Part 9

As the two men, whose steps we have been following, entered the Old Jewry, their approach was a matter of notice, and as they reached a spot directly before the church, three of the thieves sprang out of the shadows of its projecting entrance. The attack came so unexpectedly that the two men had no chance for flight, and safety seemed to lie only in such effort. In the first grapple, the taller man’s cloak was torn from him, but this was of fortunate occurrence, for it enabled him to draw his sword. His companion had been felled to his knees, but, avoiding another blow aimed at his head, he rose to his feet and staggered to one side. The drawn sword of his friend swung through the air. It cut a face wide open in its career, and was again wielded in like manner, but without effect. Then the wounded robber seized the knees of the swordsman, only to be thrust through and through, as the latter stumbled and fell in the embrace.

In the meantime, the other man assailed, tugging at the hilt of his own sword which was kept from handy withdrawal by the folds of his cloak, retreated backward into the middle of the street. Approaching him was the robber who had delivered the first ineffectual blow. In the tussle he had dropped his bludgeon, and he was now trusting to his own strength to overpower this man before him. Suddenly another sword was out of its scabbard. There was a quick thrust at the dark body between outstretched hands which had almost grasped the swordsman’s neck. A groan escaped from agonized lips, and the wielder of the sword felt warm blood upon his sword hand. His victim had fallen heavily against him, but he pushed him off like so much dead weight, and at that moment he heard his friend’s voice:

“Run, Kit, for thy life!”

“I am with you,” came the answer.

He saw that two other shadows had joined the decimated group. These two had been drowsing on the portico, and at length, aroused by the cries, had come forth. He saw his companion turn and run, and he followed him.

The lights of the windmill tavern streamed across the way, for its doors were open. They reached the fronting pillars of its portico, as though a haven, and then paused. Both of them knew that they could not venture in, and fortunately their assailants had given up the chase.

In the gloom, behind one of the columns, they stood panting. Near them stood a man also in the shadows. Their swift approach had been observed by him; but if he had apprehended the cause, it had not shaken him from his intent to remain concealed. He might have heard the retreating footsteps of their now baffled pursuers, and this should have disturbed him; for the cause of the men who had almost brushed against him was his cause. It was his duty to pursue the assailants; but there are times when the public weal is forgotten--blotted out by thoughts of one’s private welfare. And so it was with the man in the darkness of the portico. The continuance of his ability to act for the public, nay, possibly his existence, depended on different service than the arrest of midnight marauders.

This man was Gyves, the constable, and he was waiting to see Bame leave the tavern so that he might venture in, find Tabbard, and obtain by persuasion or violence the warrant for the arrest of Marlowe. He had waited there for hours, through the mist which had drifted across the portico, and then later, while the drizzling rain had beaten in his face and set him shivering. He had yet no knowledge of the destruction of the writ, and no whisper of the sudden visit of the plague had touched his ears. So it was that the paper, upon which he dreamed his welfare hung, and the man whom he had for the past eight hours yearned most to see, were both beyond power of production to him. But despite all this, the arrest of Marlowe, which was his ultimate object, required at that moment neither the departure of Bame nor his possession of the writ. And furthermore no long weary walk nor tiresome search in an unfamiliar quarter would have been necessary. He could have reached out his hand and have arrested the two men under the neighboring column for a disturbance of the peace. Even then a sword was being sheathed by one of them, and Gyves had heard the late outcry which of itself was sufficient to have justified him in taking them into custody to await further investigation. One of the men was Christopher Marlowe.

To us, with our limited vision, what a comedy is life. Over what scenes of merriment could we not amuse ourselves were we robbed of hearts and consciences and there were added to our remaining faculties the power of unlimited sight alone; to see the struggles of one during a whole life for a result which required only a few days’ effort along another line than that pursued; to see the entanglement, in a single web, of many with worthy designs, and their struggles liberating only that one who as it appeared to us should have remained entangled; to see the life pursuit for a will-o’-the-wisp; to see genius strangled, and dullness triumphant. Perhaps the truth would then burst upon us, that we are but the pawns and knights of the chess-board, moved by an Omniscient hand toward the final victory of the whole.

As the three men held back in the shadows, three more men came forth from the portals of the tavern; but only two of them walked. The third was between the others, but instead of being like them, erect, he was in a horizontal position. He lay upon a stretcher which the two men bore. He was motionless, and a rough cloth covered his form.

Certain it was that the covering of the man upon the stretcher should have concealed his face, but through some inadvertency it had rolled down upon his breast so that his face was revealed. It was expressionless and that of one from whom the soul had fled. A man with flaming torch now ran out of the doors, as though to lead the way, and as the light struck upon the form upon the stretcher, one of the two men who had escaped the murderous, bludgeons of the thieves, clutched his companion’s arm and gasped:

“My God! the dead man is Tabbard.”

Then, as the flaming torch illuminated the man in front, who, with back toward the corpse, bore the stretcher, Marlowe, for he was the speaker, sunk his fingers deep into the clutched arm, for at that moment he heard a voice near him whisper:

“And Bame, Richard Bame, carries him.”

A shadow, shifting with the wavering of the torch, fell across Marlowe’s face. The latter looked to ascertain its cause and also the source of the last words spoken, and saw the outline of a man in the coat of an officer slink from the portico into the rain and the darkness. The torch now revealed an object close to the edge of the pavement. It was a heavy cart with horses attached like the one which had passed Tabbard early that night. His body was being borne toward it.

IN THE PRINCE’S WARDROBE.

_But stay, what star shines yonder in the East?_

--_Jew of Malta, ii, 1._

_But soft: what light through yonder window breaks?_ _It is the East--_

--_Romeo and Juliet, ii, 2._

Marlowe and Tamworth now followed the example of the constable and, having moved silently along the street, in a few moments were in the wide and dark hall of a large building near the church of St. Olave.

“Hold to my arm,” said Tamworth, “This is the Prince’s Wardrobe.”

“And entered without turning so much as a knob or lifting a latch,” responded Marlowe.

“Here we climb the King’s staircase,” said Tamworth, as one of his advancing feet struck against an obstacle.

The morn was breaking, but the interior of the building, although open and windswept, was wrapped in utter darkness. Nought could be distinguished of the broken columns down the long hall, the tesselated pavement under foot, the marred frescoes of the walls, the blackened stucco of the ceilings, the solid staircase with heavy stone balustrade ascending to a middle landing. Once the principal palace of King Henry VI, it had long since been remodeled and adapted to plebeian uses. It has even survived its fitness for the latter shifts, and partially dismantled by man and ruined by time it stood simply as a landmark of the fourteenth century.

The few words of the lawyer set moving through the poet’s mind a vision of splendid pageantry. The great hall rose out of shadow, bright with the illumination of a thousand lamps, and across its shining floor and up and down the marble stairway moved figures resplendent in the pomp of royalty--men of magnificent mien in cloaks of cloth of gold and waving plumes; court sycophants with cringing shoulders under their rich mantles; clowns in cap and bells and spangles; fair ladies in regal robes, their faces beautiful in youth, or growing queenly with the marks of age. All were raised as at a masque under the signal of the Master of the Revels.

And this interior scene, from which kings, courtiers and the fairest and most womanly of women were to be drawn for all time, was not his only vision of the tumultuous past. Outside, again, Jack Cade, with his rebels, Kentish peasants, ragged mendicants and starvelings of the alleys, swept defiantly through the Old Jewry and halted with deafening uproar before the barricaded entrance. There at their head, he saw the “shag-haired crafty kerne” and, close pressing him, the leather-aproned smiths and hedge-born hinds, awkward soldiers of the day’s enlistment, from whose base lips all the drolleries of the seamy side of life were to issue.

And he, the magic creator of forms more palpable and enduring than those of clay, groping in the darkness which might never be lifted, was thus beginning the conjuration of the everlasting.

“Marlowe,” exclaimed Tamworth, noticing the lack of pressure on his arm, and his friend’s faltering footsteps. “You drag your feet as though in sleep. See, the clouds are breaking and the gray of the dawn is about us.”

They were passing along an upper corridor, and at its end, through the glassless spaces between the mullions of a lancet window, a glow was spreading so that the rear gables of the row of houses on the Lothbury could be seen shaking themselves free of the murky air. Above their steaming roofs, slender columns of smoke were rising from the cold mouths of chimneys, and early fires made gleaming spots on many of the distant walls. The last wet gust of the storm had splashed upon the open casement through which now came, like a benison, the pure breath of morning.

Down the corridor they turned, and, at length halted, while Tamworth with a great key which he had taken from a sunken niche in the wall, unlocked and swung open a narrow door. Through this they entered an apartment whose single window did not yet admit enough light to render distinctly visible the interior. The air was cold and damp, and for the moment the place seemed as gloomy as a vault. Tamworth hastily lighted a lamp, which at first flamed upward with black smoke, and as it did so Marlowe glancing around him, uttered an exclamation of surprise.

“You notice that something more than a mere vestige of past regal splendor remains here,” said Tamworth, smiling.

“Why, I should judge that the door had just closed upon the departure of the prince.”

“A hundred years ago,” answered Tamworth.

“And--” began his companion.

“Has remained vacant until I entered as its occupant.”

“Why this long disuse?”

“It is in a retired wing of the building. Only two keepers have had charge since the Crown parted with its title. The first, from what may have been an over-refined reverence for royalty, held this apartment locked and almost secret. His successor found no use for it until I solicited lodgment. He gave me possession five years since.”

“It is a wonder that the tapestries have not been removed,” said Marlowe, looking in admiration at one end of the room where hung two magnificent fabrics, still displaying in enduring colors scenes from the Apocalypse. They were drawn back from the middle line of the alcove before which they hung; and, in the recess thus disclosed, the outlines of a bed, with gorgeous canopy overhanging it, could be seen. Other textiles of equally antique manufacture, at many points detached from the fastenings, hung here and there against the walls. Separate pieces of Oriental carpet lay over some spaces of the floor. The furniture was dark as ebony. A lamp of brass, with four projecting wings and blackened chains, suspended from the center of the ceiling. The deep and wide chimney-place was fit for a fire great enough to warm the banqueting hall of a castle. Its mantel was supported by elaborately carved columns standing half out from the front of the chimney-wall.

“And where does that stairway lead?” asked Marlowe, pointing at a dark opening in the floor beside one wall. It was guarded by a brass railing raised waist-high on a closely set balustrade, and at its foot could be seen a solid door held shut by an iron bar across its face.

“To an underground passageway.”

“For escape?”

“Evidently.”

“And ends where?”

“Under a marble slab which must be somewhere in the chancel of the church of St. Olave. I have passed along it measuring the distance.”

“But never issued at the other end?”

“No. The slab is closely set in its place, but it hath hinges on its lower side.”

“And on its upper side, I doubt not,” said Marlowe ironically, “are the words in fair letters ‘Touch not mine annointed’?”

“Possibly,” rejoined Tamworth.

“If the king ever rose from the grave,” said Marlowe, smiling, “I imagine that he took great pains to conceal it.”

“There is no tradition that this room was ever occupied by a king or a prince; but what I know of the life and character of the weak and unfortunate monarch, Henry the Sixth, taken in connection with the arrangement of this room and its adjoining secret chamber, convinces me that a crowned head once rested on the bed within the alcove.”

“Ah, the secret room is an oratory, is it?”

“You surprise me,” exclaimed Tamworth, “how could that have reached your ears?”

“I simply inferred it, for I certainly do not think that the secret tunnel into the chancel was for the purpose of easy attendance upon divine service.”

Tamworth smiled, and Marlowe continued speaking:

“I knew of the imbecility of that prince and the strength of his religious devotion; and naturally in my mind was raised the picture of a world-weary king in penitential cell.”

“You are right,” returned the lawyer. “See.”

He parted the heavy and worm-eaten hangings suspended from the ornamental cornice of the wall beside the painted window. The outline of what appeared to be a walled window appeared. Its sill, like that of the one that was open and uncovered, was only a foot above the floor. He pressed on one of the mullions, which, although apparently blocked with stone on both sides, remained standing out from the surface of the wall. This surface rolled inward as he pressed. The opening was wide enough to admit the passing of a man in stooping posture.

“Come,” said Tamworth.

He stepped upon the stone sill, and as Marlowe, holding back the musty tapestry for a moment, pressed close in his wake, he entered a small room.

They were in what was certainly a devotional chamber. Before them in the center wall of a semi-circular recess, or exedra, was a gilded crucifix in bas-relief. A stone canopy extended from the top of this recess, and was still fringed with heavy black velvet. At the bottom of the recess was a platform slightly raised above the floor of the room. One could imagine that this low ambo bore the imprints of the knees of the royal penitent.

The ceiling was dome-shaped overhead, as severe in its smoothness and absence of tracery as the supporting walls, which without curvature, fronted each other with a space between of twenty feet in length and twelve in breadth. In the face of one wall, near the floor, was a dark cavity, with an iron basket within it, for the maintenance of fire during prolonged self-communion. A leather-covered couch stood in one corner, and before it hung a lamp in rusty chains. An iron table, with legs covered with elaborate scrollwork, stood at the end of the room furthest from the couch. Upon its top was a great black-lettered Mazarin Bible, and beside it was a solid square-seated chair with high carved back. Above this table hung a lamp similar to the one near the couch; and in the smoky wall behind it was a square window covered with an iron lattice. The strips of the lattice were narrow, and not closely crossed, so that the entrance of daylight was little hindered. But no sunshine could enter, for two buttresses extended far beyond its exterior face, thus concealing it from the glance of vagrant eyes in the narrow church-yard of St. Olave. It looked upon that seldom-visited but thick-tenanted piece of burial-earth.

“So there the king prayed,” murmured Marlowe, pointing toward the crucifix, while Tamworth nodded.

“And there he rested?” continued Marlowe, turning his gaze toward the couch. No reply came from Tamworth, who, with sad expression on his face, remained a listener.

“And there he studied and meditated upon the mutability of worldly things,” added Tamworth, solemnly, as both glanced in the direction of the chair and Bible.

“Study, meditation, prayer, and slumber,” repeated Marlowe, as though to himself.

“Once the occupation of a king,” said Tamworth.

“And,” added the other, “mine also until death.”

* * * * *

Tamworth was aroused from a morning sleep by the pressure of a hand upon his shoulder. He was lying undressed upon the bed within the alcove where he had thrown himself after the inspection of the secret oratory. He had vainly endeavored to induce Marlowe to gain rest by slumber; but the latter had alternately walked the floor and occupied a chair before the window. His restlessness of mind was still beyond control. The faint figures of the angels on the tapestries, the scroll work on the chimney-columns, the dragon head from whose mouth came the lamp chains, and the green trees within the courtyard, attracted his attention only temporarily. Stronger than these objects presented to his bodily eyes were the mind’s pictures of the eventful night: his meeting with Anne, the sword combat, the stripping of the slain, the conference at the Boar’s Head, the dead face of Tabbard, and his future place of study. He could not shut them out; and with them were troubled thoughts concerning Anne. The hours passed; he watched the unbroken slumber of his friend, and, at length unable to remain inactive, he shook the sleeper into consciousness.

“What will occur to-day at the Golden Hind?” he asked as soon as the lawyer was awake.

“Still brooding on that? You better sleep, Kit, and drown consciousness for a few hours.”

“No; answer me.”

“The inquest will be held at the tavern, and in the room where the body lies.”

“You must be there,” said Marlowe in a decided tone.

“For what purpose?”

“To see the woman.”

“Forget her,” said Tamworth.

“No; but more if she has been apprehended, she may need aid or advice.”

“Possibly,” answered Tamworth, and then after a moment’s thought he continued: “She may even need to be warned against a betrayal of the true situation of affairs.”

Marlowe was on the point of disputing this imputation of bad faith; but he held his peace, for he saw that this idea alone would cause the lawyer to hasten to the scene of the crime.

“I will go,” at length said Tamworth.

“And tell her where I am, and that she must keep me posted as to her whereabouts, and that I hope for final deliverance. Tell her that I think of her as of old. Tell her, that the future, though dark, may clear. Tell her to wait for me. My God! can you not bring her back with you? Let no--”

“Hold! hold, man!” exclaimed Tamworth, “this matter is too fresh in the minds of those who surround her. They think that you are dead and that the slayer is her husband. Every movement of hers will be watched. A visit like that here would be fatal. I will do what I can, but nothing rash.”

“It rests with thee, then,” resumed Marlowe, pressing his friend’s hand, “you recognize the depth of my love. Do everything in thy power to prevent an everlasting separation between us. Do not increase my despair, I pray you. I may fence myself from the world. I may succeed in drowning the memory of my friends, their faces, their voices; I may so dwell that hope is a word of no import, and the future purposeless and empty; but still there is one link in life that must not be severed.”

“I understand,” said Tamworth, feelingly, “whatever can be done with safety shall be done. Rid thy mind of these morbid ideas, or every line you write be tinctured with them. There is much yet for you to live for. The future is not so dark as you picture.”

Marlowe shook his head without replying.

“Now,” continued Tamworth, “we will see what my purveyor has for us. It will be light to-day, but before to-morrow there shall be notice given of my increase of appetite.”

He threw open the richly paneled door of what appeared to be a mediæval portable wardrobe. A shelf in its interior slowly sank under pressure of his hand, and disappeared from view down a dark shaft.

“It is late for the morning meal, but good mistress Pickle will send up something for us. The keeper and his wife live directly below, and whenever I signal with the dumb waiter, it soon rises with the best the cupboard and fire-place afford.”

WHERE LAMENTATION PREVAILED.

_Weep, heavens, and vanish into liquid tears!_ _Fall, stars that govern his nativity,_ _And summon all the shining lamps of heaven_ _To cast their bootless fires to the earth._

--_II Tamburlaine, v, 3._

_Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!_ _Comets, importing change of times and states,_ _Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky,_ _And with them scourge the bad, revolting stars._

--_First Part Henry VI, i, 1._

When Gyves, the constable, slunk away from the portico of the Windmill Tavern, where he had been exhausting his patience on protracted watch, his face was the composite picture of all the hopeless wretches whom he had arrested during his long term of office. He had waited for Tabbard, and--he had seen him. It was evident that no demand upon the latter could be responded to. What was he to do? To be without the warrant meant the loss of his office and perhaps heavy fine or severe punishment. It might be that the contents of Tabbard’s pockets had been removed before the body was taken from the tavern; but this was not likely. Every one feared contagion; and the dead, from plague, were not usually disturbed more than was necessary to move them to the death cart. A ray of hope scattered some of the gloom on his countenance, and the breaking light of the morning revealed it. He determined to follow the cart, which was already passing down the Old Jewry. He started upon this spur, and at the corner of the Poultry overtook the cart, which, turning west, entered Cheapside. Gyves kept at a distance of thirty feet from the object that he followed, either to avoid raising suspicions of evil on the part of the living occupants of the cart, or to avoid close proximity to the victims of the plague.