[XXIII]
THE RIDE TO STRATFORD
That must have been a momentous day in Shakespeare's life on which, after giving up his house in London, he mounted his horse and rode back to Stratford-on-Avon to take up his abode there for good.
He would recall that day in 1585 when, twenty-eight years younger, with his life lying before him veiled in the mists of expectation and uncertainty, he set out from Stratford to London to try his fortunes in the great city. Then his heart beat high, and he must have felt towards his horse much as the Dauphin did in Henry V. (Act iii. sc. 7) when he said, "When I bestride him I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it, the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes."
Life lay behind him now. His hopes had been fulfilled in many ways; he was famous, he had raised himself a degree in the social scale, above all he was rich, but for all that he was not happy.
The great town, in which he had spent the better part of a lifetime, had not so succeeded in attaching him to it that he would feel any pain in leaving it. There was neither man nor woman there so dear to him as to make society preferable to solitude, and the crowded life of London to the seclusion of the country and an existence passed in the midst of family and Nature.
He had toiled enough, his working days were over, and now, at last, the cloud should be lifted from his name which had so long been cast upon it by his profession. It was nine years since he had actually appeared upon the stage, since he had made over his parts to others, and now he had ceased to take any pleasure in his pen. None of those were left for whom he had cared to write plays and put them upon the stage; the new generation and present frequenters of the theatre were strangers to him. There was no one in London who would heed his leaving it, no friends to induce him to stay, no farewell banquet to be given in his honour.
He would remember his first arrival in London, and how, according to the custom of all poor travellers, he sold his horse at Smithfield. He could, if he wished, keep many horses now, but no power could renew the joyous mood of twenty-one. Then the wind had played with the long curls hanging below his hat, now he was elderly and bald.
The journey from London to Stratford took three days. He would, put up at the inns at which he was accustomed to stay on his yearly journey to and fro, and where he was always greeted as a welcome guest, and given a bed with snow-white sheets, for which travellers on foot were charged an extra penny, but which he, as rider, enjoyed gratis. The hostess at Oxford, pretty Mistress Davenant, would give him a specially cordial greeting. The two were old and good friends. Little William, born in 1606, and now seven years old, possessed a certain, perhaps accidental, resemblance of feature to the guest.
As Shakespeare rode on, Stratford, so well known and yet, as settled home, so new, would (as Hamlet says) rise "before his mind's eye." A life of daily companionship with his wife was to begin afresh after a break of twenty-eight years. She was now fifty-seven, and consequently much older, in proportion, than her husband of forty-nine than when they were lovers and newly married, the one under and the other somewhat over twenty. There could be no intellectual bond between them after so long a separation, and their married life was but an empty form.