“Nay, mine host. But a choice little pleasantry is afoot, and it demands that all who bear a share in it should be well horsed.”
“Well, you are ever a mad faggot,” said John Davenant. “And a man never knows what whimsey you will take next.”
“Peace, honest vintner. And upon your life as a famous Christian man, do I charge you to do my behest.”
Thoroughly mystified, John Davenant went to carry out these instructions, perhaps a trifle unwillingly. But he was an old friend of William Shakespeare, and although a somber fellow enough on the outside, there was a light of humor within. Besides, he had a very real respect for the moving spirit of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company.
CHAPTER XXVI
GREENFIELD MANOR was a very old house about ten miles out of Oxford. It lay in a secluded spot, but the road to London ran past the high walls of its park. A heavy growth of trees surrounded the house itself, which was in a state of neglect and disrepair.
A gloomy and forbidding place enough. The very atmosphere which invested this mass of decaying stonework seemed to invite ghosts to walk. Its chimneys rocked continually; its windows rattled. When the vane over the decrepit stables swung in the wind of the summer night, it was as if some lost soul was seeking to escape out of Hades.
As a fact, the house was certainly inhabited by a lost soul. Simon Heriot, its master, lay in the belief that he had done his nephew to death by a subtle, mean and cruel device. And no worthier purpose than greed had been in his heart. It had been his life-long passion to hold the fair manor and the broad lands in the west country, which generations of his name had held before him. These, however, had descended to the son of his elder brother. And the knowledge that there was only one life intervening between him and his great ambition, in the end, became too much for him.
The means to do ill deeds oft makes ill deeds done. It was by chance that the design was unfolded to Simon Heriot of swearing away his nephew’s life. But when occasion came to him he did not resist the call. The pent-up forces of his covetous envy rose up and slew him.
If ever a man might be said to have sold himself to the devil, that man was Simon Heriot. He had a cunning and subtle mind; moreover, he was very well acquainted with the world in which he lived. He was clever enough to make the entail of his nephew’s estates the price of his testimony. And, indeed, it was no uncommon thing in that day to reward those who brought and proved charges of high treason with the property of the people they had hounded to the scaffold. The times were very perilous for all men. The life of no man was safe. Black hatred and superstitious fear of the Pope, and his emissaries were rife throughout the land. In such circumstances, it was easy for a cunning and unscrupulous man to remove a rival from his path by some form of legal process. The character of the evidence was seldom tested. It was enough if it served the purpose it had in view. Gervase Heriot was not the first by many who had been done to death under the ready sanctions of the law.