Michael doesn't seem to realise that he is not Tom or Dick or Harry," said he. "Music, indeed! I'm musical myself; all we Combers are musical. But Michael is my only son, and it really distresses me to see how little sense he has of his responsibilities.
Then a procession of footmen came into the room bearing lemonade and soda water and whiskey and a plate of plain biscuits, and the moment after he was alone with his father. Lord Ashbridge rose and walked, very tall and majestic, to the fireplace, where he stood for a moment with his back to his son. Then he turned round.
He had annexed his father's firmness, and at his death would certainly annex all his pictures and trees and acres and the red roofs of Ashbridge. Michael saw the gate so imperially slammed, he heard the despairing howl of Robin, and though he was sorry for Robin, he could not help laughing.
It was clear that there was not likely to be much accord between them on this subject. "But could you not go down there perhaps once or twice a week, and get Bailey to come and consult you here?" he asked. Lord Ashbridge held his head very high. "That would be completely out of the question," he said. All this, Michael felt, had nothing to do with the problem of his mother and himself.
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