“Ay, that’ll be it. We’ll send ’em to th’ parson’s.”
The litter came up. They would not have this abhorred flesh cross their own thresholds, but the parson did not matter so much. They looked remorselessly on him in his agony, and then told the bearers where he must be taken.
“Well, a parson’ll be what he needs the most,” one of the soldiers replied.
The empty sleeves of the red coat on which Cope lay (it was buttoned about the muskets exactly as Cole the clogger had been wont to button his own jacket over his arms) were tied about his legs to steady him as much as possible for the precipitous descent; then they dropped down an abrupt sheep-track.
From the window of his dining-room, which, of his four ground-floor rooms, was diagonally opposite the little back study, the parson saw the approach of the party. It did not need the glimpse he had between two of the red coats to inform him of what had happened. He fell on his knees to intercede for the unhappy shedders of blood, and he was in that posture when a rat-tat sounded at his own door. He sprang to his feet and passed out to answer the knock.
A trooper informed him briefly that there was nowhere else to take the moribund man. “He’s got it,” he said.
The parson gave a glance at the stretcher. “Bring him into my dining-room,” he said.
He preceded them, got a rug and a blanket, and, litter and all, they laid Cope on a couch.
His breathing was horrible. The parson knew a little of medicine; he unbuttoned Cope’s coat and waistcoat.
“You’ll find a pair of scissors in the top drawer of that cabinet,” he said to one of the soldiers; and with the scissors he cut Cope’s shirt across the breast. Even the soldiers turned away, and the parson closed the shirt again.