“My advice,” said his fellow physician, “would be to travel to some smaller town that hath never received a whisper from France. And now”—he rose—“and now I must bid you good-bye, for an important personage expects me at this hour.”
CHAPTER IV
THE ROSE TAVERN
Three days after this conversation Gilbert Aderhold said good-bye to the Puritan woman and her son, shouldered a stick with a bundle at the end, and set his face toward the periphery of London and the green country beyond. He had no money. The idea of asking his fellow physician for a loan haunted him through one night, but when morning came the ghost was laid. He strongly doubted if the other would make the loan and he did not wish to ask it anyhow. Since he had been in London he had given a cast of his art more than once or twice in this neighbourhood. But it was a poor neighbourhood, and those whom he had served had been piteous folk, and he did not think that they could pay. He had not asked them to pay. He had no connections in London, no friends. His knowledge of men told him that, for all his tolerance and humanity, the fellow physician might be expected to drop a word of warning, here and there, among the brotherhood. His hope had been that his case was so obscure that no talk would come from Paris.... It was not only that the arm of religion had been raised; he had invoked in medicine, too, strange gods of observation and experience; he had been hounded forth with a double cry. To linger in London, to try to work and earn here—with a shudder he tasted beforehand the rebuff that might come. He would leave London.
He was without near kindred. His parents were dead, a sister also. There was an elder brother, a sea-captain. Aderhold had not seen him for years, and fancied him now somewhere upon the ocean or adventuring in the New World. He remembered his mother telling him that there were or had been cousins to the north. She had spoken of an elderly man, living somewhere in a Grange. The name was Hardwick, not Aderhold.... He had no defined idea or intention of seeking kinsmen, but eventually he turned his face toward the north.
It was six in the morning when he stepped forth. Slung beside his bundle of clothing and a book or two, wrapped in a clean cloth, was a great loaf of bread which the Puritan woman had given him. There was a divine, bright sweetness and freshness in the air and the pale-blue heaven over all. He turned into Fleet Street and walked westward. The apprentices were opening the shops, country wares were coming into town, the city was beginning to bustle. Aderhold walked, looking to right and left, interested in all. He was not a very young man, but he was young. Health and strength had been rudely shaken by anxiety, fear, and misery. Anxiety still hovered, and now and then a swift, upstarting fear cut him like a whip and left him quivering. But fear and anxiety were going further, weakening, toning down. Calm was returning, calm and rainbow lights.
Hereabouts in the street were all manner of small shops, places of entertainment, devices by which to catch money. The apprentices were beginning their monotonous crying, “What d’ye lack? What d’ye lack?”
He came to a booth where there was a raree show. A shock-headed, ragged youth was taking down the boards, which were painted with figures of Indians, copper-hued and feathered. Half a dozen children stood watching.