“Stand round, my good friends, make a ring, and see that it is fair play on my side. I am sure it will be fair on Mr. Bowles’s. He is big enough to scorn what is little. And now, Mr. Bowles, just a word with you in the presence of your neighbours. I am not going to say anything uncivil. If you are rather rough and hasty, a man is not always master of himself—at least so I am told—when he thinks more than he ought to do about a pretty girl. But I can’t look at your face even by this moonlight, and though its expression at this moment is rather cross, without being sure that you are a fine fellow at bottom, and that if you give a promise as man to man you will keep it. Is that so?”
One or two of the bystanders murmured assent; the others pressed round in silent wonder.
“What’s all that soft-sawder about?” said Tom Bowles, somewhat falteringly.
“Simply this: if in the fight between us I beat you, I ask you to promise before your neighbours that you will not by word or deed molest or interfere again with Miss Jessie Wiles.”
“Eh!” roared Tom. “Is it that you are after her?”
“Suppose I am, if that pleases you; and on my side, I promise that if you beat me, I quit this place as soon as you leave me well enough to do so, and will never visit it again. What! do you hesitate to promise? Are you really afraid I shall lick you?”
“You! I’d smash a dozen of you to powder.”
“In that case, you are safe to promise. Come, ‘tis a fair bargain. Is n’t it, neighbours?”
Won over by Kenelm’s easy show of good temper, and by the sense of justice, the bystanders joined in a common exclamation of assent.
“Come, Tom,” said an old fellow, “the gentleman can’t speak fairer; and we shall all think you be afeard if you hold back.”
Tom’s face worked: but at last he growled, “Well, I promise; that is, if he beats me.”
“All right,” said Kenelm. “You hear, neighbours; and Tom Bowles could not show that handsome face of his among you if he broke his word. Shake hands on it.”
Fighting Tom sulkily shook hands.
“Well now, that’s what I call English,” said Kenelm, “all pluck and no malice. Fall back, friends, and leave a clear space for us.”
The men all receded; and as Kenelm took his ground, there was a supple ease in his posture which at once brought out into clearer evidence the nervous strength of his build, and, contrasted with Tom’s bulk of chest, made the latter look clumsy and topheavy.
The two men faced each other a minute, the eyes of both vigilant and steadfast. Tom’s blood began to fire up as he gazed; nor, with all his outward calm; was Kenelm insensible of that proud beat of the heart which is aroused by the fierce joy of combat. Tom struck out first and a blow was parried, but not returned; another and another blow,—still parried, still unreturned. Kenelm, acting evidently on the defensive, took all the advantages for that strategy which he derived from superior length of arm and lighter agility of frame. Perhaps he wished to ascertain the extent of his adversary’s skill, or to try the endurance of his wind, before he ventured on the hazards of attack. Tom, galled to the quick that blows which might have felled an ox were thus warded off from their mark, and dimly aware that he was encountering some mysterious skill which turned his brute strength into waste force and might overmaster him in the long run, came to a rapid conclusion that the sooner he brought that brute strength to bear the better it would be for him. Accordingly, after three rounds, in which without once breaking the guard of his antagonist he had received a few playful taps on the nose and mouth, he drew back and made a bull-like rush at his foe,—bull-like, for it butted full at him with the powerful down-bent head, and the two fists doing duty as horns. The rush spent, he found himself in the position of a man milled. I take it for granted that every Englishman who can call himself a man—that is, every man who has been an English boy, and, as such, been compelled to the use of his fists—knows what a “mill” is. But I sing not only “pueris,” but “virginibus.” Ladies, “a mill,”—using with reluctance and contempt for myself that slang in which ladywriters indulge, and Girls of the Period know much better than they do their Murray,—“a mill,”—speaking not to ladywriters, not to Girls of the Period, but to innocent damsels, and in explanation to those foreigners who only understand the English language as taught by Addison and Macaulay,—a “mill” periphrastically means this: your adversary, in the noble encounter between fist and fist, has so plunged his head that it gets caught, as in a vice, between the side and doubled left arm of the adversary, exposing that head, unprotected and helpless, to be pounded out of recognizable shape by the right fist of the opponent. It is a situation in which raw superiority of force sometimes finds itself, and is seldom spared by disciplined superiority of skill. Kenelm, his right fist raised, paused for a moment, then, loosening the left arm, releasing the prisoner, and giving him a friendly slap on the shoulder, he turned round to the spectators and said apologetically, “He has a handsome face: it would be a shame to spoil it.”
Tom’s position of peril was so obvious to all, and that good-humoured abnegation of the advantage which the position gave to the adversary seemed so generous, that the labourers actually hurrahed. Tom, himself felt as if treated like a child; and alas, and alas for him! in wheeling round, and regathering himself up, his eye rested on Jessie’s face. Her lips were apart with breathless terror: he fancied they were apart with a smile of contempt. And now he became formidable. He fought as fights the bull in the presence of the heifer, who, as he knows too well, will go with the conqueror.
If Tom had never yet fought with a man taught by a prizefighter, so never yet had Kenelm encountered a strength which, but for the lack of that teaching, would have conquered his own. He could act no longer on the defensive; he could no longer play, like a dexterous fencer, with the sledge-hammers of those mighty arms. They broke through his guard; they sounded on his chest as on an anvil. He felt that did they alight on his head he was a lost man. He felt also that the blows spent on the chest of his adversary were idle as the stroke of a cane on the hide of a rhinoceros. But now his nostrils dilated; his eyes flashed fire: Kenelm Chillingly had ceased to be a philosopher. Crash came his blow—how unlike the swinging roundabout hits of Tom Bowles!—straight to its aim as the rifle-ball of a Tyrolese or a British marksman at Aldershot,—all the strength of nerve, sinew, purpose, and mind concentred in its vigour,—crash just at that part of the front where the eyes meet, and followed up with the rapidity of lightning, flash upon flash, by a more restrained but more disabling blow with the left hand just where the left ear meets throat and jaw-bone.
At the first blow Tom Bowles had reeled and staggered, at the second he threw up his hands, made a jump in the air as if shot through the heart, and then heavily fell forwards, an inert mass.
The spectators pressed round him in terror. They thought he was dead. Kenelm knelt, passed quickly his hand over Tom’s lips, pulse, and heart, and then rising, said, humbly and with an air of apology,—
“If he had been a less magnificent creature, I assure you on my honour that I should never have ventured that second blow. The first would have done for any man less splendidly endowed by nature. Lift him gently; take him home. Tell his mother, with my kind regards, that I’ll call and see her and him to-morrow. And, stop, does he ever drink too much beer?”
“Well,” said one of the villagers, “Tom can drink.”
“I thought so. Too much flesh for that muscle. Go for the nearest doctor. You, my lad? good; off with you; quick. No danger, but perhaps it may be a case for the lancet.”
Tom Bowles was lifted tenderly by four of the stoutest men present and borne into his home, evincing no sign of consciousness; but his face, where not clouted with blood, was very pale, very calm, with a slight froth at the lips.
Kenelm