she said, ‘Alas!’ she said,
‘Of gold and land
I’ve none in hand—’”
They were coming flush with the opening of a small, dim courtyard. She broke off her song. “Bring your stick and bundle in front of you! This is a marked place for snatchers.”
Her warning was not idle. As he shifted the stick a shaggy, bull-headed man made a move from shadow to sunlight, lurched against him and grasped at the bundle. Aderhold slipping aside, the fellow lost his balance and came almost to the ground. The woman laughed. Enraged, the bull-headed man drew a knife and made at the physician, but the woman, coming swiftly under his raised arm, turned, and grasping wrist and hand, gave so sudden a wrench that the knife clanked down upon the stones. She kicked it aside into the gutter, her face turned to Aderhold. “Be off, my bonny man!” she advised. “No, he’ll not hurt me! We’re old friends.”
Aderhold left the suburbs behind, left London behind. He was on an old road, leading north. For the most part, during the next few days, he kept to this road, though sometimes he took roughly paralleling, less-frequented ways, and sometimes footpaths through fields and woods. Now he walked briskly, enjoying the air, hopeful with the hopeful day. Sometime in the morning an empty cart overtook him, the carter walking by his horse. They walked together up a hill and talked of the earth and the planting and the carting of stuffs and the rates paid and the ways of horses. Level ground reached, the carter offered a lift, and the two travelled some miles together, chiefly in a friendly silence. At midday Aderhold unwrapped his loaf of bread, and the carter produced bread, too, and a bit of cheese and a jug containing ale. They ate and drank, jogging along by April hedges and budding trees. A little later the carter must turn aside to some farm, and, wishing each other well, they parted.
This day and the next Aderhold walked, by green country and Tudor village and town, by smithy and mill, by country houses set deep in giant trees, by hamlet and tavern, along stretches of lonely road and through whispering, yet unvanished forests. The sun shone, the birds sang, the air was a ripple of zephyrs. The road had its traffic, ran an unwinding ribbon of spectacle. There were the walls of country and the roof of sky and a staccato presence of brute and human life. Now horsemen went by—knightly travel or merchant travel, or a judge or lawyer, or a high ecclesiastic. Serving-men walked or rode, farming folk, a nondescript of trade or leisure. Drovers came by with cattle, country wains, dogs. A pedlar with his pack kept him company for a while. Country women passed, carrying butter and eggs to market, children coming from school, three young girls, lithe, with linked arms, a parson and his clerk, an old seaman, a beggar, a charcoal-burner, a curious small troupe of mummers and mountebanks, and for contrast three or four mounted men somewhat of the stripe of the widow’s sons. One looked a country gentleman and another a minister of the stricter sort. They gazed austerely at the mummers as they passed. Now life flowed in quantity upon the road, now the stream dwindled, now for long distances there was but the life of the dust, tree and plant, and the air.
When the second sunset came he was between hedged fields in a quiet, solitary country of tall trees, with swallows circling overhead in a sky all golden like the halos around saints’ heads in pictures that he remembered in Italy. No house was visible, nor, had one been so, had he made up his mind to ask the night’s lodging. The day had been warm, even the light airs had sunk away, the twilight was balm and stillness. He possessed a good cloak, wide and warm. With the fading of the gold from the sky he turned aside from the road upon which, up and down as far as he could see, nothing now moved, broke through the hedge, found an angle and spread his cloak within its two walls of shelter. The cloak was wide enough to lie upon and cover with, his bundle made a pillow. The stars came out; in some neighbouring, marshy place the frogs began their choiring.
Although he was tired enough, he could not sleep at once, nor even after a moderate time of lying there, in his ears the monotonous, not unmusical sound. He thought of what he should do to-morrow, and he could not tell. Walk on? Yes. How far, and where should he stop? So far he had not begged, but that could not last. The colour came into his cheek. He did not wish to beg. And were there no pride in the matter, there was the law of the land. Beggars and vagabonds and masterless men, how hardly were they dealt with! They were dealt with savagely, and few asked what was the reason or where was the fault. Work. Yes, he would work, but how and where? Dimly he had thought all along of stopping at last in some town or village, of some merciful opportunity floating to him, of tarrying, staying there—finding room somewhere—his skill shown—some accident, perhaps, some case like the alderman’s wife ... a foothold, a place to grip with the hand, then little by little to build up. Quiet work, good work, people to trust him, assurance, a cranny of peace at last ... and all the time the light growing. But where was the cranny, and how would he find the way to it?
Over him shone the Sickle. He lay and wondered, and at last he slept, with the Serpent rising in the east.
Late in the night, waking for a moment, he saw that the sky was overcast. The air, too, was colder. He wrapped the cloak more closely about him and slept again. When he woke the day was here, but not such a day as yesterday. The clouds hung grey and threatening, the wind blew chill. There set in a day of weariness and crosses. It passed somehow. Footsore, at dusk, he knocked at a cotter’s door, closed fast against the wind which was high. When the family questioned him, he told them that he was a poor physician, come from overseas, going toward kinspeople. There chanced to be a sick child in the cottage; they let him stay for reading her fever and telling them what to do.
The next day and the next and the next the sky was greyer yet, and the wind still blew. It carried with it flakes of snow. The road stretched bare, none fared abroad who could stay indoors. Aderhold now stumbled as he walked. There was a humming in his ears. In the early afternoon of his sixth day from London he came to as lonely a strip of country as he had seen, lonely and grey and furrowed and planted with a gnarled wood. The flakes were coming down thickly.
Then, suddenly, beyond a turn of the road, he saw a small inn, set in a courtyard among trees. As he came nearer he could tell the sign—a red rose on a black ground. It was a low-built house with a thatched roof, and firelight glowed through the window. The physician had a bleeding foot; he was cold, cold, and dizzy with fatigue. He had no money, and the inn did not look charitable. In the last town he had passed through he had bought food and the night’s lodging with a portion of the contents of his bundle. Now he sat down upon the root of a tree overhanging the road, opened his shrunken store, and considered that with most of what was left he might perhaps purchase lodging and fare until the sky cleared and his strength came back. A while before he had passed one on the road who told him that some miles ahead was a fairly large town. He might press on to that ... but he was tired, horribly tired, and shivering with the cold. In the end, keeping the bundle in his hand, he went and knocked at the door of the Rose Tavern.
The blowsed servant wench who answered finally brought her master the host, a smooth, glib man with a watery eye. He looked at the stuff Aderhold offered in payment and looked at the balance of the bundle. In the end, he gestured Aderhold into the house. It was warm within and fairly clean with a brightness of scrubbed pannikins, and in the kitchen, opening from the chief room, a vision of flitches of bacon and strings of onions hanging from the rafters. Besides the serving-maid and a serving-man there was the hostess, a giant of a woman with a red kerchief about her head. She gave Aderhold food. When it was eaten he stretched himself upon the settle by the kitchen hearth, arms beneath his head. The firelight danced on the walls, there was warmth and rest....
Aderhold lay and slept. Hours passed. Then, as the day drew toward evening, he half roused, but lay still upon the settle, in the brown warmth. There was a feeling about him of peace and deep forests, of lapping waves, of stars that rose and travelled to their meridians and sank, of long, slow movements of the mind. The minutes passed. He started full awake with the hearing of horses trampling into the courtyard and a babel of voices. He sat up, and the serving-wench coming at the moment into the kitchen he asked her a question. She proved a garrulous soul who told all she knew. The Rose Tavern stood some miles from a good-sized town. Those in the yard and entering the house were several well-to-do merchants and others with their serving-men. They had been to London, travelling together for company, and were now returning to this town. There was