The minister’s strong sing-song pierced the air. “Thou guilty and wretched man! We have left thee so long to hug thy own mind because there was much work elsewhere to do! To-day we would have thee bethink thyself. Thy sorcery at the Oak Grange and in Hawthorn Forest and elsewhere is wholly discovered! Thy fellows in iniquity are all taken, and sufficient have confessed to set thee at the stake! Why continue to deny—adding so to the heat of that hell which awaits thee—thy doings in this nature? What use to say that thou didst not, leaving thy double in the constable’s hands, return in the storm upon the Hawthorn road, and by the power of Satan affront and stay and with thy devil-furnished dagger wound Master Harry Carthew?”
“What use, indeed!” said Aderhold. “And yet I say it.”
“Then,” said Master Clement, and the veins upon his forehead began to swell, “thou art a foolish poor atheist! What! when thou art compact of denial, and will be lost from earth and heaven because of that, dost think that one denial more will serve thee? Come! Thou struckest the blow, we know. What witch had come at thy call and was with thee, standing on the hill brow, weaving and beckoning the storm?”
“What witch?” echoed Aderhold, startled. “Nor I was there nor any other!”
Harry Carthew had not ceased to draw the gloves held in one hand through the other. He sat with downcast eyes, wasted and sombre, more wasted, more haggard, and overlaid with the dull tint of tragedy than Aderhold himself. He spoke now with a flushed cheek. “Let that go by! It matters not what hand struck me in the side that night—” He turned on Aderhold. “That which I must know, and will know, I tell you—” Shaken by passion he pushed back his chair, and rising moved with a disordered step the length of the room.
Master Clement could not let pass the first part of his speech. “Not so, Harry Carthew! What! Matters not that you should be brought to death’s door by the stroke of a wizard misbeliever—”
Carthew again approached the table. “It matters not, I say. Unless—” He stood looking fixedly at Aderhold, the breath coming quickly from between his lips. “It has been confessed that you met these witches and wantoned with them at the sabbats in Hawthorn Wood.... Now, I have been sick and my senses wandering, and I have come but lately back into this enquiry. Much has happened—much has been done—much has been laid bare that I knew naught of. In particular—” He broke away, walked again the length of the room; then returning, stood above Master Clement in his great chair and urged some course in an undertone.
Master Clement first demurred, then, though without alacrity, acquiesced. “Is it well for you to be alone with him? I tell you the Devil hath such wiles—But since you wish it, I will go—I will go for a short while.” He heaved his slight, black figure from the chair, and, moving stiffly, quitted the room. The gaoler stood yet at the door, but, at a sign from Carthew, without, not within, the room.
The squire’s brother had his own strength. It exhibited itself now. He stilled his hurried breathing, ceased the nervous motion of his hands, indefinably broadened and heightened his frame, and became the strong, Puritan country gentleman, the future officer of Ironsides. Whatever there was in him of stanch and firm and good so struggled with what was darkly passionate that, for these minutes at least, there rose on the horizon something that was not the tempest-tossed ship of many months. The masts seemed to cease to bend, the anchor to hold again.