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The fox-gloves nodded around him. He drew toward him a long stem and softly touched, one by one, the purple bells. “Freedom—love!... Thou flower! When shall we see how thou flowest into me and I into thee?”
He let the purple stem swing back, and with his hands about his knees again regarded the gibbet; then, when some minutes had gone by, rose and pursued his way. Another half-hour and he came to a place where three roads met. A passing shepherd boy told him the name was Heron’s Cross-Roads. It was a lonely place, wold and stunted wood, and in an angle, amid heath and briar, was set a blackened stake. Aderhold went across to it. In the wood was a rudely cut name, with a word or two below; the stake was set through the heart of a suicide. Nettles were about it, and some one passing had thrown an empty and broken jug of earthenware. It lay in shards. Aderhold knelt, gathered them together, and rising, laid the heap beneath the hedge.
Back upon the highway, he turned his face again to the town. It was a long way to the Oak Grange, and Master Hardwick was concerned if the house were not closed and fast at a most early hour. Heron’s Cross-Roads. As Aderhold walked an association arose with the name. Heron—that was the name of the old man who owned the cottage on the edge of Hawthorn Forest. He was not there now; the cottage had been shut up and tenantless since early summer. He and his daughter were gone, Will had told him, on a long visit to the old man’s brother, the earl’s huntsman who lived in the castle wood above the town. No one knew when they would be back. Most of their furnishings and household things had been loaned here or there. The dairy woman had taken their cow, some one else the beehives. Heron! He had a moment’s drifting vision of the girl gathering faggots in the forest. It passed and the present day and landscape took its place. Soon he came again to the rise of ground and the gibbet so stark against the blue. He hesitated, then paused, resting as he had rested before upon a stone sunk in the wayside growth.
A horse and rider emerged with suddenness from a sunken lane upon his left, and stood still in the middle of the road—a fine horse, and a fine, richly dressed rider, a man of thirty-five with a hawk upon his gauntleted fist. Turning in the saddle he looked about him, and espying Aderhold where he sat, called to him.
“Hey, friend! Have the earl and his train passed this way?”
“I have not seen them, sir.”
The other glanced around again, then beckoned with an easy command. Aderhold rose and went to him, to find that he was wanted to hold the hooded falcon while the horseman waited for the hawking party from which some accident had separated him. Aderhold took the peregrine from the other’s wrist and stood stroking softly with one finger the blue-black plumage. The rider rose in his stirrups, swept the horizon with his eye, and settled back. “Dust in the distance.” His voice went with his looks—he seemed a rich and various person, who could show both caprice and steadfastness. Now he glanced downward at Aderhold. “Ha, I had not observed you before!—A travelling scholar?”
“A travelling physician, an it please you,” said Aderhold, smoothing the bird with his finger, “biding at present at the Oak Grange, beyond Hawthorn Village.”
“You take,” said the horseman with a glance at the gibbet, “a merry signpost to rest beneath!”
“It is neither merry nor dismal,” said Aderhold, “but a subject for thought. That which swung there swings there now—though shrunken and dark and answering to no lust of the eye. But that which never swung there swings there now neither. I trouble it not. It is away from here.”
The other swung himself from his saddle. “I had rather philosophize than eat, drink, or go hawking—and philosophers are most rare in this region!” He took his seat upon a heap of stones, while his horse beside him fell to grazing. “Come, sit and talk, travelling scholar!—That fellow on the gibbet—that small, cognized part of him that was hanged, as you would say. Being hungry, he slew a deer for his own use, then violently resisted and wounded those sent to his hut to take him, and finally, in court he miserably defamed and maligned the laws of the land and the judge in his chair. So there he swings for an example to stealers of deer and resisters of constables, to say naught of blasphemers of procedure and churls to magistrates!... What is your opinion, travelling scholar, of Authority?”
“Nay,” said Aderhold, “what is yours?”
The other laughed. “Mine, Sir Prudence?—Well, at times I have thought this and at times that. Once or twice a head like Roger Bacon’s has spoken. ‘The swollen stream forgets its source, and the overweening son turns and with his knotted and sinewy hands chokes his mother that bore him.’”
“It is a good parable,” said Aderhold. “I trust that your worship, being obviously of those in authority, will often listen to that brazen head!”
“Ah!” answered the other. “I am of that camp and not of it. My brazen head will yet get me into trouble!” He sat regarding the mound opposite, the tall upright and arm, the creaking chain, and the shapeless thing, now small, for most of the bones had fallen, which swung and dangled. “And, friend, what do you think of this matter of the Golden Age, man’s perfection, Paradise, the friendship of angels and all wisdom and happiness lying, in the history of this orb, behind us?”
“If it were so,” said Aderhold, “then were it well to walk backwards.”
“So saith my brazen head!—Hark!”
It was a horn winding at no great distance. There came a sound of approaching horsemen, of voices and laughter. The waiting cavalier rose to his feet, caught his horse by the bridle and mounted. Aderhold gave him back the falcon. The earl and his train, a dozen in all, gentlemen, falconers, and grooms, coming across the fields, leaped the hedge and crowded into the road, gathering into their number the rider with the hawk. Aderhold heard him named as “Sir Richard.” He waved his hand to the physician—all rode away with a flash of colour and a blare of sound. A few moments, and there was only the bare highway, the little rise of ground, and the gibbet with its outstretched arm against the blue and serene sky.
Aderhold, keeping on to the town, passed along its bustling high street, and down the steep slope, beneath the shadow of the great church and the castle in its woods above, to the river and its many-arched, ancient bridge. Before him lay the fair country between the town and Hawthorn village. He travelled through it in the late, golden light, and at sunset came into Hawthorn. Children were playing and calling in the one street and several lanes, on the green, by the pond, and the village stocks. The ale-house had its custom, but, as he presently saw, most of the inhabitants of Hawthorn were gathered in a buzzing cluster before the church. A post, riding from London north, had passed through the village and left behind a dole of news. Among his items, principal to Hawthorn was this: The King, they say, will presently of his good pleasure, lighten the pains and penalties now imposed upon Papists.
Aderhold, touching the fringe of the crowd, caught a glimpse of Master Clement, standing upon the church steps, haranguing. He caught the words, “The Scarlet Woman ... Babylon ... Lighten? Rather double and treble and quadruple—” Near the minister he saw Harry Carthew. He did not pause; he went by like a moth in the dusk. As the moon rose he came to the stream before the Grange, crossed it by the footbridge, and went on beneath the fairy oak to the house where one candle shone from a single window. In the middle of the night he was wakened by some one calling and throwing pebbles against his casement. The miller, a mile down the stream, was ill and groaning for the leech.
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