Leon Garfield's Shakespeare Stories

by Leon Garfield

  “Here, go!” he panted, breathless from running, and holding out the key. “The desk, the purse, sweat now, make haste!”

  At once, fear clutched at Adriana’s heart. “Where is thy master, Dromio? Is he well?”

  For answer—and with his words tumbling over one another in his frantic hurry to get them out—Dromio told how his master had been arrested for debt and needed the money to deliver himself.

  As soon as she understood, Adriana ran to fetch the purse and thrust it into Dromio’s hands. “Go, Dromio, there’s the money!” she cried. “Bear it straight and bring thy master home immediately!”

  All anger against her husband was gone. Instead, she felt horribly frightened. Antipholus’s strange behaviour, and now his strange arrest made her dread that his brain had turned and his reason was undermined.

  Back rushed Dromio, to discover, to his relief and joy, that his master was walking in the market-place, free of all restraint. It was the other Antipholus.

  “Master, here’s the gold you sent me for!” he cried; and gave him the purse.

  Wonderingly, Antipholus received the purse. He opened it. There was gold inside. He was surprised; but then he reflected that, if a perfect stranger had given him a gold chain, why should his servant not bring him ducats as well? He smiled. Surely he was a golden youth, blessed by all!

  “Is there any ship puts forth tonight?” he asked Dromio. “May we be gone?”

  Dromio scratched his head. His master’s memory was short. He reminded him that, within the hour, he had told him of a vessel bound for Epidamnum—

  “The fellow is distract,” sighed Antipholus, shaking his head, “and so am I, and here we wander in illusions. Some blessed power deliver us from hence!”

  No sooner had he called upon a blessed power than the door of an inn, bearing the sign of the Porpentine, flew open, and out stepped a damsel all in red! Her gown was red, her hair was red, and red as strawberries were her smiling lips!

  “Well met, well met, Master Antipholus,” she greeted him. “Is that the chain you promised me today?” and she pointed at the chain he was wearing round his neck.

  Like a bad fairy, the scarlet damsel had appeared to snatch away his fairy-tale gold! He had lingered in Ephesus too long. Already she was advancing upon him, swaying, holding out her hand—

  “Satan, avoid!” cried Antipholus in terror. “I charge thee, tempt me not!” and Dromio quaked and moaned behind his back.

  “Your man and you are marvellous merry, sir,” said the damsel, with a smile like strawberries and cream. “Will you go with me? We’ll mend our dinner here.” She pointed back to the inn.

  Violently Antipholus shook his head. “What tell’st thou me of supping? Thou art as you are all, a sorceress! I conjure thee to leave me and be gone!”

  The damsel frowned. “Give me the ring of mine you had at dinner,” she demanded, “and I’ll be gone, sir.”

  “Avaunt, thou witch!” cried Antipholus; and master and man fled for their lives.

  The hostess of the Porpentine—for she it was—stared after the vanished pair in some alarm. The gentleman must have lost his wits! Why else should he try to cheat her out of her ring? It was worth forty ducats—too much for her to lose! Although she was never a one to run to wives, she could see no other way. She would have to go to Adriana and tell her that her husband was mad.

  So away she went, in a burst of scarlet worry, even as, in the very next street, Adriana’s husband, still in the grip of the officer, was on his way to gaol.

  Where was his Dromio? Adriana’s husband, followed by a crowd of jeering children, joyful at the fall of the mighty and delighting in the shame of the respectable, glared about him in mounting desperation. Where was his servant with the money that would save him? The money that was in his desk that was covered over with Turkish tapestry—he could see it in his mind’s eye. At last, he was rewarded. His troubles were over: Dromio was hurrying towards him, all smiles!

  “How now, sir,” he demanded eagerly, “have you that I sent you for?” and he held out his hand for his purse.

  “Here’s that, I warrant you, will pay them all!” said Dromio proudly, and gave his master a short length of rope.

  Antipholus looked at it. He frowned. “But where’s the money?”

  “Why, sir,” returned Dromio, surprised, “I gave the money for the rope.”

  “Five hundred ducats, villain, for a rope?” shrieked Antipholus; and, beside himself with rage, hurled himself upon Dromio, with rope, fist and boot!

  “Good sir, be patient!” cried the officer, attempting to restrain him; but it was hopeless. “Thou whoreson, senseless villain!” howled Antipholus, and continued to lay about him like a madman!

  It was at this unlucky moment that the hostess returned. She had fetched Adriana and her sister to witness Antipholus’s distraction for themselves.

  “How say you now?” said the hostess triumphantly. “Is not your husband mad?”

  There could be no doubt about it; and Adriana thanked heaven that she’d had the forethought to bring Doctor Pinch with her; for he was a physician skilled in lunacy and troubles of the mind.

  “Good Doctor Pinch,” she begged tearfully, “establish him in his true sense again!”

  The good doctor, a hungry-looking gentleman, smiled in his scanty beard. “Give me your hand,” he said, approaching his patient with practised ease, “and let me feel your pulse.”

  “There is my hand, and let it feel your ear!” responded Antipholus, and fetched the doctor a mighty thump on the side of his head.

  With a cry, the good doctor fell back, straight into Adriana’s startled arms.

  ‘Dissembling harlot!” roared Antipholus, seeing all in a flash: the locked doors, the deceiving wife, and now his rival in her embrace! “Thou art false in all,” and he rushed upon her, shouting that he’d pluck out her traitorous eyes!

  “O bind him, bind him!” shrieked Adriana, skipping behind Doctor Pinch. “Let him not come near me!”

  At once, half a dozen stout citizens came forward, and Antipholus was swiftly bound hand and foot. “Go bind this man,” cried Doctor Pinch anxiously, “for he is frantic too!” and Dromio, who had valiantly come to his master’s aid, now suffered his master’s fate.

  “Good Master Doctor,” wept Adriana, deeply distressed, “see him safely conveyed home to my house. O most unhappy day! Go bear him hence,” she pleaded, and willing hands lifted the struggling, shouting pair aloft, and bore them away; and the crowd of jeering children followed after, dancing and screaming with glee.

  “Say now, whose suit is he arrested at?” asked Adriana, when the street was quiet again.

  “One Angelo, a goldsmith,” returned the officer. “Do you know him?”

  “I know the man,” said she; but before she could utter another word, she was struck dumb with terror!

  Round a corner, with fearful, bloody looks and rapiers drawn, had appeared Antipholus and Dromio! The other ones.

  “God for thy mercy!” screamed Luciana. “They are loose again!” and with one accord, she and her sister, the hostess, the officer and good Doctor Pinch, shrieked and fled!

  Antipholus and Dromio gazed after them. “I see these witches are afraid of swords,” said Antipholus with satisfaction; and Dromio agreed. They put up their weapons and set off for the Centaur Inn, to collect their possessions and board the ship that was to carry them away.

  “Signior Antipholus!” It was the goldsmith who had accosted him, the generous gentleman who had given him the chain. But gone were his gorgeous smiles, and there was a grim-faced merchant by his side, with money in his eyes. “I wonder much that you would put me to this shame and trouble,” said the goldsmith, and pointed an accusing finger at the chain. “This chain you had of me. Can you deny it?”

  “I never did deny it!” said Antipholus indignantly.

  “Yes, that you did, sir!”

  “Who heard me deny it?”

  “These ears o
f mine!” It was the merchant who spoke, his moneybag eyes pursed up in anger. “Fie on thee, wretch! ’Tis pity that thou liv’st to walk where any honest men resort!”

  Never had Antipholus been so insulted in all his life! He challenged the merchant. The merchant called him ‘Villain!’ He drew his sword. The merchant drew his. Their blades crossed; but before they could murder each other, back came the witches at the head of a furious crowd!

  “Run, master, run!” shouted Dromio. “For God’s sake, take a house!”

  Hither and thither they rushed, like a pair of hunted deer! Doors here, doors there, all shut against them—save one! “This is some priory! In, or we are spoiled!” and into the holy place they fled, desperate for sanctuary!

  The crowd halted. There was silence. It was as if all Ephesus, suddenly empty of Antipholuses and Dromios, had paused to draw breath and wipe its distracted brow. All eyes were upon the dark doorway; eager hands gripped ropes, ready to bind the madmen within—

  The crowd fell back. A figure had appeared, a stately dame in white. It was the Lady Abbess. A murmuring arose—

  “Be quiet, people,” commanded the stately dame. “Wherefore throng you hither?”

  “To fetch my poor distracted husband hence,” cried Adriana, stepping forward with her sister close behind. “Let us come in, that we may bind him fast and bear him home for his recovery.”

  The Abbess frowned. “How long hath this possession held the man?”

  “This week he hath been heavy, sour, sad . . .”

  “Hath he not lost much wealth by wrack of sea?” inquired the Abbess. “Buried some dear friend? Hath not else his eye strayed his affection in unlawful love—? Which of these sorrows is he subject to?”

  Sadly, Adriana confessed that she feared it was the last, that some other love had caught her husband’s roving eye; and she cast a bitter glance upon the hostess of the Porpentine.

  “You should for that have reprehended him,” said the Abbess sternly.

  “Why, so I did!”

  “Ay, but not rough enough.”

  “As roughly as my modesty would let me,” protested Adriana with dignity; and her sister nodded by her side.

  “Haply, in private?” suggested the Abbess.

  “And in assemblies too!” cried Adriana eagerly. “In bed he slept not for my urging it; at board he fed not for my urging it. Alone, it was the subject of my theme; in company I often glanced at it; still did I tell him it was vile and bad.”

  The Abbess held up her hand. “And therefore came it,” said she, with a look that chilled Adriana to the heart, “that the man was mad. The venom clamours of a jealous woman poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth. Thy jealous fits have scared thy husband from the use of wits.”

  “She never reprehended him but mildly!” cried Luciana, quick to her sister’s defence. “Why bear you these rebukes,” she muttered, pushing the humbled Adriana forward, “and answer not?”

  But Adriana knew she had defended herself only to her own defeat. “I will attend my husband,” she promised, with tears in her eyes, “be his nurse, diet his sickness, for it is my office . . . let me have him home with me.”

  The stately Abbess shook her head. She herself would minister to the sick man’s needs.

  “I will not hence and leave my husband here!” wept Adriana. “And ill it doth beseem your holiness to separate the husband and the wife!”

  “Be quiet, and depart. Thou shalt not have him,” pronounced the Abbess, and vanished within the priory.

  “Complain unto the Duke of this indignity!” cried Luciana, outraged by the high-handed behaviour of the holy dame. Adriana nodded and turned to go; when, with a loud and solemn roar, the priory bell began to toll. The sun was setting, and it was five o’clock.

  The crowd grew still; and a chill fell upon the air. To the sound of muffled drumbeats, a dreadful procession had come slowly into view. At its head, all in black, walked the Duke, followed by his officers and guards. Then came the old gentleman of Syracuse, still in chains, and close behind, the hooded executioner, whose shouldered axe shone blood-red in the setting sun. The tragic old man had found no friend in Ephesus, and the time for his death had come.

  “Yet once again proclaim it publicly,” loudly announced the Duke as the procession drew near the abbey. “If any friend will pay the sum for him, he shall not die!”

  No friend came forward and the procession was moving on. “Kneel to the Duke!” whispered Luciana, and, with a sisterly push, sent Adriana stumbling into the royal path.

  “Justice, most sacred Duke,” cried Adriana, as the Duke looked sternly down, “against the Abbess!”

  “She is a virtuous and a reverend lady,” said the Duke with a frown. “It cannot be that she hath done thee wrong.”

  Oh yes she had! Adriana nodded vigorously; and all her pent-up anger, grief and bewilderment burst out in a flood! Without pausing for breath, she told the Duke the wild history of Antipholus’s madness: how he and his man (as mad as he!) had rushed into houses, snatching away rings and jewels; how they’d broken loose from restraint; how they’d threatened citizens with drawn swords; and how, at last, they’d fled into the priory—“and here,” she concluded tearfully, “the Abbess shuts the gates on us, and will not suffer us to fetch him out!”

  The Duke hesitated. Adriana reminded him that Antipholus had served him well, and that he himself had promoted their marriage.

  “Go,” said the Duke to his attendants, “some of you knock at the abbey gate and bid the Lady Abbess come to me.”

  But before they could stir, there was an interruption. A servant from Adriana’s house came running, wild-eyed! “O mistress, mistress, shift and save yourself!” he panted. “My master and his man are both broke loose, beaten the maids a-row, and bound the Doctor, whose beard they have singed off with brands of fire!”

  “Peace, fool, thy master and his man are here!” cried Adriana angrily, and pointed to the priory.

  But the servant was not to be denied: “Mistress, upon my life I tell you true! He cries for you, and vows, if he can take you, to scorch your face and to disfigure you!” Suddenly, there came a sound of shouting, a roaring as of lions or bulls! “Hark, hark, I hear him, mistress! Fly, be gone!” and there burst upon the scene, wild and disordered, furious and amazed, Antipholus and Dromio!

  “Ay me!” shrieked Adriana, thinking she was going mad, “It is my husband! Witness you that he is borne about invisible! Even now we housed him in the abbey here, and now he’s there, past thought of human reason!”

  Antipholus, disregarding the terror his appearance had caused, turned to the Duke. “Justice, most gracious Duke, O grant me justice,” he cried, “against that woman there!” and pointed a furious sooty finger at the near-fainting authoress of all his misfortunes: his wife! In a voice that shook with anger, he told the Duke of all the outrageous disasters and fearful indignities that had befallen him that day, until he came to the last of all, of which he could scarcely speak. “My wife, her sister and a rabble more of vile confederates,” he sobbed, “brought one Pinch, a hungry, lean-faced villain, a mere anatomy, a mountebank, a threadbare juggler, and a fortune-teller, a needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch, a living dead man! Then all together they fell upon me, bound me, bore me thence, and in a dark and dankish vault at home there left me and my man—”

  He could utter no more. He stood, with outstretched arms before the Duke, a suppliant for justice, a man much wronged.

  The goldsmith began to speak, then the merchant, then the hostess of the Porpentine, then all together—of dinners and locked doors, of rings and chains and swords, until the Duke’s head began to spin. “Go call the Abbess!” he cried, raising his hand for silence. “I think you are all stark mad!”

  “Most mighty Duke!” Suddenly another voice was heard, a voice that had last been heard in the market-place, telling a strange and tragic tale of wandering and loss. It was the old man from Syracuse. His eyes were shining brigh
tly with tears of relief and joy! “I see a friend who will save my life!”

  “Speak freely, Syracusian,” said the Duke, encouragingly.

  The old man shuffled forward until he stood before Antipholus and Dromio.

  “I am sure you both of you remember me,” he said, and held out his shackled arms in welcome to his son!

  Antipholus retreated hastily. “I never saw you in my life till now,” he said. He was the other one.

  The old man faltered. “O grief hath changed me since you saw me last. Dost thou not know my voice?” he pleaded, stumbling forward another step, and peering with anxious, screwed-up eyes. “I cannot err. Tell me thou art my son Antipholus!”

  “I never saw my father in my life,” said Antipholus, forgetful of that sea-drenched figure shouting and waving, as the broken mast he was lashed to, drifted away for ever.

  Sadly the Duke shook his head. It was plain that grief and age had robbed the old man of his wits.

  “Most mighty Duke, behold a man much wronged!”

  In the doorway of the priory stood the Lady Abbess; and beside her, another Antipholus and Dromio!

  There was silence; and then it seemed that all Ephesus breathed “Ah!” as the cause of the day’s distractions was revealed!

  The two Antipholuses stared at one another; likewise the Dromios. It was as if the vision that each beheld in his morning mirror had stepped from the glass and come to life!

  “I see two husbands,” whispered Adriana, “or mine eyes deceive me!”

  “Which is the natural man,” wondered the Duke, “and which the spirit?”

  Then Antipholus of Syracuse, recognizing his father, rushed to embrace him; and the old man wept happy tears. The day that had begun in sorrow and darkness, was ending in brightness and joy. He was saved—

  But there was a still greater wonder to come. While all had been exclaiming and wondering over the doubled pair, the Lady Abbess had been silent. She had eyes only for the old gentleman of Syracuse. At last, she spoke: “Speak, old Egeon, if thou be’st the man that hadst a wife once called Emilia, that bore thee at a burden two fair sons. O, if thou be’st the same Egeon, speak, and speak unto the same Emilia!”