Four years. In the small bare room which was called his and which, through care for old Dorothy, he himself kept and cleaned, there stood an oaken press, where under lock and key he guarded ink and pen and paper and a book that he was writing. That guess at qualities, at origins and destinies, that more or less mystical vision, taste and apprehension of ground and consequence, that intuition of all things in flood, of form out of form, of unity in motion—all that in France he had outspoken, and in speaking had like to have lost liberty and life—all that he had not spoken of here these four years, hard-by Hawthorn Village and church—all this he was striving to put there upon paper. He rose at dawn and wrote while the light strengthened; he bought himself candles and wrote at night when all the place was so still that silence grew sound. Four years—.
Master Hardwick stirred, opened his eyes. “Gilbert!”
“I am here, cousin.”
“How long—?”
“I do not know. You do not fail fast nor easily. Your body is courageous.”
He gave him to drink. As he put down the cup Dorothy opened the door. Behind her appeared a man with a black dress, close-cut hair, and a steeple-crowned hat. Although the day was warm he had about him a wide cloak. He was short and thin, with a pale, acrimonious, zealot’s face. He carried in his hand a Geneva Bible.
Dorothy stammered out, “Master Clement did not wish to wait, master—”
Clement spoke for himself. “While I waited your master’s soul might have perished, for a soul can perish in a twinkling.” He put the old woman aside with his hand and came forward from the door to the bed. “How do you do to-day, Master Hardwick?”
The old man made a feeble movement upon his pillows. “I do as I have done, Master Clement,—I run rapidly toward this life’s end.”
“Yea,” said the minister, “and I fear me that you run toward worse than this life’s end! I am come—I am come, Master Hardwick, to wrestle with the Devil for thy soul! I tell thee, it stands in mortal danger of dropping from life’s end into that gulf where Dives burns and is mocked from Abraham’s bosom!”