_Briefly details a slight love-skirmish between Sammy and Miss
Sowersoft, which took place before Colin, while that youth was supposed
to be asleep, and also illustrates the manner in which old maids
sometimes endeavour to procure themselves husbands.--Colin's employment
at the lodge.--He becomes involved in a dilemma, which threatens
unheard-of consequences._
After Colin had spent some twenty minutes where we left him at the
conclusion of the last chapter, he crept into bed. The room in which he
lay being partly in the roof, admitted only of a very small window in
the upright portion of the wall, and that was placed so close to the
floor as to throw very little light into the apartment, except during a
strong day or moon light.
The candle being extinguished, Colin could see nothing save a small
square of dim light where the window was. Below stairs he could hear the
muttering of voices, as Miss Sower-soft still endeavoured to restore the
beauty of Mr. Palethorpe's countenance; and in the false floor over
his head the sound of rats, who were at work in the roof, making noise
sufficient over their labours to keep awake, during the whole night, any
person less accustomed to that kind of nocturnal entertainment than
the inhabitants of country-houses usually are. Colin could usually have
slept soundly had all the rats in Christendom been let loose in a legion
about him, but he could not sleep tonight. It was pitch-dark; he was in
a strange place, with brutal employers, who disliked him only because
he had offered to relieve a poor old man of some portion of his labours.
Who knew--for such things had been heard of, and passionate men often
take their revenge, regardless of consequences--who knew, as Mr.
Palethorpe was to occupy the adjoining bed, that he might not take
advantage of his sleep, and steal out in the night to murder him? He
might do so, and then throw him down the brook, as he had threatened, or
perhaps bury him deep in the garden, and say in the morning that he had
run away.
With these, and similar imaginations, did Colin keep himself awake in
a feverish state of terror during a space of time which to him seemed
almost endless; for, however groundless and ridiculous such fears may be
deemed by the stout-hearted reader who peruses this by broad daylight,
he must be pleased to call to mind that poor Colin was neither of an
age nor in a situation in which great account is commonly made of
probabilities. The boy's fancies were at length interrupted by the
appearance of something more real. A light shot through the chinks of
the door, and run an ignisfatuus kind of chase round the walls and
ceiling, as it advanced up stairs in the hands of the maid Sally.
Shortly afterwards the door was gently pushed open; and while Colin's
heart beat violently against the bars of its cage, and his breath came
short and loud, like that of a sleeper in a troubled dream, he saw a
huge warming-pan flaring through its twenty eyes with red-hot cinders,
protruded through the opening, and at the other end of the handle Miss
Sally herself. She placed her candle down in the passage, in order to
avoid awakening Colin with its light, and then commenced warming Mr.
Pale-thorpe's bed. By the time that operation was about finished, the
feet of two other individuals creeping cautiously up were heard on
the stairs. Then a voice whispered circumspectly, but earnestly, “Now,
Sammy, make haste and get in while it is nice and hot, or else it will
do you no good; and in a minute or two I 'll be up again with some warm
posset, so that you can have it when you've lain down.”
Palethorpe and Miss Sowersoft then entered, the latter having come up
stairs with no other intention, apparently, than that of frustrating
by her presence any design which Palethorpe might else have had of
rewarding Sally for her trouble with a gentle salute upon the cheek.
Having seen the maid safe out of the chamber, Miss Maria returned down
stairs.
Colin now began to tremble in earnest; for he indistinctly heard
Palethorpe muttering words of violence against every one of them without
exception, and threatening to kick the house upside down before another
day was over his head. By and by the cautious approach of his footsteps
towards Colin's bed caused the boy to peep out through the merest chink
between his eyelids, when he beheld the hideous face of the farming-man
almost close to his own, with its huge swollen and blackened features
fixed in an expression of deep malice upon him, and a ponderous clenched
fist held threateningly near his face, as the horrible gazer muttered
between his forcibly closed teeth, “I 'll pay you your wages for this,
young man! I 'll reckon with you in a new fashion before long! You shall
repent this night to the last end of your life, that shall you! I could
split your skull now, if you were not asleep. But you may rest this
time!”
Saying which, he retired to bed. Immediately afterwards Miss Sowersoft
glided noiselessly in, with a huge basin of treacle-posset in one hand,
and one of her own linen nightcaps, which she had been heating by the
fire, in the other. This last-named article she at once proceeded to
place on Mr. Palthorpe's head, and tie under his chin; because the long
tabs with which it was supplied would cover his bruised face much better
than any cap of his own. As Colin glanced from under the clothes he
could scarcely forbear laughing, in spite of his fears, at the
odd combination which, his mistress's Cupid suggested,--of a
copper-coloured, black-bearded face, with the primly-starched, snowy
frillings of a woman's nightcap.
“Is he asleep, Sammy?” asked Miss Maria in a low whisper.
“A deal faster than he deserves to be,” replied that worthy.
“I will just step across, and see,” observed the lady; and accordingly
she trod lightly over the floor, in order to assure herself of that
fact. Colin's closed eyes, his silence, and his quick full breathing,
confirmed her in the pleasing delusion; and she returned to
Pale-thorpe's bedside, and deposited herself in a chair with the remark
that, under those circumstances, she would sit with him a few minutes.
As she gazed with admiration on the uncouth countenance of Palethorpe,
set, like a picture, in the white frame of her own cap, and watched him
deliberately transfer spoonful after spoonful of the posset from the
basin into the ill-shaped hole in his own face, she heaved a profound
sigh, which seemed one moment to inflate her bosom like a balloon, and
the next to collapse it again as closely as poor Cocking's parachute.
Palethorpe went on with his posset.
[Illustration: 225]
“Ay, dear!” she sighed again.
“What 's amiss, meesis?” asked Mr. Palethorpe, as soon as the emptied
basin left him at liberty to speak.
“Nothing, Sammy,--nothing. Ay, dear! I'm quite well, as far as that
goes,” replied Miss Maria very despondingly.
“But you have summat not right, I'm sure,” persisted he.
“Oh, it is of no matter!” she sighed again.
“But, what is it?” he a third time asked.
“It does not signify much,” she again remarked; “it will be all the same
a few years hence.”
“You've tired yourself to death with that mangle, I suppose?” said
Palethorpe.
“Oh, no!” she exclaimed in a tone of voice which betrayed some slight
offence at the vulgarity of his suggestion; “it is a very different
sort of mangle to that. I am sure I am mangled enough by people's
indifference.”
“Why, as for that,” replied Sammy, trying to exculpate himself from any
charge of neglect, “you are meesis of the house, and don't want to be
pressed to your meat and drink like a visiter.”
“Meat and drink!” she exclaimed, as though indignant that such animal
ideas should degrade the present elevation of her soul, “I care nothing
about meat and drink, not I. You seem as if you could see nothing,
though people make the plainest allusions that female propriety allows
any woman to make.”
Mr. Palethorpe looked astonished as he observed, “Well, I'm sure,
meesis, you can't say that ever I made any allusions to female
propriety.”
“No,--that's it! there it is!” sighed Miss Sowersoft: “though you get
all the fat of the land, and are treated more like a gentleman in the
house than like what you are, you never make the least allusions.”
Palethorpe protested that under those circumstances he ought to feel
all the more ashamed of himself if he did make allusions, or else other
people would think it very odd of him.
“Oh, then the truth's out at last, is it?” said Miss Sowersoft,
“you have other people, have you? Ay, dear!” and she apparently fell
a-crying. “It's impossible, then, for all the goodness in the world to
make any impression. Oh!”
Saying which she rose up, with her handkerchief to her eyes, and walked
towards the door, muttering as she went, that since he seemed so very
fond of other people, other people might feed him, as that was the last
posset he would ever have from her hands. Mr. Palethorpe endeavoured
several times to recall her; but Miss Sowersoft's new jealousy of other
people had rendered her inexorable; and, in the course of a few more
seconds her own chamber-door was heard to be violently closed and to
be most resolutely bolted and locked behind her. Our worthy uttered
a discontented groan, and composed himself to sleep; an example which
Colin was enabled to follow some long time after, though not before his
weariness had completely overpowered his fears of danger from the savage
sharer of his dormitory.
While yet in the middle of his slumber, and busy with a dream of home,
which placed him again in the bright warm sunshine by the step of his
mother's door, Colin was suddenly startled by the dragging of every inch
of bed-covering from off him, and the not very sparing application of
a hand-whip about his body, while the voice of Palethorpe summoned him,
under the courteous title of a lazy heavyheaded young rascal, to turn
out, and get off to work. It was nearly broad day-light; and Colin
obeyed the summons with considerable alacrity, though not without
informing his driver at the same time, that there was no occasion for
a whip to him, because a word would have done quite as well, if not
better.
“Then you shall have both, to make sure, and plenty of them too,”
replied Mr. Palethorpe. “If long scores are ever to be cleared off, we
should begin to pay 'em betimes; and I have a score chalked on for you
that will want interest before it is discharged, I know. Mark, you will
have this every morning regularly if you are not down stairs as the
clock strikes six, neither sooner nor later. If you get up too soon, I
shall lay on you just the same as if you got up too late,--for a right
hour is a right hour, and six exactly is our time. I 'll make you feel
where your mistake was, my boy, when you thought of coming mester here!
There's last night's job I owe you for yet, and a good price you shall
pay for it, or else I don't know how to reckon.”
A blow on the right ear, and another on the left, immediately after,
in order to keep his head in the middle, fell to Colin's lot at the
conclusion of this harangue; and a push at the back of the neck which
followed directly, enabled him to get out of the room somewhat more
speedily than he would have done without that assistance. But to all
this--though taken much in dudgeon--being mildness itself as compared
with what might have been expected, Colin submitted in a sturdy mood,
and without saying anything; though he did not forget to promise himself
at some future day to adjust the balances between them.
In consequence of the lack-a-daisical turn which Miss Sowersoft's
interview with Mr. Palethorpe had taken on the preceding night, that
lady denied to the household the pleasure of her company at breakfast,
as she could not meet the ungrateful farm-servant before company again
until an explanation in private had taken place. Poor old George, all
benignity, and looking like an elder of some by-gone age, seemed more
than usually anxious to promote good feeling amongst his fellows, and to
restore the harmony which had been destroyed the evening before, on his
account. But Palethorpe was unforgiving, and Abel unrepentant: so that,
whatever might be the disposition of others, those two characters at
least regarded each other over the table much in the same manner as,
it might be supposed, two of Mr. Wombwell's beasts, placed on opposite
sides of his menagerie, would do when they address each other before a
meal-time in that language of the eyes of which poets speak, and seem to
intimate a very unequivocal desire to dine upon one another.
That day Master Colin took his first lesson in field-craft, by being
set to gather stones from off the wheat-sown lands, before the blade was
more than an inch or two out of the ground. His out-door labours
were concluded at six in the evening; after which time, as the horses
remained to be put up, he was drilled in the art of cleaning, bedding,
harnessing, and managing those animals; and, after that was done, he was
allowed, by way of amusement, to spend the remaining few hours before
bed-time in setting rat-traps, or accompanying some one or other of the
men in weasel-shooting along the banksides and hedges.
Some few days elapsed without a reconcilement having taken place
between Palethorpe and his mistress; during which time our hero fared
considerably better than otherwise he might have done; partly because
Miss Sowersoft's attention was not now so completely engrossed as it had
hitherto been by her favourite; and partly because that very pleasant
personage himself, while unsupported by the smiles and attentions of
his mistress, was by no means so formidable in his display of courage as
otherwise he would have been. The prospect which had broken on Colin's
mind on his first introduction to Snitterton began accordingly to
brighten considerably. He liked his employment in the fields, as well as
all that followed it, so well, that when on the ensuing Sunday he asked
for leave to walk over to Bramleigh for the purpose of seeing his mother
and Fanny, and was at once peremptorily denied, he felt that denial as
no very great hardship; but soon made up his mind to spend the day as
pleasantly as he could, and to write a letter to Fanny, detailing his
thoughts and opinions, his likings and dis-likings, instead.
These resolves he eventually put into execution: and everything very
probably might have gone on smoothly enough, had not a circumstance
utterly unforeseen occurred, whereby he himself was brought into a
second dilemma with his mistress and Palethorpe, still worse than the
previous one; and whereby, also, the plain-spoken epistle which he had
secretly indited for the private and especial perusal of his mother
and Fanny, was in an evil hour thrown into the hands of the identical
parties about whom, in its honest simplicity, it told so many truthful
libels. But the shame of Miss Sowersoft was so deep, and the rage of
Palethorpe so high, and the consequences of both to Colin so important,
that I verily believe it will occupy nearly the whole of the next
chapter to describe them.