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It was not long before Lady Ashbridge's nurse appeared, to take her upstairs to rest. At that her patient became suddenly and unaccountably agitated: all the happy content of the day was wiped off her mind. She clung to Michael. "No, no, Michael," she said, "they mustn't take me away. I know they are going to take me away from you altogether. You mustn't leave me." Nurse Baker came towards her.
Lady Ashbridge's funeral took place three days afterwards, down in Suffolk, and those hours detached themselves in Michael's mind from all that had gone before, and all that might follow, like a little piece of blue sky in the midst of storm clouds.
It would no more have entered into Michael's head this morning to tell to his mother about Sylvia than to have discussed counterpoint with her. But then this morning he had not been really aware that he had a mother. But to tell her now was not unthinkable, but inevitable. "Yes, there is a girl whom I can't do without," he said. Lady Ashbridge's face lit up.
Earlier in the day there had come in from the window the smell of dew-damp earth, but now that had been sucked up by the sun. Close beside the window, with her back to the light and facing the bed, which projected from one of the side walls out into the room, sat Lady Ashbridge's nurse.
Lord Ashbridge's eloquence was suddenly arrested. He had been cantering gleefully along, and had the very distinct impression of having run up against a stone wall. He dismounted, hurt, but in no way broken. "I am anxious to understand you, Michael," he said. "Yes, father, but you don't," said he. "You have been explaining me all wrong. For instance, I don't regard music as a diversion.
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.
Weekly reports were sent by Lady Ashbridge's nurse to his father, and Michael had nothing whatever to add to these. His fear of him had given place to a quiet contempt, which he did not care to think about, and certainly did not care to express.
An affirmative monosyllable, followed by the hissing of Lord Ashbridge's cigarette end as he dropped it into his coffee cup, answered him, and he perceived that the approaching storm was to be rendered duly impressive by the thundery stillness that preceded it.
"You have probably heard of her; she is the Miss Falbe who made such a sensation in London last season by her singing." The old outlook, the old traditions were beginning to come to the surface again in poor Lady Ashbridge's mind. "Oh, my dear!" she said. "A singer! That would vex your father terribly. Fancy the daughter of a Miss Tracy becoming a singer.
However, we all have our crosses, even those of us who have our coronets also." Lady Ashbridge's hospitable instincts asserted themselves. "But your husband must come in," she said. "I will go and tell him. And Robert has gone to play golf." Barbara laughed. "I am quite sure Tony won't come in," she said.
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