The Witch. Mary Johnston
He had spoken abstractedly, and more unguardedly than was his wont. The words were no sooner from his tongue than he felt alarm. They were not safe words to have spoken, even in such simple company as this. He looked aside and found that Will was staring, round-eyed. “No witches?” asked Will slowly. “Parson saith that none but miscreants and unbelievers—”
“Tell me about your church and parson,” said Aderhold calmly, and, aided by a stumble of Will’s horse and some question from the litter behind them, avoided for that time the danger.
They crossed the bridge and left behind the winding river and the town that climbed to the castle, clear-cut and dark against the brilliant sky. Before them, lapped in the golden sunshine, spread a rich landscape. Field and meadow, hill and dale, crystal stream and tall, hanging woods, it flickered and waved in the gilt light and the warm, blowing wind. There were many trees by the wayside, and in their branches a singing and fluttering of birds. The distance shimmered; here was light and here were violet shadows and everywhere hung the breath of spring. From a hilltop they saw, some miles away, roofs and a church tower. “Hawthorn Village,” said Will. “The Oak Grange is two miles the other side.”
Master Hardwick parted the curtains of the litter and called to the physician. His heart, he said, was beating too slowly; it frightened him, he thought it might be going to stop. Aderhold reassured him. He had a friendly, humorous, strengthening way with his patients; they brightened beneath his touch, and this old man was no exception. Master Hardwick was comforted and said that he thought he could sleep a little more. His lean hand clutched the other’s wrist as he stood dismounted beside him, litter and mules and Will on the sumpter horse having all stopped in the lee of a green bank disked with primroses. Master Hardwick made signs for the physician to stoop. “Eh, kinsman,” he whispered. “You and I are the only Aderholds in this part of the world. And you are a good leech—a good leech! Would you stay at the Oak Grange for your lodging, man? I’ve no money—no money at all—but I’d lodge you—”
The miles decreased between the cavalcade and the village. Aderhold was riding now alone, Carthew still ahead, and Will fallen back with the litter. Looking about him, the physician found something very rich and fair in the day and the landscape. Not for a long time had he had such a feeling of health and moving peace, a feeling that contained neither fever nor exhaustion. There was a sense of clarity, strength, and fineness; moreover, the scene itself seemed to exhibit something unusual, to have a strangeness of beauty, a richness, a quality as of a picture where everything is ordered and heightened. It had come about before, this certain sudden interfusion, or permeation, or intensity of realization, when all objects had taken on a depth and glow, lucidity, beauty, and meaning. The countryside before him was for an appreciable moment transfigured. He saw it a world very lovely, very rich. It was noble and good in his eyes—it was the dear Earth as she might always be.... The glow went as it had come, and there lay before him only a fair, wooded English countryside, sun and shadow and the April day.
He saw the village clearly now, with a sailing of birds about the church tower. Carthew, who had kept steadily ahead, occupied apparently with his own meditations, checked his horse and waited until the other came up with him, then touched the roan with his whip and he and the physician went on together.
There was something about this young man that both interested and repelled. He was good-looking and apparently intelligent. Silence itself was no bar to liking, often it was quite the reverse. But Carthew’s was no friendly and flowing quiet. His silence had a harsh and pent quality. He looked often like a man in a dream, but the dream had in it no suavity, but appeared to contemplate high and stern and dreadful things. Aderhold looked instinctively first at a man’s eyes. Carthew’s eyes were earnest and intolerant. In the lower part of his face there was something that spoke of passions sunken, covered over, and weighted down.
The two rode some little distance without speaking, then Carthew opened his lips abruptly. “How do you like this country?”
“I like it well,” said Aderhold. “It is a fair country.”
“Fair and unfair,” answered the other. “It rests like every other region under the primal Curse—The old man, back there, has taken a fancy to you and calls you his kinsman. Do you expect to bide at the Oak Grange?”
“I think it truth that I am his kinsman,” answered Aderhold. “For the other—I do not know.”
“He is misliked hereabouts,” said Carthew. “He is old and miserly. Those who have goods and gear like him not because he will not spend with them, and those who have none like him not because he gives nothing. The Oak Grange is a ruinous place.”
The village now opened before them, a considerable cluster of houses, most of them small and poor, climbing a low hill and spreading over a bit of meadow. The houses were huddled together, but they enclosed a village green and here and there rose old trees, or showed a tiny garden. At the farther end, on the higher ground, the church lifted itself, dominating. Beyond it ran the highway still. The landscape was fair, with hill and dale, and to the right, against the horizon, violet-hued and misty, an old forest.
Aderhold looked somewhat wistfully at the scene before him. He had passed through much of harm and peril. Body and mind he wanted rest, quiet routine, for a time some ease. “It looks a place where peace might be found,” he said.
“Five years ago,” said Carthew, “we had the sweating sickness. Many died. Then all saw the shadow from the lifted Hand.”
“It is wholesome now?”
“Aye,” answered the other, “until sin and denial again bring bodily grief.”
Aderhold glanced aside at his companion. The latter was riding with a stern and elevated countenance, his lips moving slightly. The physician knew that look no less than he had known the serving-man’s.
“Is it not,” demanded Carthew, “is it not marvellous how the whole Creation groaneth and travaileth with the knowledge of her doom! How contemptible and evil is this world! Yet here we are sifted out—and not the wise man of old, nor the heathen, nor the ignorant, nor the child in his cradle is excused! Is it not marvellous how, under our very feet, men and women and babes are burning in hell! How, for Adam’s sin, all perish save only the baptized believer—and he is saved in no wise of his own effort and merit, but only of another’s! How God electeth the very damned—and yet is their guilt no whit the less! Is it not marvellous!”
“Aye, fabulously marvellous,” said Aderhold.
“The sense of sin!” pursued Carthew. “How it presses hard upon my heart! The sense of sin!”
Aderhold was silent. He possessed a vivid enough realization of his many and recurring mistakes and weaknesses, but, in the other’s meaning, he had no sense of sin.
They came to the village and rode through it, the litter arousing curiosity, allayed every few yards by Will’s statements. Aderhold observed the lack of any sympathy with the sick old man, even the growling note with which some of the people turned aside. There was the usual village traffic in the crooked street, the small shops and the doorways. Children were marching with the geese upon the green, where there was a pond, and near it the village stocks. Housewives, with tucked-up skirts and with pattens,—for an April shower had made mire of the ways,—clattered to and fro or sat spinning by window or door. Many of the men were in the fields, but there were left those who traded or were mechanic, as well as the aged, sitting, half-awake, half-asleep, in sunny spots. It was the usual village of the time, poor enough, far from clean, ignorant and full of talk, and yet not without its small share of what then counted for human flower and fruition, nor without promise of the future’s flower and fruition.
They rode by the church, set in dark yews. Almost in its shadow rose a plain stone house. “Master Thomas Clement, the minister’s,” said Carthew. “Hawthorn hath a godly and zealous pastor! The town behind us is all for prelates and vestments and a full half at least of the old superstitions. But Hawthorn and the country to the north have purged themselves as far as they safely may.”
Out upon the open