As if to prevent the manslaughter threatened, the Parson breathed heavily once or twice, and tried to put his hand to his temples; and then looked about with a placid amazement.
"You 'bide there, sir, for a second," said the man, setting him carefully upon a dry bank with his head against an ash-tree. "Thy soul shall zee her desire of thine enemies, as I've a'read when I waz a little buy."
To verify this promise of Holy Writ, he took up the stoutest of the white switches, and visiting the ditch first, and then the hedge-trough, left not a single accessible part of either of those ruffians without a weal upon it as big as his thumb, and his thumb was not a little one. They howled like a couple of pigs at the blacksmith's, when he slips the ring into their noses red-hot; and it is lawful to hope that they felt their evil deeds.
"T'other two shall have the very same, bumbai; I knows where to put hands on 'em both;" said the operator, pointing towards the village; and it is as well to mention that he did it.
"Now, sir, you come along of I." He cast away the fourth rod, having elicited their virtues, and taking Mr. Penniloe in his arms, went steadily with him to the nearest house. This stood alone in the outskirts of the village; and there two very good old ladies lived, with a handsome green railing in front of them.
These, after wringing their hands for some minutes, enabled Mr. Penniloe to wash his face and head, and gave him some red currant wine, and sent their child of all work for Mrs. Muggridge. Meanwhile the Parson began to take a more distinct view of the world again, his first emotion being anxiety about his Sunday beaver, which he had been wearing in honour of the Proclamation—the last duty it was ever destined to discharge. But the "gigantic individual," as the good ladies called him, was nowhere to be seen, when they mustered courage to persuade one another to peep outside the rails.
By this time the weather was becoming very bad. Everybody knows how a great gale rises; not with any hurry, or assertion of itself, (as a little squall does, that is limited for time) but with a soft hypocritical sigh, and short puffs of dissimulation. The solid great storm, that gets up in the south, and means to make every tree in England bow, to shatter the spray on the Land's-end cliffs while it shakes all the towers of London, begins its advance without any broad rush, but with many little ticklings of the space it is to sweep. A trumpery frolic where four roads meet, a woman's umbrella turned inside out, a hat tossed into a horse-pond perhaps, a weather-cock befooled into chace of head with tail, and a clutch of big raindrops sheafed into the sky and shattered into mist again—these, and a thousand other little pranks and pleasantries, are as the shrill admonitions of the fife, in the vanguard of the great invasion of the heavens.
But what cares a man, with his money in his pockets, how these larger things are done? And even if his money be yet to seek, still more shall it preponderate. A tourney of wrestlers for cash and great glory was crowding the courtyard of the Ivy-bush with every man who could raise a shilling. A steep roof of rick-cloth and weatherproof canvas, supported on a massive ridge-pole would have protected the enclosure from any ordinary storm; but now the tempestuous wind was tugging, whistling, panting, shrieking, and with great might thundering, and the violent rain was pelting, like the rattle of pebbles on the Chessil beach, against the strained canvas of the roof; while the rough hoops of candles inside were swinging, with their crops of guttering tallow welted, like sucked stumps of Asparagus. Nevertheless the spectators below, mounted on bench, or stool, or trestle, or huddled against the rope-ring, were jostling, and stamping, and craning their necks, and digging elbows into one another, and yelling, and swearing, and waving rotten hats, as if the only element the Lord ever made was mob.
Suddenly all jabber ceased, and only the howls of the storm were heard, and the patter from the sodden roof, as Polwarth of Bodmin, having taken formal back from Dascombe of Devon, (the winner of the Standards, a very fine player, but not big enough for him) skirred his flat hat into the middle of the sawdust, and stood there flapping his brawny arms, and tossing his big-rooted nose, like a bull. In the flare of the lights, his grin looked malignant, and the swing of his bulk overweening; and though he said nothing but "Cornwall for ever!" he said it as if it meant—"Devonshire be d—d!"
After looking at the company with mild contempt, he swaggered towards the umpires, and took off his belt, with the silver buckles and the red stones flashing, and hung it upon the cross-rail for defiance. A shiver and a tremble of silence ran through the hearts, and on the lips of three hundred sad spectators. Especially a gentleman who sate behind the umpires, dressed in dark riding-suit and a flapped hat, was swinging from side to side with strong feeling.