The Witch. Mary Johnston
will eventually be found out.” He lifted his finger impressively. “Now the temper of the time is religious and growing ever more so. The Italian and antique spirit that I remember is going—is almost gone. We are all theologians and damn the whole world outside of our particular ark. People of the old faith, people of the established faith, people of the Presbytery—each of the three detests and will persecute the remaining two. Right and left suffer from the middle, which is in power, as the middle—and the remaining other—would suffer were the right or left in power. War, secret or open, war, war! and they only unite to plague a witch or to run to earth and burn for heresy one like you who belongs not to right nor left nor middle. The tolerant, humane, philosophic heart dissents—but few, my friend, are tolerant and humane, too few, too few! All this being so, I do not advise you to remain in London—no, I should not, were you Galen himself!”
Aderhold stood gazing at the garden without. There were thorn hedges everywhere—across all paths. “I do not know,” he said, “where I should go—”
“My advice,” said his fellow physician, “would be to travel to some smaller town that hath never received a whisper from France. And now”—he rose—“and now I must bid you good-bye, for an important personage expects me at this hour.”
CHAPTER IV
THE ROSE TAVERN
Three days after this conversation Gilbert Aderhold said good-bye to the Puritan woman and her son, shouldered a stick with a bundle at the end, and set his face toward the periphery of London and the green country beyond. He had no money. The idea of asking his fellow physician for a loan haunted him through one night, but when morning came the ghost was laid. He strongly doubted if the other would make the loan and he did not wish to ask it anyhow. Since he had been in London he had given a cast of his art more than once or twice in this neighbourhood. But it was a poor neighbourhood, and those whom he had served had been piteous folk, and he did not think that they could pay. He had not asked them to pay. He had no connections in London, no friends. His knowledge of men told him that, for all his tolerance and humanity, the fellow physician might be expected to drop a word of warning, here and there, among the brotherhood. His hope had been that his case was so obscure that no talk would come from Paris.... It was not only that the arm of religion had been raised; he had invoked in medicine, too, strange gods of observation and experience; he had been hounded forth with a double cry. To linger in London, to try to work and earn here—with a shudder he tasted beforehand the rebuff that might come. He would leave London.
He was without near kindred. His parents were dead, a sister also. There was an elder brother, a sea-captain. Aderhold had not seen him for years, and fancied him now somewhere upon the ocean or adventuring in the New World. He remembered his mother telling him that there were or had been cousins to the north. She had spoken of an elderly man, living somewhere in a Grange. The name was Hardwick, not Aderhold.... He had no defined idea or intention of seeking kinsmen, but eventually he turned his face toward the north.
It was six in the morning when he stepped forth. Slung beside his bundle of clothing and a book or two, wrapped in a clean cloth, was a great loaf of bread which the Puritan woman had given him. There was a divine, bright sweetness and freshness in the air and the pale-blue heaven over all. He turned into Fleet Street and walked westward. The apprentices were opening the shops, country wares were coming into town, the city was beginning to bustle. Aderhold walked, looking to right and left, interested in all. He was not a very young man, but he was young. Health and strength had been rudely shaken by anxiety, fear, and misery. Anxiety still hovered, and now and then a swift, upstarting fear cut him like a whip and left him quivering. But fear and anxiety were going further, weakening, toning down. Calm was returning, calm and rainbow lights.
Hereabouts in the street were all manner of small shops, places of entertainment, devices by which to catch money. The apprentices were beginning their monotonous crying, “What d’ye lack? What d’ye lack?”
He came to a booth where there was a raree show. A shock-headed, ragged youth was taking down the boards, which were painted with figures of Indians, copper-hued and feathered. Half a dozen children stood watching.
Aderhold stopped and watched also. “Have you an Indian here,” he asked the boy. “I have never seen one.”
The youth nodded. “He sleeps in the corner back of the curtain. You pay twopence to see him—” He grinned, and looked at the children. “But it’s before hours, and if so be you won’t tell master on me—”
“We won’t, master, we won’t!” chorused the children.
The boy took down the last board, showing a concave much like a den with a black curtain at the back. He whistled and the curtain stirred. “We got him,” said the boy, “from two Spaniards who got him from a ship from Florida. They trained him. They had a bear, too, that we bought, but the bear died.” He whistled again. The curtain parted and the Indian came forth and sat upon a stool planted in the middle of the den.
It was evident that he had been “trained.” Almost naked, gaunt, dull and hopeless, he sat with a lack-lustre eye. The boy whistled again and he spoke, a guttural and lifeless string of words. The children gathered close, flushed and excited. But Aderhold’s brows drew upward and together and he turned a little sick. He was a physician; he was used to seeing wretchedness, but it had not deadened him. Every now and then the wave of human misery came and went over him, high as space, ineffably dreary, unutterably hopeless.... He stood and looked at the Indian for a few moments, then, facing from the booth, walked away with a rapid and disturbed step which gradually became slower and halted. He turned and went back. “Has he eaten this morning? You don’t give him much to eat?”
“Times are hard,” said the boy.
Aderhold took the smaller bundle from his stick, unwrapped it and with his knife cut from the loaf a third of its mass. “May I give him this?”
The boy stared. “If you choose, master.”
The physician entered the booth, went up to the Indian and placed the bread upon his knee. “Woe are we,” he said, “that can give no efficient help!”
The savage and the European looked each other in the eyes. For a moment something hawk-like, eagle-like, came back and glanced through the pupils of the red man, then it sank and fled. His eyes grew dull again, though he made a guttural sound and his hand closed upon the bread. The physician stood a moment longer. He had strongly the sacred wonder and curiosity, the mother of knowledge, and he had truly been interested to behold an Indian. Now he beheld one—but the iron showed more than the soul. “I am sorry for thee, my brother,” Aderhold said softly.
The boy spoke from without. “Hist, hist! Master’s coming down the street.”
Aderhold left the booth, shouldered his stick and bundle and went on his way.
He walked steadily, the sun at his back, lifting through the mist and at last gilding the whole city. He was now upon its northwestern fringe, in the “suburbs.” They had an evil name, and he was willing to pass through them hurriedly. They had a sinister look,—net-work of foul lanes, low, wooden, squinting houses, base taverns that leered.
A woman came and walked beside him, paint on her cheeks.
“Where are you going, my bonny man?” Then, as he would have outstepped her, “What haste? Lord! what haste?”
“I have a long way to go,” said Aderhold.
“As long and as short as I have to go,” said the woman. “If you are willing we might go together.”
Aderhold walked on, “I am not for that gear, mistress.”
“No?” said the woman. “Then for what gear are you?... Perhaps I am not for it, either, but—Lord God! one must eat!” She began to sing in a cracked voice but vaguely sweet.
“A lass there dwelled in London