Great Britain -- History -- James I, 1603-1625 -- Fiction; Witchcraft -- Fiction
Aderhold came and knelt beside the bed, and laid his hands over the
cold and shrunken hand of Master Hardwick. “I would trust and hope—and
that not less in myself than in that Other that seems to spread around
us. I think that ourselves and that Other may turn out to be the same.
I would think of myself as continuing, as journeying on, as surely
carrying with me, in some fashion, memory of the past, as growing
endlessly through endless experience. I would take courage. And if, in
my heart, I knew that in this life I had at times—not all the time,
but at times—been sour and hard and withholding and fearful, and if I
felt in my heart that that made against light and love and wisdom and
strength for all—then, as I lay here dying, and as I died, I would
put that withholding and fear from me, and step forth toward better
things.... There is within you a fountain of love and strength. Trust
yourself to your higher self.... Hoist sail and away!”
The night passed, and at dawn Master Hardwick died. Aderhold closed
his eyes, straightened his limbs, and smoothed the bed upon which
he lay. Going to the window he set the casement wide. The dawn was
coming up in stairs and slopes of splendour. The divine freshness,
the purity, the high, austere instigation, the beginning again....
The dawn perpetual, never ceasing, the dawn elsewhere when here would
be noon, the dawn elsewhere when here would be night—Never, from
the first mists upon earth rising to the great sun, had dawn failed,
dawn rising from the bath of night and sleep, dawn the new birth, the
beginning again, the clean-washed.... Aderhold breathed the divine air,
the blended solemnity and sweetness. The light was growing, a thousand
beauties were unfolding, and with them laughter and song. The water
rippling over the stones came to him with a sound of merriment. The
window was clustered around with ivy and a spray nodded, nodded against
his hand with an effect of familiarity, a friend tapping to call his
attention. From some near-by bush a thrush began to sing—so golden,
so clear. “O moving great and small!” said Aderhold; “O thought of all
sense and soul, gathered, interfused, and aware of a magic Oneness! O
macrocosm that I, the microcosm, will one day lift to and be and know
that I am—O sea of all faiths, O temperer of every concept, O eternal
permission and tolerance, nurse of growth and artifex of form from
form!... These children’s masks which we lift upon a stick and call
Thee, crying, Lo, this is God with the fixed face—”
He rested a little longer in the window, listening to the thrush, then
turned, looked again at the quiet figure upon the bed, and going from
the room wakened old Dorothy and the boy. Later that day, Will, Goodman
Cole, old Heron, and a lawyer from the town being present, he searched
for and found the spring that opened the panel Master Hardwick had
indicated. Behind was a recess, and within it twenty gold-pieces. He
gave them into the lawyer’s hands for keeping.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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