“Fiend!” shouted Nobbs, gnashing his teeth, “you have got me to do it, and now I’ll smash in your thick skull—I’ll—”
He stopped abruptly for a moment. Joe Binney came up behind and gently laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Come, John, you ain’t agoin’ to do it. You knows you’re not.”
The quiet tone, the gentle yet fearless look, and, above all, the sensible, kindly expression on his friend’s countenance, effectually subdued the blacksmith for a few seconds, but the fury soon returned, though the channel in which it flowed was changed, for Jabez was forgotten, having slunk away.
“Ha!” he shouted, grasping Joe by the hand and arm, “I’ve had it again! You don’t know how it shoots through my veins. I—I’ve tried to break with it, too—tried—tried! D’ee know what it is to try, Joe, to try—try—try till your blood curdles, an’ your marrow boils, and your nerves tingle—but I gained the victory once—I—ha! ha! yes, I took the pledge an’ kep’ it, an’ I’ve bin all right—till to-night. My Mary knows that. She’ll tell you it’s true—for months, and months, and months, and—but I’ll keep it yet!”
He shouted his last words in a tone of fierce defiance, let go his friend, caught up the sledge-hammer, and, whirling it round his head as if it had been a mere toy, turned to rush towards the sea.
But Joe’s strong arm arrested him. Well did he understand the nature of the awful fiend with which the blacksmith was fighting. The scene enacting was, with modifications, somewhat familiar to him, for he had dwelt near a great city where many a comrade had fallen in the same fight, never more to rise in this life.
Joe’s superior strength told for a moment, and he held the struggling madman fast, but before Dominick and the doctor could spring to his aid, Nobbs had burst from him. The brief check, however, seemed to have changed his intentions. Possibly he was affected by some hazy notion that it would be a quicker end to leap headlong from the neighbouring cliffs than to plunge into the sea. At all events, he ran like a deer up towards the woods. A bonfire, round which the revellers had made merry, lay in his path. He went straight through it, scattering the firebrands right and left. No one attempted, no one dared, to stop him, but God put a check in his way. The course he had taken brought him straight up to the row of casks which stood on the other side of the fire, and again his wild mood was changed. With a yell of triumph he brought the sledge-hammer down on one of the casks, drove in the head, and overturned it with the same blow, and the liquor gushing out flowed into the fire, where it went up in a magnificent roar of flame.
The effect on those of the rioters who were not too drunk to understand anything, was to draw forth a series of wild cheers, but high above these rang the triumphant shout of the blacksmith as he gazed at the destruction of his enemy.
By this time all the people in the settlement had turned out, and were looking on in excitement, alarm, or horror, according to temperament. Among them, of course, was the widow Lynch, who was quick to note that events were taking a favourable turn. Springing boldly to the side of the smith, and, in her wild dishevelment of hair and attire, seeming a not unfit companion, she cried—