Michael drew himself up to his full height. This was an indiscretion, for it but made his father recognise how short he was. It brought farce into the tragic situation.
“Oh, by no means,” he said. “My heart is not going to break yet. I don’t give up hope.”
Then, in a flash, he thought of his mother’s pale, anxious face, her desire that he should not vex his father.
“I am sorry,” he said, “but that is the case. I wish--I wish you would try to understand me.”
“I find you incomprehensible,” said Lord Ashbridge, and left the room with his high walk and his swinging elbows.
Well, it was done now, and Michael felt that there were no new vexations to be sprung on his father. It was bound to happen, he supposed, sooner or later, and he was not sorry that it had happened sooner than he expected or intended. Sylvia so held sway in him that he could not help acknowledging her. His announcement had broken from him irresistibly, in spite of his mother’s whispered word to him last night, “This is our secret.” It could not be secret when his father spoke like that. . . . And then, with a flare of illumination he perceived how intensely his father disliked him. Nothing but sheer basic antipathy could have been responsible for that miserable retort, “Am I to bind up your broken heart?” Anger, no doubt, was the immediate cause, but so utterly ungenerous a rejoinder to Michael’s announcement could not have been conceived, except in a heart that thoroughly and rootedly disliked him. That he was a continual monument of disappointment to his father he knew well, but never before had it been quite plainly shown him how essential an object of dislike he was. And the grounds of the dislike were now equally plain--his father disliked him exactly because he was his father. On the other hand, the last twenty-four hours had shown him that his mother loved him exactly because he was her son. When these two new and undeniable facts were put side by side, Michael felt that he was an infinite gainer.
He went rather drearily to the window. Far off across the field below the garden he could see Lord Ashbridge walking airily along on his way to the links, with his head held high, his stick swinging in his hand, his two retrievers at his heels. No doubt already the soothing influences of Nature were at work--Nature, of course, standing for the portion of trees and earth and houses that belonged to him--and were expunging the depressing reflection that his wife and only son inspired in him. And, indeed, such was actually the case: Lord Ashbridge, in his amazing fatuity, could not long continue being himself without being cheered and invigorated by that fact, and though when he set out his big white hands were positively trembling with passion, he carried his balsam always with him. But he had registered to himself, even as Michael had registered, the fact that he found his son a most intolerable person. And what vexed him most of all, what made him clang the gate at the end of the field so violently that it hit one of his retrievers shrewdly on the nose, was the sense of his own impotence. He knew perfectly well that in point of view of determination (that quality which in himself was firmness, and in those who opposed him obstinacy) Michael was his match. And the annoying thing was that, as his wife had once told him, Michael undoubtedly inherited that quality from him. It was as inalienable as the estates of which he had threatened to deprive his son, and which, as he knew quite well, were absolutely entailed. Michael, in this regard, seemed no better than a common but successful thief. 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.
