“I see the town is full of play-acting rogues,” she said. “Whence do they come?”
“From London, madam, I believe,” said Master Tidey, without venturing to look in the direction of his friend.
“I am afraid they are a saucy-looking crew. My groom”—perhaps it was well that the voice of Mistress Anne did not reach the ears of the haughty young falconer who was taking charge of her horse at the tailor’s door—“my groom pointed them out to me as I passed the Moot Hall. As soon as I return to the Castle I will inform my father the Constable, and I will see if they cannot be put in the stocks, which to my mind is where they belong.”
As became the shrewd man he was, Master Nicholas Tidey made no reply. He was content to nod his head gravely, as if he tacitly approved, while at the same time he contrived to keep a tail of an eye upon his distinguished friend. There might or there might not have been a ghost of a smile upon that prim and cautious mouth.
Indeed, very wisely, Master Tidey left it to the play-actor himself to try a fall with such a formidable adversary. And this that daring individual proceeded to do in a manner quite cool and leisurely, and yet with a vastly considered air. In his eye, it was true, there was a suspicion of something far other than gravity. That of course was regrettable; but it was undoubtedly there.
Mr. William Shakespeare’s first act was to remove his hat with its single short cock’s feather, and then he bowed very low indeed, in the manner of one quite well aware of addressing a social superior.
“Cry you mercy, mistress,” he said, “but as one who is himself a poor actor may he ask wherein his guild has had the unhappiness to offend you?”
Mistress Anne Feversham met this effrontery with a disdain that was wonderful. Her chief concern at the moment was to show her great contempt without a descent into downright ill-breeding. But as soon as she met the somber eyes of this individual, in which a something that was rare and strange was overlaid by a subtle mockery, this natural instinct took wings and fled. In those eyes was something that hardly left her mistress of herself, in spite of her father the Constable, her young blood-horse and her incomparable pair of galligaskins.
“My father the Constable would have all play-actors whipped,” said Mistress Anne Feversham.
But her voice was not as she had intended it to be. Moreover, her father the Constable had yet to deliver himself of such an illiberal sentiment. And this graceless individual seemed to be fully aware that this was the case.