Читать книгу The Red Saint онлайн

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A poor rag of a man, with the pinched face of a sick girl, came limping on sore heels to the western gate of Pevensey. The man had a broken arrow through the flesh of his neck; his mouth was all awry, and his breath came in great heaves, for he had run ten miles that morning. When someone caught him round the middle as he tottered at the gate, he doubled up like a wet clout over a line, and emptied his very soul over the stones. The guards put him on his back awhile, rubbed his legs, and gave him a horn of mead to drink. One of them forced the back of the arrow through the skin, and whipped it out as a woman whips a broken bodkin out of a friend’s finger.

The beer, and the blunt heroism of this barber surgeon brought Barnabo’s man briskly upon his haunches. He clapped his hand to his neck, saw that there was blood on it, and promptly began to whimper.

“You’ve pulled the spiggot out,” he wailed. “Lord, did ever a hogshead gush faster! Linen—oil, and linen, for the love of the Saints.”

The men laughed at him. One of them took a smock that hung on a nail outside the porter’s lodge, tore a strip from it, spat on the wound, and bandaged Barnabo’s man till he had a gorget and whimple fit for a nun.