_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.
The morning light was now strong enough for Gyves to see that the cart
was only half full of bodies. His apprehension, that frequent halts
would ensue before they reached the potters’ field, soon proved to be
in part well founded. The first one occurred near the mouth of a side
street or lane. Gloomy looking buildings stood at the corners, and
close behind each, facing on the lane, were rows of small, miserable
cottages. Despite the ordinance prohibiting the building of houses of
frail and perishable material, these structures had been raised with
fronts of wood and roofs of reeds. They were all of one story and arose
from the edge of the muddy walk--low walls of upright planks, broken
by narrow windows and spaces between doorposts. The reeds of the roofs
never flourished in a locality more suitable for their rank growth
than the lane below. It was deep with mud and water. Lights shone from
some of the windows, but so faintly that the still dull glimmer of the
morning seemed to mock the poverty of their rays. On several of the
doors red crosses were printed, and two watchmen were pacing to and
fro before them, to see that these marked doors were kept closed except
for the purpose of passing out the corpse of an inmate.
Sounds of lamentation came from the lane. These were somewhat smothered
by the thin walls which only added to their mournfulness. The cart
turned into the lane, and Gyves heard one of the watchmen say:
“Always late. Ten minutes more an’ it’ll be sun up, and we wouldn’t
dare to pass another corpse to the cart. Why don’t you start earlier?”
“Always growling,” returned the driver. “How many are here?”
“Six,” answered the watchman.
“It’s growing worse.”
“Yes; only two yesterday morning.”
“Which dwellings this time?” asked the second man on the cart, who was
known as a burier.
“There, there and there,” said the watchman, pointing with the head of
his halberd.
“What! again?” exclaimed the driver, looking at the hovel nearest at
hand.
“The last of the family,” added the watchman.
“Man or woman?”
“Neither; a ten-year-old girl.”
“Died alone?”
“Yes. A friend came early in the night to see her, but the law, you
know, allows no one to go into and then come out of an infected house,
except you buriers.”
“And this friend said he would want to come out.”
“Of course.”
“So he went away?”
“She did; it was a woman.”
“Then, the crying don’t come from that house.”
“No, from over there. They raised the window an hour ago, and a man
said, ‘My son just died and my wife is now taken sick in the same way.’
He wanted to come out for medicine, but I couldn’t let him. You can
hear him.”
“We’ll have trouble with him, likely.”
“Yes. He may want to go to the church-yard.”
Just then the window was raised and the white face of a man peered out
over the sill. Even the hardened buriers felt sick at heart, as they
caught the trembling tone of his voice and heard his words. He said:
“So you have come for them?”
“Then there’s seven instead of six,” whispered the watchman; “for I
only counted on one here.”
“And everything is gone from me,” continued the man at the window.
“We can’t say nothing cheerful,” said the watchman, in low voice,
to the two men near him, “so it’s best to keep quiet, except when
necessary. Go in there first,” he added, pointing to the house wherein
lay the dead girl.
While the two buriers went in and were carrying out the body, the
watchman said to the man at the window: “Is your door locked?”
“They’re all dead,” he answered, “there’s no need coming in. You can’t
help them any, and it’s better they remain here than be thrown into
that black pit. I’ve seen it. I went out the night John Andrews died.
They threw him in naked, and at least a hundred others were in the same
great hole. It isn’t christian-like.”
“Come, open the door,” said the watchman.
“No,” returned the man. “They’re my dead.”
“He’s crazy,” whispered the watchman.
“And we have no time to spare,” suggested the driver.
“And you’ll have a load with the four over in that house,” said the
watchman.
“To-morrow we’ll come for that pale face, too,” remarked the burier;
and then they proceeded with their task at the other house.
Gyves nervously thought of his own family as he watched the proceedings
in the lane. They lived in no better quarters, and although the plague
had not yet visited his neighborhood, he could find little to cheer him
in that fact.
The cart now began rolling through Cheapside. The sun, well cleared
from the clouds along the horizon, was rapidly drinking up the dampness
of streets and roof-tops. Gyves was reverent enough to bow his head,
as, gleaming before his eyes, he saw the gilt cross in Cheap. It was
an imposing object for the center of the thoroughfare, but the fact
of it being an obstruction to the current of midday trade was not
apparent at this early hour, when only one vehicle was wheeling under
one of its extended arms. This vehicle stopped for its living load to
refresh itself at the stream of water pouring from the breast of the
alabaster image of Diana that stood out from the tabernacle under the
cross. During the interval Gyves’ eyes ranged from the muddy and broken
pavement to the dangling signs of every conceivable trade, to the
projecting galleries of the upper stories of great buildings, to the
fronts of imposing churches, and then to the open and continuing space
ahead into which Cheapside entered and ran on as Newgate street. It was
into Newgate street that the cart was now driven. On it went in haste,
for other travelers were beginning to thread the thoroughfares, and the
Charter House burying ground was still at some distance, outside the
city wall. No closed gates confronted them either at the city wall or
at the cemetery, through whose open ways they passed.
Gyves was at length amid the tombs and the cypresses of the now long
since abandoned necropolis, and was close enough to the cart to hear
the crunching of its wheels on the freshly graveled road, and for the
driver to notice him. He was taken for a mourner, and even the gruff
sexton who looked from his window in the little house just within the
wall, failed to come forth and warn him to keep outside the gate.
He idly watched the unloading of the vehicle; and with that task
completed, the men, as though exhausted with the night’s unpleasant
work, immediately drove away without glancing at the solitary figure
near the pile of corpses. The burden of the cart should have been
cast immediately into a common grave, but one had just been entirely
filled and a new one was not quite ready. This condition of things was
most opportune for Gyves. He did not delay; but, taking hold of the
shoulders of one body wrapped in a sheet, he was about to shove it off
the pile, when he heard some one say in a tone of remonstrance:
“What are you doing there?”
The voice came from a grave-digger, who, having raised himself from a
deep trench near at hand, now stood near the pile of corpses. He had
been digging in the rain and the mud all night, and the morning light
and the warmth of his own respiring body wrapped him in a steam. It
arose, as though from a dung-hill, for he was plastered with black mud
from head to foot. Gyves raised his head and stared at him. There was
nothing to dread but the shovel, so, pulling two bodies apart, and
rolling one over the rest, he said:
“Looking for a brother.”
“Got a permit?”
“No,” gruffly answered Gyves.
“What do you want of him? He’s, dead, ain’t he?”
“I want to identify him.”
“You’re taking a risk,” continued the grave digger.
“How so?”
“The plague.”
“Bah!” exclaimed Gyves.
“And, furthermore, it’s a crime.”
“Go back to your hole,” growled Gyves.
“For you are rifling the body of the dead,” continued the man, raising
his voice.
Gyves had found the corpse of Tabbard; and, at the last loud words, he
was thrusting his hands into the pockets of the dead man.
“Keep your clapper still,” sneered Gyves, contemptuously.