“Abroad,” said Aderhold, “I have seen this sickness in a far worse form. I have hopes that it will not outlast the winter.”
The other smelled at his box of spices. “Do you feel no fear, bending over their beds?”
Aderhold shook his head. “No. It is my calling.”
The man on horseback kept ten feet between them and smelled continually at his silver box, but for the rest was willing to stay and talk. “That seems to be it. The soldier will run from the pest, but face a cannon mouth. The sailor rocks upon a masthead or boards a Spanish galleon with a cutlass between his teeth, but a churchyard ghost turns him into a whimpering child! Your thinker will scale Olympus and enquire of Jove direct, but the sight of torn flesh turns him pale. To each his courage and each his fear! Each a master and each a slave.”
“Aye,” said Aderhold briefly, “I know that well.” He put his hand upon the door behind him. “I must not stay.”
The other gathered up the reins. “I am dwelling at the castle. When the plague is spent, and the air again is clean and sweet, and old clothing has been burned and new put on, then, before you travel farther, come to see me there.—I have faced cannon and fought a galleon. I would go far to have speech with an authentic ghost. A brazen head would like me well, and I am constantly considering new Dædalus’ wings. But to enter that house behind you, and stand over that swollen, ghastly, loathsomely smelling and moaning thing—no, no! There I am your abject Eastern slave.”
He backed his horse farther from the house.
“Ah,” said Aderhold, “I, too, have a great region where Fear is my master and sets his foot upon my neck! I will enter this house, but I make no talk of Dædalus’ wings—seeing that the neighbours like it not, and that they have the whip-hand!—When all’s well I’ll come to the castle.”
The one rode away, the other entered the plague-touched house. The first, returning home, found company, come from the southward, and so reaching the castle without passing through the town. An old nobleman, father of the countess, was here, come unexpectedly from the Court, and having no knowledge of the family flitting. Now he was in an ill-humour, indeed, and yet not very fearful of the plague, and set upon resting his old bones before he pursued his further journey. Mistress Borrow, the housekeeper, promised to make him comfortable—there were servants enough—“And your Lordship will be glad to know that Sir Richard is here.” With his lordship was a London physician of note, one that had sometimes been called to the old Queen. For years he had doctored his lordship; now, at special invitation, he was making this journey with him.
That evening at supper the talk was almost solely of the plague. The physician had had experience in London; he had written learnedly upon the subject, and was reckoned an authority. He talked of preventives and plague-waters, and hoped that while, for his lordship’s sake, he should not think of closely exposing himself, he might yet, with proper precautions, descend into the town and observe the general appearance of matters. He would be glad to give to the authorities or to the physicians in the place any advice in his power,—and then he fell to the capon, the venison pasty, and the canary. The old nobleman asked Sir Richard how he should get word to William Carthew, living beyond Hawthorn Village, of his presence at the castle. It seemed that there was some tie of old service a generation agone,—Carthew’s father had owed a captaincy and other favours to the nobleman,—and now that he was dead the present squire and justice always came dutifully to see the great man upon the occasions when he was at the castle. “They tell me that he hath turned Puritan—or rather that his younger brother hath turned Puritan and draggeth William with him. A pack of crop-eared wretches! I should have thought better of John Carthew’s son. I wish to see him just to tell him so.”