"I pray Fortune the new action Hal put in my tragedy shall prove indeed the winning of his freedom!"
CHAPTER XXV.
"This wild-goose chase is done; we have won o' both sides."—The Wild-Goose Chase.
Marryott, in the midst of the fight with Mercutio, had in a flash two thoughts, one springing from the contact of his glance with the balcony, the other following instantly upon the first. The first was, that a man might gain the balcony by one swift effort of agility and strength; the second was, that when momentous action holds the attention of spectators to one part of a stage, a person elsewhere on the stage may move unobserved before their eyes, if his movement be swift, silent, and in harmony with what has preceded,—a fact well known to people of stage experience. No incident in the drama more focuses attention than the dying scene of Mercutio; spectators have no eyes for Tybalt, of whom they retain but a vague impression of hasty flight.
The thing was scarce thought, when the time had come to act it. To make all seem right to those he must pass near, and inspired by necessity, he indeed spoke, for their ears alone, the words, "Away! Nay, I'll to the balcony;" at the same time casting his sword against the curtain, so that it fell less loudly to the stage. He seized two balusters, swiftly raised himself, and then—not proceeding exactly as the rustic beau had described—lodged a foot in the angle of a brace supporting the balcony, set his other foot on the balcony's edge, and rose ready to swing his body over the rail. To do this, and to glide across the balcony and through the way left open for Juliet, was the matter of a second. He was conscious, as he crossed the balcony, of slightly surprised looks from the musicians at one side, and from a few spectators at the other; but as he plunged into the room, he heard behind him only the lamenting voice of Romeo. Most of the spectators, and those chiefly concerned in his doings, had not observed his flight; like the dupes of a juggler, in watching one thing they had missed another; and those who perforce had seen his exit thought all was as it should be.
Across the room he ran, to a door leading into a passage. He traversed this to the end, where a window gave upon the street. Through the window ere he had time to think of possible broken bones, he hung from the ledge, and dropped. The fall was from the second story only. He slipped sidewise on alighting, jarred his elbow, and bruised his leg. But he was up in a moment. The street was deserted,—everybody in the neighborhood was at the play.
He looked in both directions, but saw no horse. Then he started on a run, to make a circuit of the inn. If the horse was not in sight on one side, it must be so on another. Fortune could not so cruelly will it that when at last he had made the dash, performed the miracle, his friends should, for the first time, fail him. He directed his steps so as first to pass the inn gate, and be gone from it ere Barnet's men should have time to sally out. This he accomplished, but without glimpse of the horse. He turned into a street on the third side of the inn; traversed it to its junction with a lane leading toward the side where he had landed from the window; darted into this lane with the fast-beating heart of a dying hope, passed half-way through it, glanced with dreading eyes down a narrow passage conducting from it, and saw, in a street beyond, the waiting horse.