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Updated: May 27, 2025
Stop him there!" he heard the master-player shout, and there was something in the fierce, high voice that turned his whole heart sick. What right had they to stop him? This was not the Stratford road; he was certain of that now. But "Stop him stop him there!" he heard the master-player call, and a wild, unreasoning fright came over him.
"What?" cried Nick. "As sure as shooting, they did!" said Robin; "and when Sir Thomas's gentry yeomen would have seen to it what? Why, my Lord Admiral's master-player clapped his hand to his poniard-hilt, and dared them come and take it if they could." "To Sir Thomas Lucy's men?" exclaimed Nick, aghast. "Ay, to their teeth!
"Did ye hear me, Master Carew?" asked Nick. The master-player stepped aside a moment into a doorway to let the mob go by, and then strode on. Nick tried again: "I pray thee, sir " "Do not pray me," said Carew, sharply; "I am no Indian idol." "But, good Master Carew " "Nor call me good I am not good."
But there seemed small chance of its coming about; for the doors of Gaston Carew's house were locked and barred by day and by night, as much to keep Nick in as to keep thieves out; and all day long, when Carew was away, the servants went about the lower halls, and Gregory Goole's uncanny face peered after him from every shadowy corner; and when he went with Carew anywhere, the master-player watched him like a hawk, while always at his heels he could hear the clump, clump, clump of the bandy-legged man following after him.
"Oh, sir, do be brisk!" begged Nick, fearing every instant to see the master-player and the bandy-legged man come running down the bank. "More haste, worse speed," said the gardener; "only evil weeds grow fast!" and he rubbed the groat on his jerkin. "Now, jack-sculler, hold thy breath; for up she goes again!" A man came running over the rise. Nick gave a little frightened cry.
And Master Tom Heywood, the play-writer, came out with a great slice of fresh wheat-bread, thick with butter and dripping with yellow honey, and gave it to Nick; and stood there silently with a very queer expression watching him eat it, until Carew's groom led up a stout hackney and a small roan palfrey to the block, and the master-player, crying impatiently, "Up with thee, Nick; we must be ambling!" sprang into the saddle of the gray.
Then the master-player pushed him up a narrow staircase and along a black corridor to a door at the end of the passage, through which he thrust him into a darkness like night, and slammed the door behind him. Nick heard the bolts shoot heavily, and Master Carew call through the heavy panels: "Now, Jackanapes, sit down and chew the cud of solitude awhile.
"All the same, I believe someone tried to warn the princess," Tommy insisted. "And it couldn't have been anything less than a master-player that got off that rhapsody to Jack last night!" There was a note of teasing in this that the others did not detect. "Well, Mr. Thomas, you're wrong, sir." Gates, who had been listening attentively, now uncrossed his legs and spoke.
"I do na know, sir," said he; "mother learned me part, and the rest just came, I think, sir." The master-player, his whole face alive and eager, now stared at Nicholas Attwood as fixedly as Nick had stared at him. It was a hearty little English lad he saw, about eleven years of age, tall, slender, trimly built, and fair.
Its glimmer fell across the bed upon Nick's tousled hair; and when the master-player saw the boy's head upon the pillow he started eagerly, with brightening eyes. "My soul!" he whispered to himself, a little quaver in his tone, "I would have sworn my own desire lied to me, and that he had not come at all! It cannot be yet, verily, I am not blind.
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