Aid me, O ye Nine! whom the incomparable Persius satirised his
contemporaries for invoking, and then, all of a sudden, invoked on his
own behalf--aid me to describe that famous battle by the Stocks, and
in defence of the Stocks, which was waged by the two representatives
of Saxon and Norman England. Here, sober support of law and duty and
delegated trust--_pro aris et focis_; there, haughty invasion, and
bellicose spirit of knighthood, and that respect for name and person,
which we call honour. Here, too, hardy physical force--there, skilful
discipline. Here--The Nine are as deaf as a post, and as cold as a
stone! Plague take the jades!--I can do better without them.
Randal was a year older than Lenny, but he was not so tall nor so
strong, nor even so active; and after the first blind rush, when the
two boys paused, and drew back to breathe, Lenny, eyeing the slight
form and hueless cheek of his opponent, and seeing blood trickling from
Randal's lip, was seized with an instantaneous and generous remorse.
"It was not fair," he thought, "to fight one whom he could beat so
easily." So, retreating still farther, and letting his arms fall to his
side, he said mildly--"There, let's have no more of it; but go home and
be good."
Randal Leslie had no remarkable degree of that constitutional quality
called physical courage; but he had all those moral qualities
which supply its place. He was proud--he was vindictive--he had
high self-esteem--he had the destructive organ more than the
combative;--what had once provoked his wrath it became his instinct to
sweep away. Therefore, though all his nerves were quivering, and hot
tears were in his eyes, he approached Lenny with the sternness of a
gladiator, and said between his teeth, which he set hard, choking back
the sob of rage and pain--
"You have struck me--and you shall not stir from this ground--till I
have made you repent it. Put up your hands--I will not strike you
so--defend yourself."
Lenny mechanically obeyed; and he had good need of the admonition: for
if before he had had the advantage, now that Randal had recovered the
surprise to his nerves, the battle was not to the strong.
Though Leslie had not been a fighting boy at Eton, still his temper
had involved him in some conflicts when he was in the lower forms,
and he had learned something of the art as well as the practice in
pugilism--an excellent thing, too, I am barbarous enough to believe,
and which I hope will never quite die out of our public schools. Ah,
many a young duke has been a better fellow for life from a fair set-to
with a trader's son; and many a trader's son has learned to look a lord
more manfully in the face on the hustings, from the recollection of the
sound thrashing he once gave to some little Lord Leopold Dawdle.
So Randal now brought his experience and art to bear; put aside
those heavy roundabout blows, and darted in his own, quick and
sharp--supplying the due momentum of pugilistic mechanics to the
natural feebleness of his arm. Ay, and the arm, too, was no longer so
feeble: so strange is the strength that comes from passion and pluck!
Poor Lenny, who had never fought before, was bewildered; his
sensations grew so entangled that he could never recall them
distinctly: he had a dim reminiscence of some breathless impotent
rush--of a sudden blindness followed by quick flashes of intolerable
light--of a deadly faintness, from which he was roused by sharp
pangs--here--there--everywhere; and then all he could remember was,
that he was lying on the ground, huddled up and panting hard, while his
adversary bent over him with a countenance as dark and livid as Lara
himself might have bent over the fallen Otho. For Randal Leslie was
not one who, by impulse and nature, subscribed to the noble English
maxim--"Never hit a foe when he is down;" and it cost him a strong if
brief self-struggle, not to set his heel on that prostrate form. It
was the mind, not the heart, that subdued the savage within him, as,
muttering something inwardly--certainly not Christian forgiveness--the
victor turned gloomily away.