What could have happened? Those were perilous times indeed; times in which the quietest, most law-abiding citizen took his life in his hand when he walked down the street. The tragedy of poor Kit Marlowe was in every mind. Had Will Shakespeare, the incomparable poet and charming personality, met the assassin’s knife by chance or by design? The face of Raleigh portended not less than that. Yet not one of these men could summon enough resolution to set his doubts at rest. The silence was painful. A pin could have been heard to fall in the room.
Suddenly there came sounds of heavy feet stumbling, blundering up the wooden stairs. The door was flung open. A thick, squat, gnarled-looking fellow reeled in like a man under the influence of wine. His face shone livid in the light of the candles.
It was Burbage the tragedian.
“Speak, man! Tell the news!” came the hoarse demand of a dozen voices.
“Shakespeare,” The voice of the tragedian could hardly be heard. “He is arrested by the Queen’s order. They say—they say he will lose his head.”
CHAPTER XXXV
GRIEF, consternation, horror surged through that room. For the moment, the shock of the announcement was more than they could bear. It was as if each man present had been stunned by a blow. But the calm was for the moment only. In the next came a babel of tongues framing a score of incoherent questions.
Richard Burbage replied to none of these. He stood an instant swaying, his ashen face framed in the eerie glow of the candles. And then without a further word he turned and passed like a ghost through the door of the room with the same abruptness with which he had entered it. He went headlong, stumbling and creaking, down the ricketty stairs of the old tavern and out into the July evening.
In the street, hard by the signboard, under the shadow of the tavern wall, two men lay in wait for the tragedian. One of these was his fellow-player, William Kemp, the other John Heming the manager of the Globe Theatre. These also were men of strong feelings, but they had them under control, whereas Richard Burbage who might almost be said to worship the ground on which the poet trod, had been carried completely away by this direst of tragedies, which he knew not how to face.
As became good men, true friends, staunch comrades, Kemp and Heming were fully determined not to let Burbage pass out of their sight during the remainder of that night. But they must not show themselves in his. Already he had resented their presence fiercely, had cursed them when they had sought to console him, and had so far fallen from that poise of mind and temper which at ordinary times made him a most agreeable companion, as to threaten to do them violence, “if they would not have the goodness to keep themselves to themselves and stand out of his light.”