Lord Ashbridge gave a little giggle.

"I must tell Barbara that," he said. "She has become a sort of Ca.s.sandra, since she became a diplomatist, and sits on her tripod and prophesies woe."

"She asked me about it," said Michael. "I don't think she believes in his sincerity."

He giggled again.

"That's because I didn't ask her down for his visit," he said.

He rose.

"And what are you going to do, my dear?" he said to his wife.

She looked across to Michael.

"Perhaps Michael will come for a stroll with me," she said.

"No doubt he will. I shall have a round of golf, I think, on this fine morning. I should like to have a word with you, Michael, when you've finished your breakfast."

The moment he had gone her whole manner changed: it was suffused with the glow that had lit her last night.

"And we shall have another talk, dear?" she said. "It was tiresome being interrupted last night. But your father was better pleased with you this morning."

Michael's understanding of the situation grew clearer. Whatever was the change in his mother, whatever, perhaps, it portended, it was certainly accompanied by two symptoms, the one the late dawning of mother-love for himself, the other a certain fear of her husband; for all her married life she had been completely dominated by him, and had lived but in a twilight of her own; now into that twilight was beginning to steal a dread of him. His pleasure or his vexation had begun to affect her emotionally, instead of being as before, merely recorded in her mind, as she might have recorded an object quite exterior to herself, and seen out of the window. Now it was in the room with her. Even as Michael left her to speak with him, the consciousness of him rose again in her, making her face anxious.

"And you'll try not to vex him, won't you?" she said.

His father was in the smoking-room, standing enormously in front of the fire, and for the first time the sense of his colossal fatuity struck Michael.

"There are several things I want to tell you about," he said. "Your career, first of all. I take it that you have no intention of deferring to my wishes on the subject."

"No, father, I am afraid not," said Michael.

"I want you to understand, then, that, though I shall not speak to you again about it, my wishes are no less strong than they were. It is something to me to know that a man whom I respect so much as the Emperor doesn't feel as I do about it, but that doesn't alter my view."

"I understand," said Michael.

"The next is about your mother," he said. "Do you notice any change in her?"

"Yes," said Michael.

"Can you describe it at all?"

Michael hesitated.

"She shows quite a new affection for myself," he said. "She came and talked to me last night in a way she had never done before."

The irritation which Michael's mere presence produced on his father was beginning to make itself felt. The fact that Michael was squat and long-armed and ugly had always a side-blow to deal at Lord Ashbridge in the reminder that he was his father. He tried to disregard this--he tried to bring his mind into an impartial att.i.tude, without seeing for a moment the bitter irony of considering impartiality the ideal quality when dealing with his son. He tried to be fair, and Michael was perfectly conscious of the effort it cost him.

"I had noticed something of the sort," he said. "Your mother was always asking after you. You have not been writing very regularly, Michael. We know little about your life."

"I have written to my mother every week," said Michael.

The magical effects of the Emperor's interest were dying out. Lord Ashbridge became more keenly aware of the disappointment that Michael was to him.

"I have not been so fortunate, then," he said.

Michael remembered his mother's anxious face, but he could not let this pa.s.s.

"No, sir," he said, "but you never answered any of my letters. I thought it quite probable that it displeased you to hear from me."

"I should have expressed my displeasure if I had felt it," said his father with all the pomposity that was natural to him.

"That had not occurred to me," said Michael. "I am afraid I took your silence to mean that my letters didn't interest you."

He paused a moment, and his rebellion against the whole of his father's att.i.tude flared up.

"Besides, I had nothing particular to say," he said. "My life is pa.s.sed in the pursuit of which you entirely disapprove."

He felt himself back in boyhood again with this stifling and leaden atmosphere of authority and disapproval to breathe. He knew that Francis in his place would have done somehow differently; he could almost hear Aunt Barbara laughing at the pomposity of the situation that had suddenly erected itself monstrously in front of him. The fact that he was Michael Comber vexed his father--there was no statement of the case so succinctly true.

Lord Ashbridge moved away towards the window, turning his back on Michael. Even his back, his homespun Norfolk jacket, his loose knickerbockers, his stalwart calves expressed disapproval; but when his father spoke again he realised that he had moved away like that, and obscured his face for a different reason.

"Have you noticed anything else about your mother?" he asked.

That made Michael understand.

"Yes, father," he said. "I daresay I am wrong about it--"

"Naturally I may not agree with you; but I should like to know what it is."

"She's afraid of you," said Michael.

Lord Ashbridge continued looking out of the window a little longer, letting his eyes dwell on his own garden and his own fields, where towered the leafless elms and the red roofs of the little town which had given him his own name, and continued to give him so satisfactory an income. There presented itself to his mind his own picture, painted and framed and glazed and hung up by himself, the beneficent n.o.bleman, the conscientious landlord, the essential vertebra of England's backbone. It was really impossible to impute blame to such a fine fellow. He turned round into the room again, braced and refreshed, and saw Michael thus.

"It is quite true what you say," he said, with a certain pride in his own impartiality. "She has developed an extraordinary timidity towards me. I have continually noticed that she is nervous and agitated in my presence--I am quite unable to account for it. In fact, there is no accounting for it. But I am thinking of going up to London before long, and making her see some good doctor. A little tonic, I daresay; though I don't suppose she has taken a dozen doses of medicine in as many years.

I expect she will be glad to go up, for she will be near you. The one delusion--for it is no less than that--is as strange as the other."

He drew himself up to his full magnificent height.

"I do not mean that it is not very natural she should be devoted to her son," he said with a tremendous air.

What he did mean was therefore uncertain, and again he changed the subject.

"There is a third thing," he said. "This concerns you. You are of the age when we Combers usually marry. I should wish you to marry, Michael.

During this last year your mother has asked half a dozen girls down here, all of whom she and I consider perfectly suitable, and no doubt you have met more in London. I should like to know definitely if you have considered the question, and if you have not, I ask you to set about it at once."