Rodney Stone by Arthur Conan Doyle (ebook reader below 3000 TXT) 📕

to make it all straight with the missus.  I couldn’t convince her all at once, an’ so I brought her with me, and we argued it out on the way.”

Looking at the gig, I saw that it was indeed Mrs. Harrison who was seated in it.  Sir Charles beckoned him up to the wheel of the curricle.

“What in the world brings you here, Harrison?” he whispered.  “I am as glad to see you as ever I was to see a man in my life, but I confess that I did not expect you.”

“Well, sir, you heard I was coming,” said the smith.

“Indeed, I did not.”

“Didn’t you get a message, Sir Charles, from a man named Cumming, landlord of the Friar’s Oak Inn?  Mister Rodney there would know him.”

“We saw him dead drunk at the George.”

“There, now, if I wasn’t afraid of it!” cried Harrison, angrily.  “He’s always like that when he’s excited, and I never saw a man more off his head than he was when he heard I was going to take this job over.  He brought a bag of sovereigns up with him to back me with.”

“That’s how the betting got turned,” said my uncle.  “He found others to follow his lead, it appears.”

“I was so afraid that he might get upon the drink that I made him promise to go straight to you, sir, the very instant he should arrive.  He had a note to deliver.”

“I understand that he reached the George at six, whilst I did not return from Reigate until after seven, by which time I have no doubt that he had drunk his message to me out of his head.  But where is your nephew Jim, and how did you come to know that you would be needed?”

“It is not his fault, I promise you, that you should be left in the lurch.  As to me, I had my orders to take his place from the only man upon earth whose word I have never disobeyed.”

“Yes, Sir Charles,” said Mrs. Harrison, who had left the gig and approached us.  “You can make the most of it this time, for never again shall you have my Jack—not if you were to go on your knees for him.”

“She’s not a patron of sport, and that’s a fact,” said the smith.

“Sport!” she cried, with shrill contempt and anger.  “Tell me when all is over.”

She hurried away, and I saw her afterwards seated amongst the bracken, her back turned towards the multitude, and her hands over her ears, cowering and wincing in an agony of apprehension.

Whilst this hurried scene had been taking place, the crowd had become more and more tumultuous, partly from their impatience at the delay, and partly from their exuberant spirits at the unexpected chance of seeing so celebrated a fighting man as Harrison.  His identity had already been noised abroad, and many an elderly connoisseur plucked his long net-purse out of his fob, in order to put a few guineas upon the man who would represent the school of the past against the present.  The younger men were still in favour of the west-countryman, and small odds were to be had either way in proportion to the number of the supporters of each in the different parts of the crowd.

In the mean time Sir Lothian Hume had come bustling up to the Honourable Berkeley Craven, who was still standing near our curricle.

“I beg to lodge a formal protest against these proceedings,” said he.

“On what grounds, sir?”

“Because the man produced is not the original nominee of Sir Charles Tregellis.”

“I never named one, as you are well aware,” said my uncle.

“The betting has all been upon the understanding that young Jim Harrison was my man’s opponent.  Now, at the last moment, he is withdrawn and another and more formidable man put into his place.”

“Sir Charles Tregellis is quite within his rights,” said Craven, firmly.  “He undertook to produce a man who should be within the age limits stipulated, and I understand that Harrison fulfils all the conditions.  You are over five-and-thirty, Harrison?”

“Forty-one next month, master.”

“Very good.  I direct that the fight proceed.”

But alas! there was one authority which was higher even than that of the referee, and we were destined to an experience which was the prelude, and sometimes the conclusion, also, of many an old-time fight.  Across the moor there had ridden a black-coated gentleman, with buff-topped hunting-boots and a couple of grooms behind him, the little knot of horsemen showing up clearly upon the curving swells and then dipping down into the alternate hollows.  Some of the more observant of the crowd had glanced suspiciously at this advancing figure, but the majority had not observed him at all until he reined up his horse upon a knoll which overlooked the amphitheatre, and in a stentorian voice announced that he represented the Custos rotulorum of His Majesty’s county of Sussex, that he proclaimed this assembly to be gathered together for an illegal purpose, and that he was commissioned to disperse it by force, if necessary.

Never before had I understood that deep-seated fear and wholesome respect which many centuries of bludgeoning at the hands of the law had beaten into the fierce and turbulent natives of these islands.  Here was a man with two attendants upon one side, and on the other thirty thousand very angry and disappointed people, many of them fighters by profession, and some from the roughest and most dangerous classes in the country.  And yet it was the single man who appealed confidently to force, whilst the huge multitude swayed and murmured like a mutinous fierce-willed creature brought face to face with a power against which it knew that there was neither argument nor resistance.  My uncle, however, with Berkeley Craven, Sir John Lade, and a dozen other lords and gentlemen, hurried across to the interrupter of the sport.

“I presume that you have a warrant, sir?” said Craven.

“Yes, sir, I have a warrant.”

“Then I have a legal right to inspect it.”

The magistrate handed him a blue paper which the little knot of gentlemen clustered their heads over, for they were mostly magistrates themselves, and were keenly alive to any possible flaw in the wording.  At last Craven shrugged his shoulders, and handed it back.

“This seems to be correct, sir,” said he.

“It is entirely correct,” answered the magistrate, affably.  “To prevent waste of your valuable time, gentlemen, I may say, once for all, that it is my unalterable determination that no fight shall, under any circumstances, be brought off in the county over which I have control, and I am prepared to follow you all day in order to prevent it.”

To my inexperience this appeared to bring the whole matter to a conclusion, but I had underrated the foresight of those who arrange these affairs, and also the advantages which made Crawley Down so favourite a rendezvous.  There was a hurried consultation between the principals, the backers, the referee, and the timekeeper.

“It’s seven miles to Hampshire border and about two to Surrey,” said Jackson.  The famous Master of the Ring was clad in honour of the occasion in a most resplendent scarlet coat worked in gold at the buttonholes, a white stock, a looped hat with a broad black band, buff knee-breeches, white silk stockings, and paste buckles—a costume which did justice to his magnificent figure, and especially to those famous “balustrade” calves which had helped him to be the finest runner and jumper as well as the most formidable pugilist in England.  His hard, high-boned face, large piercing eyes, and immense physique made him a fitting leader for that rough and tumultuous body who had named him as their commander-in-chief.

“If I might venture to offer you a word of advice,” said the affable official, “it would be to make for the Hampshire line, for Sir James Ford, on the Surrey border, has as great an objection to such assemblies as I have, whilst Mr. Merridew, of Long Hall, who is the Hampshire magistrate, has fewer scruples upon the point.”

“Sir,” said my uncle, raising his hat in his most impressive manner, “I am infinitely obliged to you.  With the referee’s permission, there is nothing for it but to shift the stakes.”

In an instant a scene of the wildest animation had set in.  Tom Owen and his assistant, Fogo, with the help of the ring-keepers, plucked up the stakes and ropes, and carried them off across country.  Crab Wilson was enveloped in great coats, and borne away in the barouche, whilst Champion Harrison took Mr. Craven’s place in our curricle.  Then, off the huge crowd started, horsemen, vehicles, and pedestrians, rolling slowly over the broad face of the moorland.  The carriages rocked and pitched like boats in a seaway, as they lumbered along, fifty abreast, scrambling and lurching over everything which came in their way.  Sometimes, with a snap and a thud, one axle would come to the ground, whilst a wheel reeled off amidst the tussocks of heather, and roars of delight greeted the owners as they looked ruefully at the ruin.  Then as the gorse clumps grew thinner, and the sward more level, those on foot began to run, the riders struck in their spurs, the drivers cracked their whips, and away they all streamed in the maddest, wildest cross-country steeplechase, the yellow barouche and the crimson curricle, which held the two champions, leading the van.

“What do you think of your chances, Harrison?” I heard my uncle ask, as the two mares picked their way over the broken ground.

“It’s my last fight, Sir Charles,” said the smith.  “You heard the missus say that if she let me off this time I was never to ask again.  I must try and make it a good one.”

“But your training?”

“I’m always in training, sir.  I work hard from morning to night, and I drink little else than water.  I don’t think that Captain Barclay can do much better with all his rules.”

“He’s rather long in the reach for you.”

“I’ve fought and beat them that were longer.  If it comes to a rally I should hold my own, and I should have the better of him at a throw.”

“It’s a match of youth against experience.  Well, I would not hedge a guinea of my money.  But, unless he was acting under force, I cannot forgive young Jim for having deserted me.”

“He was acting under force, Sir Charles.”

“You have seen him, then?”

“No, master, I have not seen him.”

“You know where he is?”

“Well, it is not for me to say one way or the other.  I can only tell you that he could not help himself.  But here’s the beak a-comin’ for us again.”

The ominous figure galloped up once more alongside of our curricle, but this time his mission was a more amiable one.

“My jurisdiction ends at that ditch, sir,” said he.  “I should fancy that you could hardly wish a better place for a mill than the sloping field beyond.  I am quite sure that no one will interfere with you there.”

His anxiety that the fight should be brought off was in such contrast to the zeal with which he had chased us from his county, that my uncle could not help remarking upon it.

“It is not for a magistrate to wink at the breaking of the law, sir,” he answered.  “But if my colleague of Hampshire has no scruples about its being brought off within his jurisdiction, I should very much like to see the fight,” with which he spurred his horse up an adjacent knoll, from which he thought that he might gain the best view of the proceedings.

And now I had a view of all those points of etiquette and curious survivals of custom which are so recent, that we have not yet appreciated that they may some day be as interesting to the social historian as they then were to the sportsman.  A dignity was given to the contest by a rigid code of ceremony, just as the clash of mail-clad knights was prefaced and adorned by the calling of the heralds and the showing of blazoned shields.  To many in those ancient days the tourney may have seemed a bloody and brutal ordeal, but we who look at it with ample perspective see that it was a rude but gallant preparation for the conditions of life in an iron age.  And so also, when the ring has become as extinct as the lists, we may understand that a broader philosophy would show that all things, which spring up so naturally and spontaneously, have a function to fulfil, and that it is a less evil that two men should, of their own free will, fight until they can fight no more than that the standard of hardihood and endurance should run the slightest risk of being lowered in a nation which depends so largely upon the individual qualities of her citizens for her defence.  Do away with war, if the cursed thing can by any wit of man be avoided, but until you see your way to that, have a care in meddling with those primitive qualities to which at any moment you may have to