CHAPTER XV
NEXT DAY
AT sunrise she shut the cottage door behind her, locked it, and put thekey in a hiding-place under the eaves, then went down the path betweenthe daffodils and out of the little gate. She had a basket upon her armand within it in a blue jar a honeycomb for a gift to Mistress Borrow.It was a morning fresh and fragrant, the grass diamonded with lastnight’s rain, the tree-tops veiled with mist, distant cocks crowing.When she came upon the road the sun was drinking up the mist; it wasgoing to be a beautiful day.
She walked for some distance toward the village, but at a point whereshe saw Carthew House among the trees and the church yews were growinglarge before her, she turned into a path that would take her throughthe fields and bring her out upon the highway with the village leftbehind. She did not wish to go through the village, she did not wish topass Alison Inch’s door, she did not wish to come near to Carthew House.
She walked between the springing grain, and through a copse where athrush was singing, and by a stream that was the same that murmuredpast the Oak Grange, and so at last came back to the highway. Shelooked back. The village roofs, the church tower, rested dark againstthe blue sky; light curls of smoke were rising and a great bird sailedoverhead.
Before her, over hill and dale, ran the road to the town. She shiftedher basket to the other arm and walked on in the golden morning. Nowshe was by nature courageous, and by nature also a lover of light andair, of form and colour, of diverse motion and the throb of life. Inher soul the whole round earth mirrored itself as alive, and, despiteblack moods and fits of madness, as dominantly good and fair. What ofsorrow, gloom, and care had of late clung about her, what of terrorand horror the happening of the evening before had left with her,slowly lessened, grew diaphanous in the sunlight and open country. Theroad began to entertain her, and there came sweet wafted memories ofthe castle wood, of how fondly she and her father and uncle had livedtogether and understood one another and liked life, and of all thepleasant doings when the great family were at the castle. Music hummedin her ears again, the figures of the masque filed across the greensward.
In the fresh morning there was more or less meeting and passing onthe road. A shepherd with a flock of sheep overtook her, and shestood under an elm to let them by. The shepherd whistled clearly, thesheep kept up their plaintive crying, pushing and jostling with theirwoolly bodies, their feet making a small pattering sound. “To market!To market!” said the shepherd. “Are you for the market, too, prettymaid?” Farther on she overtook in her turn two or three children goingon some errand and walked with them awhile. They wanted to know whatwas in her basket and she opened the jar and showed them the brighthoneycomb, then, breaking clean skewers from a wayside hazel, dippedthem in the liquid gold and gave each child a taste. They left her ata lane mouth, and she walked for a little way with two women who werecarrying between them an old tavern sign painted with a sheaf of wheatand a giant bunch of grapes. When she had left these two behind and hadgone some distance upon a bare, sunny road, she saw before her like apicture the river and the bridge, the climbing town and the castle. Shecould make out the Black Tower among the trees.
The town was quit of the plague. To the knowing there would be stillvisible a gloom about the place, a trailing shadow of remembered fearand loss. People would be missed from the streets, vacant houses andshops remarked. Street cries and sounds would come more sombrely andthe sunshine fall less warmly. But to the stranger it would seem atown as usual. For Joan, it was not so gay and rich as once it hadbeen, because she that looked on it was not so care-free as once shehad been. But still it was to her the great town, so different fromHawthorn, so jewelled with pleasant memories.... She passed thevintner’s house and was glad to see that it was open and cheerful, andthat therefore he had not died of the plague. At length she came toclimb the castle hill, and with her heart beating fast to cross thepleasaunce and go around to a certain small door of the offices throughwhich she would soonest gain admittance to Mistress Borrow. The sky wasso blue, the grass, the flowers, the budding trees were so fair, mavisand lark and robin sang so shrill and sweet, that earth and heaven oncemore assumed for Joan a mother aspect. Warm, not unhappy, tears cameto her eyes. She shook them back and went on over daisies and violets.She had not slept last night and the miles were long between her andHeron’s cottage. She felt light-headed with the assurance of comfortand counsel, the sense that the black cloud that had gathered about herso strangely, so almost she knew not how, would now begin to melt away.
Mistress Borrow was not at the castle. Her sister, thirty miles away,was dying of a dropsy, and the housekeeper had been given leave togo to her. She had gone last week—she might be away a month.... Thefamily were not there—they had gone at the first alarm of the plague.Sir Richard had stayed through it and my lord the countess’s father,had stopped for a week, but they, too, were now away.... It was acivil-spoken girl who told her all this, a new maidservant who hadno knowledge of Joan. There were men and women servitors whom sheremembered and who would remember her, but when the girl asked if,Mistress Borrow being away, she could do her errand to any one else,she shook her head. “You look dazed,” said the maid. “Better come inand sit awhile.” But no, said Joan, she must be getting home. So shethanked the girl, and they said good-morning to each other, and sheleft the little door and the flagged courtyard, and coming out underan archway found herself again upon the flower-starred grass, withthe shadows of the trees showing two hours from noon. To the rightstretched the castle wood, and she would go through it and see againthe huntsman’s house.
It rose among the trees before her, a comfortable, friendly, low,deep-windowed place. She would not go very near; she did not know thepeople who had it now, and truly she felt dazed and beaten and did notwish questioning or talk. She found an old, familiar oak with huge andknotted roots rising amid bracken, and here she sank down and lay withher head upon her arm and her eyes upon the place where in all herlife she had been happiest. An old hound came and snuffed about her, aredbreast watched her from a bough. She lay for some time, resting, notthinking but dreaming back. At last she rose, settled the basket uponher arm, looked long at the huntsman’s house, then turned away, andleaving the wood began to descend the castle hill.
When she passed through the high street of the town the church bellswere ringing. She turned out of the brighter street into one thatsloped to the river, and here she came upon an open place and theprison tall and dark. She stopped short, standing in the shadow of abit of wall. It was easy for one’s own cares to make one forget, andshe had forgotten Aderhold. But he would be here—there was no realgaol in Hawthorn itself, though offenders might be locked for a time ina dungeon-like room beneath the sexton’s house. But a learned man anda property-owner and a man accused of the greatest crime of all, whichwas to deny the real existence and power of the God of Abraham, Isaac,and Jacob,—such an one would be brought here. They would have haledMaster Aderhold here last night.... She stood and gazed at the frowningmass. The windows were few and far apart and small and closely barred.To-day that was so sunshiny bright would be stifling and black enoughin there. She wished that she could send in the light and air.
A man, coming, too, from the high street with his course shapedfor Hawthorn Village, joined her where she stood. He was a wiry,crooked-shouldered, grizzle-headed, poorly clad person with a face ofsome knavery, cunning, and wildness. Over his shoulder, strung togetherwith leather thongs, hung some small pots and pans, and in a leatherpouch he seemed to carry tools and bits of metal. Joan recognized himfor the tinker, who, after wandering far and wide, came back, at longintervals, to a hut just this side of Hawthorn. It appeared that on hispart he remembered her face. “From Heron’s cottage, mistress?—nearthe Oak Grange.” He seemed to cast a glance upon the prison, but thenhe looked at her grey eyes and her face, paler to-day than was itswont, and asked if she had walked from home. She said yes, she had beento see the housekeeper at the castle—but she was not there. “Was shewa
lking back to Hawthorn?” Yes, she said, and began to move across theprison square. He moved with her. “I walked from Hawthorn myself thismorning. Matters to buy for my trade! Shall stop here at the Boar’sHead before I take the road back.” To her content he left her, and shewent on by the great church and down the hill to the arched bridge. Butwhen she had crossed it, and when the river behind her lay thin like asilver crescent, she found him again at her side.
It was hot midday and the road bare of folk. She did not wish atravelling companion and would have liked to tell him so, but she wassomehow cowed this noon, weary and listless where on the sunrise roadshe had been hopeful. She let him walk beside her, a freakish figure,vowed to mischief. Immediately he began to talk about the plague.Her father had died?—“Yes.”—He had been told so. Many people haddied—many people in the town, and not so many, but enough in Hawthornand roundabout. Once he saw the plague. He was lying in the heatheron a hillside near a town that had it. Dark was coming. Then a greatfigure of a woman, black and purple, with a veil all over, rosestraight up above the roofs and chimneys. She lifted her arms and tookthe veil from her head, and it was crowned with shiny gold and she wasthe Plague—and she floated in the sky and took her veil and drew itbehind her, and every roof it touched they were going to die in thathouse.—Yes, tinkers saw strange things, wandering over the country.There were a many strange things, weren’t there? The plague left thecountry very fearful—and there was another strange thing, Fear! Ittook a man and knocked the heart out of him—but then to make up, itgave him more eyes and ears than he’d ever had before!
He looked at her aslant. “Did you ever see the Devil?”
“No.”
“Then you aren’t fearful,” said the tinker. “Fearful folk can see himplain.”
He kept silence for a little, his eyes upon a cloud of butterfliesfluttering before them over a muddy place in the road, then againturned upon Joan his curious, half-squinting look. “Of course there’vebeen men who weren’t afraid and yet have seen him. Men who were greatenemies to him, and pushing him hard, and he so angry and despairingthat he shows himself, tail, claws, and all! Tall Bible men and greatmen like Doctor Martin Luther who threw his ink-well at him. And alot of other men—mass-priests, and bishops, and marprelates, allthe same. It’s to their honour to have seen him, for so the peoplesee how the Devil must hate them to come himself to beard them, andwhat a strong enemy they are to him, which means, of course, that theKing of Heaven must hold them in high regard.—Even poor wights maysometimes give a good blow—just as a camp-follower might save an armyor a scullion a palace! I’m not saying that I didn’t get a glint of hishorns myself once on Little Heath, between two furze bushes!”
Joan was not talkative. She walked steadily on, but she was tired, andher mind now seemed to drowse, and now, rousing itself, strayed farfrom the other’s talk.
The tinker was piqued by her inattention. “And then witches andwarlocks see him.—_Women_ see him,” he said with spite. “And notbecause they’re his enemies neither! Ten women know him, hair and hoof,to one man.... For why? They knew him first, as the good Book tells us,and became his gossips in Eden Garden. So ’tis that still when thingsgo wrong ’tis woman that gives them the shog. The Devil gives her theapple still, and she takes it and shakes out harm on mankind—whichis why we’ve got a leave to keep her somewhat down! That’s woman inordinary—and then you come to witches—”
Joan’s eyelids twitched.
He saw that she attended. “Witches! First they begin by having commercewith elves and fays, green men, and such. They get into fairy hillsand eat and drink there, and they dance in the moonlight around treesin the wood. But the elves are the Devil’s cousins, and he’s always onhand, and some night he comes smirking up, dressed now this way andnow that. So the woman drops a curtsy, and he puts out his hand andgives her something, just as he did in Eden Garden. She takes it, andthat seals her both sides of the Judgement Day! Pay for pay! Bloodgives him strength, and so he sucks from a little place he makes uponher body—that’s the witch mark that can’t be made to feel pain, andthat’s why we strip and prick witches to find their mark, which isbetter proof even than their confessing! Now she’s the Devil’s servantand leman forever, and begins to work evil and practise the Black Art.He shows her how to fly through the air and change herself into allmanner of shapes. Then she goes to his Sabbat and learns to know otherwitches and maybe a wizard or two, though there aren’t so many wizards.They’re mostly witches and demons. If you look overhead at night youcan sometimes see a scud of them flying between you and the moon. Thenbegin the tempests of hail and thunder and lightning, and the shipsthat are sunk at sea, and the murrain in the cattle, and the cornblighted and ricks burned and beasts lamed and children possessed andgear taken and sickness come—”
He stopped to cough and also to observe if she were listening. She waslistening. He was saying nothing that she had not heard before. Theywere commonplaces alike of pulpit and doorstep. But it had all beenlike figures seen afar off and upon another road. Now she had come toa place in life where, bewildered, she found them about her. Joan wasconscious that life was becoming like an evil dream. Just as in a dreama hundred inconsequences might form the strongest net, entangling you,withholding you from some longed-for escape, so now, awake, a hundredthings so little in themselves— She never said to herself that therewas a net weaving about her; the mind, struck and bewildered, could notyet give things a name, perhaps would not if it could. She only saw thegold and warmth going for her steadily out of the sunshine—and knewnot how it came that they were going nor how to stop that departure.Now she said dully, “I do not believe all that,” and then sawimmediately that it was a mistake for any one to say that.
The tinker again looked aslant. “Most of your witches are old women.At their Sabbats you’ll see a hundred withered gammers, dancing andleaping around a fire with the Devil sitting in the midst, and allsing-songing a charm and brewing in a kettle a drink with which tofreeze men’s blood! But each crew hath always one young witch that theycall the maiden. A young and well-looking wench with red lips and shecalls the dance. They were burning such an one where I was a while agoin Scotland. She cried out, ‘I be no witch! I be no witch!’ to theend. But they sang and prayed her down and she burned on.”
Joan moistened her lips. “Why did they think she was—”
“Ah,” said the tinker, “there was a young laird she had bewitched! Hepeaked and pined and syne he cried out that a dirk was always turningin his side. So they found, beneath the hearth in her cot, a figure ofwax with a rusted nail set in its side, and as the wax melted away,so was he to pine. And there were other tokens and matters proved onher. Beside, when they tried her in the loch she never sank at all._Convicta et combusta_—which is what they write in witch cases uponthe court book.”
By now they were much advanced upon the Hawthorn road. The day waswarm, the air moist and languid. Joan felt deadly tired. There swamin her mind a desire to be away, away—to find a door from this earththat was growing drear and ugly. She moved in silence, her grey eyeswide and fixed. The tinker, his throat dry with talking, drew in frontof him one of the pans which he carried and in lieu of further speechdrummed upon it as he walked. Presently a cart came up behind them,empty but for a few trusses of hay, and the carter known to them both,being Cecily Lukin’s brother.
“Hey!” said the tinker. “Give me a lift!”
The cart stopped. “Get in!” said Lukin. He stared at Joan.
The tinker, swinging himself up, spoke with a grin. “There’s room foryou too—”
Joan shook her head. She made no halting, but went on by in her greyishgown and wide hat with her basket on her arm.
The carter flicked his horse, the cart passed her, left her behind, ina few minutes disappeared around a bend of the road. To the last thetwo men stared back at her; she seemed to hear Lukin’s slow, clownishvoice repeating Cecily’s tattle—Cecily’s and Alison’s.
Hawthorn Village g
rew plain before her: thatched cottages, the treesupon the green, the church yews and the church tower—there flashedupon her again yesterday at church, and Master Aderhold in prison. Hewas a good man; despite what the minister had said, she believed thatwith passion—he was a good man. It had not kept them from haling himto prison. What would they do to him, what?... She came to the paththat would spare her going through the village and turned into it fromthe highway. It led her by the stream and through the fields and outupon Hawthorn Forest road. Heron’s cottage was in sight when she metGoodman Cole, walking to the village.
He looked at her oddly. “Good-day, Joan.”
“Good-day, Goodman.”
“Where have you been?”
“I walked to the castle to see Mistress Borrow. But she was not there.”
Goodman Cole propped himself upon his stick, full in her way in thesunny road. “We are seeing strange doings in Hawthorn Parish! Aye,strange doings we are seeing! Have you heard about Master HarryCarthew?”
“No.—Heard what?”
“Then I’ll tell you,” said the old man. “Yesterday afternoon MasterCarthew rode a part of the way with the men who were taking the leechto the town.—And there,” said Goodman Cole, “is another strange thing!That we could like an atheist well enough, and think him skilled andkindly, and all the time he was mankind’s deadliest foe! ’Twas theDevil sure that blinded us!—Well, as I was telling you, Master Carthewrode a part of the way. Then, having seen them well started, he turnshis horse, meaning to go first to Master Clement’s to consult abouthaving a commission named, before the next assize, to look into a manythings that have happened about Hawthorn, some in connection with theleech and some by themselves—and then to ride from the minister’s hometo Carthew House. It was stormy as we know, the kind of hot and darkstorm they say witches brew. He was riding, looking straight beforehim, and thinking what a darkness like the darkness of the sky was overEngland, when what does his horse do but start aside and begin to rearand plunge—and yet there was nothing there! It lightened, and the roadon all sides lay bare. And yet, in an instant, just like that! MasterCarthew was struck in the side and wounded as by a sword or dagger. Itlightened again and he had time to see a tall black man dressed, bitfor bit, like the leech,—and it lightened the third time and the roadwas bare as a blade, only he saw on the top of a bank a figure like awoman making signs to the sky. Then it fell dark, and there burst agreat roar of thunder and wind and the horse began to run. He checkedit just outside Hawthorn and rode around by Old Path and the fields,for he felt himself bleeding and did not wish to frighten people. So,going slowly, he got home at last, and they laid him in bed and found agreat wound in his side.... Joan!”
“Will he die?” said Joan.
“And will you be glad if he does?... Wench, wench, why do you look likethat?”
The old man and she faced each other, between them but a narrow spaceof the forest road. Her face was mobile, transparent,—a clear windowthrough which much of her nature might be read. She had never thoughtto try to veil it—never until of late. It was, on the whole, a strongand beautiful nature, and none had quarrelled with the face that wasits window. But of late there had come into her life to work her injurysomething bitter, poisonous, and dark. Fear and hatred had come, anda burning wrath against the net that was weaving, she knew not how—awrath and helplessness and a wrath against her helplessness. All hernature flamed against a lie and an injustice. And because she hadknown so little fear, and when it came it found it hard to make anentry, so it worked like poison when it was within the citadel. Itwas the foe she liked least; all her being rose and wrought to castit out. But it was giving her a fight—it was giving her a fight....And nowadays she had to try not to show what she thought or felt.Sometimes, by force of wit and will, she succeeded, keeping her soulback from the window of her face. She was not succeeding now, she felt.She bit her lips, she struggled, she turned her face from Goodman Cole,and stood, her hands closing and unclosing, then, the victory won, buttoo late to save her with him, she turned upon him a quiet face.
It was too late. A good old man, but simple and superstitious, he wasstaring at her with a misliking and terror of his own.
“I’d heard tales, but I wouldn’t believe any real harm of Heron’sdaughter,—but God knows what to think when a woman looks like that!”He edged from her, his hand trembled upon his staff; he would evidentlyput distance between them, be gone on his way. “The minister saith thatfrom the Witch of Endor on they have baleful eyes—”
He suddenly put himself in motion. “Good-day to you!” he said in aquavering voice, and went on down the road with a more rapid step thanwas his wont.