The Witch. Mary Johnston

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ proved to be the lawyer who had befriended him. They were standing before some church. Wall and porch, it rose above them, dark and vacant. The lawyer looked about him, glanced along the steps and into the hollow of the porch. “Bare as is this land of grace!—Look you, friend, we know that it is allowable at times to do that in danger which we disavow in safety. Especially if we have great things in trust.—I marked you quickly enough for a man with a secret—and a secret more of the soul and mind than of worldly goods. Hark you! I’m as little as you one of the mass-denying crew we’ve left. What! a man may go in troublous times with the current and keep a still tongue—nay, protest with his tongue that he loves the current—else he’ll have a still tongue, indeed, and neither lands nor business, nor perhaps bare life! But when we recognize a friend—” He spoke rapidly, in a voice hardly above a whisper, a sentence or two further.

      “You take me,” said Aderhold, “to be Catholic. You mistake; I am not. I spoke without mask.” Then, as the other drew back with an angry breath. “You were quick and kindly and saved me from that which it would have been disagreeable to experience. Will you let me say but another word?”

      “Say on,” said the other thickly, “but had I known—”

      The light from Thames bank reddening the street even here, they drew a little farther into the shadow of the porch. “I have travelled much,” said Aderhold, “and seen many men and beliefs, and most often the beliefs were strange to me, and I saw not how any could hold them. Yet were the people much what they were themselves, some kindly, some unkindly, some hateful, some filled with all helpfulness. I have seen men of rare qualities, tender and honourable women and young children, believe what to me were monstrous things. Everywhere I have seen that men and women may be better than the dogma that is taught them, seeing that what they think they believe is wrapped in all the rest of their being which believes no such thing. Both in the old religion and in the Reformed have I known many a heroic and love-worthy soul. Think as well as you may of me, brother, and I will think well of thee—and thank thee, besides,—”

      “Cease your heretic talk!” said the lawyer. “I held you to be of holy Mother Church—” With suddenness, in the darkness, he put forth his foot and swung his arm, at once tripping and striking the physician with such violence that he came to the ground with his forehead against the stone step of the church. When he staggered to his feet the lawyer was gone. Around him howled the March wind and far above the church vane creaked. He stood for a moment until the giddiness passed, then gathered his cloak about him and, hurrying on through the nipping air, reached his lodging without further adventure.

      That night he slept well. The next morning, as he was eating his breakfast, that was spare enough, he heard a loud and formal crying in the street below. He went to the window. A crier was approaching, at his heels a mob of boys and of the idle generally. “The Queen is Dead!—The Queen is Dead!—The Queen is Dead!—Long Live King James!”

CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      THE TWO PHYSICIANS

      He went that morning to visit the alderman, inopportune as he knew the visit would be esteemed. But many things were inopportune—hunger, for instance. The alderman found the visit offensively, unpatriotically inopportune. “What! The King’s Majesty’s ascension day—!” But one thing saved Aderhold, and that was the presence in the alderman’s parlour of some seven or eight cronies, men and women. It would not do—it would not do for the alderman to seem haggling and unwilling. Aderhold quitted the house the richer by twelve shillings.

      The narrow streets were crowded; everybody was out, excited and important as though he or she had died or been crowned. The physician strolled with the others. The morning was fine, he felt wealthy and happy. The sunshine that stroked the projecting, timbered fronts of houses was the sunshine of home, the soft and moist light of England. He loved England. He wandered for an hour or two here and there in the London of less than two hundred thousand souls. He went down to the riverside, and sat upon a stone step, and gazed into the purple, brooding distance.... At last he turned back, and after a time found himself in the street of his lodging, and before the house.

      It was a narrow, poor, and gloomy place, owned by people whom he guessed to have fallen on evil days. The plainly dressed elderly woman from whom he had hired his room had told him, indeed, as much. “Aye?” said Aderhold. “Then, mother, I’ll feel the more at home.” He had lodged here now ten days and he had seen only the elderly woman and her son, a boy far gone in consumption who coughed and coughed. The woman was a silent, rigid person, withered but erect, wearing a cap and over her gown of dark stuff a coarse white kerchief and apron. This morning, when she brought him his half loaf and tankard of ale, he had spoken with casualness of the Cap and Bells. She looked at him strangely. “The Cap and Bells!... Doubtless you heard good talk there.” Then had come the crying about the Queen’s death. When he turned from the window the woman was gone.

      Now he entered the house. As he laid his hand upon the stair-rail the woman stood framed in a doorway. “Tarry a little,” she said. “I wish to tell you that this house will lodge you no longer.”

      Aderhold stood still, then turned. “And why, good mother? I like my room and the house. I have striven to be in no way troublesome.” He put his hand in his purse and drew it forth with the alderman’s shillings upon the palm. “You see I have money. You’ll not lose by me.”

      A voice came from the room behind the woman. “Let him enter, mother. We would see this fellow who will make no trouble for us.”

      Aderhold noted a pale triumph in the woman’s strong, lined face and in her tense, updrawn figure. “Aye, it happened to give thanks for!” she told him. “Two things happened this morning. A King came to the throne who, for all his mother’s scarlet and raging sins, has himself been bred by godly men to godly ways! And my two sons came home from overseas!”

      She turned and passed through the doorway into the room from which she had come. Aderhold, after a moment of hesitation, followed. It was a large, dark place, very cold and bare. Here, too, was a table, drawn toward the middle of the room, with a cloth upon it and bread and a piece of meat. Beside it, chair and stool pushed back, stood two men—the returned sons Aderhold was at once aware. He had seen before men like these men—English sectaries abroad, men who stood with the Huguenots in France, and in the Low Countries fought Spain and the Devil with the soldiers of Orange. Estranged or banished from home, lonely and insular, fighting upon what they esteemed the Lord’s side, in the place where they esteemed the fight to be hottest, they exhibited small, small love and comradeship for those in whose cause they fought. Only, truly, in conventicles, could they seem to warm to people of another tongue and history. Ultra-zealous, more Calvin than Calvin, trained to harshness in a frightful war, iron, fanatic, back now they came to England, the most admirable soldiers and the most uncharitable men!

      The two stood in their plain doublets, their great boots, their small falling collars. They were tall and hard of aspect, the one bearded, the other with a pale, clean-shaven, narrow, enthusiast’s face. The home-keeping son also had risen from table. He stood beside his mother, coughing and pressing a cloth to his lips.

      The bearded man spoke. “Good-morrow, friend!”

      “Good-morrow, friend,” answered Aderhold.

      “You spoke that,” said the bearded man, “as though you were indeed a friend, whereas we know you to be but a Cap and Bells friend.”

      “I do not take your meaning,” said Aderhold. “I would be friends—no man knows how I would СКАЧАТЬ