She was bitter about the secrecy of those debts incurred unknown to her. And yet to set herself against John!
Wandering with the children down the garden-path, idly she plucked a red rose and laid its cheek against a white one already in her hand. A kingdom divided against itself.
She sighed, then became conscious of the boy pulling at her sleeve.
"Tell us a story, Mother," he was begging, "a story with fighting an' a sword."
"A story, Will, with fighting and a sword?" Never yet could she say the child nay. She held her roses from her and pondered while she gazed. And her heart was bitter.
"There was an Arden, child, whose blood is in your veins, who fought and fell at Barnet, crying shrill and fierce, 'Edward my King, St. George and victory!' And the young Edward, near him as he fell, called to a knight to lay hand to his heart, for Edward knew and loved him well, and had received of him money for a long-forgotten debt which young Edward's father would not press. So Edward called to a knight to lay hand upon his heart. But he was dead. 'A soldier and a knight,' said he who was afterward the King, 'and more-an honest man.'"
Then she pushed the boy aside and going swiftly to the house ran to her room; and face laid in her hands she wept. What had she said in the bitterness of her feeling? What-even to herself-had she said?
Yet money must be had, she admitted that. But to encumber the estate!
She shrank from her own people knowing; she had inherited more of her father's estate than her sisters, and there had been feeling, and her brothers-in-law, Lambert and Webb, would be but upheld in their prophecies about her husband's capacity to care for her property. She would not have them know. "Talk it over first with your father, John," she told her husband, "or with your brother Henry. Let us not rush blindly into this thing. You had promised anyhow, you remember, to take Will out to the sheep-shearing."
VII
So the next morning John Shakespeare swung Will up on the horse before him, and the two rode away through the chill mistiness of the dawn, Will kissing his hand back to Mother in the doorway. Bound for Grandfather's at Snitterfield they were. So out through the town, past the scattering homesteads with their gardens and orchards, traveled Robin, the stout gray cob, small Will's chattering voice as high-piped as the bird-calls through the dawn; on into the open country of meadows and cultivated fields, the mists lifting rosy before the coming sun, through lanes with mossy banks, cobwebs spun between the blooming hedgerows heavy with dew, over the hills, past the straggling ash and hawthorn of the dingles. And everywhere the cold, moist scent of dawn, and peep and call of nest-birds.
[Illustration: "Bound for Grandfather's at Snitterfield they were"]
And so early has been their start and so good stout Robin's pace, that reaching the Snitterfield farm, they find everything in the hurly-burly of preparation for sheep-shearing. So, after a hearty kissing by the womenfolk, aunts and cousins, Will, with a cake hot from the baking thrust into his hand, goes out to the steading to look around. At Snitterfield there are poultry, and calves, too, in the byre, and little pigs in the pen back of the barn. Then comes breakfast in the kitchen with the farm-hands with their clattering hobnailed shoes and tarry hands, after which follows the business of sheep-washing, which Will views from the shady bank of the pool, and in his small heart he is quite torn because of the plaintive bleatings of the frightened sheep. But he swallows it as a man should. There is a pedler haunting the sheep-shearing festivals of the neighborhood. The women have sent for him to bring his pack to Snitterfield, and Dad bids Will choose a pair of scented gloves for Mother-and be quick; they must be off for Stratford before the noon.
Dad seems short and curt. Grandfather, his broad, florid face upturned to Dad astride Robin, shakes his hoary head. "Doan' you do it, son John," says Grandfather; "'tis a-building on sand is any man who thinks to prosper on a mortgage. Henry and I'll advance you a bit. After which, cut down your living in Henley Street, son John, an' draw in the purse-strings."
VIII
But baby years pass. When Will Shakespeare is six, he hears that he is to go to school. But not to nod over a hornbook at the petty school-not John Shakespeare's son! Little Will Shakespeare is entered at King's New College, which is a grammar-school.
But, dear me! Dear me! It was a dreary place and irksome. At first small Will sat among his kind awed. When Schoolmaster breathed Will breathed, but when Schoolmaster glanced frowningly up from under overhanging brows like penthouse roofs, then the heart of Will Shakespeare quaked within him.
But that was while he was six. At seven, when the elements of Latin grammar confronted him, Will had already found grammar-school an excellent place to plead aching tooth or heavy head to stay away from. At eight, a dreary traveling for him to cover did his "Sententiae Pueriles" prove, and idle paths more pleasing.
At nine, he had learned to know many things not listed at grammar-school. For instance, he knew one Bardolph of the brazen, fiery nose, the tapster at the tavern. It was Bardolph who drew him out from under the knee and belaboring fists of one Thomas Chettle, another grammar-school boy, who had him down, behind High Cross in the Rother Market.
[Illustration: "For instance, he knew one Bardolph ... the tapster at the tavern"]
"In the devil's name," said Bardolph, setting him on his feet, "with your nose all gore an' never an eye you can open-what do you mean, boy, to be letting the like of that come over you?" "That" meant Thomas Chettle, his fists squared, and as red as any fighting turkey, held off at arm's-length by Bardolph.
"Come over me!" cries Will, with a rush at Thomas, head down, for all his being held off by Bardolph's other hand. "Who says he has come over me?"
Now the matter stood thus. The day before, Will Shakespeare had followed a company of strolling mountebanks about town instead of going to school. And Thomas Chettle had told Schoolmaster, and he had told Father. When Will reached home the evening before, Dad was telling as much to Mother and blaming her for it. "An' Chettle's lad admits Will had ever rather see the swords an' hear a drum than look upon his lessons--"
This Father was saying as Will sidled in. Will heard him say it. And so Thomas Chettle had to answer for it.
"Come over me!" says Will to Bardolph who is holding him off and contemplating him, a battered wreck. "Come over me!" spitting blood and drawing a sleeve across his gory countenance, "I'd like to see him do it!" Will Shakespeare was not one to know when he was beaten.
IX
A year or two more, and school grew more irksome. Father fumed, and Mother sighed and drew Will against her knee whereon lay new little Sister Ann while little Sister Joan toddled about the floor. "Canst not seem to care for your books at all, son?" Mother asked, brushing Will's red brown hair out of his eyes. "Canst not see how it frets Father, who would have his oldest son a scholar and a gentleman?"
He meant to try. But hadn't Dad himself let him off one day to tramp at heels after him and Uncle Henry in Arden Forest? Will Shakespeare at eleven is a sorry student.
There comes a day when he is a big boy near thirteen years old. It is a time when the soft, hot winds of spring and the scent and the pulse of growing things get in the blood, and set one sick panting for the woods and the feel of the lush green underfoot and the sound of running water. Not that Will Shakespeare can put it into words-he only knows that when the smell of the warm, newly turned earth comes in at the schoolroom window and the hum of a wandering bee rises above the droning of the lesson, he lolls on the hacked and ink-stained desk and gazes out at the white clouds flecking the blue, and all the truant blood in his sturdy frame pulls against his promises.