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 his eyeballs and all imagination behind them were fastened by invisible wires to the grotesque and horrible carvings. Into his countenance came a creeping terror and a kind of fearful exaltation. Aderhold knew the look—he had seen it before, in France and elsewhere, upon peasant faces and upon faces that were not those of peasants. It was not an unusual look in his century. Again, for the millionth time, imagination had been seized and concentrated upon the Satanic and was creating a universe to command. Will shivered, then he put his hand to his ear.
“There is nothing there,” said the physician, “but your ear itself.”
“Mice never come out of men’s mouths,” said Will. The physician knew the voice, too, the dry-throated, rigid-tongued monotone. “The comfort is that most of the wicked are women.”
“Then take comfort,” said Aderhold, “and come away. Those figures are but the imagination of men like yourself.”
But Will was not ready to budge. “Twelfth night, I was going through the fields. They were white with snow. Something black ran across and howled and snapped at me.”
“A famished wolf,” said Aderhold.
“Aye, it looked like a wolf. But this is what proved it wasn’t,” said Will. “That night in Hawthorn Forest Jock the forester set a trap. In the night-time he heard it click down on the wolf and the wolf howl. He said, says he, ‘I’ve got you now, old demon!’ and went back to sleep. But at dawn, when he went to the trap, there was blood there and a tuft of grizzled hair, but nothing else. And so he and his son followed red spots on the snow—right through the forest and across Town Road. And on the other side of the road, where the hedge comes down, they lost it clean—not a drop of blood nor the mark of a paw on the snow. But the dog they had he ran about, and at last he lifted his head and bayed, and then he started—And where, sir, do you think he led them? He led them to the hut of old Marget Primrose between Black Hill and Hawthorn Brook. And Marget was lying huddled, crying with a bloody cut across her ankle. And they matched the hair from the trap with the hair under her cap.”
“They did not match with care,” said Aderhold. “And there are many ways by which a foot may be hurt.”
“Nay,” said the serving-man, “but when they brought the trap and thrust her leg in it the marks fitted.” He continued to stare at the stone wolf tearing the ear. “That’s been four years, and never since have I been able to abide the sight of a wolf!... Witches and warlocks and wizards and what they call incubi and succubi and all the demons and fiends of hell, and Satan above saying, ‘Hist! this one!’ and ‘Hist! that one!’ and your soul lost and dragged to hell where you will burn in brimstone, shrieking, and God and the angels mocking you and crying, ‘Burn! Burn forever!’—Nay, an if they do not get your soul, still they ravage and ruin what you have on earth—blast the fields and dry the streams, slay cow and sheep and horse, burn your cot and wither your strength of a man.... Thicker than May flies in the air—all the time close around you, whether you see them or you don’t see them—monkeys and wolves and bat wings flapping.... Once something came on my breast at night—Satan, Satan avaunt!”
Aderhold leaned across, seized the bridle of the other’s horse, and forcibly turned Will from further contemplation of the sculptured portal. “Come away, or you will fall down in a fit!”
Carthew ahead was in motion, the mules with the litter following. Will rode for a few paces with a dazed look which was gradually replaced by his usual aspect. The red came back into his cheeks, the spring into his figure. By the time they had reached the bridge he was ready for something palely resembling a disinterested discussion of the supernatural.
“Isn’t it true, sir, that witch or warlock, however they’ve been roaming, must take their own shape when they cross running water?”
“Whatever shape matter takes is its own shape,” said the physician, “and would be though we saw it in a thousand shapes, one after the other. I have never seen, nor expect to see, a witch or warlock.”
“Why, where have you travelled, sir?” asked the yeoman bluntly; then, without waiting for an answer, “They’re hatching thick and thicker in England, though not so thick as they are in Scotland. In Scotland they’re very thick. Our new King, they say, does most fearfully hate them! Parson preached about them not long ago. He said that we’d presently see a besom used in this kingdom that would sweep such folk from every corner into the fire! He read from the Bible and it said, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!’”
He spoke with considerable cheer, the apple-red back in his cheeks. “It’s good to feel,” he said, “that they are nearly all women.”
They were trampling across