Part 3

“Why, a friend’s visit, the thirst that is, the thirst that will be, the flavour of the wine, and any other reason.”

“They are reasons for. There is one more potent against.”

“What’s that?”

“Why reason itself, which, being robbed by wine, hath no reason to applaud it.”

He saw, indeed, that the man was irretrievably drunk, and that he was wasting time on him. He prepared to go on his way--which was to Greenwich, where the Court was being held.

“Not robbed, but transmuted,” cried Marlowe. “O liquid alchemy! So to be traduced! Have I not ought to thee all the golden treasures of my brain? And he prefers a bone! Well, sir, pick it, pick it.”

“It is german to the matter, I think. Thy golden treasures sink thee even like the shipwrecked miser’s laden belt. Not reason exalted is wine’s, but reason debased--so lowered in the mind’s balance that it sees all the world lopsided, deformed. Such is my quarrel, sir, with the author of the _Jew of Malta_. A man cannot lust with him but he can do naught else; a Jew cannot be a Jew but he is an unredeemed monster. It is not so in fact; we derive from the multitudinous past--are compact of a thousand inconsistencies. There is more good than ill in all men. The purpose of the drama should be to hold a mirror up to Nature--to give us truth, not anamorphosis. There is no truth in wine, despite the proverb.”

He moved to go, and the playwright sprang to his feet.

“No truth?” he cried. “Then let me swallow lies faster than Churchmen can promulgate them. The world’s redeemed, they say--I see it not; we are the children of a beneficent Providence, they say--It will not even feed us, but sends the worm and storm to kill the grain It’s given. My figments are the types of what I see--passion, black malice, usury--selfishness unredeemed by God’s love, but tempered, brute-like, by His terror. An arrant orb of reptiles, worshipping through fear. And so I paint it--sober. Then--drink! Ah, it is my good angel, my better half, my sweet gentle mate that woos me to the larger temperance. I could show you things--but there! Not truth?--not sordid truth? Give me the noble lie, then, that transports me to Elysium, that lends me the wider vision, and I will rain benevolence on this crawling sphere. I am no pessimist in wine.”

His eyes were flaming, his breast heaved, some real emotion strung him.

The great lawyer smiled. “God forbid I should debar you Elysium,” he said, and throwing a gold angel on the table, he left the room.

For some moments after he was gone Marlowe, his passion slowly subsiding, stood eyeing the bright coin.

“A lackey’s vail,” he said at length, “yet the obolus to pay my passage to Elysium. And did I not earn it? Answer, old sack; answer, my rosy Thaïs of the leaping-house. Elysium, Elysium! O, it opens to me!”

A hand came past him like a snake and nipped the coin.

“The debt you ought me,” gulped Archer, with a pallid snigger. “We are quits at last, Christopher.”

With a snarl the playwright turned on the thief.

“Give me back mine own.”

“It is mine.” He hugged and cherished the piece convulsively. “You ought it me. I have the first claim--to Doll and your Elysium.”

“To hell rather--I’ll send you there--be warned.”

“I’ll not yield it.”

He slithered aside, preparing to bolt. With a scream of rage Marlowe drew a knife from his belt and sprang upon him. The actor, warding off the assault, struck out blindly. His arm caught the vicious wrist with a force that made it twist and recoil, driving back the blade full into the eye of the assailant. There followed a gasp, a stagger, a tearing fall--and then silence.

It was the prelude to that immortal music whose symphony had already closed in Elysium.

And the lawyer, profoundly thoughtful, went unconscious on his way.

Queen Elizabeth

“What was that?”

“Madam, it was the snow falling from the roof.”

“Methought it was a footstep.”

“No, madam.”

“There, heard you it not--the sound of someone running?”

“But a rat behind the wainscot. Your Grace’s ears deceive you.”

“What, for ever? Poor ears, so curst to lies and flattery!”

“Your Highness is overwrought.”

“Will someone speak the truth to me before I die? God, how my bones ache! No step? Go look in the gallery, child.”

The girl to whom she spoke, leaving her embroidery-frame, stepped lightly to the door, glanced this way and that, and returned. Her young eyes shone humid between pity and awe.

“No, indeed, madam,” she said low. “The corridor is empty.”

The Queen, without answering, crossed to the window and stood staring from it. It looked upon the privy garden of Whitehall, now one carpet of quiet, sad-coloured snow with the river ruled across its far end like an inky mourning border. A motionless fog brooded over the trees and over the Palace buildings trooped to right and left. There seemed no sign of life anywhere.

Within, a glare of fire burning on a great stone-hooded hearth dashed the wainscoting with red, and crimsoned the hands and faces of the figures in the panels of tapestry, and touched the gold groining of the ceiling and the fresh rushes on the floor with smears like blood. The old eyes, gazing so fixedly across the snow, seemed streaked with the same ruddy hue, but reflected from another and an inward fire. As to the first, she was ever disdainfully insensible to cold, this gaunt, strong old Tudor woman.

Two ladies-in-waiting, a mother and her daughter, had their places by the hearth, where they embroidered together, the former seated, the child bending over. They were the Queen’s only attendants for the moment, since her Majesty was in that tortured frame of mind when her own sole company was but less terrible to her than the thought of an officious suite, veiling curiosity under devotion. Human neighbourhood, silent, tactful, unobtrusive, was the balm her torn soul most needed; any ostentatious sympathy would have maddened her. She could abandon herself to herself beside this gentle pair, as if they were no more than inarticulate animals--wistful dumb affections on which she could lean her voluble heart, certain of their unconscious understanding.

Now the younger lady, returning to her place, stood awestruck a moment, then bent and whispered to her mother, “O, madam, the Tower gun! How shall we close her Grace’s ears to it?”

The Queen, hearing the whisper but not its import, started, and, with a deep flurried sigh, turned round. The wild tumult of thoughts in her mind found expression in detached and broken questions, abstractions, self-communings.

“‘All wounds have scars but that of fantasy, all affections their relenting but that of womankind.’ Who writ those words? Not the mutinous boy. ’Twas Raleigh--he that saw us like Dian, the gentle wind blowing the hair from our face. Essex never spoke such balm. He was no courtier--the worse for him. Am I like Dian?”

The elder lady had arisen hurriedly, and stood, her daughter clinging to her arm, to answer to the voice, which appeared to have addressed her.

“Yes, madam,” she whispered low.

“He never flattered, I say,” went on the Queen. “He was too honest--the devil damn honesty! What day is it?”

“Your Highness,” was the tremulous answer, “it is the twenty-fifth day of February.”

She had known it well enough. All night within her haunted brain the horror of this coming day had brooded--this ghastly morning when on Tower Hill the young Earl of Essex--he was but thirty-four--was to pay the penalty of his madness. She stood staring before her, like one tranced.

“Never flattered,” she repeated--“a bad policy where a woman reigns. The twenty-fifth, is it? Let us know if my Lord of Essex sends or writes.”

“Yes, madam--O yes, indeed!”

The girl, leaning to her mother, buried her pale face in her shoulder.

“Hush!” whispered the Queen; “was not that a step?”

“Indeed, madam, I cannot hear a sound.”

“A stubborn, relentless dog!” muttered the Queen hoarsely. “Let the axe convince him. He will see clearer being dead--no longer dub my mind as crooked as my body; learn that the soul’s glory waxeth with the years, striving to slough its vesture like a snake. A fool, that cannot penetrate that crackling veil, and see, other than a boy, how Truth abhors externals. Raleigh is older; Raleigh can look deeper. Shall I not be Dian still to him?”

She faced her frightened witnesses with the enormous challenge--an old, arid, charmless woman of sixty-eight. Her withered, clay-white face was latticed with countless wrinkles; her nose was high and pinched; her thin, bloodless lips parted to show a ruin of blackened teeth--little spoiled and broken gravestones recording dead memories. Her gullet pursed; her eyes were bloodshot; the red periwig on her poll glowed like a dull flame over expiring ashes. Even her sloven dress betrayed the sickness of her spirit.

“Yes, indeed, madam,” said the mother.

“You lie!” cried Elizabeth fiercely. “He is false like the rest. His eyes betray his lips. Their love-light is the gilding on my crown. When he looks beneath I see mine image in them, an old and loveless woman--barren, and old, and loveless. Do you not hear my heart cry? It turns on a dry axle. O, I would give my queenhood to weep! So utterly alone--no child, no heir, no hope. They say that Charles of Valois wasted and died of poison. What could he expect? Was he not a prince and curst to flattery?”

She strode up and down once or twice in intolerable anguish.

“Truth!” she cried--“truth! And yet when it was mine at last, I turned and struck it down.”

“Not truth, your Grace, but jealousy,” ventured the trembling lady.

“Jealousy!” exclaimed the Queen, stopping suddenly. She stared at the speaker, her breath falling from hard to soft. “Was he jealous, think you?”

“O! madam,” said the other, “is it not thy player, Master Shakespeare, that calleth jealousy ‘green-eyed,’ like as with sour bile that clouds the vision. The distempered speak distempered thoughts, and often turn the most against their most-beloved. I count it green-eyed jealousy with him because he saw your Highness so distorted--not to extenuate the grievous crimes upon which his passions launched him. O, pardon me, madam!”

The Queen stood with her eyes still fixed upon the speaker, but it was evident that their vision took no heed of her, though her ears regarded the import of her speech.

“Jealous!” she said, with a tremulous sigh. “Mayhap like a silly quean I gave him cause, sporting with my troth-ring till it rolled into the well. He was too sure and bold, forgetting who had lifted him, and who could cast him down. But, jealous? Does not his hair curl sweetly on his forehead, child?”

“O, madam! Your Grace!”

“And his eyes so frank and fearless. Fear! He knows it not, the rash and head-strong fool! To think to overbear us!--teach our displeasure a lesson! O, a venture once too often! Because he can boast a strain of royal blood in his veins to dare to lift his head at us! to stamp, and cry: ‘Now, madam, do you hear me?’ or ‘I would have it thus, or thus and thus.’ Such presumption! And yet to see the pretty lord--his lip thrust out in scorn of sycophancy--a man of men, brave, honest, generous, and a fool.”

“Rash and foolish indeed, your Highness.”

“Those are but virtues in reverse. Had he no cause to doubt the love that made him but to ruin?”

“I cry your Grace’s mercy.”

“What for?”

“The ruin followed on the treachery.”

“Was he a traitor?”

“O, madam! did he not curry favour with the King of Scotland, and plot and league to win him the succession?”

“Yes, he’s a traitor.”

“Your Grace forgive me.”

“And I’m a woman.”

“Madam!”

“At the last I yield him all my pride and self-will. He hath so much of me, ’twere idle to reserve that little. Who is that coming?”

“’Twas but the wind in the corridor, madam.”

“I swear I heard him.”

“No, madam.”

“Pride! Will he not meet us so far--but to crave our clemency? He knows the way, and, not taking it, must die! What o’clock is it? O God, he shall not die! Send for my lord Keeper; have horses ready. Hush! he’s coming! Should I not know his footfall?”

She drew herself erect and away; a flush came to her withered cheek; she was the Queen again, aloof, haughty, self-contained. The two terrified women, shrunk together into the shadows by the hearth, saw her eyes gaze into vacancy, heard her lips address some apparition beyond their ken:

“What imports this visit, my Lord of Essex? Who gave you leave to come? Our Constable of the Tower shall be roundly questioned, trust to us. What! are you so pale at last to meet offended majesty? Will you not speak? Will you not pray the mercy you have abused in us too long? A viper in our bosom--O, my lord, that loved and trusted you! What can we think or say, God help us! But we will hear what is to hear. So pale?--the sickness of the stones hath chilled thy fiery blood. Why, I would have come to you, you know well, if you had sent it. Why did you not send it--prouder than thy Queen? Where is the ring? Give it me. O, I have waited, dear my love--have waited dying for this token. Speak--utter one word of sorrow, and I will forgive thee. Aye, kneel so and bow thy comely head----”

A burning log on the hearth fell with a crash and a spurt of flame; a shrill agonised cry broke from the lips of the Queen; she flung her hands before her eyes:

“O God in heaven! The falling head! They are killing my love!”

Weeping and trembling, the two women crept from their corner. At that instant a dull boom, coming from down the river, shook the glass of the casement. The Queen dropped her hands.

“What was that?” she crowed. Her face was all distorted.

“Your Majesty!”

“What was that, I say? My Lord of Essex! He was here but now! Where is he?”

“In heaven, by God’s mercy, madam. It was the Tower gun.”

The Queen sank down moaning where she stood.

Drake’s Chaplain

Looking like a man who had fallen from a roof, a pulp of red and grey, with joints heaved out of all relation to anatomy, the prisoner of the Inquisition was haled before his most Catholic Majesty, who sat in a closet of the Escurial eating rich pastry from a salver, and licking his fingers between. A swarthy guard on either side held up the poor wretch, else he would have weltered to the stones, for he had no limbs capable of supporting him. Yet he swaggered in grotesque suggestion, and gave a twisted parody of a laugh. The pitiful, it seemed, where such existed, could endure the sight of his mutilation less than he himself the fact. He was one of those endowed with a constitutional insensibility to pain. That such human anomalies occur, witness the contemporary examples of Gérard, who murdered William the Silent, and Ravaillac, who stabbed Henry of Navarre. Each endured, jesting and unflinching, the most exquisite tortures, the least of which, one cannot but think, would have killed any man of normal nerves.

Like Gérard, like Ravaillac, was William Donne--Drake’s Chaplain, as he was called, being trebly damned in the title. He had been captured in that final descent of his master on Cadiz, and had thereafter, of course, nothing but the worst to expect. Not short shrift, but particular torments was the ruling for the “sea-dogs,” whom Philip had especial cause to hate. The appeal of their odd buccaneering divinity was largely to humour, of which he was utterly devoid. He had been offended by nothing so much as Drake’s boast of singeing his Spanish Majesty’s beard, and he retorted, wherever he got the chance, with flame and molten lead.

But now he was, for him, in a rare good temper--which might continue until the pastry, to which he was gluttonously addicted, began to assert its effects on an enfeebled digestion. Gleeful in the triumphant maturation of his long-elaborated schemes, he played in fancy at baiting and pricking the English bull, to which he was about to deliver the Spanish quietus, and William Donne offered himself as well as any to symbolise the fated victim.

It was the 1st of August, 1588; the invincible Armada, after a mishap or two, had sailed for Flanders, where the Prince of Parma awaited it with a force of seventeen thousand veterans and a fleet of flat-bottomed transports; Portugal was annexed, William of Orange dead, and, to crown all, the Leaguers, under Henry of Guise, held France and Paris. The Catholic nobility in England only awaited, according to the King’s Jesuit advisers, the landing of the Spanish troops to join forces with the invaders; there was nothing to fear at last and everything to gain. No wonder his Majesty, for ever cold, calculating, patient, had relaxed a little in the near prospect of this unprecedented harvest of his sowing.

He swallowed a last scrap of pastry, and dusted his fingers delicately. An emaciated little man of sixty, with over-blown forehead, small-pupilled ice-blue eyes, and pinched aquiline nose, not all his power nor all his dominions could redeem him from the charge of personal insignificance. His mouth was repulsively wide; his lower jaw, from which bristled a point of grizzled beard, once dusty yellow, was so protruded as to thrust into prominence a disorder of broken teeth like an old bulldog’s. He was dressed unostentatiously in velvet doublet, trunk-hose and curt-manteau, all black, and the collar of the Golden Fleece hung round his neck under a small ruff. Such was Philip, as he sat regarding, without one spasm of emotion, the human wreck before him. Illiterate, infinitesimal-minded, pusillanimous, a disgusting debauchee, he had no one virtue in all the world but sincerity, and with that he endowed a thousand crimes. The monstrous idolatry, through him, of the hereditary principle he embodied, had long supplied its own moral in the torture and immolation of countless hosts of guiltless, happy human beings, in scores of midnight assassinations, in the poisoning of the very springs of nature. Let it be said of him that the murder of his own son was his greatest act of grace, and there is the man summarised.

An English Jesuit, Father Allen, the King’s principal authority for the statement about the Catholic nobility, hung confidentially over his Majesty’s chair, his chill grey eyes scanning the figure of that mutilated fellow-countryman. A second, a Spaniard, but of the like black cloth and inhuman aspect, stood motionless near the prisoner. The King, having cleansed his fingers, glanced up covertly (to the day of his own agonised death he could never look any man, not even the meanest, in the face) and spoke suddenly, in the rapid voice that always seemed to grudge its own utterance:

“The gnat will kill the King! Were those the man’s words?”

Allen looked towards his colleague, who answered in a passionless voice:

“Those and little else--the constant burden of his blasphemy. On the pulley, on the rack, wrenched in the ‘Escalero,’ or with the greased soles of his feet frying at the brazier, always that cry or song. He utters it as it were a charm against pain, jubilant, triumphant.”

His Majesty’s eyes frowned.

“Methinks the Holy Office lacks a counter-charm. Has it no hooks to root up speech, no blistering gags to choke it? Bid him construe his words, or suffer worse.”

“It seems that feeling is dead in him,” said the Father adviser, “killed like a bird in the hand. He is own brother to Balthazar Gérard, who, after all, was a martyr. But it is just a trick of the spirit, detaching itself from the matter it makes sensitive. Shall I question the man?”

Philip waved his hand, and Allen crossed the closet and stood before William Donne, an ingratiatory smile on his lips.

“Good seaman,” he said, “what is this same regicidal gnat you chaunt of?”

The prisoner jerked up his battered face, hearing a question in his own tongue.

“The gnat,” he said in a thick voice, faintly rollicking, “that killed the King.”

“Why and how did he kill him?”

An expression of slyness evolved itself from the wrecked features. A parable was quite in keeping with the regenerate privateering of the time.

“The King,” said William Donne, “had conquered all the blessed world, from the Orcades to Cape Horn, and then, being puffed-up like, he thought he’d sail for the land of God and conquer that. So he fitted up a fleet of winged carracks and steered for heaven. But was the Almighty disturbed to see the countless host approaching? Not He. He just sent out a single gnat, that flew and crept into the King’s ear and stung his brain, burning it to madness, so that there was an end of the expedition; and the fleet went about, crashing together in its confusion, and returned, what was left of it, to the Spanish Main.”

A short pause succeeded, and then Allen smiled and nodded.

“To the Spanish Main,” he said, “exactly. And the land of God, my friend?”

“What but little England,” cried William Donne, “and Drake the jolly gnat?”

The Jesuit turned and interpreted to the King, who, for all his world-dominion, spoke no tongue but his own. His Majesty, caressing his thin beard, answered without emotion: “Well, he hath betrayed his charm. Let the Holy Office get at him at last.”

He dismissed the man and the subject with a gesture, and, rising, put a hand upon the priest’s shoulder. His eyes glistened with a cold, remote look, as if their pupils contracted to a distant vision.

“It comes, Allen,” he said, “it comes--the fruition of our long desire. These news--how spiteful Fate delays them; and yet it can be but a day or so. To grasp that little stronghold of heresy in our hand at last, and dust the tares into the fire. Woe on them that have baulked us in the hour of their triumph! They shall burn, Allen, they shall burn. We will sweep the land with flame, that the after-crop may be rich and virgin. The world surrenders piecemeal to our Christ, the Prince of love and justice. A land of God we’ll make it----”

He paused abruptly on the word, and stood staring, his jaw loose. Then rallied, and, breathing out a deep sigh, whispered: “That dog! A blasphemous appropriation! We’ll show his God of gnats the warrant of the Cross; we’ll dispute his claim, I think. His God!--a Jezebel, a false idol, who sends her ships to poison my new world--mine, decreed of Rome! A curse upon the gnat!”

He appeared of a sudden strangely moved. The gnat’s particular humour, indeed, was the sting he most abhorred; the virus of its memory for ever rankled in his veins. Not eight years was it since this gnat, this Drake, this bold heretic fanatic, had, daring his edict, swept the Spanish Indies and plundered a Spanish galleon of their treasures, loaded with which he had returned to England, to be applauded and knighted by its Queen. Not one year was it since, descending upon Cadiz and the ports of the Faro, this same freebooter had inflicted an almost irreparable blow upon the preparations ripening for the great attack.

The land of God! The land of the foul fiend rather. But it was all decided at last; the hour of reckoning was come, and he, Philip, only awaited the news confirmatory to exact his bitter toll for every abuse, for every humiliation, for every insult so long heaped upon him.

Standing there, he recalled a certain letter, in which this Jezebel, this Queen of heretics, had finally, soon after her accession, rejected the offer of his hand. That had been thirty years ago, but the memory remained, an open wound. She was to answer for it in her “land of God.” And Drake! With the venom of a mean nature he lusted to wreak the first of his triumphant hate on the body of the “sea-dog’s” chaplain. The wretch’s nerves of feeling must be got at somehow; he, Philip, must think of some harrowing method; and in the meantime it would be richly gratifying to disinter that old letter of rejection, and gloat over the reprisals to be exacted for it.