A Warwickshire Lad

II

But these things all vanish from mind when the outer door opens and Dad comes in stamping and blowing. Dad is late, but men are always late. It is expected that they should come in late and laugh at the women who chide and remind them that candles cost and that it makes the maid testy to be kept waiting.

Men should laugh loud like Dad, and catch Mother under the chin and kiss her once, twice, three times. Will means to be just such a man when he grows up, and to fill the room with his big shoulders and bigger laugh as Dad is doing now while tossing Brother Gilbert. He, little Will, he will never be one like Goodman Sadler, Gammer's son-in-law, with a lean, long nose, and a body slipping flatlike through a crack of the door.

And here Dad bends to tweak the ear of Will who would laugh noisily if it hurt twice as badly. It makes him feel himself a man to wink back those tears of pain.

[Illustration: "Dad bends to tweak the ear of Will"]

"A busy afternoon this, Mary," says Dad. "Old Timothy Quinn from out Welcombe way was in haggling over a dozen hides to sell. Then Burbage was over from Coventry about that matter of the players, and kept me so that I had to send Bardolph out with your Cousin Lambert to Wilmcote to mark that timber for felling."

Now for all Master Shakespeare's big, off-hand mentioning thus of facts, this was meant for a confession.

Mary Shakespeare had risen to take the crowing Gilbert, handed back to her by her husband, and with the other hand was encircling Will, holding to her skirt. She was tall, with both grace and state, and there was a chestnut warmth in the hair about her clear, white brow and nape, and in the brown of her serene and tender eyes. These eyes smiled at John Shakespeare with a hint of upbraiding, and she shook her head at him with playful reproach.

Little Will saw her do it. He knew too how to interpret such a look. Had Father been naughty?

"You are not selling more of the timber, John?" asked Mother.

"Say the word, Mistress Mary Arden of the Asbies," says Father grandly, "and I stop the bargain with your Cousin Lambert where it stands. 'Tis yours to say about your own. Though nothing spend, how shall a man live up to his state? But it shall be as you say, although 'tis for you and the boy. He is the chief bailiff's son-his Dad can feel he has given him that, but would have him more. I have never forgot your people felt their Mary stepped down to wed a Shakespeare. I have applied to the Herald's College for a grant of arms. The Shakespeares are as good as any who fought to place the crown on Henry VII's head. But it shall be stopped. The land and the timber on it is Mistress Mary Shakespeare's, not mine."

But Mary, pushing little Will aside clung to her husband's arm, and the warmth in her tender eyes deepened to something akin to yearning as they looked up at him. With the man of her choice, and her children-with these Mary Shakespeare's life and heart were full. There was no room for ambition for she was content. Had life been any sweeter to her as Mary Arden of the Asbies, daughter of a gentleman, than as Mary Shakespeare, wife of a dealer in leathers? Nay, nor as sweet!

But she could not make her husband see it so. Yet-and she looked up at him with a sudden passion of love in that gaze-it was this big, sanguine, restless, masterful spirit in him that had won her. From the narrow, restricted conditions of a provincial gentlewoman's life, she had looked out into a bigger world for living, through the eyes of this masterful yeoman, his heart big with desire to conquer and ambition to achieve. Was her faith in his capacity to know and seize the essential in his venturing, less now than then? Never, never-not that, not that!

"Do as you will about it, John," begs Mary, her cheek against his arm, "only-is it kind to say the land is mine? We talked that all out once, goodman mine. Only this one thing more, John, for I would not seem ever to carp and faultfind-you know that, don't you?-but that Bardolph--"

"He's a low tavern fellow, I allow, Mary-of course, of course. I know all you would say-his nose afire and his ruffian black poll ever being broken in some brawl, but he's a good enough fellow behind it, and useful to me. You needs must keep on terms with high and low, Mary, to hold the good will of all. That's why I am anxious to arrange this matter with Burbage to have the players here, if the Guild will consent--"

"Players?" says Will, listening at his father's side. "What are players?"

"Tut," says Dad, "not know the players! They are actors, Will-players. Hear the boy-not know the players!"

But Mother strokes his hair. "When I told you a tale, sweet, this very morn, you went to playing it after. I was the Queen-mother, you said, outside the prison walls, and you and Brother were the little Princes in the cruel tower, and thus you played. You stood at the casement, two gentle babes, cradling each other in your arms, and called to me below. So with the players, child, they play the story out instead of telling it. But now, these my babes to bed."