“I’ll do my best,” said Nick, his own eyes full.
The turnkey raised his heavy bunch of keys. “I’ll ding thee out o’ this” said he.
And the last Nick Attwood saw of Gaston Carew was his wistful eyes hunting down the stairway after him, and his hand, with its torn fine laces, waving at him through the bars.
And when he came to the Mermaid Inn Master Shakspere’s comedy was done, and Master Ben Jonson was telling a merry tale that made the tapster sick with laughing.
CHAPTER XXXIII
CICELY DISAPPEARS
That Master Will Shakspere should be so great seemed passing strange to Nick, he felt so soon at home with him. It seemed as if the master-maker of plays had a magic way of going out to and about the people he met, and of fitting his humor to them as though he were a glover with their measure in his hand.
With Nick he was nothing all day long but a jolly, wise, and gentle-hearted boy, wearing his greatness like an old cloth coat, as if it were a long-accustomed thing, and quite beyond all pride, and went about his business in a very simple way. But in the evening when the wits were met together at his house, and Nick sat on the hindmost bench and watched the noble gentlemen who came to listen to the sport, Master Will Shakspere seemed to have the knack of being ever best among them all, yet of never too much seeming to be better than the rest.
And though, for the most part, he said but little, save when some pet fancy moved him, when he did speak his conversation sparkled like a little meadow brook that drew men’s best thoughts out of them like water from a spring.
And when they fell to bantering, he could turn the fag-end of another man’s nothing to good account in a way so shrewd that not even Master Ben Jonson could better him—and Master Ben Jonson set up for a wit. But Master Shakspere came about as quickly as an English man-of-war, dodged here and there on a breath of wind, and seemed quite everywhere at once; while Master Jonson tacked and veered, and loomed across the elements like a great galleon, pouring forth learned broadsides with a most prodigious boom, riddling whatever was in the way, to be sure, but often quite missing the point—because Master Shakspere had come about, hey, presto, change! and was off with the argument, point and all, upon a totally different tack.