"About Mrs. Burbidge perhaps not being all right. She's as right as
rain. I don't know what made me say it."
"A sort of 'do-good-by-stealth-and-blush-to-find-it-fame' feeling, I
expect, wasn't it? Of course she's all right. You know I knew you knew
she was, don't you?"
"I know now," said he. "Yes, of course I knew it. Don't let's pretend we
aren't both jolly glad we met her."
"No, don't let's," said she. And laid her hand on his. His turned under
it and held it, lightly yet tenderly, as his hand knew that hers would
wish to be held, and not another word did either say till their car drew
up at the prosperous, preposterous Shakespeare Inn at Stratford-on-Avon.
But all through the drive soft currents of mutual kindness and
understanding, with other electricities less easy to classify, ran from
him to her and from her to him, through the contact of their quiet
clasped hands.
The inn at Stratford is intolerably half timbered. Whatever there may
have been of the old woodwork is infinitely depreciated by the modern
imitation which flaunts itself everywhere. The antique mockery is only
skin deep and does not extend to the new rooms, each named after one of
Shakespeare's works, and all of a peculiarly unpleasing shape, and
furnished exactly like the rooms of any temperance hotel. The room where
Katherine washed the dust of the road from her pretty face was called
"The Tempest," and the sitting-room where they had tea was a hideous
oblong furnished in the worst taste of the middle-Victorian lower middle
class, and had "Hamlet" painted on its door.
"We must see the birthplace, I suppose," said Edward, "but before we go
I should like to warn you that there is not a single authentic relic of
Shakespeare, unless it's the house where they say he was born, and even
that was never said to be his birthplace till a hundred and fifty years
after his death, and even then two other houses claimed the same honor.
If ever a man was born in three places at once, like a bird, that man
was William Shakespeare."
"You aren't a Baconian, are you?" she asked, looking at him rather
timidly across the teacups. "But you can't be, because I know they're
all mad."
"A good many of them are very, very silly," he owned, "but don't be
afraid. I'm not a Baconian, for Baconians are convinced that Bacon wrote
the whole of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature off his own bat. I only
think there's a mystery. You remember Dickens said the life of
Shakespeare was a fine mystery and he trembled daily lest something
should turn up."
"And nothing has."
"Nothing. That's just it. There's hardly anything known about the man.
He was born here--died here. He went to London and acted. One of his
contemporaries says that the top of his performance was the Ghost in
'Hamlet.' He married, he had children, he got hold of money enough to
buy a house, he got a coat of arms, he lent money and dunned people for
it, he speculated in corn, he made a will in which he mentions neither
his plays nor his books, but is very particular about his second-best
bed and his silver-gilt bowl. He died, and was buried. That's all that's
known about him. I'm not a Baconian, Princess, but I'm pretty sure that
whoever wrote 'Hamlet,' that frowzy, money-grubbing provincial never
did."
"But we'll go and see his birthplace, all the same, won't we?" she said.
And they went.
If she desired to worship at the shrine of Shakespeare he did not give
her much chance. She listened to the talk of the caretaker, but always
he was at her ear with the tale of how often Shakespeare's chair had
been sold and replaced by a replica, how the desk shown as his is that
of an eighteenth-century usher and not of a sixteenth-century scholar.
How the ring engraved "W. S." was found in the surface of the ground,
near the church, in 1810, where, one supposes, it had lain unnoticed
since Shakespeare dropped it there two hundred years before.
At the grammar-school Edward pointed out that there is no evidence to
show that Shakespeare ever attended this or any other school. Anne
Hathaway's cottage could not be allowed to be Anne Hathaway's, since it
was only in 1770 that its identity was fixed on, two other houses
having previously shared the honor. Like her husband, she would seem to
have possessed the peculiar gift of being born in three places at once.
"I don't think I like it," she said at last. "I'd rather believe
everything they say. It's such a very big lot of lies, if they are lies.
Let's go to the church. The man's grave's his own, I suppose."
"I suppose so," said he, but not with much conviction; "anyhow, I won't
bore you with any more of the stuff. But it _is_ a fine mystery, and
there's a corner of me that would like to live in Bloomsbury and grub
among books all day at the British Mu. and half the night in my booky
little den, and see if I couldn't find something out. But the rest of me
wants different things, out-of-door things, and things that lead to
something more than finding the key to a door locked three hundred years
ago."
The bust of Shakespeare in Stratford Church is a great blow to the
enthusiast. A stubby, sensual, Dutch-looking face.
"I wish they'd been content with the gravestone," she said, and read
aloud the words:
"Goodfrend for Jesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloasèd heare
Blest be ye man yt spares these stones
And curst be he yt moves my bones."
"There's not much chance of any one doing that--look, the altar-step
goes right across the tombstone. I wonder what they _would_ find, if
they _did_ move the stone."
"Nothing, madam," said a voice behind her--"nothing human, that is."
She turned to face a tall, gaunt man in loose, ill-fitting clothes with
a despatch-case in one hand and three or four note-books in the other.
"Excuse my joining in," he said, "but I couldn't help hearing what you
said. Whatever there is in that tomb, there is not the body of the man
Shakespeare. Manuscripts there may be, but no corpse."
"What makes you think so?" she asked.
"Evidence, madam, evidence. The evidence of facts as well as of
ciphers."
"Oh," she said, and smiled brilliantly, "you must be a Baconian. How
very interesting!"
Now she had received all Edward's criticisms of Shakespearian legend
with a growing and visible impatience. Yet for this stranger she had
nothing but sympathy and interest.
"It _is_ interesting," said the stranger. "There's nothing like it. I've
spent eighteen years on it, and I know now how little I know. It isn't
only Bacon and Shakespeare; it's a great system--a great cipher system
extending through all the great works of the period."
"But what is it that you hope to find out in the end?" she asked.
"Secrets of state, or the secret of the philosopher's stone, or what?"
"The truth," he said, simply. "There's nothing else worth looking for.
The truth, whatever it is. To follow truth, no matter where it leads.
I'd go on looking, even if I thought that at the end I should find that
that Stratford man did write the plays." He looked up contemptuously at
the smug face of the bust.
"It's a life's work," said Mr. Basingstoke, "and I should think more
than one life's work. Do you find that you can bring your mind to any
other kind of work?"
"I gave up everything else," said the stranger. "I was an accountant,
and I had some money and I'm living on it. But now . . . now I shall
have to do something else. I've got a situation in London. I'm going
there next week. It's the end of everything for me."
"There ought to be some endowment for your sort of research," said
Edward.
"Of course there ought," said the man, eagerly, "but people don't care.
The few who do care don't want the truth to come out. They want to keep
that thing"--he pointed to the bust--"to keep that thing enthroned on
its pedestal forever. It pays, you see. Great is Diana of the
Ephesians."
"I suppose it wouldn't need to be a very handsome endowment. I mean that
sort of research work can be done at museums. You don't have to buy the
books," Edward said.
"A lot can be done with libraries, of course. But I have a few books--a
good few. I should like to show them to you some day--if you're
interested in the subject."
"I am," said Edward, with a glance at the girl, "or I used to be.
Anyhow, I should like very much to see your books. You have a Du Bartas,
of course?"
"Three," said the stranger, "and six of the Sylva Sylvarum, and Argalus
and Perthenia--do you know that--Quarles--and--"
Next moment the two men were up to the eyes in a flood of names, none of
which conveyed anything to her. But she saw that Edward was happy. At
the same time, the hour was latish. She waited for the first pause--a
very little one--but she drove the point of her wedge into it sharply.
"Wouldn't it be nice if you were to come back to dinner with us, at
Warwick, then we should have lots of time to talk."
"I was going to London to-night," said the stranger, "but if Warwick can
find me a night's lodging I shall only too gladly avail myself of your
gracious invitation, Mrs.--"
"Basingstoke," said Edward.
The stranger had produced a card and she read on it:
DR. C. P. VANDERVELDE,
Ohio College, U. S. A.
"Yes," he said, "I'm an American. I think almost all serious Baconians
are. I hope you haven't a prejudice against my country, Mrs.
Basingstoke--"
"It's Miss Basingstoke," she said, thinking of the hotel, "and I've
never met an American that I didn't like."
He made her a ceremonious and old-fashioned bow. "Inscrutable are the
ways of fate," he said. "Only this morning I was angry because the
chambermaid at my inn in Birmingham destroyed my rubbing of the grave
inscription, and I had to come to Stratford to get another. Yes, I could
have written, but it was so near, and I shall soon be chained to an
office desk--and now, in this of all spots, I meet youth and beauty and
sympathy and hospitality. It is an omen."
"And what," she asked, as they paced down the church, "was the cipher
that said there was nothing in the tomb? Or would you rather not talk
about your ciphers?"
"I desire nothing better than to talk of them," he answered. "It's the
greatest mistake to keep these things secret. We ought all to tell all
we know--and if we all did that and put together the little fragment of
knowledge we have gathered, we should soon piece together the whole
puzzle. The first words I found on the subject are, 'Reader, read all,
no corpse lies in this tomb,' and so on, and with the same letters
another anagram in Latin, beginning '_Lector intra sepulcho jacet nullum
cadaver_.' I'll show you how I got it when we're within reach of a table
and light."
They lingered a moment on the churchyard terrace where the willows
overhang the Avon and the swans move up and down like white-sailed
ships.
"How hospitable we're getting," she said to Edward that night when their
guest had gone to his humbler inn--"two visitors in one day!"
"Katherine," he said, just for the pleasure of saying it, for they two
were alone, so he could not have been speaking to any one
else--"Katherine, that man's ciphers are wonderful. And what a gift of
the gods--to possess an interest that can never fail and that costs
nothing for its indulgence, not like postage-stamps or orchids or
politics or racing!"
"The ciphers were wonderful," she said. "I had no idea such things were
possible. I understood quite a lot," she added, a little defiantly.
"But it's rather hateful to think of his being chained to a desk doing
work that isn't _his_ work."
"That, or something like it, is the lot of most people," he said, "but
it needn't be his lot. It's for you to say. I can very well afford a
small endowment for research, if you say so."
"But why must _I_ decide?"
"Because," he said, slowly, "I felt when I was talking to you to-day
that you hated everything I said; you wanted to go on believing in all
the Shakespeare legends."
"I think I said so. I'm not sure that I meant it. Anyhow, if it rests
with me I say give him his research endowment, if he'll take it."
"He'll take it. I'll get a man I know at Balliol to write, offering it.
In his beautiful transatlantic simplicity the dear chap will think the
college is offering the money. He'll take it like a lamb. But won't you
tell me--why was it that you hated me to be interested in this business
and you are glad that this Vandervelde should be helped to go on with
it?"
"I should like him to be happy," she said, "and there's nothing else in
life for him--he has given up everything else for it. I want him, at
least, to have the treasure he's paid everything for--the joy of his
work. But that sort of joy should be reserved for the people who can
have nothing else. But for you--well, somehow, I feel that people who
take up a thing like this ought to be prepared to sacrifice everything
else in life to it, as he has done. And I could not bear that you should
do it. Life has so much besides for you."
"Yes," he said, "life holds very much for me."
"And for me, too," she said, and with that gave him her hand for good
night.
He was certain afterward that it had not been his doing, and yet it must
have been, for her hand had not moved in his. And yet he had found it
laid not against his lips, but against his cheek, and he had held it
there in silence for more than a moment before she drew it away and said
good night.
At the door she turned and looked back over her shoulder. "Good night,"
she said again. "Good night, Edward."
And that was the first time she called him by his name.