My lord was quick to approve of this condition. "Your prisoner, mayhap," he added, "will give his word not to attempt escape."
"Ay, my lord," cried Hal, at once, "if this officer rely on that word alone, and dispense with guards about me."
Marryott knew, of course, and Barnet promptly affirmed by word, that the latter would prefer to rely on his guards. Hal showed no offence at this; had he thought his word would be accepted he would not have offered it.
"Then," said he, when Barnet had expressed himself, "I will not give my word."
The pursuivant was content. He attributed Hal's attitude to a mere idle punctilio which would not accept moral bonds without a reciprocal withdrawal of physical ones, even though freedom from moral bonds was useless. Barnet was accustomed, in his observations of gentlemen, to such bootless niceties in matters of honor.
The musicians were put to it for another quarter of an hour, and Barnet conducted the prisoner down-stairs and to the tiring-room. He placed a guard at each entrance to that room, stationed others in the yard so that one breasted each side of the small stage, set two upon the steps between stage and tiring-room, and established himself on a three-legged stool on the stage. He seemed to have conveniently forgotten that Tybalt, even during the acts wherein he appears, is less time on the stage than off. He had put the faithful Hudsdon, however, at the door from the tiring-room to the steps behind the stage. Indeed, Hal's freedom was little more than it had been in the chamber, save that. Tybalt being a swordsman's part, his hands were now unbound.
Barnet had assured himself that the rapiers used by the actors were blunted so as not to pierce. He knew, too, that he had won the crowd by his concession to their wish, and that he should have all the spectators, including the lord's people and the inn-folk, as active barriers against any dash the prisoner might rashly venture for liberty.
Hal's friends had crowded around him in the tiring-room, which was lighted with candles against the gloom caused by the curtain at the back of the stage. Even Burbage had pressed his hand, and uttered a hope that there might be nothing in this treason matter. "Fortune send thee safe out of it, whatever it be!" was Master Shakespeare's wish. "If thou camest to grief, Hal," said the Juliet, the same pert stripling that had played Ophelia eleven days before, "I should weep like a real girl!" Gil Crowe alone had nothing to say, for he was stretched half clad, in the corner where he had fallen, in the deepest drunken slumber.
Master Shakespeare wore the white beard and religious cowl of the Friar; a habit that had wakened in Hal's mind a thought to be quenched the next moment by Barnet's injunction to the guards of the tiring-room:
"And lose not sight of him an instant while he is here, lest during an eye-wink he slip into some player's disguise of face and body, and pass one of you unknown."