HAWTHORN CHURCH
TOWN and village and all the country roundabout were growing clean of
the plague. Day by day the evil lessened, the sickness stole away. It
left its graves, and among those whose loss was personal its mood of
grief. At large there was still a kind of sullen fear, a tension of the
nerves, a readiness to attend to any cry of “Wolf!” The wolf might come
no more in the guise of the plague, but there were other damages and
terrors. All Hawthorn region was in a mood to discover them.
It came Sunday. The danger, at least, of congregating together seemed
to have rolled away. Comfort remained, comfort of the crowd, of feeling
people warm about you, gloomy comfort of “Eh, sirs!” and shakings of
the head. Hawthorn, village and neighbourhood, flocked to church.
Going, the people drew into clusters. The North-End Farm folk had a
large cluster, and there the shaking of the head was over the possessed
boy. But the widow whose cow was dead and the waggoner whose horses
were lamed had their groups, too, and the largest group of all came
compactly from the lower end of the village, past the green and the
pond and the stocks and the Sabbath-closed ale-house, with the tinker
from Scotland talking in the midst of it.
Dark stone, gaunt and ancient, rather small than large, Hawthorn Church
rose among yew trees. Within was barer than without. What of antique
carving could be broken away was broken away, what could be whitewashed
was whitewashed, what of austerity could be injected was injected. The
Act of Uniformity loomed over England like a writing in the sky; there
must be and was use of the book of Common Prayer. But parishes minded
like Hawthorn used it with all possible reserves. Where matters could
be pared they were pared to the quick; all exfoliation was done away
with. As far as was possible in an England where Presbyterianism yet
sat in the shadow of the Star Chamber and the Independents had not
arisen, idolatrousness was excluded. Only the sermon was not pared.
Sunday by Sunday minister and people indemnified themselves with the
sermon.—You could not speak against the King; except in metaphor you
could not speak against the Apostolic Succession; there were a number
of things you could not speak against unless you wished to face gaol
or pillory or worse. Because of this the things that you could speak
against were handled with an added violence. The common outer foe
received the cudgellings you could not bestow within the house. The
Devil was mightily dealt with in pulpits such as this of Hawthorn,
the Devil and his ministers. The Devil was invisible; even the most
materializing mind did not often get a glimpse of him, though such a
thing was possible and had of course happened: witness Martin Luther
and others. But his ministers—his ministers! They were many and
palpable....
Hawthorn Church was filled. They sat very still, men and women and
children. They were peasants and yeomen, small tradespeople, a very few
of the clerkly caste, one or two families of gentry. The only great
enclosed pew was that belonging by prescription to Carthew House. The
squire, the squire’s wife, his young son, and the squire’s brother sat
there, where the force of the sermon could reach them first. Quite
at the back of the church sat Gilbert Aderhold, a quiet, dark figure
beside an old, smocked farmer. Joan sat where she had been wont to sit
with her father, halfway down the church, just in front of Alison Inch
and her mother. It was a dark day, the air hot, heavy, and oppressive,
drawing to a storm.
Master Thomas Clement came into the pulpit wearing a black gown. He
opened his Geneva Bible and laid it straight before him. He turned
the hourglass, then lifting his hands to the lowering sky he smote
them together, and in a loud, solemn and echoing voice read from the
book before him, “_If there arise among you a prophet or a dreamer of
dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder. And the sign or the wonder
come to pass whereof he spake to thee, saying, Let us go after other
gods, that thou hast not known, and let us serve them.... That prophet
or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death; because he hath spoken
to turn you away from the Lord your God.... And all Israel shall hear
and fear and shall do no more any such wickedness as this is among
you...._”
“_... There shall not be found among you any one that ... useth
divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a
consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer._”
He ceased to read, and with another gesture of his long, thin hands,
began to preach. He had a peculiar power and calibre had Master Thomas
Clement. He stood in his black gown, a small man with a pale face; then
his dire vision came upon him and it was as though his form gained
height and dilated. He burned like a flame, a wind-tossed flame,
burning _blue_. When he spoke his words came with a rushing weight.
His figure bent toward the people, his lean hands quivered above his
head, gesturing against the dark concave of the roof. The roof might
have been an open, stormy sky, the pulpit a rock upon some plain of
assemblage, the preacher a gaunt, half-clad Israelite shrilling out
to the Hebrew multitude the rede of their lawgivers. _Thou shalt not
suffer doubt to live! Thou shalt endure no speech of more or other
paths than this one. He that differeth, he shall die!_
But it was not Sinai and some thousands of years ago and an Asiatic
tribe struggling back from Egypt to some freehold of its own, or
Asiatic lawgivers building a careful theocracy. It was Europe,—it was
England and the seventeenth century,—and still men like this stood in
fiery sincerity and became mouthpieces for that people and its history
and its laws. The order to Judah and Simeon and Levi rolled through
the ages like never-cooling lava, withering and whelming vineyards of
thought. _Thou shalt not suffer doubt to live. He that differeth, he
shall die!_—And a thousand thousand pale shapes might rise to the
inner eye and speak to the inner ear. “_We died._”
Aderhold sat still, far back in Hawthorn Church. In his own mind he
saw that he was on the edge of the abyss. He doubted much if he would
escape.... The old farmer sitting, blue-smocked, beside him, his
watery eyes fixed upon the minister, broke now and again into a mutter
of repetition and comment. “Aye, aye! The misbeliever to perish for
idolatry.... Of course he blasphemes—the misbeliever blasphemes....
Aye, aye! ‘Why,’ and ‘Wherefore,’ the Devil’s own syllables.... Aye,
aye! Unbelief and sorcery go together.... Aye, now we’re at fire in
this world and everlasting, lasting fire to come!”
The preacher had before him a people who had come through a narrow
strait and a valley of the shadow, gathered together in a mood of
strained nerves, of twitches and starts aside, of a readiness to
take panic. The day was dark with heat and oppression, a sense of
hush before tempest. It was a day on which it was easy to awaken
emotion. The faces of the people showed pale in the dusk, breathing
became laboured. At last it grew that men and women looked aside with
something like a shudder and a sigh in the dimness. It was as though
they looked to see a serpent’s head, fanged and crowned, lifting itself
in the gloom from monstrous coils. Aderhold saw the slow turning of
eyes in his direction.
He thought swiftly. He had served many in this congregation. Since,
in the winter-time, his eyes had been opened, he knew of the drifting
talk of his hoarding gold, of his practising alchemy there in the dark
Oak Grange, alchemy, and perhaps worse. Even after his return from the
plague-stricken town, even in his going through Hawthorn countryside
from house to house where there were sick, helping, serving, even then
he had seen doubtful looks, had known his aid taken hurriedly, as it
were secretly and grudgingly. But all had not done so. There had been
those too simple and too suffering and sorrowful for that, and there
had been those whose minds seemed not to have taken the dye. There
were some in this church of whom, in the years he had dwelt in this
country, he had grown fond; folk that of their own bent felt for him
liking and kindness.... But he did not deceive himself. He knew of none
that would stand before this parching and withering wind. Heretofore
the talk might have been idle talk, but now it was evident that Master
Clement had at his shaken finger-ends the history in France of Gilbert
Aderhold. Friends! By what multitude of written words, of hearsay and
legend—by what considerable amount of personal observation did he
know how friends fell away from the denounced dreamer of dreams!...
Poor friends! He felt no rise of bitterness against them. They would
not have fallen away in physical battle; they would have stood many a
strain, perhaps all but this. This was not to cow the blood; it was to
cow mind and the immortal spirit. To face for a friend a wolf, a lion,
or an earthly angered King, that was well!—but to face for a friend an
angered God, to save him not from hell-fire and to be yourself whelmed,
remediless, for eternity! Few there were who could inwardly frame the
question, “Is He angered?” or “What is He that can be so angered?” or
“You who would silence this man with the silence of death, are you
beyond doubt the spokesmen of God and Eternity? Are you, after all,
_God’s_ Executioners?” But they said that they were, and the human mind
was clay to believe.... Aderhold looked over the church and thought he
saw none who would not be terrified aside.
Well! he asked those questions and other questions. Mind and moral
nature rose in him and stood. But he knew that his body would betray
him if it could. Highly strung, very sensitive to pain, he possessed
an imagination and memory vivid to paint or to bring back all manner
of pangs and shrinkings of the earthly frame. No detail of any Calvary
but in some wise he knew and feared it. He felt the cold sweat dew his
temples and break out upon the backs of his hands. He felt the nausea
that numbed and withered the brain and brought the longing for death....
Not in the beginning, the middle, or the ending of his white-heated
discourse did the minister call the name of Gilbert Aderhold or say
the Oak Grange. The invective, the “Lo, this is he that troubleth
Israel!” only drew in circles, closer, closer, until there was no one
there who did not know who was meant. The tremendous accusation was
of Atheism, but in and out there tolled like a lesser bell, _Sorcery!
Sorcery!_ The withdrawing light, the hot, small, vagrant breaths of
air, announcers of the onward rolling storm, the darkened hollow of
the building with the whitewashed walls glimmering pale, the faces
lifted from the benches, the square Hall pew, the high pulpit and the
black sounding-board and the black figure with the lifted arms and the
death-like shaken hands, and in the back of the church, all knew, even
if they could not see him, the man who had made pact with the Devil....
A woman fainted; a child began a frightened, whimpering crying. The
sands had quite run out from the upper half of the hourglass....
Aderhold, close to the door, was the first of the congregation to
step from the church into the open air. It would seem that those near
him held back, so as to let the fearful thing forth and out. The
churchyard path stretched bare before him, between the yews to the
mossed gate, and so forth from the immediate pale. There came as yet no
challenge or molestation. He had looked for this; when all had risen
and he with them, it had been with an inward bracing to meet at the
door a writ of arrest. He looked to see the Hawthorn constable. But he
was not at the door, or out upon the path, or at the gate.... The storm
was at hand, with clouds heavy and dark as the yew trees and with a
mutter of thunder. As he reached the village street, raindrops touched
his face. Behind him the churchyard was astir with people, murmuring
and dark. He wrapped his cloak about him, pulled his hat down against
the rain, and faced homeward. Almost immediately, the church being at
the village end, the cloud-shadowed country was about him.
He walked rapidly for half a mile, then halted and stood in the wind
and rain, trying to think it out. It occurred to him that he might turn
back through the fields and passing the village come out on the highway
and strike southward to the town and the castle. He knew not if his
friend of the hawk were yet at the castle. And if he were not?—and if
he were?...
There was that at the Oak Grange which must be considered. His
book—there in the quiet room behind the cupboard’s oaken door, all his
writing lying there—that which he was trying to put down. It turned
him decisively from the town and the bare chance of reaching help.
His book was his lover and playmate and child. He put himself into
motion again and went on toward the Grange, beneath the tempestuous
sky, through the wind and the rain.... When he came within Hawthorn
Forest there arrived a sudden lull. The oaks stood still around
him, the raindrops fringing branch and twig and unfolding tufts of
velvet leaves. Overhead the clouds drove apart, there came a gleam of
intensest blue. As he moved through the forest it took on an ineffable
beauty. When he came to the edge and to the stream murmuring over its
pebbly strand there was a great rainbow. He crossed the footbridge and
went on by the fairy oak.
Within the still old house was none but himself. Dorothy and the boy,
her nephew, had been there in Hawthorn Church. They would come on but
slowly; indeed, they might have stopped at a cousin’s on the way;
indeed, he knew not if, terrified and at a loss, they would come back
to the Grange at all. They might, perhaps, have waited to beseech the
minister’s and the squire’s protection and advice. There was a fire
in the kitchen. Aderhold, spreading his cloak to dry, knelt upon the
hearth, crouched together, bathed by the good warmth. But even while
the light and comfort played about him there came into his mind,
suddenly, with sickening strength, a thing that he had witnessed in his
childhood, here in England. Again he saw a woman burning at a stake....
He shuddered violently, rose and left the room.
Upstairs he unlocked the cupboard and took from it a heap of closely
covered manuscript. It rested upon the table before him.... He stood
for some moments with a bowed head; presently his hand stole to the
leaves and caressed them. He knew what he should do; he should take
the whole down to the kitchen and lay it in the fire. Since the
warning of the man with the hawk he had known that that was what
should be done. The knowledge had lain upon his heart at night. “I
will do it to-morrow,” and again, “I will do it to-morrow.” The only
other thing was to hide it in some deep and careful place, whence, if
ever there came escape and security, he might recover it, or where,
long years after he was dead, men might find it and read it. He had
thought of digging beneath the fairy oak—but the fire, he knew, was
the safest.... He gathered all together and with it in his hands went
downstairs. He thought that he had decided upon the fire, but going, he
had a vision of a mattock and spade resting behind an outhouse door.
Now would be the time to dig, now at once! As his foot touched the oak
flooring of the hall there sounded a heavy knock upon the door. It was
not locked or barred; even as he stood the one uncertain instant, it
swung inward to admit the men who had followed him from Hawthorn.