The Witch

by Mary Johnston

Aderhold had risen. Dorothy, having placed a chair for Master Clement, was on the point of vanishing, but the minister called her back. “Stay, woman, and be edified likewise! Or wait! Call also the serving-man and the lad that I saw without. It befits that a dying man, suing for pardon to an offended King, should have his household about him.”

Dorothy brought them in, Will and the boy, her nephew. The three stood in a solemn row. Long habit had made them accept old master and his ways, but they did not doubt that he stood in peril of his soul. It was proper that the minister should exhort him. They stood with slightly lifted and exalted countenances. After all, so little came into their lives to make them feel a comparative righteousness, to set them in any wise upon a platform of honour!

Master Hardwick lay awake and conscious but passed beyond much speaking. Aderhold withdrew into the shadow of the bed-curtains, and out of this twilight regarded Master Clement. He knew of more than one or two heroic things which this man had done. Moreover, he had heard that years before, when Calvin had by no means as yet tinctured England, Master Clement had stoutly set up his standard and kept strict vigil before it. It was whispered that he had stood in the pillory for “No Pope—and No Prelates!” Aderhold, gazing upon him, was aware that Master Clement would endure persecution as unflinchingly as, indubitably, he would inflict it. Each quality somehow cancelled the other—Master Clement was out of it—and there was left only the gross waste and suffering....

Aderhold had heard priest and preacher, after pulpit cries of human worthlessness, of the insignificance of the soul, of universal and hopeless guilt, of the inflamed mind of God, of the hell which, in the course of nature, awaited every child of Adam, of the predestination of some, indeed, through grace of another, to an unearned glory, of the eternal, insufferable loss and anguish of those multitudes and multitudes and multitudes, who either had never known or heard of that remedy, or who, the Devil at their ear, had made bold to doubt its utter efficacy—he had heard and seen such men, at death-beds, in the presence of solemn and temperate Death, turn from what they preached to Reason and Love. He had heard them try to smooth away the deep and dark trenches in the bewildered brain which they themselves had done their best to dig. He thought their conversion the saddest miracle—sad, for it did not last. Death passed for that time from their view, back they went to preach to listening throngs who must die, Inherited Guilt, Inherited, fiendish punishment, an Inherited, fearful God, an Inherited curse upon enquiry, and the humbling, indeed, of an Inherited vicarious atonement.... He wondered that they never foresaw their own death-bed. He thought that they never truly, bone and marrow, believed what they said, but that the reverberating voices of the ages behind them stunned, went through them, produced an automatic voice and action. To resist that insistence, to breast the roaring stream of the past—he acknowledged that it was difficult, difficult!

Three or four times in these years he had chanced to find himself together with Master Clement at some death-bed. Once he had seen him soften—a child dying and crying out in terror of the Judgement Day. “You were baptized—you were baptized—” repeated the minister to him over and over again. “I baptized you myself. You are safe—you are safe, my dear child! The Lord Christ will help you—the Lord Christ will help you—” But the child had died in terror.

To-day there was no softening in the aspect of Master Clement. This old man before him was a wretched miser hoarding gold, a solitary who in this dark old house as probably as not practised alchemy, lusting to turn lead and iron into gold, and as probably as not practised it by unlawful and demoniacal aid. Rarely was he seen in church—too feeble to come, he said; too unwilling, thought Master Clement. He did not give of his substance, he was bitter and misliked, he asked no prayers—Master Clement had many counts against him, and was fain to believe that they tallied with God’s counts. He girded himself and came forth to wrestle with and throw this soul, and by the hair of its head to drag it from the edge of the bottomless pit. He wrestled for the better part of an hour.

Master Hardwick lay unwinking, high upon his pillows. Aderhold could not tell how much really entered ear and mind; the old man seemed to be regarding something far away, something growing in the distance. The pity of it, he thought, was for Will and old Dorothy and the boy; they were drinking, drinking.

At last Master Clement desisted. He stared with a fixed face at Master Hardwick who stared beyond him. “Thou impenitent old man—!” He rose and with a gesture dismissed the three in line. Will and Dorothy and the boy filed out, primed to discuss among themselves master’s impenitency. “I go now, Master Hardwick,” said the minister, “but I shall come again to-morrow, though I fear me thou art as utterly lost as any man in England!”

Aderhold accompanied him from the chamber into the hall. He knew that it was in order to speak with unction of the just closed exhortation; to wonder at the minister’s fervent power, and deprecate with sighs and shaken head the horrible wickedness of the human heart; to marvel that any could hold out against the truth so presented—how many times had he heard such an utterance and seen the self-congratulation behind—how many times! He knew that the pause which the minister made, unconscious as it certainly was, was a pause for the accustomed admiration. When it did not come he saw that, as unconsciously again, Master Clement’s mistrust of him deepened. He knew that, for all his locked lips and eyes withheld from expression, for all his stillness, repression, and church-going, the minister liked him not. The clash of minds came subtly through whatever walls you might build around it.

“I fear, Master Aderhold,” now said the minister, “that you have done little during your residence with your kinsman to bring him to repentance. Surely, in these years of such close communion, a godly man could have done much! Such a man as Harry Carthew would have had him by now day and night upon his knees!”