Again she courtesied as she addressed Mrs. Jane with another “Good morning to you, ma'am!” She then continued, “I beg your pardon, sir, but I am not Miss Sowersoft now. I am sure I never expected to say that I regretted being Mrs. Palethorpe!”
“Indeed!” exclaimed Colin. “How is that?”
“Oh, sir!” rejoined Mrs. Palethorpe, “I do not wish to remind you of those circumstances—unfortunate circumstances I am sure they were—which brought me into connexion with you in your juvenile days; but I am sure you cannot forget what a brute that man was from first to last: you must be aware that it was next to impossible for anybody to live in the same house with him even at that time. But I have been a poor infatuated creature!” Here she began to cry. “Though I am paying dearly for it now! He is a sad man indeed!”
Colin now observed that his old mistress had very recently been favoured with a remarkably black eye.
“Does he ill-use you?” demanded Colin more seriously.
“He is a disgrace, sir,—though I say it that should not,—a disgrace and scandal to the name of man! I have come here, sir, I assure you, to see if the Squire will bind him over to keep the peace towards me; for only last night,—and it is his regular work now he is married, and master of the farm,—only last night he came down from Barwick as drunk as a lord, and he insisted on having a posset immediately. The fire was out, sir,”—Mrs. Palethorpe here wept afresh,—“and Dorothy was gone to bed.”
Mrs. Palethorpe could not (for human nature will fail and sink sometimes) get any further.
Though Colin and Jane had much ado to forbear laughing at this account of her grievances, the former yet requested her to be comforted; and assured her that he had no doubt Mr. Lupton would very soon take such steps with Mr. Palethorpe as should effectually prevent him from resorting to personal violence for the future.
“As, I suppose,” he continued, “this black eye is an evidence of some of his handiwork?”
“It is, sir!” exclaimed Mrs. Samuel, with passionate firmness. “I simply told him as gently as I could how circumstances stood, when he made no more to do than strike me two or three blows—he repeated them—in the face, and made me this figure, that I am ashamed of anybody seeing me!” And then she covered her face with her handkerchief.