There was a stealthy rustling in the right-hand cell. The fellow in it had his ear pressed close against the bars. “He is listening,” said Nick.
The fellow cursed and shook his fist, and then, when Master Carew dropped his voice and would have gone on whispering, set up so loud a howling and clanking of his chains that the lad could not make out one word the master-player said.
“Peace, thou dog!” cried Carew, and kicked the grating. But the fellow only yelled the louder.
Carew looked sorely troubled. “I dare not let him hear,” said he. “The very walls of Newgate leak.”
“Yak, yah, yah, thou gallows-bird!”
“Yet I must tell thee, Nick.”
“Yah, yah, dangle-rope!”
“Stay! would Will Shakspere come? Why, here, I’ll send him word. He’ll come—Will Shakspere never bore a grudge; and I shall so soon go where are no grudges, envy, storms, or noise, but silence and the soft lap of everlasting sleep. He’ll come—Nick, bid him come, upon his life, to the Old Bailey when I am taken up.”
Nick nodded. It was strange to have his master beg.
Carew was looking up at a thin streak of light that came in through the narrow window at the stair. “Nick,” said he, huskily, “last night I dreamed I heard thee singing; but ’twas where there was a sweet, green field and a stream flowing through a little wood. Methought ’twas on the road past Warwick toward Coventry. Thou’lt go there some day and remember Gaston Carew, wilt not, lad? And, Nick, for thine own mother’s sake, do not altogether hate him; he was not so bad a man as he might easily have been.”