[XXIV]
STRATFORD-UPON-AVON
He was home again. Home once more, where he knew every road and path, every house and field, every tree and bush. The silence of the empty streets struck him afresh as his footsteps echoed down them, and the river Avon shone bright and still between the willows bending down to the water's edge. He had shot many a deer in the neighbourhood of that stream, and it was by its banks that Jaques, in As You Like It, had sat as he watched the wounded stag that sighed as though its leathern coat would burst, while the big round tears coursed down its innocent nose. The fine arched bridge was erected in the time of Henry VIII. by the same Sir Hugh Clopton who had built New Place, the house which Shakespeare had bought, and been obliged to restore before his family could live in it.
Close by the river stood the avenue leading to the beautiful Gothic church of the Holy Trinity, with its slender spire and handsome windows. Within were the graves and monuments of the neighbouring gentry, and there, so much sooner than he could possibly have dreamed, was Shakespeare himself to lie.
Passing through Church Street, he would come upon the Guild Chapel, a fine square building, from whose tower rang the weekly bells calling to Sunday-morning service. He remembered those bells from of old, and now they would be constantly sounding in his ears, for New Place lay just across the road. Soon they would be tolling his own funeral knell. Directly adjoining the chapel stood the timbered building which represented both Guildhall and school. Once it had seemed large and spacious; how small and mean it looked now! It was more satisfactory to glance on to the corner where his large garden and green lawns stood, and his eye would rest affectionately upon the mulberry-tree his own hands had planted. Ten steps from his door lay the tavern, quaint and low, and how familiar! Not the first time would it be that he had sat at that table, the largest, it was said, that had ever been cut in England from a single piece of wood. He would at least find something to drink there, and a game of draughts or dice. With a sigh he realised that this tavern was likely to prove his chief refuge from his loneliness.
Every spot was rich in memories. Five minutes' walk would bring him to Henley Street, where he had played as a child, and where stood the old house in which he was born. He would enter; there was the kitchen, which had been the living room as well in his parents' time; near the entry was the woman's storeroom, and above, the sleeping-room in which he was born. How little he dreamed that this spot was to become a place of pilgrimage for the whole Anglo-Saxon race—nay, for the whole civilised world.
He would take the road to Shottery, along which he had walked times out of number in his youth—for had not he and Anne Hathaway kept their trysts there? Right and left rose the high hedges separating the fields. Trees, standing singly or in groups, were scattered about the country, and the road, lined with elms, beeches, and willows, wound its way through the undulating country lying between Stratford and Shottery. Half-an-hour's walk would bring him to Anne Hathaway's cottage, with the moss-grown roof. He would enter, and look once more upon the wooden bench in the chimney-corner on which he and she had sat in their ardent youth. How long ago it all seemed! There was the old fifteenth-century bed in which Anne's parents had slept, with her, as a child, at their feet. The mattress was nothing but a straw palliasse, but the bedstead was beautifully carved with figures in the old style. When, a year or two later, he bequeathed to his wife "the second best bed," did he remember that this bed was already hers, I wonder?
Another day he would make his way as far as Warwick and its castle. The town was not unlike that of Stratford; it had the same timbered houses, but here the two great towers of the castle rose and predominated over the beautiful scenery. How vividly the past would rise up before him as he stood on the bridge and gazed up at the castle. He would remember his own youthful dreams concerning it, and the forms he had conjured up from their graves to people it afresh. There was the Earl of Warwick, who enumerated all the proofs of Gloucester's violent death in Henry VI. and that other Earl in the Second Part of Henry IV, (Act iii. sc. I) into whose mouth he had put words whose truth he was now proving:
"There is a history in all men's lives
Figuring the nature of the times deceased."
Charlcote House he would see too. He had stood as a culprit before its master once, and had suffered the bitterest humiliation of his life, one so deep that it had driven him away from home, and had thus been the means of leading him to success and prosperity in London.