The Witch

by Mary Johnston

Over him shone the Sickle. He lay and wondered, and at last he slept, with the Serpent rising in the east.

Late in the night, waking for a moment, he saw that the sky was overcast. The air, too, was colder. He wrapped the cloak more closely about him and slept again. When he woke the day was here, but not such a day as yesterday. The clouds hung grey and threatening, the wind blew chill. There set in a day of weariness and crosses. It passed somehow. Footsore, at dusk, he knocked at a cotter’s door, closed fast against the wind which was high. When the family questioned him, he told them that he was a poor physician, come from overseas, going toward kinspeople. There chanced to be a sick child in the cottage; they let him stay for reading her fever and telling them what to do.

The next day and the next and the next the sky was greyer yet, and the wind still blew. It carried with it flakes of snow. The road stretched bare, none fared abroad who could stay indoors. Aderhold now stumbled as he walked. There was a humming in his ears. In the early afternoon of his sixth day from London he came to as lonely a strip of country as he had seen, lonely and grey and furrowed and planted with a gnarled wood. The flakes were coming down thickly.

Then, suddenly, beyond a turn of the road, he saw a small inn, set in a courtyard among trees. As he came nearer he could tell the sign—a red rose on a black ground. It was a low-built house with a thatched roof, and firelight glowed through the window. The physician had a bleeding foot; he was cold, cold, and dizzy with fatigue. He had no money, and the inn did not look charitable. In the last town he had passed through he had bought food and the night’s lodging with a portion of the contents of his bundle. Now he sat down upon the root of a tree overhanging the road, opened his shrunken store, and considered that with most of what was left he might perhaps purchase lodging and fare until the sky cleared and his strength came back. A while before he had passed one on the road who told him that some miles ahead was a fairly large town. He might press on to that ... but he was tired, horribly tired, and shivering with the cold. In the end, keeping the bundle in his hand, he went and knocked at the door of the Rose Tavern.

The blowsed servant wench who answered finally brought her master the host, a smooth, glib man with a watery eye. He looked at the stuff Aderhold offered in payment and looked at the balance of the bundle. In the end, he gestured Aderhold into the house. It was warm within and fairly clean with a brightness of scrubbed pannikins, and in the kitchen, opening from the chief room, a vision of flitches of bacon and strings of onions hanging from the rafters. Besides the serving-maid and a serving-man there was the hostess, a giant of a woman with a red kerchief about her head. She gave Aderhold food. When it was eaten he stretched himself upon the settle by the kitchen hearth, arms beneath his head. The firelight danced on the walls, there was warmth and rest....

Aderhold lay and slept. Hours passed. Then, as the day drew toward evening, he half roused, but lay still upon the settle, in the brown warmth. There was a feeling about him of peace and deep forests, of lapping waves, of stars that rose and travelled to their meridians and sank, of long, slow movements of the mind. The minutes passed. He started full awake with the hearing of horses trampling into the courtyard and a babel of voices. He sat up, and the serving-wench coming at the moment into the kitchen he asked her a question. She proved a garrulous soul who told all she knew. The Rose Tavern stood some miles from a good-sized town. Those in the yard and entering the house were several well-to-do merchants and others with their serving-men. They had been to London, travelling together for company, and were now returning to this town. There was with them Master—she couldn’t think of his name—of Sack Hall in the next county. And coming in at the same time, and from London, too, there was old Master Hardwick who lived the other side of Hawthorn village, in a ruined old house, and was a miser. If he had been to London it would be sure to have been about money. And finally there was Squire Carthew’s brother, also from Hawthorn way. He was a fine young man, but very strict and religious. The company wasn’t going to stay—it wished food and hot drink and to go on, wanting to reach the town before night. And here the hostess descended upon the girl and rated her fiercely for an idle, loose-tongue gabbling wench—

Aderhold, rested, rose from the settle and went into the greater room. Here were the seven or eight principal travellers—the serving-men being without, busy with the riding and sumpter horses. All in the room were cold, demanding warmth and drink,—peremptory, authoritative, well-to-do burghers of a town too large for village manners and not large enough for a wide urbanity. In a corner, on a bed made of a bench and stool, with a furred mantle for cover, lay a lean old man with a grey beard. He was breathing thick and hard, and now and again he gave a deep groan. A young serving-man stood beside him, but with a dull and helpless aspect toward sickness. Across the room, standing by a window, appeared a man of a type unlike the others in the room. Tall and well-made, he had a handsome face, but with a strange expression as of warring elements. There showed a suppressed passionateness, and there showed a growing austerity. His dress was good, but dark and plain. He was booted and cloaked, and his hat which he kept upon his head was plain and wide-brimmed. Aderhold, glancing toward him, saw, he thought, one of the lesser gentry, with strong Puritan leanings. This would be “Squire Carthew’s brother.”

As he looked, the serving-man left the greybeard stretched upon the bench, went across to the window, and, cap in hand, spoke a few words. The man addressed listened, then strode over to the chimney-corner and stood towering above the sick man. “Are you so ill, Master Hardwick? Bear up, until you can reach the town and a leech!”

Aderhold, who had not left the doorway, moved farther into the room. Full in the middle of it, a man who had had his back to him swung around. He encountered one whom he had encountered before—to wit, the red and blue bully of the Cap and Bells. Master Anthony Mull did not at first recognize him. He was blustering against the host of the Rose because there was no pasty in the house. The physician would fain have slipped past, but the other suddenly gave a start and put out a pouncing hand. “Ha, I know you! You’re the black sorcerer and devil’s friend at the Cap and Bells who turned a book into a bowl of sack!”