He listened quite quietly till my mother came in, and got fidgetty, and told me not to argue with my uncle. Then he said—
"Ah! let the boy talk, Geraldine, and let me hear what he has to say for himself. There's a sublime audacity about his notions, I tell ye. Upon me conscience, I believe he thinks his grandmother was created for his particular convenience."
That's how he mocks, and I suppose he meant my Irish grandmother. He thinks there's nobody like her in the wide world, and my father says she is the handsomest and wittiest old lady in the British Isles. But I did not mind. I said,
"Well, Uncle Patrick, you're a man, and I believe you agree with me, though you mock me."
"Agree with ye?" He started up, and pegged about the room. "Faith! if the life we live is like the globe we inhabit—if it revolves on its own axis, and you're that axis—there's not a flaw in your philosophy; but if—Now perish my impetuosity! I've frightened your dear mother away. May I ask, by the bye, if she has the good fortune to please ye, since the Maker of all souls made her, for all eternity, with the particular object of mothering you in this brief patch of time?"
He had stopped under the portrait—my godfather's portrait. All his Irish rhodomontade went straight out of my head, and I ran to him.
"Uncle, you know I adore her! But there's one thing she won't do, and, oh, I wish you would! It's years since she told me never to ask, and I've been on honour, and I've never even asked nurse; but I don't think it's wrong to ask you. Who is that man behind you, who looks such a wonderfully fine fellow? My Godfather Bayard."
I had experienced a shock the night before, but nothing to the shock of seeing Uncle Patrick's face then, and hearing him sob out his words, instead of their flowing like a stream.
"Is it possible? Ye don't know? She can't speak of him yet? Poor Geraldine!"