The Witch

by Mary Johnston

At sunrise she shut the cottage door behind her, locked it, and put the key in a hiding-place under the eaves, then went down the path between the daffodils and out of the little gate. She had a basket upon her arm and within it in a blue jar a honeycomb for a gift to Mistress Borrow. It was a morning fresh and fragrant, the grass diamonded with last night’s rain, the tree-tops veiled with mist, distant cocks crowing. When she came upon the road the sun was drinking up the mist; it was going to be a beautiful day.

She walked for some distance toward the village, but at a point where she saw Carthew House among the trees and the church yews were growing large before her, she turned into a path that would take her through the fields and bring her out upon the highway with the village left behind. She did not wish to go through the village, she did not wish to pass Alison Inch’s door, she did not wish to come near to Carthew House.

She walked between the springing grain, and through a copse where a thrush was singing, and by a stream that was the same that murmured past the Oak Grange, and so at last came back to the highway. She looked back. The village roofs, the church tower, rested dark against the blue sky; light curls of smoke were rising and a great bird sailed overhead.

Before her, over hill and dale, ran the road to the town. She shifted her basket to the other arm and walked on in the golden morning. Now she was by nature courageous, and by nature also a lover of light and air, of form and colour, of diverse motion and the throb of life. In her soul the whole round earth mirrored itself as alive, and, despite black moods and fits of madness, as dominantly good and fair. What of sorrow, gloom, and care had of late clung about her, what of terror and horror the happening of the evening before had left with her, slowly lessened, grew diaphanous in the sunlight and open country. The road began to entertain her, and there came sweet wafted memories of the castle wood, of how fondly she and her father and uncle had lived together and understood one another and liked life, and of all the pleasant doings when the great family were at the castle. Music hummed in her ears again, the figures of the masque filed across the green sward.

In the fresh morning there was more or less meeting and passing on the road. A shepherd with a flock of sheep overtook her, and she stood under an elm to let them by. The shepherd whistled clearly, the sheep kept up their plaintive crying, pushing and jostling with their woolly bodies, their feet making a small pattering sound. “To market! To market!” said the shepherd. “Are you for the market, too, pretty maid?” Farther on she overtook in her turn two or three children going on some errand and walked with them awhile. They wanted to know what was in her basket and she opened the jar and showed them the bright honeycomb, then, breaking clean skewers from a wayside hazel, dipped them in the liquid gold and gave each child a taste. They left her at a lane mouth, and she walked for a little way with two women who were carrying between them an old tavern sign painted with a sheaf of wheat and a giant bunch of grapes. When she had left these two behind and had gone some distance upon a bare, sunny road, she saw before her like a picture the river and the bridge, the climbing town and the castle. She could make out the Black Tower among the trees.

The town was quit of the plague. To the knowing there would be still visible a gloom about the place, a trailing shadow of remembered fear and loss. People would be missed from the streets, vacant houses and shops remarked. Street cries and sounds would come more sombrely and the sunshine fall less warmly. But to the stranger it would seem a town as usual. For Joan, it was not so gay and rich as once it had been, because she that looked on it was not so care-free as once she had been. But still it was to her the great town, so different from Hawthorn, so jewelled with pleasant memories.... She passed the vintner’s house and was glad to see that it was open and cheerful, and that therefore he had not died of the plague. At length she came to climb the castle hill, and with her heart beating fast to cross the pleasaunce and go around to a certain small door of the offices through which she would soonest gain admittance to Mistress Borrow. The sky was so blue, the grass, the flowers, the budding trees were so fair, mavis and lark and robin sang so shrill and sweet, that earth and heaven once more assumed for Joan a mother aspect. Warm, not unhappy, tears came to her eyes. She shook them back and went on over daisies and violets. She had not slept last night and the miles were long between her and Heron’s cottage. She felt light-headed with the assurance of comfort and counsel, the sense that the black cloud that had gathered about her so strangely, so almost she knew not how, would now begin to melt away.

Mistress Borrow was not at the castle. Her sister, thirty miles away, was dying of a dropsy, and the housekeeper had been given leave to go to her. She had gone last week—she might be away a month.... The family were not there—they had gone at the first alarm of the plague. Sir Richard had stayed through it and my lord the countess’s father, had stopped for a week, but they, too, were now away.... It was a civil-spoken girl who told her all this, a new maidservant who had no knowledge of Joan. There were men and women servitors whom she remembered and who would remember her, but when the girl asked if, Mistress Borrow being away, she could do her errand to any one else, she shook her head. “You look dazed,” said the maid. “Better come in and sit awhile.” But no, said Joan, she must be getting home. So she thanked the girl, and they said good-morning to each other, and she left the little door and the flagged courtyard, and coming out under an archway found herself again upon the flower-starred grass, with the shadows of the trees showing two hours from noon. To the right stretched the castle wood, and she would go through it and see again the huntsman’s house.

It rose among the trees before her, a comfortable, friendly, low, deep-windowed place. She would not go very near; she did not know the people who had it now, and truly she felt dazed and beaten and did not wish questioning or talk. She found an old, familiar oak with huge and knotted roots rising amid bracken, and here she sank down and lay with her head upon her arm and her eyes upon the place where in all her life she had been happiest. An old hound came and snuffed about her, a redbreast watched her from a bough. She lay for some time, resting, not thinking but dreaming back. At last she rose, settled the basket upon her arm, looked long at the huntsman’s house, then turned away, and leaving the wood began to descend the castle hill.

When she passed through the high street of the town the church bells were ringing. She turned out of the brighter street into one that sloped to the river, and here she came upon an open place and the prison tall and dark. She stopped short, standing in the shadow of a bit of wall. It was easy for one’s own cares to make one forget, and she had forgotten Aderhold. But he would be here—there was no real gaol in Hawthorn itself, though offenders might be locked for a time in a dungeon-like room beneath the sexton’s house. But a learned man and a property-owner and a man accused of the greatest crime of all, which was to deny the real existence and power of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,—such an one would be brought here. They would have haled Master Aderhold here last night.... She stood and gazed at the frowning mass. The windows were few and far apart and small and closely barred. To-day that was so sunshiny bright would be stifling and black enough in there. She wished that she could send in the light and air.

A man, coming, too, from the high street with his course shaped for Hawthorn Village, joined her where she stood. He was a wiry, crooked-shouldered, grizzle-headed, poorly clad person with a face of some knavery, cunning, and wildness. Over his shoulder, strung together with leather thongs, hung some small pots and pans, and in a leather pouch he seemed to carry tools and bits of metal. Joan recognized him for the tinker, who, after wandering far and wide, came back, at long intervals, to a hut just this side of Hawthorn. It appeared that on his part he remembered her face. “From Heron’s cottage, mistress?—near the Oak Grange.” He seemed to cast a glance upon the prison, but then he looked at her grey eyes and her face, paler to-day than was its wont, and asked if she had walked from home. She said yes, she had been to see the housekeeper at the castle—but she was not there. “Was she walking back to Hawthorn?” Yes, she said, and began to move across the prison square. He moved with her. “I walked from Hawthorn myself this morning. Matters to buy for my trade! Shall stop here at the Boar’s Head before I take the road back.” To her content he left her, and she went on by the great church and down the hill to the arched bridge. But when she had crossed it, and when the river behind her lay thin like a silver crescent, she found him again at her side.