That night he slept well. The next morning, as he was eating his breakfast, that was spare enough, he heard a loud and formal crying in the street below. He went to the window. A crier was approaching, at his heels a mob of boys and of the idle generally. “The Queen is Dead!—The Queen is Dead!—The Queen is Dead!—Long Live King James!”
CHAPTER III
THE TWO PHYSICIANS
He went that morning to visit the alderman, inopportune as he knew the visit would be esteemed. But many things were inopportune—hunger, for instance. The alderman found the visit offensively, unpatriotically inopportune. “What! The King’s Majesty’s ascension day—!” But one thing saved Aderhold, and that was the presence in the alderman’s parlour of some seven or eight cronies, men and women. It would not do—it would not do for the alderman to seem haggling and unwilling. Aderhold quitted the house the richer by twelve shillings.
The narrow streets were crowded; everybody was out, excited and important as though he or she had died or been crowned. The physician strolled with the others. The morning was fine, he felt wealthy and happy. The sunshine that stroked the projecting, timbered fronts of houses was the sunshine of home, the soft and moist light of England. He loved England. He wandered for an hour or two here and there in the London of less than two hundred thousand souls. He went down to the riverside, and sat upon a stone step, and gazed into the purple, brooding distance.... At last he turned back, and after a time found himself in the street of his lodging, and before the house.
It was a narrow, poor, and gloomy place, owned by people whom he guessed to have fallen on evil days. The plainly dressed elderly woman from whom he had hired his room had told him, indeed, as much. “Aye?” said Aderhold. “Then, mother, I’ll feel the more at home.” He had lodged here now ten days and he had seen only the elderly woman and her son, a boy far gone in consumption who coughed and coughed. The woman was a silent, rigid person, withered but erect, wearing a cap and over her gown of dark stuff a coarse white kerchief and apron. This morning, when she brought him his half loaf and tankard of ale, he had spoken with casualness of the Cap and Bells. She looked at him strangely. “The Cap and Bells!... Doubtless you heard good talk there.” Then had come the crying about the Queen’s death. When he turned from the window the woman was gone.
Now he entered the house. As he laid his hand upon the stair-rail the woman stood framed in a doorway. “Tarry a little,” she said. “I wish to tell you that this house will lodge you no longer.”
Aderhold stood still, then turned. “And why, good mother? I like my room and the house. I have striven to be in no way troublesome.” He put his hand in his purse and drew it forth with the alderman’s shillings upon the palm. “You see I have money. You’ll not lose by me.”
A voice came from the room behind the woman. “Let him enter, mother. We would see this fellow who will make no trouble for us.”
Aderhold noted a pale triumph in the woman’s strong, lined face and in her tense, updrawn figure. “Aye, it happened to give thanks for!” she told him. “Two things happened this morning. A King came to the throne who, for all his mother’s scarlet and raging sins, has himself been bred by godly men to godly ways! And my two sons came home from overseas!”
She turned and passed through the doorway into the room from which she had come. Aderhold, after a moment of hesitation, followed. It was a large, dark place, very cold and bare. Here, too, was a table, drawn toward the middle of the room, with a cloth upon it and bread and a piece of meat. Beside it, chair and stool pushed back, stood two men—the returned sons Aderhold was at once aware. He had seen before men like these men—English sectaries abroad, men who stood with the Huguenots in France, and in the Low Countries fought Spain and the Devil with the soldiers of Orange. Estranged or banished from home, lonely and insular, fighting upon what they esteemed the Lord’s side, in the place where they esteemed the fight to be hottest, they exhibited small, small love and comradeship for those in whose cause they fought. Only, truly, in conventicles, could they seem to warm to people of another tongue and history. Ultra-zealous, more Calvin than Calvin, trained to harshness in a frightful war, iron, fanatic, back now they came to England, the most admirable soldiers and the most uncharitable men!
The two stood in their plain doublets, their great boots, their small falling collars. They were tall and hard of aspect, the one bearded, the other with a pale, clean-shaven, narrow, enthusiast’s face. The home-keeping son also had risen from table. He stood beside his mother, coughing and pressing a cloth to his lips.
The bearded man spoke. “Good-morrow, friend!”
“Good-morrow, friend,” answered Aderhold.
“You spoke that,” said the bearded man, “as though you were indeed a friend, whereas we know you to be but a Cap and Bells friend.”
“I do not take your meaning,” said Aderhold. “I would be friends—no man knows how I would be friends with men.”
The shaven man spoke. “Thou hypocritical prelate’s man! Why did you let slip to my mother that the Cap and Bells was your place of revelling and roistering and blackening God to his face? As if, before we went to the wars, the Cap and Bells was not known for what it was—yea, and is! for my mother saith the leopard hath not changed his spots nor the Ethiop his skin—a bishop-loving, stained-glass praising, Prayer-Book upholding, sacrament kneeling, bowing, chanting, genuflecting, very pillar and nest of prelacy! drinking-place of all they who, if they had their wicked will, would give into the hand of ruin—yea, would pillory and stock, yea, would put to the rack if they might, yea, would give to the flame if they were strong enough!—the Lord’s chosen people, sole fence between this land and the fate of the cities of the plain!”
“There have been before now,” said the bearded man, “spies sent among the Lord’s people, and always such have been received and comforted in that same house—to wit, the Cap and Bells!”
The consumptive took the red cloth from his lips. “Mother, mother, did I not say, when the man came, that he had a strange look?”
“Aye, Andrew,” said the mother, “he went like a man with a guilty load and watched his shadow.—But I had you to think on, and the need for bread, and he paid me, which, God knoweth! they do not always do. And it came not into my head, until, before he thought, he had said the ‘Cap and Bells,’ that he might be here to spy and wring news of us—cozening us to tell reportable tales of the Lord’s Saints!” She stopped, then spoke on with a high, restrained passion and triumph. “But now—but now I think that that is what he is! But now I am not afraid—and now he may get his deserts—seeing that the new King is surely for us, and that my sons have come home!”
“The new King!” exclaimed the shaven man. “The new King is an old Stuart! Lean upon that reed and it will pierce your hand! I tell that to my brother and to you, mother, and you will not believe—”
“Time will show,” said the bearded man impatiently. “Time will show which of us is right. But to-day my mother can turn out this bishop’s man, neck and crop! Yea, and if he murmurs—”
He made a step forward, a big-boned, powerful man, grim of countenance. His hand shot out toward the physician.
Aderhold gave back a step, then recovered himself. “You are mistaken,” he said. “I am no spy and I am no bishop’s man. Like you, I have