A Warwickshire Lad

VI

But as spring came, the garden offered a broader stage for life. The Shakespeare house was in Henley Street, and a fine house it was-too fine, some held, for a man in John Shakespeare's circumstances-two-storied, of timber and plaster, with dormer-windows and a penthouse over its door. And like its neighbors, the house stood with a yard at the side, and behind, a garden of flowers and fruit and herbs. And here the boy played the warm days through, his mother stepping now and then to the lattice window to see what he was about. And, gazing, often she saw him through tears, because of a yearning love over him, the more because of the two children dead before his coming.

[Illustration: "His mother stepping now and then to the lattice window ..."]

And Will, seeing her there, would tear into the house and drag her by the hand forth into the sweet, rain-washed air.

"An' see, Mother," he would tell her, as he haled her on to the sward beyond the arbor, "here it is, the story you told us yester-e'en. Here is the ring where they danced last night, the little folk, an' here is the glow-worm caught in the spider's web to give them light."

But something had changed Mary Shakespeare's mood. John Shakespeare, chief bailiff and burgess of Stratford, was being sued for an old debt, and one which Mary Shakespeare had been allowed to think was paid. Thereupon came to light other outstanding debts of which she had not known which must be met. John Shakespeare, with irons in so many fires, seemed forever to have put money out, in ventures in leather, in wool, in corn, in timber, and to have drawn none in. And now he talked of a mortgage on the Asbies estate.

"Never," Mary told herself, with a look at little Will, at toddling Gilbert at her feet, with a thought for the unborn child soon to add another inmate to the household-"not with my consent. When the time comes they are grown, what will be left for them?"

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."