The woman spoke uncertainly. “If we have been mistaken in you, sir,—”
“What you say has truth,” said the bearded man. “But it also has a strangeness and rings not like our truth.... If you are a Brownist, this house will have naught to do with you!”
“I am not a Brownist,” said Aderhold wearily. The sense of space widening off and intenser light was gone. Never yet had it stayed but the fewest of moments, and, going, it threw life back upon itself....
But the second son, who had been standing with an abstracted and distant look, started and spoke. “Let him alone, mother and my brother! Whatever he be, he hath no ill-will nor guile—” He turned to the table. “Are you hungry?” he asked. “Sit down and eat with us.”
Aderhold dwelt in this house some days longer. He did not again see the two sons; they had taken horse and ridden to visit some returned comrade or officer in the country. The woman he saw, and sometimes talked with, but she had ceased to be curious about him, and they chiefly spoke of the consumptive boy. He was near death. The physician could only give something that should make the nights pass more swiftly, less painfully.
He himself wished to see a physician, the physician to whom, as to Cecil, he had been recommended by a great noble of France, but whom he had not seen since that day in Richmond, after that hour in the Queen’s chamber. He had gone to his house to enquire—he was yet out of London, he would be home on such a day. Aderhold went then, but could not see him; waited two days, and was again denied; went in another three, and was admitted. The physician was alone, in a small room, and his manner dry and cold.
If Aderhold still nursed a hope it was a faint and failing one. Before that day in Richmond the hope had been strong. This physician was a skilled man and knew skill when he saw it—the great Frenchman had written with a guarded enthusiasm, but yet with enthusiasm of what Gilbert Aderhold might do—the London physician had let drop a hint that he himself had thought at times of an assistant—if not that, he could certainly speak a word in season in another quarter. Aderhold had hoped—after Richmond he had hoped less strongly. Now he found that hope was failing. What had happened? What always happened?
The physician continued standing. The room opened upon a garden, and outside the lattice window there showed a tender mist of budding tree and shrub. “You were so good,” said Aderhold, “as to bid me come to you upon your return.”
“I wished,” said the physician, “to give all weight and recognition to the commendation of the Duke of ——.” A grey cat came and rubbed against his ankle. He stooped and lifting the creature to the table beside him stood stroking it. “The commendation of great noblemen is at times like their largesse. It often falls—through, of course, no fault of theirs—before the stranger and the unworthy.”