Carthew sat his horse, dark as a thunder-cloud, and for all his iron frame and power of control, shaking like a leaf. “I believe neither of you,” he said thickly. He looked at Joan. “This is why you will not turn to me.”
Her eyes flamed against him. “I never thought to hate a human creature as you have made me hate you!—And now I am going home.”
She snatched up the staff with which she had been playing and turned with decision. He turned his horse also, but uncertainly, with his eyes yet upon Aderhold. Black wrath and jealousy were written in his face, and something else, a despairing struggle against total self-abandonment. “Stay a moment!” he cried to Joan. “Will you swear by God on high that you and this man have not been meeting, meeting in Hawthorn Forest?”
Joan turned, stood still the moment asked.
“Master Carthew, shall I tell you what I shall shortly do if you leave me not alone? I shall go with my father to the squire your brother, and to the minister, and to the three most zealous men in Hawthorn Parish, and I shall say to them, ‘This holy and zealous young man whom I have heard you, Master Clement, call Joseph, and young David, and what-not—this same Master Harry Carthew, who will speak and exhort and pray with sinners,—this same man has for months made a harmless girl’s life wretched to her, offering loathed love and insult—’”
Her voice broke; she threw up her arms in a gesture of anger and unhappiness and fled away. Carthew sat like a graven image, watching her go. He spoke to himself, in a curious voice from the lips only. “If ever I should come to hate you as now I—” and again—“She will never dare—” The last flutter of her skirt vanished among the trees. Suddenly he said with violence, “She denied it not!” and turned upon Aderhold as though he would ride him down.
The physician caught the bridle of the roan. “You are mad, Master Carthew! Look at me!”
He forced the other’s gaze upon him and a somewhat cooler judgement into his eyes. Each, with his inner vision, was viewing in waves and sequences past relations, knowledge, and impressions. For the first time, general observation and lukewarm interest quickened into the keen and particular and well-warmed. Aderhold saw again Carthew at the Rose Tavern, and Carthew upon the road; heard again Carthew’s cosmic speculations and Carthew’s expressed sense of sin. Four years gone by, and yet that impression remained the most deeply graved. After that came the long stretch of time in this region, and, during it, little speech, few meetings with Carthew. There had been knowledge that at times he was away, often for months, from Hawthorn, and there had been observation at church and elsewhere of the sterner sort in him of Puritan zeal and faith, together with hearsay that the minister and he were like elder and younger brother in the word, and the younger a growing power in this part of England and a chosen vessel. And there had been a kind of half-melancholy, half-artistic and philosophic recognition of the perfection of the specimen Carthew afforded. In look, frame, dress, countenance, temper, and inward being, he seemed the exactest symbol!—Nowhere further than all this had Aderhold come until to-day.
As for Carthew, with far narrower powers of reflection, and with those concentrated with hectic intensity in a small round, it might be said that in these years he had barely regarded or thought of the physician at all. Such a statement would be true of all sides but one. Master Clement had, within the past year, doubted to him any true zeal in religion on the part of the physician, and had set up a faint current of observation and misliking. It had been nothing much; at times, when he thought of it, he marked Aderhold at church, how he looked and demeaned himself; once or twice when he had overheard some peasant speak of the leech, he had come in with his deep and stern voice. “Aye? Can he doctor thy soul as well as thy body?” But the whole together had weighed little. He had the soul of Harry Carthew to be concerned for ... though, of course, for that very soul’s salvation, it behooved to see that other lamps were kept burning.... Nay, it behooved for those others’ salvation—for the warfare of the true saint was for the salvation of every soul alive!—All this was before the past few months. Through these months he had thought but of one thing—or if at all of another thing, then of how his own soul was on the brink of the pit, with the Devil whispering, and the heat of the flame of hell already burning within him.... And now, suddenly, it seemed that the physician living at the Oak Grange was a figure in the sum. He looked at him, and where before he had seen but a silently coming and going learned man, to be somewhat closely watched by God’s saints lest mysterious knowledge should lead him astray, he saw now a tall man, still young, not ill-looking, with strange knowledge that might teach him how to ingratiate.... He spoke in a hollow voice. “I have been blind.”