“And now, Alice, I shall be glad if you will give me an explanation of all this; for, damme, if I can make head or tail of it.”
“My dear uncle,” Alice said, cheerfully, “I don’t know that there is anything to explain. You see, Frank and I do not want to marry each other, and although I believe that parents and guardians have a right to put a veto upon marriages of which they do not approve, I confess that I do not think their power extends to the point of compelling two strongly objecting parties to marry each other.”
Captain Bradshaw rubbed his forehead with his handkerchief, and then performed the same operation with great violence all over his head, brushing up his short grey hair into a state of the wildest and most aggressive looking confusion. It was not that he was actually hot, but it was a trick he had acquired in India, and was a certain sign, with him, of great irritation.
“But I always looked upon it as a settled thing, Alice; I have set my mind upon it for years, and I always felt sure that you were fond of him. I don’t know what to make of it; but if you do care for him, Alice, by Gad, he shall marry you, or, at any rate, he shall be made most thoroughly to understand that not one penny of my money shall he ever have if he does not.”
“Thank you very much, uncle,” Alice said, smiling quietly; “but you see I should not particularly care about being married to a man who only took me as an incumbrance with my money and yours.”
“But, Alice,” her uncle said impatiently, “I do not understand why you took his part to-day, and so rendered all I said of no avail. I was sure you cared for him. You never attempted to deny it when I spoke to you upon the subject, and now you upset all the force of my arguments, and confirm that young jackanapes in his refusal to listen to my wishes, by saying that you are mutually indifferent to each other.”
“My dear uncle,” Alice said, very gravely, “the whole of the unfortunate position has been brought about by your deceiving yourself in the first place; and in the second, by the very unfair and unjustifiable way in which you have deceived me.”
“Upon my word, Alice,” Captain Bradshaw said, astonished at this sudden attack upon himself, and replacing untasted upon the table the wine he was in the act of raising to his lips, “I do not understand what you mean.”
“This is what I mean, uncle. You all along thought and hoped that Frank and I would some day take a fancy to each other. About that I have no reason to complain, nor that you deceived yourself into believing that things were turning out as you wished. What you were wrong in, my dear uncle, was, to have spoken to me as you did about Frank. What could I think? I could not suppose it possible that you were doing so merely upon the strength of your hopes upon the subject. I naturally concluded that you were in his confidence, that you had talked the matter over before he left England, and that although he or you might have thought it wrong to ask me to enter upon an engagement at the age of eighteen, and just as he was leaving England for two or three years, still that he perfectly intended to propose for me upon his return. What else could I think, uncle?”
Captain Bradshaw was silent. He felt that he had been wrong, and that without sufficient cause he had led his niece to believe that Frank loved her, and had thus greatly endangered the happiness of his favourite. Once feeling himself to be wrong, no one could be more ready to admit it than Captain Bradshaw.