Читать книгу The Doomington Wanderer - Louis Golding - Страница 24

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The tour continued. There were no more major excitements on the way beyond the excitement of making money. That was what the tour was all about, of course. The two prize-fighters had set out to make three hundred guineas, the stake money for the second championship fight between Tom Cribb and Tom Molyneux.

The tour became more and more successful. They made more than three hundred guineas. They added Tom Belcher to their team, brother of the recent champion, and made still more money. They made so much money, in fact, that they almost forgot that all England was seething with excitement over the forthcoming second fight between the great white champion and the great black challenger.

But no one in England was less excited than Tom Molyneux himself. The savour had gone out of it. If he won the championship, at whose feet now would he lay it as an offering? The woman who had broken his heart? The friend whose trust he had wickedly betrayed?

He ate and drank and made love as he chose. Bill Richmond was so delighted with the money his big black exhibit brought in that he made no effort to discipline him. The white champion and the black champion met again on a day in September 1811. And Tom Cribb was lean and fit as a racehorse. Tom Molyneux was gross as a sow.

Once faced up against his superb rival, something of his old ferocity and majesty returned to the negro. For a man in so bloated a condition he put up a fight which staggered all its beholders. But he could not last. In fifteen minutes his breath was labouring and his eyes bloodshot. In twenty minutes he lay beaten, knocked quite senseless. His jaw, too, was broken. To this inglorious end came Tom Molyneux’s second bid for the championship, which he might have won on the first bid had Fate been kinder to him.

He made no further bid for the championship, but during the long weeks it took him to recover from his injuries it became more and more firmly impressed on his slow mind that he still had an account to settle.

Being put to rights at length, Tom Molyneux set out on a journey. He went westward—to the state of Somerset, as he called it—and arrived late one evening at the village of Winfold. Though his heart contracted with pain as he passed a small garden where once a snowball tree bloomed, which was not blooming now, he did not pause there. He marched slowly and sombrely to an inn on the edge of the green—the Golden Lion.

He thrust open the door of the bar-room and stood a moment or two staring round from face to face. No one spoke. The place was stiff in an enchantment of fear. Then the negro recognised the faces he had come to find. He walked up to two young men, brothers, planting his feet somewhat deliberately before him, like a gorilla.

He seized the two young men by the backs of their jackets and lifted them from the benches they were sitting on. Then he carried them out, dangling from his clenched fists like two ungainly puppies. Still silent as a dumb man, he crossed the roadway to the village green, holding the two young men before him. There was a duckpond in the centre of the green. He carried them over to the edge of it and placed them there. They stood rigid and still as wooden toys.

Then with the flat of his two hands he pushed them both backwards into the pond; he then turned round again, and so disappeared into the darkness out of which he had come.