Part 2

“And didst thou not ask the number of the room?”

“Wait. I heard the step and looked below, and when I turned again her finger was on her lips and she drew back.”

“Canst thou never learn expedition?” exclaimed the other, biting his lip.

“She was behind the balustrade,” resumed Tabbard, unmindful of the interruption, “and where the light from the skylight fell upon her. He could not see her, nor she him, but she heard him hit the stairs. I say he could not see----”

“Go on, you stumble in your speech.”

“----not see her, but I could. She was dressed like a lady; her cheeks pink, her eyes as dark as thine own; her hair golden.”

“The same,” uttered the other, nodding his head.

“She went into the room with carved panels on the door.”

“Are they not all carved?”

“May be so; but I think not. No, ’twas the first guest’s room; the second door on the right from the head of the stairs. The man passed me as I went down.”

“Who was he?”

“I never saw him before.”

“Was he not her father?”

“Oh, no. He was a young man dressed in grand style. In face he was so like thee that I almost stopped him as I have thee now.”

“And did you make no inquiry at the bar?”

“The tapster was busy; the serving men were strangers to me, and Dodsman was not in sight.”

“And you learned nothing more?”

“No; I mounted and came on.”

“Marry, and why didst thou not wait, and why didst thou not find me before?” questioned the other, in tones of reproof. “It is now near six o’clock and three miles lie between here and London bridge and then another three miles or more to Deptford.”

“Is that not time enough?”

“And how much can one spare from it for a full meal and a glass of Canary at the Red Bull or the Mermaid? I would not chance more than a mug of sack and a square of black bread at the ale-house next to the London wall. And how can one push his horse faster than a walk through such a fog as this? But let us press on.”

Through the fields they proceeded along a wide path unfenced and bordered with stretches of grass and rushes.

“You ask me why I did not wait for knowledge about the lady,” at length said Tabbard, thinking that some explanation was still due. “It was then late, and besides the message I had for the Earl’s actors, I wished to see Gabriel Spencer as the king in ‘Edward the Second,’ at the Theater. I could not miss that, Sir Kit.”

“And nearly missed seeing me,” said Kit, absently.

“I expected to see thee there, too. For admission I paid my last penny, or at not seeing thee on the stage I should have gone to the other playhouse. I tried to go into the galleries, but an upstart youth in bare head and with sword at his side, like one of the Queen’s men, forced me back, demanding another penny. Before me went a crowd of women, and the galleries were filled with them. Unlike those in the open pit, they sat under roof and without fear of rain.[6] So into the pit I went, and must needs have paid another penny for a seat had not Dudden, a countryman of mine from near Maidstone, in Kent, whom I had not seen for four years, touched me on the shoulder and bade me squeeze in between him and a friend. They had brought bottles of sack in with them,[7] and not a drink would they take without my joining them.”

“And did that require much urging?”

“Little at first,” answered Tabbard, “but when once the play was well on, I could not drink for fear of taking my eyes from the stage; not that the devil heads on the tops of the posts on each side interested me, or the dandies on the stools and dried rushes on the stage-floor[8] under these heads, but the actors! Ah, but the actors, Sir Kit! Were there ever such crimson doublets and cloaks with copper lacings worn? And the rich dresses that the men wore, who played the parts of the Queen and ladies, made me think that they had broken into the wardrobe at Whitehall. And do ladies never play such parts, Sir Kit?”

“Never,”[9] answered the other, shaking his head.

“But Dudden swore they were ladies, and when one of the spectators on the stage hissed the Queen for forgetting a line he threw one of the empty bottles of sack at him. It was all so grand, so fierce, so bloody. And Dudden went into a drunken fit when the head of Mortimer was brought in. But that was at the end. My own heart was in my throat at the sight of the mowers, with their Welch hooks, taking the king captive.”

“Art thou so easily disturbed, fellow?” asked Kit, with a twinkle in his eye.

“Prut!” exclaimed Tabbard, “Thou couldst never have seen the play, if you say that. What man could sit still when the king moaned; ‘Lay me on a litter and to the gates of hell----’”

“Hold,” interrupted the other, “not quite so. These are the words:

‘A litter hast thou? Lay me in a hearse, And to the gates of hell convey me hence: Let Pluto’s bells ring out my fatal knell, And hags howl for my death at Charon’s shore.’”

“Then he throws off his disguise,” continued Tabbard, excitedly. “Why those sound like the very words. Didst thou ever play the part of Edward?”

“Nay,” said Kit, shaking his head.

“Or Gaveston or Mortimer?”

“Nay, neither.”

Tabbard looked at his companion with open mouth, and then asked:

“And what says the king when he hands the Bishop his crown?”

“Now, sweet God of Heaven, make me despise this transitory pomp,” answered the other without hesitation.

“Well, and dost thou know all the play?” asked Tabbard in amazement.

“Much of it,” came the answer.

“And never was in it as an actor?”

“Never.”

“And how comes it that you know it all?”

“I wrote it,” quietly answered the other.

“Wrote it!” exclaimed Tabbard, “and then thou art----”

“Christopher Marlowe,” continued the gentleman, “commonly called Kit.”

The effect on the excited youth was something magical. He stopped talking but gave vent to a prolonged “Oh,” that died into a whisper. He was in the presence of genius; this was the man who had written the lines which for three hours under a hot sun, he had listened to in silent awe and tremblings of terror. He could scarcely believe his eyes; and Marlowe noticing Tabbard’s stupid amazement said:

“How much sack did you punish, Tabbard?”

The question was designed to bring the latter-mentioned person out of his stupefaction, and it had this effect; but in his recovery Tabbard’s wonder ran along the mental line of inquiry concerning how it was that genius could be interested in such common matters.

“Enough to have lost my way and the place where I tied my horse,” at length answered Tabbard, recovering his voice, and looking about him.

“Tied him? Witless, you should have had a boy hold him,” said Marlowe, exhibiting some interest in the welfare of the man who had brought him the message of all others the most pleasing to his ear.

“Then I needst must have cheated the boy, for I have not an old Harry Groat in my pocket,” answered Tabbard, spreading his hands open before him, with palms turned up.

“It is not safe to trust one’s animal with rope and post in these fields nor in this lane,” said Marlowe in the tone of an adviser.

“Well a boy held two horses near where I tied mine to a tree not a great way from this opening. But for the fog I could see him. And I said ‘keep an eye on him. He can not be held.’”

“Which was false, undoubtedly,” nodded Marlowe, smiling.

“Ay, for the brute needs spurs for walking smooth roads. But the watching required no labor.”

“And I suppose that your horse is a pleasing sight to look upon,” said the other.

“True, Sir Kit, and so the score will be even.”

“Was one horse gray that the boy held, and one black, and did the boy wear a cap and stand under an apple tree next to the Priory wall?”

“That is all true,” responded Tabbard.

“Well, the gray horse is mine,” said Marlowe.

“And why did you leave him so far from the entrance to the play-houses?” asked Tabbard.

“A man who has creditors must appear to be a beggar on foot. I limped to the theater and have now let the crowd precede me as you see,” explained the other, and then noticing a group emerging from the fog, he exclaimed: “Ah! here the boy is now, and there is your horse where you tied him.”

The pair had been following the path for some distance, and now mounting their horses, rode down the lane between brick walls, over which great orchard trees extended their branches, and again on between low houses with green blinds where the miserable outcasts of the city had located themselves. Before them ran the Shore-ditch highway, and entering this they rode on toward the invisible city wall.

In this vacancy of event, there is space for an epitome of the period, in so far as it affected the condition of the principal character of this romance. The somberness of the natural scenery, and the obscurity of the sky were in keeping with his social surroundings and the uncertainty of his existence. The fog might rise disclosing a sky conducive of joyous spirits, or it might gather so dense that naught but the austere form of Melancholy, with her trailing robes of black, could walk with firm and unfaltering strides within it. It was the latter condition that was to follow. At that moment, in the mind of Marlowe, the rosiest dreams of life pursued one another as though conceived by an Ovid, and impelled by the spirit of a Homer; but they were to be buried in the blackness of what seemed eternal night.

Fired with the ambition of a god, he had issued from the studious walks of Cambridge in 1587. Finding dramatic art confined to a close circle, wherein only rhyming productions were considered fit for presentation on the stage, and the public clamorous for aught that possessed the fire of action and the thunder of bombastic declamation, he cast from his shoulders the splendid cloak of rhyme, in which for a moment he had adorned himself, and with the plain but majestic front of a warrior, with feet in the buskins of an actor, he presented himself before the public. It fell in adoration at his feet. The thunder of his tread shook all the gods of rhyme from their immemorial thrones, and from amid the ruins Greene, Nashe and others lifted their protesting voices. Recognizing him as the son of the clerk of the parish church of St. Mary, Greene insisted that he could not “write true English without the help of clerks of parish churches,”[10] and Nashe, like Gervinus in his analysis of the “Shakespere” plays, saw in the productions of this late graduate of Cambridge and dramatic innovator, the lines of Seneca read under the light of the English candle.[11] But all in vain was the outcry.

In the production of Tamburlaine he had with one bound reached an eminence from which it was impossible to dislodge him,[12] and, in quick succession, followed the dramas of Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward the Second, and the Massacre at Paris. These plays had been produced during a term of six years, wherein he had alternated his afternoon occupation as an actor at the Curtaine,[13] with nights as a dramatic writer. These productions, teeming with majestic lines, and filled with a spirit from “translunary” sources, required not the critical minds of a later school of commentators to establish their worth.[14] Some passages are still recognized as having “no parallel in all the range of tragedy.”[15] Thus it was that at this period he was throned in a school where all his fellows were his servile imitators. Among them were Nashe, Peele, and Lilly; but poor Greene, with one more outburst against the “upstart crow,” with “his tygres heart,”[16] who could have been none else than the writer whom he had attacked in 1587, had finished his unfortunate career. And his career was the one being pursued by all these fiery and impatient souls. It was Marlowe, especially, who had plunged into all the mad excesses of an unbridled life,[17] the temporary drift of a youth with convictions unsettled by draughts from Greek philosophers, senses inflamed by the voluptuousness of Ovid, and an existence checkered by frequent shadows of poverty and flitting gleams of plenty. It was the unsettled state of vigorous youth, augmented by the peculiar social conditions then existing.

Upon the continent the civil wars of Henry IV. had approached their close. In England the Starchamber held its secret sessions; the block of the executioner was kept warm with the blood of the insecure nobility; while the torch for the fires of heretics was never allowed to smolder. Elizabeth had been on the throne 35 years; Francis Bacon, with mind bent on pre-eminence as a philosophic writer, was her counsel learned extraordinary, and William Shakespere, six years previously arrived from the obscure village of Stratford-on-Avon, was a member of Lord Pembroke’s Company of actors. There were no theaters at that time within the walls of the city; histrionic exhibitions being presented on the boards of the “gorgeous playing houses erected in the fields.” The edict against strolling players was rigorously enforced; freedom of expression in matters of religious belief was the subject of penal laws, and any animadversions concerning the policy of the government were declared treasonable.

As an evidence of the barbarity of the times, the Southwark end of the London bridge was decorated with the heads of thirty traitors, all of which had fallen beneath the axe of the executioner after the hanging and disemboweling of the bodies. The tower held many martyrs of religion; and Fleet Street prison, with its foul quarters, was the abiding place of hopeless prisoners for debt. If the pinch of poverty of itself was spur enough to have produced the poems of Goldsmith, the wonder at the immortal dramas and poems of the Elizabethan era must vanish upon consideration of what poverty and debt then meant, and the insecurity of the beggar who gave expression to his coin-producing thoughts.

It was during a time, thus out of joint, that Hamlet and Richard the III. walked, as embodied entities, from the brain of their author. Besides the barbarity of the period, the intolerant spirit, and the harsh laws, did any other factor add its motive power toward these productions? Had some crisis been reached in the life of the author greater than that evolved through poverty and the prospect of imprisonment alone?

A CHANCE TO SERVE THE CHURCH.

_Now will I show myself To have more of the serpent then the dove; That is more knave than fool._

--_The Jew of Malta, ii, 3._

_And thus I clothe my naked villainy With odd old ends stolen forth of holy writ, And seem a saint when most I play the devil._

--_King Richard III, i, 3._

Under the newly-cast sign of an iron dolphin suspended before the ale-house of that name, the two horsemen, who had ridden abreast from Finbury Fields, dismounted for hasty refreshment. While Tabbard was securing the horses near the end of the long stone trough, at the front of the building, his waiting companion was idly surveying the suroundings.

Directly across the unpaved highway, he could see the bulky steeple of the parish church of Saint Botolph lifting itself into the misty air, and just beyond the brick walls of the structure, the miserable churchyard of Petty France. The few straggling headstones of the graves of a multitude of buried foreigners could be faintly discerned under scrubby trees inclosed with a fence of crumbling masonry. Its southern edge was bordered by the town ditch, once broad enough for the defense of the city, but now showing only a narrow black mouth under the shadow of the old Roman wall. The latter was near enough to be visible, and, coming out of the fog from east and west, terminated in stone bulwarks against which the ancient gates of Bishopsgate were hung. These were swung back, revealing a black expanse below which ran the unseen road into the metropolis.

The scene was desolate in the extreme, but the spirits of the silent observer had reached too high a pitch of exaltation to be affected by any aspect of Nature. The news brought him by the present henchman of the Duke of Sussex and past servant of the Golden Hind, had lifted his mind above the plane where even thoughts of approaching financial distress or fears of the plague could arise, much less any sober-colored clouds be created by what passed before the eye.

The bearer of the message, menial though he was, had rendered too valuable a service to be treated in any other manner than as a good fellow of equal rank with himself. Hence, he had thrown off the superiority he generally assumed amid the common rabble, and after listening affably to the remarks of Tabbard, had held him for a meal at the Dolphin.

“How long will those gates be open?” asked Tabbard, looking in the direction of the wall.

“Until ten o’clock, and even after that hour you can pass through if you pound upon their fronts loudly enough to wake the keeper, who sleeps within the little black house close to the wall on the southern side. But in pounding, mind thee, Tabbard,” continued the speaker, with a smile, “see to it that you do not mar the stone features of the full length figure of King Richard the Second, which with broken scepter in his hand, stands out from the northern front of one of the rotting gates.”

“He must have his face now against the wall, for they are swung outward,” remarked Tabbard.

“Yes, for the nonce, as closely hidden as the manner of his violent death.”

“Ah,” said Tabbard, his mind crowded with the thoughts of the existing religious persecutions, “did he espouse the cause of the Papists?”

“Nay, my good fellow, that was two hundred years ago, when the fury of the church, then in power, expended itself mainly in bulls of excommunication. The violence of these days did not exist; but still conflicting doctrines entertained by the clergy disturbed the serenity of Rome, and the chief heretic was Wycliffe, whom the young king protected. That priest sowed the most fruitful seeds of the Reformation; but none of the Brownists or Puritans appear to recognize, amid the tenets of their beliefs, the handwriting of that master husbandman.”

“And I suppose that he was burnt, was he not?”

“After death.”

“In hell’s everlasting fire, eh?”

“Nay, I do not mean that. He died a natural death; but many years after, his body was taken from its grave and publicly burned.”

“Little it disturbed him, I wot,” remarked Tabbard.

“So it seems that fanaticism rests not even with the death of the person on whom it would wreak its fury, and it burns even in the breasts of men as mild looking as yonder group of Puritans.”

He pointed to the middle of the road close before them where several men were slowly walking toward Houndsditch. The plainness of their dress, of the same color from head to foot, and of exactly similar cut, was in striking contrast with the apparel of the two men whom they were passing.

Their broad brimmed hats were high-crowned and flat at the top, and pulled down so low that only four inches of face were visible above the deep collars of their gray coats. The latter were hung with heavy capes, and fronted with pin-head buttons to the lowest point below their waists. Loose breeches disappeared at their knees into rough looking high-boots with great rolling tops.

Their appearance excited Tabbard to laughter. Although still regarded as objects of ridicule by the irreligious populace and the body of the established church, the more thoughtful of those of adverse belief were beginning to recognize in the Puritans’ open and covert attacks upon the follies and vices of the times, the growth of a moral and political power which likewise demanded forcible suppression. Their railing libels against the clergy of the established church had at length formed a pretext for Parliament to pass an act that year making Puritanism an indictable offense. Their assembling had already been prohibited by the Black Act of 1584.

Despite their persecution, the zeal of the dissenters continued in their attacks upon what they considered crying evils. They stood ready to apprehend all offenders against such ecclesiastical laws as upheld the truth and sacredness of religion and the divinity of Christ. So far as Romanism might be by them considered destructive of true religion, they were ready to wield the sword forged by the Episcopalian Parliament for the dismemberment of the Papists. Many a non-conformist discovered in the person of the prosecuting witness swearing against him a member of the sect of Brownists. But particularly in the case of apostates and blasphemers the Puritans and Brownists directed their efforts toward having meted out to the offender the effective punishment provided by law.

As the two men turned and approached the door of the tavern, a man with deep-set eyes, sunken nose and red-bearded face, and dressed in the garb of a Puritan, hurriedly withdrew his face from a window adjoining the entrance. The sinister expression of his face had grown more pronounced during the last moment of his survey of the newcomers; for it was at them that his gaze had been directed. It was evident that their approach had disturbed him greatly; but the disturbance was rather that of joy than of alarm. Still, whatever the sight created or revived in the mind of Richard Bame, the fanatic, his movements elicited the fact that he was either not desirous of the impending meeting, or that he considered that his presence in another quarter would be more to his advantage. He had seen the gentleman in the black cloak before, but not to the knowledge of the latter, so it was not the dread of an encounter that made Bame turn and hasten toward the side-door of the dimly lighted tap-room. It was the second step which he had taken in what he considered a holy cause; of most evil effect it might be to the man approaching. As the former passed the big chair in which the fat hostess of the Dolphin sat knitting he muttered not too softly to be kept from ears already aroused at the note of his departure:

“My chance to serve the church is ripe.”

He passed into the side alley leading to the high road when the two men entered the room. The leader spoke without giving the woman chance for words of greeting:

“Good hostess, a hasty snack is what we want.”

“Of what shall it be?” she asked.

“Sack, cheese, bread and two pieces of meat as big as your hand. Drop yourself there, Tabbard?”

The speaker had tossed his cloak over the back of a chair as he spoke and as hastily filled another. In impatience he drummed a tattoo with one of his feet on the smooth oaken floor; and, apparently without noting the freshness of the bare walls and the chimney in which no fire had ever burned, his eyes roamed around the room.

“Just built,” remarked Tabbard.

“Yes,” returned the hostess, setting the dishes called for before the two strangers and smiling as though she felt flattered over the knowledge that her house was the subject of observation and comment.

“Where went the old building?” asked Tabbard.

The hostess turned her hand with thumb pointing upwards and said, “In smoke.”

“Yes,” said Marlowe, whose scarlet doublet and silver-corded belt had awakened the hostess’ admiration and almost hushed her into respectful awe, “I saw its blaze from as far south as the Standard in Cheap. The old tavern was twice as large as this, and being just outside the wall was greatly frequented by travelers approaching London late at night.”

“Do many stop here now?” inquired Tabbard.

“Not many at this season,” answered the hostess.

“The last one before you, kind sir,” she continued, now turning her attention to Marlowe and bowing so that her eyes caught only the sparkle of his rapier’s hilt, “left just as you entered. He acted strangely as he caught sight of you.”

“So, who was he?”

“He gave me no name, but as he went out I heard him say: ‘My chance to serve the church is ripe.’”

“How was he dressed?” asked Marlowe, suddenly setting down his half-raised mug, and fixing his eyes upon the hostess.