The horses were soon untethered and their heads turned in the direction of Oxford. No time was lost in making for the Crown. It was most likely there would be the devil to pay for that evening’s tragic work. The law would certainly be invoked against them; indeed, already it was in process of being summoned. As far as the players themselves were concerned, their chief hope was that none save Gervase Heriot had been recognized. If that happened to be the case, and the young man could lie perdu for a few days, the hue and cry might pass, always provided that no evidence was forthcoming against the members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company. Not a word was spoken as they rode to the Crown. The minds of all were filled with a sense of vague horror. The sinister trick they had put upon a blood-guilty man had turned to a grim tragedy. Full many a grisly scene had these men enacted in the process of their calling. Full many a scene of pity and terror had the master mind among them devised. But never in all their play-acting had they approached the sheer horror of the human soul which had been tormented so ruthlessly that night. It was in vain they reflected that even with his callous crime heavy upon him they had not meant to do the man to death. The world was undoubtedly a better place for his quittance; it was necessary that his soul should be wrung to its extremity if an innocent man was to escape the ax; but let them urge in extenuation all that was possible, and there was still not one among them who would ever forget the dreadful thing with which he had been face to face that night. As they rode along the moonless lanes in the stifling silence of a midsummer night, the weird shapes of the trees far spreading in their heavy leafage seemed to affront their eyes with phantom shapes. The eerie darkness that lay like a pall on the fields and woods and the grim sentinel hedgerows oppressed them almost beyond endurance. Never once did they ease the pace of their horses, not even to listen for sounds of pursuit. And to more than one among that band of conspirators, perhaps most of all to the mind of William Shakespeare, it was a real, an unspeakable relief when a sudden bend in the dark road showed two or three fugitive lights twinkling a little ahead where Oxford lay. Luckily, it was not a difficult matter to get through the city gate. Still, it was necessary to knock up the porter, who rose from his couch in no civil mood and asked why virtuous men rode so late. But a gold angel that was thrown to him reassured him wonderfully. They came into the city unmolested. And thus far there was never a sign of pursuit. But they had a deep sense of relief when, at last, they turned round by the Cornmarket and alighted under the oil lamp that had been kept burning for them before the door of John Davenant’s hostelry. CHAPTER XXVIII