At the date of this journey, the Colonel’s two daughters were still away at a boarding-school; but they were to come and spend the Christmas with his aunt in London, and then follow their father into Sussex, and perhaps appear as bridesmaids. Meanwhile their father was making himself a leading power at Coombe Lorraine. He naturally entered into strict alliance with his aunt’s friend, Lady Valeria, and sternly impressed upon everybody the necessity of the impending marriage. “What earthly objection can there be?” he argued with Mrs. Pipkins, now Alice’s only partisan, except old Mr. Binns, the butler; “even if Captain Chapman is rather lazy, and a little too fond of his wine-glass; both points are in her favour, ma’am. She will manage him like a top, of course. And as for looking up to him, that’s all nonsense. If she did, he would have to look down upon her; and that’s what the women can’t bear, of course. How would you like it now, Mrs. Pipkins? Tut, tut, tut, now don’t tell me! I am a little too old to be taken in. I only wish that one of my good daughters had £50,000 thrown at her, with £20,000 a-year to follow.”
“But perhaps, sir, your young ladies is not quite so particular, and romantic like, as our poor dear Miss Alice.”
“I should hope not. I’d romantic them. Bread and water is the thing for young hussies, who don’t know on which side their bread is buttered. But I don’t believe a bit of it. It’s all sham and girlish make-believe. In her heart she is as ready as he is.”
Almost everybody said the same thing; and all the credit the poor girl got for her scorn of a golden niddering, was to be looked upon as a coy piece of affectation and thanklessness. All this she was well aware of. Evil opinion is a thing to which we are alive at once; though good opinion is well content to impress itself on the coffin. Alice (who otherwise rather liked his stolid and upright nature) thought that Colonel Clumps had no business to form opinion upon her affairs; or at any rate, none to express it. But the Colonel always did form opinions, and felt himself bound to express them.
“I live in this house,” he said, when Alice hinted at some such phantasy; “and the affairs of this house are my concern. If I am not to think about the very things around me, I had better have been cut in two, than made into three pieces.” He waved the stalk of his arm, and stamped the stump of the foot of his better leg, with such a noise and gaze of wrath, that the maiden felt he must be in the right. And so perhaps he may have been. At any rate, he got his way as a veteran colonel ought to do.
With everybody he had his way. Being unable to fight any more, he had come to look so ferocious, and his battered and shattered body so fiercely backed up the charge of his aspect, that none without vast reserve of courage could help being scattered before him. Even Sir Roland Lorraine (so calm, and of an infinitely higher mind), by reason perhaps of that, gave way, and let the maimed veteran storm his home. But Alice rebelled against all this.
“Now, father,” she said on that Christmas-eve, when the house was chilled with the coming cold, and the unshedden snow hung over it, and every sheep, and cow, and crow, and shivering bird, down to the Jenny-wren, was hieing in search of shelter; “father, I have not many words to say to you; but such as they are, may I say them?”
Sir Roland Lorraine, being struck by her quite unwonted voice and manner, rose from his chair of meditation, left his thoughts about things which can never be thought out by mankind, and came to meet what a man should think of foremost—his child, his woman child.
“Lallie, my dear,” he said very gently, and kindly looking at her sad wild eyes, whose difference from their natural softness touched him with some terror—“Lallie, now what has made you look like this?”
“Papa, I did not mean to look at all out of my usual look. I beg your pardon, if indeed I do. I know that all such things are very small in your way of regarding things. But still, papa—but still, papa, you might let me say something.”