The Brazen Head Read Online Free PDF Page B

blessed relief and comfort to them if your renowned Sir Mort Abyssum and your noble and beautiful Lady Valentia would allow them to rest here for a short space and be refreshed by the famous hospitality of this princely House.”
    The door-keeper, though anything but a quick-witted individual , was one of those mortals whose sympathy with animals is strong and instinctive, although totally inarticulate. There was therefore a wordless exchange of ideas going forward at this moment between Master Cortex and the grey horse on the absorbing topic, of intense interest to them both, of this mysterious deformity in the creature’s neck.
    So occupied indeed were both the door-keeper and the horse in the exchange of wordless communications about this weird growth in the latter’s neck that the former soon ceased to listen to what Spardo was saying to him. It must have been after more than five minutes of this concentrated examination of the phenomenal shape which this strange growth on the horse’s neck was gradually assuming, that the door-keeper suddenly leapt to his feet and began shouting: “Bundy! Bundy! Bundy! come quick! Here’s a horse that’s going to have two heads! For God’s sake come quick, Bundy, and look! It’s going to have a man’s head as well as its own! Quick! Quick! Bundy! come quick!”
    The fellow’s appeal didn’t go unanswered. He had kept it up after leaving the horse altogether and throwing all hisstrength into pushing the great double gate of Roque wide open enough to admit half a dozen horses, when his wise old spouse emerged from her retreat and shuffling up to the animal’s side began at once stroking it tenderly. “Kyre! Kyre! Kyre!” she chanted in a curious kind of gloating ecstasy, as she rubbed the knuckles of one hand up and down over the crown of the creature’s forehead, above its large, blurred, weary, and far-away-staring eyes, while with the ringers of her other hand she gently stroked its thick mane.
    Her repetition of the word “Kyre” had an odd effect on the man Spardo. He had been educated in a monastery where they knew a little classical Greek as well as theological Greek; so that to hear this old lady repeat these two syllables which might mean “O Lord!” and also might mean “Hail!” and to see her obvious assumption that in either case the word would please the deformed creature, impressed to the depths of his being the man who was leading it, for he handed its bridle to the doorkeeper, came round by the animal’s tail and bowed low before Bundy, who was a grey-haired old woman with an extremely long face not altogether unlike the face of a horse.
    “Spardo is my name, mistress,” he said, “and it’s Spardo who now salutes you and does homage to you, and does so more deeply than you can possibly know. I don’t suppose you’ve ever had the son of a king as your familiar friend; but you’ve got one now, and if I know anything of women you’ll find me even better suited to your taste than the master here.”
    What the lady thus addressed felt in her secret mind, as she listened to this fantastic progeny of the King of Bohemia, it would be impossible for any male chronicler to describe—but it was clear that the rogue didn’t displease her; for though she didn’t blot out from her attention the massive jaw, the small eyes, and the narrow, sucked-in mouth of her mate—which latter feature resembled one of those straight lines which certain melodramatic chroniclers tend to throw in between a blow and a cry, or between a cry and a crash—she drew a little closer. Soon indeed she was touching the side of the horse with a fascinated interest in the extraordinary growth in its neck. As for Spardo, his movements were spectacular.He seemed as unable to keep still as a white butterfly in a vegetable garden.
    What he was doing now was rolling his blue eyes so queerly in his head that while one of them seemed to be caressing with besotted unction the deformity in