A Warwickshire Lad

XII

And after that, things went worse in the Shakespeare household. All of John Shakespeare's ventures were proving failures. Debt pressed on every side. There began talk again of a mortgage on the Asbies estate, and this time none could say nay.

Dad went about with his head sunk on his breast, and at home sat staring in moody silence.

[Illustration: "Dad ... sat staring in moody silence"]

"Don't, Mary, don't," he would say to Mother, putting her hand on his shoulder. "Take the children away. Instead of the name their father would have left them, 'John Shakespeare, Gentleman,' they are to read it-what?"

"John, John," said Mother, "is there no more then in it all-our love, our lives-than pride?"

Pride! Will Shakespeare by now knew what it meant, and his heart went out to his father. He had felt the sting of this thing himself. It had been the year before. Dad had taken him behind him on his horse to Kenilworth, to see the masks and fireworks given by the Earl of Leicester in the Queen's honor. The gay London people come down with the court had sat in stands and galleries to witness the spectacle of the water pageant, breathing their perfumed breath down upon the country people crowding the ground below. And Will Shakespeare among these, at sight of the great Queen, had cheered with a lusty young throat and thrown his cap up with the rest. Will Shakespeare was the once chief bailiff's son. He was the son of Mary Arden of the Asbies. Though he never had thought about it one way or another, he had always known himself as good as the best.

And so at Kenilworth, standing with the crowd and looking up at the jeweled folk in fine array casting their jokes and gibes down at the trammel, he had laughed, too, as honest as any. But when the time came for the water pageant, Dad had given him a lift up and a boost to the branches of a tree. And he had heard what she said, the lady upon whom he had from the first fixed his young gaze, the dark lady, with the jewels in her dusky hair, breathing lure and beauty and glamour. As he straddled the limb of his high perch that brought him so near her, he heard her cry out, her head thrown backward on her proud young throat: "Ah, the little beast, bringing the breath of the rabble up to our nostrils."

And it was something like to what burned in young Will Shakespeare's soul then that Dad was feeling now. Will, big boy that he was, laid a hand on Dad's hand. Father looked up; their eyes met.

Dad threw an arm about his shoulder and drew him close-father and son.

Something passed from the older to the younger. The boy squared his shoulders. The man in Will Shakespeare was born.

How best could he help Dad? So the lad pondered, meanwhile digging the sense piecemeal out of his Ovid for the morrow's lesson.

"It is the mind that makes the man, and our strength-measure-vigor"-any one of the three words would do-"our measure is in our immortal souls."

Why-why is there truth in books? Had Ovid lived and been a man, a man who knew and fought it out himself?

Will Shakespeare caught sight of a great and glorious kingdom he had not visioned before. The schoolmaster hitherto had talked in riddles.