Mary Johnston

The Witch


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houses. Now and then he went into the great church where the light fell through stained glass and lay athwart old pillars. Once he found himself here, sitting in the shadow of a pillar, when people began to enter. Some especial service was to be held, he knew not wherefore. The organ rolled and he sat where he was, for he loved music. There was a sermon, and it was directed against Puritan and Presbyterian, and more especially against that taint of Republicanism which clung to their Geneva cloaks. No such imputation breathed against the surplice. The Divine Right of Kings.The duty of Passive Obedience.Authority! Authority! Authority! It rolled through the church, boomed forth with passion.

      Aderhold, coming out into the sunshine, walked through the town and found himself upon the London road. It was high summer, the sun yet far aloft, and when it sank the round pearl of the moon would rise. He had not before walked upon this road. An interest stirred within him to view the country toward the Rose Tavern, travelled through in the darkness that night. He left the town behind him and walked southward. Between two and three miles out, he saw before him a little rise in the road, and crowning it, a gibbet with some bones and shrivelled flesh swinging in the chains. It was nothing uncommon; he had seen in France a weary number of such signposts, and on this great road, coming north from London, he had twice passed such a thing. It was so fair and soft a summer’s day, the gauzy air filled with dancing sunbeams, the sky a melting blue—the very upright and cross of the gibbet faded into it and seemed robbed of horror. Indeed, long usage had to the eyes of most robbed it of frightfulness at any hour, unless it was in the dead of night when the chains creaked, creaked, and something sighed. The traffic of the road went talking and jesting by, with hardly a glance aside at the arm across the sky.

      Aderhold sat down upon the opposite bank, amid fern and foxglove, and with his chin in his hand regarded the gibbet. Now and again man and beast passed, but they paid no attention to the dusty, seated figure. For the greater while the road lay bare. He gazed, dreaming, and through the mists of time he seemed to see Judea....

      At last he spoke. “Carpenter of Nazareth! Man as we are men, but a Prince in the house of Moral Genius! Born with thy heritage, also, of an ancient, savage faith, in thine ears, still, old saws of doom, on thy lips at times hard sayings of that elder world, in thy mind, yet unresolved, more than one of the ancient riddles.... But thou thyself, through all the realm of thy being, rising into the clearer light, lifting where we all shall lift one day, transfiguring life!... Genius and Golden Heart and Pure Courage and Immortal Love.... Condemned by a Church, handed over by it to the secular arm, gone forth to thy martyr’s death—and still, Sage and Seer! misunderstood and persecuted,—and still thou standest with the martyrs ... slain afresh by many, and not least by those who call themselves thine. Wisdom, freedom, love.... Love—Love—Love!”

      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