The consumptive took the red cloth from his lips. “Mother, mother, did I not say, when the man came, that he had a strange look?”
“Aye, Andrew,” said the mother, “he went like a man with a guilty load and watched his shadow.—But I had you to think on, and the need for bread, and he paid me, which, God knoweth! they do not always do. And it came not into my head, until, before he thought, he had said the ‘Cap and Bells,’ that he might be here to spy and wring news of us—cozening us to tell reportable tales of the Lord’s Saints!” She stopped, then spoke on with a high, restrained passion and triumph. “But now—but now I think that that is what he is! But now I am not afraid—and now he may get his deserts—seeing that the new King is surely for us, and that my sons have come home!”
“The new King!” exclaimed the shaven man. “The new King is an old Stuart! Lean upon that reed and it will pierce your hand! I tell that to my brother and to you, mother, and you will not believe—”
“Time will show,” said the bearded man impatiently. “Time will show which of us is right. But to-day my mother can turn out this bishop’s man, neck and crop! Yea, and if he murmurs—”
He made a step forward, a big-boned, powerful man, grim of countenance. His hand shot out toward the physician.
Aderhold gave back a step, then recovered himself. “You are mistaken,” he said. “I am no spy and I am no bishop’s man. Like you, I have been from England. I return poor and seeking physician’s work. Desiring lodging, I asked at this house as I had asked at others, and as honestly as a man may. For the Cap and Bells, I knew naught of it nor of its frequenters. I crossed its threshold but once, and so ill did the place suit me that I am not like to go again. I tell you the plain truth.”
The woman and her sons regarded him fixedly. “What think you,” asked the shaven man at last, abruptly and sternly, “of the law that maketh it an offense for a man to worship his Creator after the dictates of his own heart—yea, that would compel him to conform to practices which his soul abhorreth?”
“I think,” said Aderhold, “that it is an evil law.”
“You say truth,” answered the shaven man. “Now tell me plainly. Believe you in copes and stoles and altars and credence tables, in kneeling at communion, in Prayer-Book and surplice and bowing when the name is mentioned, in bishops and archbishops and pride of place before God?”
Aderhold looked at him dreamily. The fear of physical injury, which was the weakness that most beset him, was gone by. He had at times a strange sense of expansion, accompanied by a differentiation and deepening of light. The experience—he knew it to be inward, and never steadfast, very fleeting—returned to him now. The room looked world-wide, the four interlocutors tribes and peoples. “My mind does not dwell overmuch,” he said, “upon matters such as these. They are little matters. The wrong is that a man should be made to say they are necessary and great matters, and, to avoid falseness, be made to fight dwarfs as though they were giants.—I need no priest in cope or surplice or especial dress when all that I am lifts in contemplation and resolve. I need not kneel when All communes with All. No slave is my soul. Would I pray, I can pray without book, and would I not, no book held before my face hath power to pray for me. If I bowed my head at each thought of the mystery that surrounds us, I would not with overmuch frequency walk erect, for I think much and constantly of that mystery. If I bow my head without thought—an idiot may do the same. As for prelates and they who are called ‘spiritual princes’—I have seen not one who is not a man-chosen master of a man-built house.”