Yes, undoubtedly a gallant pair. John Markham, in spite of his superior condition and rising renown, rode behind his mistress at a respectful distance of ten yards. They sat their horses with great skill and assurance. First one and then the other, as they walked them slowly down the street, would touch them gently with the spur, in order to enjoy the pleasure of showing them off in the sight of the townspeople.
The player, still standing at the tailor’s door, could not take his eyes from the spectacle. Almost wistfully, and yet in a kind of entrancement, he watched them until at last there came a turn in the street and they were lost to view. Then he went within to rejoin his scandalized friend, who to compose his mind had had recourse already to the needle and shears.
“I never saw the like o’ that,” said Master Nicholas Tidey. “It’s rare to be the quality. But that’s nothing to you, Master Shakespeare. I reckon you see it every day o’ the week.”
“It’s a fine thing, I grant you, when it rides proud in the sight of heaven,” said the player abstractedly.
“Aye, Master Shakespeare, and even when it goes afoot!” said the tailor, whose mind was more pedestrian. “It does a man good, I always think, to have a sight of the quality now and again. But as I say, Master Shakespeare, it is nothing to you who go to Court like a gentleman.”
But the part-proprietor of the Globe Theatre was not heeding the words of his friend. The light that never was on sea or land had come into those somber eyes. Suddenly his hand struck the tailor’s counter a great blow. “That is an adorable miniard,” he said. “By my soul, if Gloriana requires a comedy, here is matter for a comedy for Gloriana!”
CHAPTER III
IN the meantime, the unconscious cause of Mr. William Shakespeare’s enthusiasm was proceeding somewhat arrogantly through the streets of the town. Mistress Anne Feversham was mightily proud of herself, of her young blood-horse, of her pied merlin, above all of her brand-new hawking-breeches, which she had had the audacity to copy from two particularly dashing ladies of the Court who had accompanied the Queen on her recent visit to Nottingham.
As for John Markham, she was proud of him too. He made a fine squire. But nothing would have induced her to let him know it. None the less surely was he subdued to her purposes. A wise fellow in all things else, he was the true knight, the ready slave of his young mistress. And his young mistress was imperious.
High temper was in every clean-run line of her. It was in the eye, a thing of mist and fire, gloriously placed like that of one of Leonardo’s ladies. It was in the nose, curved like the beak of her merlin; in the delicate molding of the chin and mouth, in the slender column of the throat, in the poise of the head, in the supple assurance of the body which ruled a beast of mettle and goaded it into setting up its will for the pleasure of subduing it.