Bankside they hie with money in their purses: and if his purse be long enough, my Lord Mayor shall have a fountain running with real wine, and Mass Thomas a Hell with flames of real cloth-in-grain, or at least a Lazarus with real sores. Doth the Court require a masque, the Queen a bull-baiting, the City a good roaring tragedy, full of blood and impugned innocence——Will! Will, I say! Tarry a moment!"
They had reached the landing, and looked down a corridor at the end of which, where a lamp hung, Shakespeare waited with his hand on a door-latch. From behind the door came a buzz of many voices.
"Lad, lad, let us go in together! Though the world's applause weary thee, 'tis sweet to thine old father."
As he pressed down the latch the great man turned for an instant with a quick smile, marvellously tender.
"He can smile, then?" thought the apprentice to himself. "And I was doubting that he kept it for his writing!"
Within the room, as it were with one shout, a great company leapt to its feet, cheering and lifting glasses. Shakespeare, pausing on the threshold, smiled again, but more reservedly, bowing to the homage as might a king.
V
Three hours the feast had lasted: and the apprentice had listened to many songs, many speeches, but scarcely to the promised talk of gods. The poets, maybe, reserved such talk for the Mermaid. Here they were outnumbered by the players and by such ladies as the Bankside (which provided everything) furnished to grace the entertainment; and doubtless they subdued their discourse to the company. The Burbages, Dick and Cuthbert, John Heminge, Will Kempe—some half-a-dozen of the crew perhaps—might love good literature: but even these were pardonably more elate over the epilogue than over the play. For months they, the Lord Chamberlain's servants, had felt the eyes of London upon them: to-night they had triumphed, and to-morrow London would ring with appreciative laughter. It is not every day that your child of pleasure outwits your man of business at his own game: it is not once in a generation that he scores such a hit as had been scored to-day. The ladies, indeed, yawned without dissembling, while Master Jonson—an ungainly youth with a pimply face, a rasping accent, and a hard pedantic manner—proposed success to the new comedy and long life to its author; which he did at interminable length; spicing his discourse with quotations from Aristotle, Longinus, Quintilian, the Ars Poetica, Persius, and Seneca, authors less studied than the Aretine along Bankside. He loved Will Shakespeare. … A comedy of his own (as the company might remember) owed not a little to his friend Will Shakespeare's acting. … Here was a case in which love and esteem—yes, and worship—might hardly be dissociated. … In short, speaking as modestly as a young man might of his senior, Will Shakespeare was the age's ornament and, but for lack of an early gruelling in the classics, might easily have been an ornament for any age. Cuthbert Burbage—it is always your quiet man who first succumbs on these occasions—slid beneath the table with a vacuous laugh and lay in slumber. Dick Burbage sat and drummed his toes impatiently. Nashe puffed at a pipe of tobacco. Kempe, his elbows on the board, his chin resting on his palms, watched the orator with amused interest, mischief lurking in every crease of his wrinkled face. Will Shakespeare leaned back in his chair and scanned the rafters, smiling gently the while. His speech, when his turn came to respond, was brief, almost curt. He would pass by (he said) his young friend's learned encomiums, and come to that which lay nearer to their thoughts than either the new play or the new play's author. Let them fill and drink in silence to the demise of an old friend, the vanished theatre, the first ever built in London. Then, happening to glance at Heminge as he poured out the wine—"Tut, Jack!" he spoke up sharply: "keep that easy rheum for the boards. Brush thine eyes, lad: we be all players here—or women—and know the trade."
It hurt. If Heminge's eyes had begun to water sentimentally, they flinched now with real pain. This man loved Shakespeare with a dog's love. He blinked, and a drop fell and rested on the back of his hand as it fingered the base of his wine-glass. The apprentice saw and noted it.
"And another glass, lads, to the Phœnix that shall arise! A toast, and this time not in silence!" shouted John Shakespeare, springing up, flask in one hand and glass in the other. Meat or wine, jest or sally of man or woman, dull speech or brisk—all came alike to him. His doublet was unbuttoned; he had smoked three pipes, drunk a quart of sack, and never once yawned. He was enjoying himself to the top of his bent. "Music, I say! Music!" A thought seemed to strike him; his eyes filled with happy inspiration. Still gripping his flask, he rolled to the door, flung it open, and bawled down the stairway—
"Ahoy! Below, there!"
"Ahoy, then, with all my heart!" answered a voice, gay and youthful, pat on the summons. "What is't ye lack, my master?"
"Music, an thou canst give it. If not——"
"My singing voice broke these four years past, I fear me."
"Your name, then, at least, young man, or ever you thrust yourself upon private company."
"William Herbert, at your service." A handsome lad—a boy, almost—stood in the doorway, having slipped past John Shakespeare's guard: a laughing, frank-faced boy, in a cloak slashed with orange-tawny satin. So much the apprentice noted before he heard a second voice, as jaunty and even more youthfully shrill, raised in protest upon the stairhead outside.
"And where the master goes," it demanded, "may not his page follow?"
John Shakespeare seemingly gave way to this second challenge as to the first. "Be these friends of thine, Will?" he called past them as a second youth appeared in the doorway, a pretty, dark-complexioned lad, cloaked in white, who stood a pace behind his companion's elbow and gazed into the supper-room with eyes at once mischievous and timid.
"Good-evening, gentles!" The taller lad comprehended the feasters and the disordered table in a roguish bow. "Good-evening, Will!" He singled out Shakespeare, and nodded.
"My Lord Herbert!"
The apprentice's eye, cast towards Shakespeare at the salutation given, marked a dark flush rise to the great man's temples as he answered the nod.
"I called thee 'Will,'" answered Herbert lightly.
"You called us 'gentles,'" Shakespeare replied, the dark flush yet lingering on either cheek. "A word signifying bait for gudgeons, bred in carrion."
"Yet I called thee Will," insisted Herbert more gently. "'Tis my name as well as thine, and we have lovingly exchanged it before now, or my memory cheats me."
"'Tis a name lightly exchanged in love." With a glance at the white-cloaked page Shakespeare turned on his heel.
"La, Will, where be thy manners?" cried one of the women. "Welcome, my young Lord; and welcome the boy beside thee for his pretty face! Step in, child, that I may pass thee round to be kissed."
The page laughed and stepped forward with his chin defiantly tilted. His eyes examined the women curiously and yet with a touch of fear.
"Nay, never flinch, lad! I'll do thee no harm," chuckled the one who had invited him. "Mass o' me, how I love modesty in these days of scandal!"
"Music? Who called for music?" a foreign voice demanded: and now in the doorway appeared three newcomers, two men and a woman—the same three of whom the apprentice had caught a glimpse within the room at the stairs' foot. The spokesman, a heavily built fellow with a short bull-neck and small cunning eyes, carried a drum slung about his shoulders and beat a rub-a-dub on it by way of flourish. "Take thy tambourine and dance, Julitta—
Julie, prends ton tambourin;
