Sir Richard looked at him curiously. “Of course! of course! Poor worm!” There fell a silence, then the last speaker, unthinkingly, merely to make talk to the great door before which stood the visitors’ horses, brought forward Aderhold’s presence in the town. “Hawthorn hath played the Samaritan in one person—though, I believe, indeed, that he lives beyond the village. You’ve given a good leech. I saw him yesterday morning in the town, going from sick to sick.”
The squire spoke. “You mean one Gilbert Aderhold? Yes, he is a leech. But Hawthorn sent him not—”
The London physician, returning at the moment, caught the name, “Gilbert Aderhold!—What! I’ve wondered more than once what became of the man—if, indeed, you speak of the same—”
“A tall, quiet man,” said Sir Richard. “A thinker who has travelled—”
“It has a sound of him,” said the physician. He somewhat despised the two country gentlemen, so he addressed himself exclusively to Sir Richard. As to what followed, it must be said that he spoke alike without malice and without forethought. Indifferentist himself, dulled by personal vanity and complacence of position, and with a knowledge at least of the tolerant-mindedness of the person to whom he spoke, he possibly took not into consciousness at all the very different nature of the two who might be listening, nor realized that the man of whom he spoke dwelled in their bailiwick and not in the town. At any rate, he spoke on with vivacity. “A man of abilities who should have risen—studied in Paris—was for a time in the Duke of ——’s household. Then what must he do but grow atheist and begin to write and teach! ‘The God of Isaac and Jacob, Isaac and Jacob’s idea of God. God the vast abstraction, like and differing with all times and peoples. The Bible not writ by the finger of God, but a book of Eastern wisdom with much that is gold, and much that is not.—No Fall of Man as therein told.—Salvation out of the depths of yourself and not by gift of another.—No soul can be bathed clean by another’s blood.’—His book,” said the physician, “was burned in an open place in Paris by the common hangman, and he himself lay a long while in prison and was hardly dealt with, nay, just escaped with life—which he might not have done but for the Duke of ——, who got him forth from France with a letter to Sir Robert Cecil, and—seeing that I had brought his Grace up from an illness which he had when he was in England—one from his secretary to me. But naturally neither Sir Robert nor I could do aught—”
Sir Richard, his brow clouded, stopped him with a gesture. “You caught my interest and held me fast—but I should have checked you at once! Now—” He bit his lip, his brows drawn together with deep vexation.
The two men from Hawthorn were standing stone still. In the elder’s face, at once stolid and peremptory, was only single-minded amazement and wrath. What was this that Justice Carthew and all Hawthorn had been harbouring? A Jesuit spy would have been bad enough—but atheist!—But the younger was more complex, and in him a number of impulses were working. He left it to the elder to speak, who did so, explosively. “Atheist! No one hath thought well of the man of late—but atheist!—I will promise you, doctor—I will promise you, Sir Richard—”
“Nay,” said Sir Richard, no longer with suavity, “what I would have you promise, that I know you will not!” He shook himself like a great dog. “Unhappy!”
The two Carthews rode down the castle hill and through the town where people went dully to and fro with Fear in company. There rose the pungent smell of burning wood, a church bell made a slow and measured clangour. They passed between tall, gloomy, jutting houses, passed the prison with the stocks and pillory, and the great church with the sculptured portal, wound down to the river, and crossed the arched bridge. Before them rolled the yet wintry country. Mounting a hill, they saw on the horizon a purple-grey line that was Hawthorn Forest.
The younger Carthew spoke. “It comes back to me.... That night at the Rose Tavern when he so suddenly appeared beside old Hardwick.... Master Anthony Mull, of Sack Hall, who was travelling with us, appeared to recognize him and flew out against him.... Wait a moment!—his very words will come back. He said—’Black sorcerer and devil’s friend!’”