Читать книгу Peter and Alexis. The Romance of Peter the Great онлайн

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“Friends, friends,” sobbed Petka, trembling like a leaf, and his teeth chattering, “I feel frightened; we speak about him, but is he himself not somewhere close by? See how we are all troubled!”

“I don’t know where you get all this old woman’s fear. Ram a pike down his throat, and that’ll finish him,” boastingly began Furlong; but he too grew pale, and began to quake when Kilikeya, who was sitting next to him, suddenly called out in a piercing voice, fell on the ground, twisting her body in convulsions, and began to shriek.

Kilikeya had been injured in her childhood. Once, so she herself was wont to relate, her stepmother had poured out some soup in a wooden bowl, and passed it to her to eat—reviling her at the same time, saying, “there, sup it up, the devil be with you,” and three weeks later she fell ill, and it seemed to her that something had begun to growl audibly within her, like a dog, so that everybody could hear it. And really an evil spirit did seem to growl with human and animal voices within her. She had been imprisoned according to the Tsar’s law, concerning such nervous women; she had been questioned, judged, even whipped. She had signed promises, not to call out again under pain of punishment with the lash or of being convicted to lifelong labour in the weaving mill. Yet lashes could not cast out demons, and she continued to have fits.