‘I was always a bit frivolous, as you said just now, Mr. Thistlewood,’ Lane remarked in the first enforced pause of the combat, ‘but I’d like you to bear me witness that I stick to what I’m at while I’m at it.’
This address was delivered pantingly, whilst the speaker lay flat upon his back on the grass, with his arms thrown out crosswise. Thistlewood disdained response, and sat with one great shoulder propped against a dwarf oak, breathing fast and hard. When this sign of distress had a little abated, he arose, and said ‘Time’ as if he had been a mere cornerman in the affair, and rather bored by it than otherwise. Lane rolled over on to his face, rose to his hands and knees, smiled at his adversary for a little while, as if to give him an appetite for the business in hand, and then got to his feet and made ready.
Now for a man to hold his own at this particular form of fighting against an equal adversary for a bare five minutes argues five grand things for him, and these are chastity, temperance, hardihood, strength, and courage. It speaks well for these admirable qualities in both of them that Messrs. Thistlewood and Protheroe made a good hour of it. The advantages and disadvantages had been so equally distributed that by this time they were pretty nearly harmless to each other, but each was sustained by the hope of victory, and each would have died, and, for the matter of that, would have gone on dying, rather than yield the precious palm to the other.
Now the clergyman who ministered to the spiritual wants of Beacon Hargate was never disposed to gorge his flock with too much doctrine at a time, and on this Sabbath had an invitation to luncheon at a great house some four or five miles away, and so treated his parishioners--to the scandal of some and the joy of others--to the shortest discourse they had ever heard from the pulpit. By this mischance it happened that the combatants were discovered by a silent male advance-guard of the home-returning congregation, who ran back--his footsteps soundless on the grass--to spread the splendid news. Sunday or week-day there was no more welcome break in the monotony of life in Beacon Hargate than that afforded by a fight. The time being church-time, and the combatants men of respectable position, lent piquancy to the event, of course, as who shall say me nay? The churchgoers, two or three farmers, Mr. Drake, the manager of Lord Barfield’s estates at Heydon Hey, and a handful of labourers came up, at first stealthily, and then more boldly, and looked on at the finish.