“I should laugh, Raoul, if the Comte de Mont-Gobert were to take you by surprise; you would not get off so easily as if he were the Bailiff Magloire; there would be swords drawn, and blows given and received.”
At last, with a terrible effort, and suffering the while excruciating pain, Thibault succeeded in dragging himself on to one knee. He could then make out people walking along a road not far off on their way to market, and he tried to call to them, but the blood filled his mouth and nearly choked him. So he put his hat on the point of his knife and signalled to them like a shipwrecked mariner, but his strength again failing, he once more fell back unconscious. In a little while, however, he again awoke to sensation; he appeared to be swaying from side to side as if in a boat. He opened his eyes; the peasants, it seemed, had seen him, and although not knowing who he was, had had compassion on this handsome young man lying covered with blood, and had concocted a sort of handbarrow out of some branches, on which they were now carrying him to Villers-Cotterets. But by the time they reached Puiseux, the wounded man felt that he could no longer bear the movement, and begged them to put him down in the first peasant’s hut they came to, and to send a doctor to him there. The carriers took him to the house of the village priest, and left him there, Thibault before they parted, distributing gold among them from Raoul’s purse, accompanied by many thanks for all their kind offices. The priest was away saying mass, but on returning and finding the wounded man, he uttered loud cries of lamentation.
Had he been Raoul himself, Thibault could not have found a better hospital. The priest had at one time been Curé of Vauparfond, and while there had been engaged to give Raoul his first schooling. Like all country priests, he knew, or thought he knew, something about doctoring; so he examined his old pupil’s wound. The knife had passed under the shoulder-blade, through the right lung, and out between the second and third ribs.