The Witch. Mary Johnston

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      “He brought you in as a slight case, but typical, of what grows up in the narrow strip between religious wars and factions, between Leaguer and Huguenot—to wit, something that is neither Catholic nor Protestant, which the Leaguer would burn and the Huguenot would flay! He told me of your case and your trial and imprisonment, and how none would help you, neither Papist nor Reformed, but only this one nobleman whose child, it seems, you had healed, and even he could only help by helping you forth from France.” The physician continued to draw his hand over the grey fur. “I quarrel with that nobleman for considering that an atheist might prosper here in England, and for deceivingly writing to me only of his skill in all that pertained to his art! I might,” said the physician, “have become involved in what discovery and disfavour you may bring upon yourself in this realm!”

      “I am not,” said Aderhold, “an atheist. Sanction and authority and restraint are within.”

      The other shrugged. “Oh, your fine distinctions!” He went to the window and set it wider so that the whole green garden and white and rosy branches of bloom seemed to come into the room. “I am not,” he said, with his back to the lattice, “myself a theologian. By nature I am a ‘live and let live’ man. Peter, Luther, Calvin, Mohammed, and Abraham each may have had his own knowledge of heaven and hell! I will not quarrel with knowledge for being various. I am tolerant—I am tolerant, Master Aderhold! But I hold with emphasis that you must not inculpate others—no, you must not let the edge of your mantle of heresy touch another! It were base ingratitude, for instance, were you—”

      “I have been careful,” said Aderhold, “to mention your name to no one. I have led since seeing you a retired and soundless life. I am a stranger in this city and none knows my life, nor feels an interest in it.”

      The physician’s countenance showed relief. “I did not know of what folly you might not have been capable!” He stroked the cat, moved a few paces about the room and returned. “I regret that I can give you no aid. Indeed, I must tell you plainly that I owe it to my family and my patients and my place—which is no slight one—in the esteem of this city, to refuse all association with a man who at any hour may fall under suspicion and prosecution.” He paused. “I may say to you once, and this once only, that I find your case a hard one. I certainly advise you not to be stiff-necked, but living in the world to conform to the world. Philosophize, if you choose, but inwardly, inwardly, man!”

      He spoke quite amiably, even genially. It was apparent that Aderhold had taken his dismissal, that he was not going to beg or be distressful. He considered through the open casement the height of the sun. He could give the unfortunate man a minute or two longer. “Let us speak a moment,” he said, “of our art. London is thronged with doctors. I tell you truly that there is scant room for another, even were the circumstances not as they are, and you were as like others as you are unlike. However still a tongue you may keep,—and I think you may betray yourself oftener than you think,—you 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

       Table of Contents

      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 СКАЧАТЬ