The Witch. Mary Johnston

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      Aderhold crossed to the bench and bending over the sufferer proceeded to loosen his ruff and shirt. “Give him air,” he said, and then to the tall man, “I am a physician.”

      They laid Master Hardwick upon a bed in an inner room, where, Aderhold doing for him what he might, he presently revived. He stared about him. “Where am I? Am I at the Oak Grange? I thought I was on the road from London. Where is Will, my man?”

      “He is without,” said Aderhold. “Do you want him? I am a physician.”

      Master Hardwick lay and stared at him. “No, no! You are a leech? Stay with me.... Am I going to die?”

      “No. But you do not well to travel too far abroad nor to place yourself where you will meet great fatigues.”

      The other groaned. “It was this one only time. I had monies at stake and none to straighten matters out but myself.” He lay for a time with closed eyes, then opened them again upon Aderhold. “I must get on—I must get home—I must get at least as far as the town to-night. Don’t you think that I can travel?”

      “Yes, if you go carefully,” said Aderhold. “I will tell your man what to do—”

      The old man groaned. “He works well at what he knows, but he knows so little.... I do not know if I will get home alive.”

      “How far beyond the town have you to go?”

      “Eight miles and more.... Doctor, are you not travelling, too? You’ve done me good—and if I were taken again—” He groaned. “I’m a poor man,—they make a great mistake when they say I’m rich,—but if you’ll ride with me I’ll pay somehow—”

      Aderhold sat in silence, revolving the matter in his mind. “I have,” he said at last, “no horse.”

      But Master Hardwick had with him a sumpter horse. “Will can now ride that and now walk. You may have Will’s horse.” He saw the long miles, cold and dark, before him and grew eager. “I’m a sick man and I must get home.” He raised himself upon the bed. “You go with me—you’ve got a kindly look—you do not seem strange to me. What is your name?”

      “My name is Gilbert Aderhold.”

      “Aderhold!” said Master Hardwick. “My mother’s mother was an Aderhold.”

CHAPTER V

       Table of Contents

      THE ROAD TO HAWTHORN

      It was full dusk when the London travellers did at last win away from the Rose Tavern. The evening was cold, the snow yet falling in slow, infrequent flakes. The merchants and their men, together with Master Anthony Mull, first took the road. Then followed Master Harry Carthew, straight and stern, upon a great roan mare. In the rear came on slowly old John Hardwick, his servant Will, and the physician Gilbert Aderhold. These three soon lost sight of the others, who, pushing on, came to the town, rest, and bed, ere they had made half the distance.

      At last, very late, the place loomed before them. They passed through dark and winding streets, and found an inn which Master Hardwick knew. Together Will and Aderhold lifted the old man from his horse and helped him into the house and into a great bed, where he lay groaning through the night, the physician beside him speaking now and again a soothing and steadying word.

      He could not travel the next day or the next. Finally Aderhold and Will wrung permission to hire a litter and two mules. On the third morning they placed Master Hardwick in the litter and all took the street leading to the road which should bring them in the afternoon to the Oak Grange. Going, they passed a second inn, and here Master Harry Carthew suddenly appeared beside them upon his great roan. It seemed that affairs had kept him likewise in this town, but that now he was bound in their direction.

      The snow had passed into rain. The weather had moderated, the rain ceased, and this morning there was pure blue sky and divine sunlight. The latter bathed the unpaved streets, the timbered, projecting fronts of houses, guildhall and shops and marketplace, and the tower and body of a great and ancient abbey church. Beyond the church the ground sloped steeply to the river winding by beneath an arched bridge of stone. Above the town, commanding all, rose a castle, half-ruinous, half in repair. The streets were filled with people, cheerful in the morning air. Litter, mules, and horsemen moved slowly along. Honest Will drew a long breath. “Fegs! Who would live in the country that could live in a town?”

      Aderhold was riding beside him, Carthew being ahead on his great roan mare. “Tell me something,” said the physician, “of the country to which we are going.”

      “The country’s a good country enough,” said Will. “But the Oak Grange—Lord! the Grange is doleful and lonely—”

      “Doleful and lonely?”

      “It’s all buried in black trees,” said Will, “and nobody lives there but our old master.”

      “Where does Master Carthew live?”

      “He lives in the squire’s house beyond the village. He’s the squire’s brother.”

      “You’re near a village?”

      “Aye, the village of Hawthorn.”

      They rode on, Will gazing busily about him. They were still in the town, indeed in an important part of it, for before them rose the prison. Without it stood pillory and stocks, two men by the legs in the latter, a dozen children deliberately pelting them with rotten vegetables, shards, and mud. Aderhold stared with a frown, the countryman with a curious mixture of interest in the event and lumpish indifference as to the nature of it. “Aye,” he repeated, “the village of Hawthorn.”

      “Is there,” asked Aderhold, “a physician in the village?”

      They had passed the prison, and were approaching the sculptured portal of the great church. “A physician?” said Will. “No. There was one, but he died two years ago. Now they send here, or the schoolmaster will bleed at a pinch or give a drench. And sometimes they go—but the parson would stop that—to old Mother Spuraway.”

      They were now full before the great portal of the church. Carthew, ahead, stopped his horse to speak to some person who seemed an acquaintance. His halting in the narrow way halted the mules with the litter. Master Hardwick had fallen into a doze. The physician and serving-man, standing their horses together, looked up at the huge pile of the church, towering like a cliff immediately above them. On each side of the vast arched doorway had stood in niches the figures of saints. These were broken and gone—dragged down in the day when the neighbouring abbey was closed. But around and about, overhead and flanking the cavernous entrance, had been left certain carvings—a train of them—imps and devils and woe-begone folk possessed by the foul fiend. The fiend grinned over the shoulder of one like a monkey, he tugged like a wolf at the ear of another, he crept like a mouse from a woman’s mouth.... Aderhold’s gaze was upon the great tower against the sky and the rose-window out of which the stained glass was not yet broken. But Will looked lower. Something presently causing the physician to glance his way, he was startled at the serving-man’s posture and expression. It was as though he had never seen these stone figures before—and, indeed, it proved that he had never been so closely within the porch, and that, in short, they had never so caught his attention. He was staring at them now as though СКАЧАТЬ