He rested a little longer in the window, listening to the thrush, then turned, looked again at the quiet figure upon the bed, and going from the room wakened old Dorothy and the boy. Later that day, Will, Goodman Cole, old Heron, and a lawyer from the town being present, he searched for and found the spring that opened the panel Master Hardwick had indicated. Behind was a recess, and within it twenty gold-pieces. He gave them into the lawyer’s hands for keeping.
They buried Master Hardwick in Hawthorn Churchyard. Hard upon the end of that, there appeared a merchant and a man of means from the town with a note-of-hand. The farm land, such as it was, would go there in satisfaction. The lawyer produced a will made one year before. Lacking issue and near kindred, Master Hardwick left all that he had, his creditors being satisfied, to his loving cousin, the physician, Gilbert Aderhold. What that was in reality was solely the decaying old house and the few acres of worn garden and orchard immediately surrounding it. The twenty pieces of gold, when all was paid, shrunk to three.
Aderhold dwelled solitary in the Oak Grange as he and his kinsman had dwelled solitary before. The land around went no longer with the Grange, but there was no change else. The old tenants hung on; it still spread, poor in soil, poorly tilled, shut off from the richer vale by Hawthorn Forest. Will no longer came to the Grange; Aderhold, old Dorothy, and the boy lived in the place and kept it. There was no other money than the scant sixpences and shillings that the physician gained. To sell the house sounded well, but there was no purchaser. The place was ruinous, lonely, and without advantage, said to be haunted as well. Aderhold, only, had grown to love it, the ivied walls and the wild garden, the oak and the stream, and the room where he took from behind locked doors his book and sat and wrote. All was so quiet, still, secure, there behind the shield of Hawthorn Forest....
But Hawthorn countryside and village refused to believe that the gold was gone. It was known that the dead miser had had a chest-full of broad pieces. Probably he had buried this great store—some said under the house itself, some said under the fairies’ oak. Wherever it was buried, certainly the leech must know where it was; or if he did not know yet, he would. If one were to go that way through Hawthorn Forest, and come into sight of the house and see a candle passing from window to window, or hear a digging sound in the orchard or beneath the ill-named oak, that would be he.... A whisper arose, none knew how, that Master Hardwick had practised alchemy, and that his kinsman practised it too; that he knew how to make gold. If he knew, then, of course, he would be making it, in the dead of night. Could you make gold alone, unaided by any but your own powers? Alchemists, it was known, did not hesitate to raise a spirit or demon. Then there was little difference between an alchemist and a sorcerer?... There came among the whispers a counter-statement from several cotters and poor folk. Master Aderhold was no sorcerer—he was a good leech; witness such and such a cure! Whereupon opposition sharpened the whisperers’ ingenuity. Aye, perhaps the demon helped him cure as well as make gold! Came another counter—he was a good church-goer. So! but Master Clement thinks not highly of him.
How this vortex and whirling storm began, whose breath first stirred it up, it were hard to say. It had moved in widening rings for months, before Aderhold discovered how darkened was the air about him.
CHAPTER X
IN HAWTHORN FOREST
It was winter—a mild, bright, winter’s day—when, for the second time, he met and spoke to Joan in the forest. She was standing beneath a beech tree, in her hand a dry, fallen bough which she was brandishing and making play with as though it had been a quarter-staff. She was singing, though not in the least loudly,—