Part 2

Such a face was Maud’s, framed in its yellow braids so long that, parted from her forehead and plaited in with a cord of gold, they almost touched the ground when she stood up. For the rest her simple tunic was green, and clasped loosely at the hips by a belt of jewelled gold, the slack of which hung low. Madelon la Belle she was called, or Passerose, for the sweetness of her Saxon face and the Saxon blue of her eyes. But most of all she herself loved her name of Maid Marian, given her in those green holts and brakes of Sherwood whither she had followed her own true love, the outlawed Earl, and whence, in a dire moment, she had been ravished by the cursed King. He had seen her loveliness and coveted it, and where John coveted was no safety for wife or virgin. And so it had befallen that once, when abiding in her father’s castle of Dunmow, the Baron being absent, he had come, shedding in his hot haste his smooth phrases and courtly wiles, and had torn her from her shelter and carried her to London to his Tower on the Thames. And there he kept her fast, not doubting but that she would yield to him in time, and glooming ever a little and a little more as her obduracy held him aloof.

This Kay was one of the King’s minions, whom he would send to bribe or threaten the lovely captive into surrender. The fellow was no better than a maquereau, who tasted passion by deputy. He was confident, in the soft persuasiveness of his voice, in the irresistibility of his figure and finery, of the ultimate success of his mediation. His hair, rolled about his ears, was scented; his tunic, short beyond custom, was of gold-embroidered crimson, and his hose were like-hued. A curt-manteau, of cloth of gold lined with green, hung about his shoulders, and on his feet were boots of green cloth, the upper part of lattice-work, embossed at each crossing with a little leopard’s head in gold. He had no real heart of tenderness or mercy. He was a mere painted mask, as bowelless as the Elf-maiden herself.

“I would have you reasonable, madam,” he said.

She rose and stood away from him.

“Is it not in reason to guard one’s virtue?” she said, panting.

“Nay,” he answered; “but if you guard it alone and weaponless, and the thief come in well armed and strong of body? It were reason better to yield it with a good grace.”

She threw herself upon a bench wailing, “O hence, thou beast!” And so she lay writhing--“Only to die--and they will not let me die!”

She sought and cried for death perpetually; she knew she was lost, lacking that kind friend. Was it not pitiful? she whom life had so favoured and love so moulded. She sought him, moaning and wringing her hands, at barred windows, in dusky corners; she entreated her gaolers to have pity on her, to put poison into her food, to lend her a weapon, or a pathway to the battlements whence she might cast herself down. Her every prayer but increased their watchfulness; Death was excluded from her as jealously as if he had been her outlawed lover himself.

On this day her desperation had risen to a pitch scarce endurable. There had been signs that the royal patience was near exhausted. And it was late spring without--she could see it through her window across the green flats that stretched beyond the moat, beyond her prison. Its sweetness reminded her of past days in the forest, so that her heart came near to breaking. Her lips whispered the words of the little glad song that she and her Robin had often sung together:

“_Summer is a comin’ in,_ _Loud sing cuckoo._ _Groweth seed and bloweth mead,_ _And springeth the wood now._ _Sing cuckoo, cuckoo._”

“Sing cuckoo,” she wept, “the wanton’s shame! O Robin, my Robin!” She would never see him again--could never wish to. In a few hours, perhaps, she would be a thing for his scorn, a thing that not death, found too late, could cleanse.

In the evening came the King himself, with his frowning eyes and grim jaw that, with the thick beard clipped close on it, looked like a bulldog’s. He was in a furious mood, his Queen having vexed him, and flashed and scintillated like a scaled devil in the light of the dozen torches he brought.

“How now,” he thundered, “thou rever’s doxy! Still obdurate?”

Her very heart shook; but she stood up to him bravely.

“Plunge thy knife into my breast, Sir King,” she said, “and with my last sigh I will praise thee.”

“What!” he snarled--“so much in love with Death? We’ll see to it thy desire’s whetted in his fondling. He shall prick thee here and there before ye close. Away with her to the Watch Tower!”

It was at least a respite, and she had dreaded the instant worst. This Watch, or Round Turret, rose from the north-east angle of the great Keep. He had her there at his mercy. Her cries might rise to heaven, but could not penetrate the dense fabric below. In this chill, high dungeon they imprisoned the girl. Its cold, its dreadful loneliness, scant food, and the silent guard should break her spirit, the wretch thought. He would taste her submission to the dregs, then fling her to his lackeys to teach her what it meant to flout her King. She answered by starving herself; on which came Kay, the silky-tongued, and warned her smoothly that such contumacy could only invite its swift reprisal. She would not be permitted so to slip through her royal lover’s hands. Whereat she ate all that they would give her, and despaired the more.

There was no escape, none. Locked in as she was, she knew that her every movement was canvassed by hidden eyes, her every sigh recorded. And Robin made no sign.

One day it moved her to hear unwonted sounds rising from the outer ward below, into which the public were admitted on occasion of State festivities, executions, and so forth. The multitudinous jollity of voices, soaring above the whine of bugle and tap of drum, proclaimed it a May-day revel, when the whole place was delivered over to sport and merriment.

She could not see from her high, narrow window, sunk deep in the wall; but the babble flowing in on a shaft of sunlight made her heart warm as it had never felt for days. Some spirit of release seemed to ride in on the happy music, some emotion that made her bosom heave and her eyes fill thick with tears.

She was standing, drinking in the merry noise, when her lids blinked involuntarily, and, with a swish and smack on the ceiling of her cell, something alighted at her feet. She fancied on the instant that a bird had flown in and struck against the stone; but, looking down quickly, she saw that it was a broken arrow--one of a dear, familiar pattern. With a gasp she stooped, snatched at it, and stood listening. There was no sign of anyone having observed. With swift trembling fingers she detached a strand of green worsted which was knotted about the shaft under the quill, and found beneath a folded scrap of parchment, which, on being opened, revealed a glutinous smear of brown substance, and just these four woeful words written above:

“_Poor Robin’s Pledge. Farewell._”

It was her death-warrant.

So sweet and tragic, her heart near stopped from its sorrow as she read it. She knew at once what it was--a mortal Arab poison, given long years ago to her woodland lover by a follower of the Lion King. It might serve him in a sore need, had been the words accompanying the gift--to taste it was death. And once Robin had shown it to her, proposing, half playfully, that they should pledge one another in its Lethe were Fate ever to dispart them.

And so she knew that her last hope was dead before her. Robin could not come. He was hurt; he was ill; the guards were too many for them, the Fates too strong, and their only refuge at last was in death. He had sent some one of his cunning archers, Will Scarlet belike, to take advantage of this merrymaking to speed the message, and, when she had realised all that it meant to her, she fell on her knees with a bursting prayer of gratitude to the Providence, to the dear lover, between whom her honour was held safe from the despoiler.

She never doubted that her Robin meant to share the pledge. Likely his dear spirit was waiting for her now, eager to link with hers in the green woods where first their loves were spoken. Fearful of interruption, she put her lips to the poison, and died with his name on them.

That evening came Master Kay to the cell, with a sick smile on his mouth, and in his hands a tray of comfortable things, including a flask of drugged wine. The King’s patience was exhausted.

But when he saw what had happened he stole out, and fled to join the refractory Barons, of whom was Fitzwalter, father of Madelon la Belle.

And in the meantime Robin did not die. The poison that was to kill him came years later from the hand of his kinswoman, the Prioress of Kirklees. Women will take things so literally.

Raleigh

“Admit, Captain,” said the scholar, “that Opportunity signifieth by the lexicon a meet or convenient time; and what is time but an abstraction? Wherefore whoso seizeth opportunity seizeth an abstraction, the which has never been held, nor ever will or can be held, to constitute a violation of that social contract which is called the law.”

Two men were seated in a bower of the “Ship Aground” at Greenwich. The bright little garden at their feet ran down to a low parapet overlooking the river, whose waters, gay with shipping, sparkled merrily in the June sunshine. Behind them the tinkle and gossip of the inn sounded pleasantly; to their left a small plantation of trees led direct to the boundaries of the royal palace--“Placentia,” or the “Manor of Pleazaunce,” it was called--whose red roofs and bowed Italian windows were plainly visible through the green. A flight of wooden steps in the embankment to their right constituted the public landing-place; and for the rest and everywhere were climbing wood and lawn, tumbled with houses like warm red boulders, and gathered at their summit into that Lancastrian tower which was destined in future ages to blossom into the universal meridian.

The men sat on either side a rustic table, a stoup of warm ale with a toast in it between them. The soldier, strong and thickset, was Captain Nicholas Blount, of the Earl of Sussex’s guard. The other, a dissipated, whimsical-looking young man, dressed in black, with a plain falling band, and on his head the scholar’s biretta with embracing flaps, was Master John Sparrow, ex-graduate of Trinity and clerk to the same nobleman. The former sprawled with his doublet unbuttoned, and his rapier and bonnet laid aside. He was an honest, downright soul, more of a Davus than an Œdipus, and yet with a naïve humorous side to him that ingratiated. In common with some soldiers of his rare time he had a tremendous respect for learning.

“Jack Sparrow,” quoth he, “thou hast a damnable overplus of sophistication to answer a plain man withal. But I’ll have thee there. Is not theft an abstraction, and yet punishable by the law?”

“Well countered, Captain,” said the clerk; “but I will prove it otherwise.”

“How, sharp wit?”

“Why, look you; by the token that a theft is an abstraction, an abstraction is a theft. But I say an abstraction is no theft, sith it steals nothing but time, which is itself an abstraction. Is a thief a thief, therefore, who steals from himself?”

“Thou playest on the word, that hath another meaning.”

“God save your neck if you’ll insist on ’t. One day you’ll be caught in a reverie and hanged for an abstraction. For me, one word one meaning is enough.”

“What hanged--Nick hanged!” cried a voice, that of one of two gentlemen who at the moment came round the leafy angle of the bower. “What is his offence?”

Blount and the young man rose to their feet, the one with a jocund, the second with a respectful manner of salutation.

“Fair welcome, masters,” said the soldier. “Your wit shall save me a halter, or I’ll be hanged for it.”

The two new-comers were Mr. Greville and his _alter ego_ Mr. Philip Sidney, the latter already the _preux chevalier_ of his age. Though now in no more than his twenty-seventh year, his world-knowledge and accomplishments exceeded those of most contemporary gallants. Tall, spare, with a rather long melancholy face full of sweetness and intelligence, his whole aspect conveyed an assurance of reasonableness and liberality. His hair, warm yellow and somewhat sleek, was parted at one side into the long love-lock in vogue; his doublet and trunk-hose were of a sober grey but laced with a rich frilling of gold. So was his own quiet nature veined with light. A poet and scholar, a traveller and man of action, a courtier in the worthiest sense, some paltry squabble thrust upon him had banished him latterly from the side of the sovereign to whom his qualities were most endeared, and he was only present in Greenwich on a private affair during the absence of the Court. His friend and coetanian, the Lord Brooke to be--he who came to desire of posterity no greater recognition than that he had been Shakespeare’s friend--was a young man of like learning, sincerity, and skill in arms.

“Why, Nick,” quoth Sidney, “the alternative is certain. But whereby hangs the halter?”

“Round my neck,” answered Blount. “He seeks to throttle me, this learned clerk here, with his sophistications.”

The three gentlemen sat down, the student remaining standing.

“How throttle?” said Sidney.

Jack Sparrow took the answer out of the soldier’s mouth:

“We were discussing your friend, Master Raleigh, sirs, whom the Captain here will dub the very thief of opportunity.”

“And hold to it,” said Blount.

“Nay,” said the ex-graduate, “when, as I maintain and repeat, Opportunity is the common property, whereby to take it is no more offence in a man than the picking of blackberries on the highway.”

“Or the picking of pockets,” said Mr. Greville.

“Hold, Fulke,” said Sidney: “I do perceive a flaw there, in that the seizure or prehension is by its very terms held personal to the appropriator. Thus I may take _my_ opportunity, but not another man’s.”

“Well decreed, Phil,” cried the soldier, with a shout of triumph, and smacked a hand to his knee. “How now, Master Quiddity? Wilt answer to that?”

“With submission, Mr. Sidney,” replied the student, “is not all opportunity yours when you see it? _Oblatam occasionem tene_: the warrant of Cicero is in the phrase.”

“The very offering, my friend, implies a priority of ownership by another; wherefore, if I seize another man’s opportunity uninvited, I am guilty of a moral felony.”

“But supposing he, that other, omits or refuses to make use of his own?” persisted the student, with his tongue in his cheek.

Nicholas Blount roared: “Omits, quotha! But what is mine is mine, rogue, though there be a thousand popinjays could convert the thing to their own more profitable usage. Wherefore I say, who takes my opportunity steals; wherefore I say, this Raleigh is a thief of opportunity.”

“Instance, instance!” cried the two young gentlemen, crowing; and Greville bawled for the drawer to bring wine.

The soldier grunted: “I’m no man for equivoque; I hold by what I say. You shall hear and judge between us. This Walter, sirs----”

“A very proper courtier of his inches,” said Greville.

“Your friend, sir,” answered Blount sarcastically; “and mine--God quit us of all such allies. He was my friend once, and took the privileges. There was little he would not take, including the wall, of any man. To do him justice, a sweet fighting Hector, full of courage as of grace. He was just home from Ireland when we met last year--fresh from carving of the Kerns. Yet a hand like milk. Nothing would ever stick to it but gold. I cry you mercy, gentles. He was my friend, I say.”

Greville broke into laughter, and Sidney smiled, his lips twitching.

“_Castigo te non quod_--eh, master clerk?” said the latter. “Perchance he chastised the Captain for very love.”

“You shall hear,” said Blount grimly. “A proper courtier, quoth Master Greville--a very proper courtier. I doubt it not. How looked he when you saw him last?”

“It was at Whitehall,” said Greville. “You know the man--the mirror of fashion, the prince of wit, the pink of assurance. One noon he met the Queen just stepping from her closet. ‘What time is it, good sir?’ quoth she. ‘What time your Highness pleases,’ he answered. ‘Then,’ says her Majesty, ‘I will have it the hour when men speak truth.’ ‘Alas, madam!’ says Raleigh, ‘do you seek a pretext for destroying me?’ ‘What pretext, sir?’ she asks. ‘Why,’ says he, ‘the enforced confession of my hopeless passion for a Queen.’”

The soldier snorted alarmingly. “I warrant he’d rehearsed it, preening and curling before his glass,” he said.

“Alack!” said Sidney; “his hair curls naturally--the worse for sleeker heads.”

“How went he?” said Blount--“a painted popinjay?”

“Always in silk and velvet,” answered Greville demurely--“white for choice, and his doublet jewelled in the seams. He becomes his dress, in sooth; knows how to shadow with ambrosial fleece the high pale culture of his forehead; wears his sword as if he used it; hangs his cloak----”

The soldier roared out:

“Hold! His cloak? God’s grace! It hangs--hang him, I say! So I picture him--all but the cloak. It was here we sat together, in this green arbour, but a year ago. Just home from bloody Ireland was he, yet as white and cool as swan’s-down. We were here, I say, we two, in this very spot, and the Court at Pleazaunce. The Queen was in her barge on the river. We saw her pass, and the rogue’s eyes dreamed. Some caprice--some premonition belike--engaged her Majesty to land at the common steps yonder. They were wet and foul, the morning having rained, and, perceiving his chance, my comrade snatched up cloak, and leaped and joined the throng that hovered on the royal advent. I came more leisurely behind, and saw the pretty Queen mount up and hesitate, pursing her lips in comical dismay before a pool of mud. And then, all in a moment--but you’ve heard the story?”

“He spread his cloak for her to step on?”

“Damn him!”

“Why so?”

“It was _my_ cloak, that was all--new green velvet, and home that morning from the cutter’s. Own him now a thief of opportunity.”

Mr. Sidney and Mr. Greville looked at one another gravely a moment, then burst into a shout of laughter.

Marlowe

“Prithee, Kit, pay me the pound you owe me.”

Mr. Christopher Marlowe, Master of Arts, playwright and rakehell, sprawled his arms upon the tavern table, and leered inebriously across it at the speaker. Behind him an open red lattice gave upon a sunny street alive with swarthy gold-ear-ringed mariners; before his sleepy eyes glowed, framed in the end of a black passage, like a picture in a diorama, a square of green banks and flashing waters webbed with rigging. The waters were the waters of Deptford Creek, and the tackle, or at least part of it, belonged to Drake’s ship, the _Golden Hind_, already, in this June of the year 1593, laid by for perpetuity at her Majesty’s command, as a memorial of her nation’s characteristic prowess.

Marlowe tinkled with his fingers an empty flagon on the table.

“A pound, Frank Archer?” quoth he in a slurred derisive voice. “Listen here--as empty as my pocket or your head. An I had a pound, I should know better what to do with it.”

The man he addressed, a fellow-actor in Lord Strange’s company, stood up sulkily before him. He was a neurotic player of women’s parts, and somehow uncleanly attractive to the sex he paraphrased. Perhaps he understood it enough to be feared by it--a lithe vicious creature, as white-faced as a girl, and subject to feminine spites and hysterics. He hated the playwright just now, not only because the latter owed him money, but because the two were rival suitors for the favour of some riverside Thaïs. It was a pitiful association, as who, regarding that other figure of bright genius, could not but feel. Not yet thirty, with blue eyes and honey hair, the face of an angel, the forehead of a sage, the indulgence of insatiable appetites had already marked down this Christopher Marlowe for death or insanity. He seemed to find no adequate satisfaction for his passions’ hunger short of feeding their ravenous fires, as Cellini fed the molten arteries of his Perseus, with dishes and quart measures.

“An you had one?” protested the player. “What! with your _Edward_ still mouthing it at the ‘Rose’?--a damned play.”

“A damned play lines no purses,” said Marlowe.

“Pay me my pound, I say.”

“For what? To frank you to the stews? A man were a fool so to accommodate his rival.”

“Ah! You fear my rivalry.”

“I fear the woman’s cupidity, sir. If Kit with gold, the better; but gold at any price, says she. So they compound. Will you take a post-obit?”

“I want my money, Kit Marlowe.”

“How the parrot repeats! No, on my honour, Frank, on my honour. I am drunk out. Should I not otherwise have been before you with the girl? I cannot pay.”

A shadow darkened the lattice, and Archer, on the point of retorting, paused with his mouth open. Some stranger, attracted by the colloquy, had stopped to listen. He came round now by the open porch and entered the room.

“By your favour, sirs,” he said, “I overheard a name to whose possessor methought I owed a duty. Was not it Master Marlowe’s, the playwright’s.”

Christopher nodded, without rising.

“Duty’s a dry debt,” said he. “I would you had ought the name that cup of burnt sack which my present poverty denies me.”

The new-comer was a young man--little more than his own age--of a very fine and distinguished appearance. His face was delicate and handsome, but a little irregular in its contour, as if its commanding intelligence were easily at the mercy of its humour. A chestnut moustache and beard, small but already strong, clothed a jaw a thought underhung. The eyes above were wonderful--brown vivacious lights of sagacity that seemed to take all observation for their province. A comely compact figure, of the average height, clothed sombrely but richly in purple velvet, a snowy ruff, a flexible black hat with a rolled band of silk above its brim--such completed a personality which was as attractive as it was compelling.

“Is that so?” said the stranger. “Genius insolvent? ‘_Ingenium res adversæ nudare solent, celare secundæ._’ Your poverty should be your gain, sir.”

“As with the Horace you quote?” answered the playwright. “I ask for nothing better, sir, nor for a more enlightened Mæcenas than her Majesty’s Counsel-Extraordinary.”

Mr. Francis Bacon--for it was he, indeed--laughed, knowing himself detected, as if pleased.

“I am well answered,” he said. He was already, young as he was, in advance of his amazing promise--a Bencher and Reader of his Inn, a Member of Parliament, my Lord of Essex’s loved client. And his vast imagination had been the first to grasp the full significance of the dramatic revolution inaugurated by this scapegrace genius who sat revealed before him. “And by a scholar,” he added.

“An exhibitioner, an it please your worship,” cried the other. “Bachelor and Master of Arts of Benet’s College of your own University; translator of Helen’s Rape from Coluthus, and, since, a humble reformer of the Miracles, and, as some aver, even a worker of new ones.”

“I have been eye and ear-witness of your _Tambourlaine_,” said the stranger; “of your _Faustus_, of your _Jew_; lastly of your _Edward the King_; and I have no desire to traverse the statement. You have done things; you have revealed; you have opened out worlds which others, perchance, shall colonise. I doff my hat to that fine madness of your Muse--the hot passion that tears the ‘unities’ to rags and leaves her clothed in Nature. Withal, Master Marlowe, I have a bone or two to pick with you.”

“Alack!” cried the playwright: “this arid mirthless feast!”

“Anon, anon, my gentleman! Grace before meat.”

“But sack before all. Have you never mastered, learned sir, the five most excellent reasons for drinking?”

“I know them not.”