"Curse my jacket," says the drunken fellow, "if this is not the first time I have kissed a wife in the presence of her husband."
"It shall be the last, sir," I hiccoughed furiously.
"What words are these to use before a lady?" says Mr. Fielding, amiably measuring out glasses of wine for the three of us. "If I were not the most easy man in the world, I vow and protest it should be coffee and pistols at five."
"By God, sir, it shall be whatever you are," says I, holding on by the table. "I swear I will pup—punish you for this."
"Well, as you are determined to pup—punish me," says he, "here is another glass of Tommie's claret, another hair of the dog that bit you, to confirm you in that meritorious resolve."
As he laughingly offered me the glass of wine, Cynthia came forward and took it from him. But instead of giving it to me, she flung both the wine and the glass in his face. Whereon he stood with the claret dripping from his features, and the blood too where the broken glass had cut his forehead, so that he made the very picture of his own Parson Adams, when he was assailed in a similar way by the hostess of the inn with the pan of hog's blood.
Poor Cynthia stood white and trembling, but she never once looked at me for counsel or countenance. The tears were in her eyes too, but she never uttered so much as a word of reproach, although I am sure her misery was very great. I never felt such a mean villain and coward in my life as I did then.
"Come," says she, "let us leave these—these people."
Here she threw such a glance at the sleeping justice that must have pierced him to the marrow had he but been conscious of it. By this, however, Mr. Fielding with the aid of his silk handkerchief had wiped a good deal of the wine and blood from his features, and stood staunching the wound on his forehead. A more truly whimsical expression I never observed in any man before. There was a highly comic look of contrition, humility, and self-abnegation in him, and withal an air of the most perfect good-breeding, that could not possibly have been more contrary to his appearance. Although Cynthia was white and speechless with anger, and she had made what might easily have been construed into a very unprovoked attack on a benefactor, Mr. Fielding behaved, whatever his faults, as only a true gentleman could have done. Cynthia's act had brought him to his senses; he saw that he had pushed the matter too far; but after all he did not apprehend, as I more shrewdly did, that the head and front of his offending lay, not so much in his own conduct, as in that he had been the inspirer of mine.
"I crave a thousand pardons of you, madam," says he, "if I have been so unlucky as to carry a jest farther than a jest should go. Perchance it was not conceived in quite the best taste at the outset; but at least I make you all amends. I am sure I am your duteous humble servant, madam, if you will but permit me to be so."