Hetty Wesley | Page 3

his collar,
and darted down Little College Street to Hutton's Boarding House,
under the windows of which he pulled up and executed a derisive
war-dance.
"Hutton's, Hutton's, Put up your buttons, Hutton's are rottenly Whigs--"
"Mill--mill! Come out and carry home your Butcher Randall! You'll be
wanted when Wesley has done with him."
He was speeding back by this time, and flung this last taunt from a safe
distance. The old gentleman collared him again by the entry.

"Stop, my friend--here, hold hard for a moment! A fight, you said: and
Wesley--was it Wesley?"
The boy nodded.
"Charles Wesley?"
"Well, it wouldn't be Samuel--at his age: now would it?" The boy
grinned. The Reverend Samuel Wesley was the respected Head Usher
of Westminster School.
"And what will Charles Wesley be fighting about?"
"How should I know? Because he wants to, belike. But I was told it
began up school, with Randall's flinging a book at young Murray for a
lousy Scotch Jacobite."
"H'm: and where will it be?"
The boy dropped his voice to a drawl. "In Fighting-green, I believe, sir:
they told me Poets' Corner was already bespoke for a turn-up between
the Dean and Sall the charwoman, with the Head Verger for
bottle-holder--"
"Now, look here, young jackanapes--" But young jackanapes, catching
sight of half a dozen boys--the vanguard of Hutton's--at the street
corner, ducked himself free and raced from vengeance across the yard.
The old gentleman followed; and the crowd from Hutton's, surging past,
showed him the way to Fighting-green where a knot of King's Scholars
politely made room for him, perceiving that in spite of his small stature,
his rusty wig and countrified brown suit, he was a person of some
dignity and no little force of character. They read it perhaps in the set of
his mouth, perhaps in the high aquiline arch of his nose, which he fed
with snuff as he gazed round the ring while the fighters rested, each in
his corner, after the first round: for a mill at Westminster was a
ceremonious business, and the Head Master had been known to adjourn
school for one.

"H'm," said the newcomer; "no need to ask which is Wesley."
His eyes set deep beneath brows bristling like a wire-haired
terrier's--were on the boy in the farther corner, who sat on his backer's
knee, shoeless, stripped to the buff, with an angry red mark on the right
breast below the collar-bone; a slight boy and a trifle undersized, but
lithe, clear-skinned, and in the pink of condition; a handsome boy, too.
By his height you might have guessed him under sixteen, but his face
set you doubting. There are faces almost uncannily good-looking: they
charm so confidently that you shrink from predicting the good fortune
they claim, and bethink you that the gods' favourites are said to die
young: and Charles Wesley's was such a face. He tightened the braces
about his waist and stepped forward for the second round with a sweet
and serious smile. Yet his mouth meant business.
Master Randall--who stood near three inches taller--though nicknamed
"Butcher," was merely a dull heavy-shouldered Briton, dogged, hard to
beat; the son of a South Sea merchant, retired and living at Barnet, who
swore by Walpole and King George. But at Westminster these
convictions--and, confound it! they were the convictions of England,
after all--met with scurrilous derision; and here Master Randall nursed
a dull and inarticulate resentment in a world out of joint, where the
winning side was a butt for epigrams. To win, and be laughed at! To
have the account reopened in lampoons and witticisms, contemptible
but irritating, when it should be closed by the mere act of winning! It
puzzled him, and he brooded over it, turning sulky in the end, not
vicious. It was in no viciousness that he had flung a book at young
Murray's head and called him a lousy Jacobite, but simply to provoke
Wesley and get his grievance settled by intelligible weapons, such as
fists.
He knew his to be the unpopular side, and that even Freind, the Head
Master, would chuckle over the defeat of a Whig. Outside of Hutton's,
who cheered him for the honour of their house, he had few
well-wishers; but among them was a sprinkling of boys bearing the
great Whig names--Cowpers, Sackvilles, Osborns--for whose sake and
for its own tradition the ring would give him fair play.

The second round began warily, Wesley sparring for an opening,
Randall defensive, facing round and round, much as a bullock fronts a
terrier. He knew his game; to keep up his guard and wait for a chance
to get in with his long left. He was cunning, too; appeared slower than
he was, tempting the other to take liberties, and, towards the end of the
round,