In the end, it was perhaps the resolved attitude of Anne that enabled Shakespeare to get his way. And, after all, if she had the courage to embrace a plan so desperate, it was hardly for Gervase to dissent.
And she, it seemed, with a strange faith discerned some slender hope in it. Such a faith could only spring out of the depths of her despair. But with the dauntless courage that had carried her through everything, she began at once to bring the whole force of her will to bear on the matter in hand.
Little as she knew of the man who had made this singular proposal, she could not remain insensible to his personality. It appealed to her in a subtle way. This man, with his gentle voice and face of sad expressiveness, had masked depths of power that few men and fewer women were able to resist.
Thus it was that the luckless fugitives came to yield themselves to the player’s care. Their pass was desperate, indeed. Whatever happened now could not make it worse. God knew, the expedient offered was forlorn enough, but for the sake of the slender hope it bore, they would submit themselves entirely to this man’s hands.
CHAPTER XXIX
AS if to lend color to Shakespeare’s fears, he was soon to hear disquieting news. Finding himself in the course of the morning in the tavern parlor, he overheard the conversation of those assembled there. A sturdy yeoman, it seemed, was full of information concerning a murder that had been committed during the night at the Grange, the house of Mr. Simon Heriot, along the Banbury Road.
“They do say that Mr. Heriot himself has had his throat cut by his own nephew,” said the bearer of the news.
“What’s that you say?” sharply interposed a man who sat in the corner drinking his morning flagon.
The man was Grisewood. Instantly, he was all attention and alertness.
The countryman repeated his story, to be sure with a number of embellishments that were very wide of the truth. But the essential fact was there, that Simon Heriot had been done to death by his nephew in the course of the previous night.