“… Adieu!
Since destiny doth call me from thy shore.”
—MARLOWE, in _Dido, Queen of Carthage_.
At Croatan the springs ran freely, and the soil, being naturally
irrigated, bore sufficient crops for all. This the English sowers learned
gladly, after inspecting the work of their uncivilized brethren with
admiration for the bountiful result, if not for the crude and irksome
methods of cultivation. Here men, women, and children were alike tillers
of the soil, and although, with needless exertion, sticks were used
instead of ploughs and holes dug instead of furrows, the wide fields
beyond the town’s encircling strip of woodland showed an abundance of
maize, or guinea wheat; beans, pease, and tobacco. About a third of the
forest was composed of walnut-trees, from which the nuts were plucked
by the natives, to be used as seasoning in spoon-meat. Chestnuts, which
strewed the ground, were also gathered and made into a kind of bread.
The recent rains appeared to have reawakened nature; for not only had
all the crops of fruit and vegetables been revivified, but animal
life as well. Wild geese and turkeys, immense flocks of waterfowl and
penguins, swans, crows, and magpies, being affrighted now and then by
some unaccustomed sound, as a trumpet-call or accidental musket-shot,
would rise with a concerted flutter and whir like a great wind above the
forest. At these moments the varied clamor of their cries would fill the
air with an alarum so loud as to seem almost human in tone and power.
Beasts of the field, great and small, were also near neighbors of the
tribesmen. Black bear, deer, rabbits, opossums, wild hog, and foxes
abounded on every side. Thus all manner of palatable meat was to be had
for a single day’s hunting.
In life and custom the English soon became half Indian, the Indians half
English.
Yet, with all the outward sign of harmony, and despite the genuine
friendliness, a hope, deep down in the English hearts, strove to believe
that this condition was in no way final. The barrier of race was too
strong so soon to be removed. The Indians were on their own soil,
surrounded by their intimate kinsmen, and living much as they had always
lived; but the English were in exile. Thoughts of England haunting them
at moments brought restless longings. That which had been born and bred
in the bone must die with it. As the grave is the only portal to a life
divine, so Death is the sole power by which a new country is forced to
yield itself in full before the influx of aliens. The earthly land of
promise is for sons, not fathers. With the first generation it is a
trust, and only with the second a possession.
Many of the colonists, despite their new-found comfort and prosperity,
were yet unsatisfied. Their hearts yearned for England. Gradually they
went from bad to worse. Their turbulence, vice, and incontinence ran
riot as never before. Only a few labored steadily for the common good.
On these the others lived as parasites. Yet the minority averted the
colony’s dissolution. Eleanor Dare, for one, by a daily example of
fortitude, a never-failing sympathy, a detailed attention to the little
ills and troubles of her fellows, served, through her influence upon the
women, to maintain the industry of the men. While, however, it was she
who thus gradually turned sorrowful resignation to contentment, it was
Vytal who, by personal and continual contact with the planters, dominated
their wills and held them fast to duty.
The control of these two superior spirits, one feminine, the other
masculine, and each the other’s need, formed an almost perfect diarchy,
by which the colonists of Virginia were governed for many years.
The influence of a third dominant spirit is more difficult to define,
being that of Christopher Marlowe, whose temperament, ever varying and
mystical, was understood by few.
As months passed the poet became again enveloped in abstraction, until
at last his mind seemed to be concentrated on some definite purpose, of
which the existence was made evident by an unusual taciturnity and set
expression, while the purpose itself remained a mystery.
It had become the custom of Marlowe to absent himself daily from the
town, and to pursue his solitary way, morning after morning, to a
northeastern promontory that stretched out into the sea from an adjacent
island. On these walks he was always, by apparent intention, alone.
Standing on the shore, with face turned northward and eyes intent on
scanning the wide horizon, his graceful figure was ever solitary, his
reflections ever with no response save from his inward self. Thus for
months, without the exception of a single day, he went to the promontory,
until his patience was rewarded by the sight of that which he had so long
awaited. An instinct, a premonition, an inward certainty, call it what he
would, had told him that his determination must find an opportunity at
last. Therefore, when the chance to work his will finally offered itself,
he regarded it with small surprise. He called himself, not without a
certain vain though mournful loftiness, the agent of Destiny; hence,
when Destiny came to claim self-sacrifice at his hands, he met it with
familiar greeting.
Starting out to welcome that which he termed “Incarnate Fate,” he made
his way farther north, and having finally, as he told himself, “bound the
Parcæ with their own thread,” returned to Croatan.
It was all a mystical thrall, dominant and positive, yet vaguely
transcendental, as it is here described. The actual was resolved
instantly to the poetical in his mind, and in this, the beginning of
the final act of his life’s drama, he became that astral dreamer and
etherealist whom a few, by the perceptive comprehension of his poetry,
have recognized and understood.
On re-entering the town, Marlowe sought Eleanor Dare. She was sitting
near the threshold of her door with Virginia, who, slight, pale, and more
visionary than real, watched him with a curious eagerness and joy as he
approached; for Christopher and the Indian youth were, with the exception
of her mother, the sole favorites of her child heart. To her father
Virginia showed a peculiar devotion, but this was often broken by moments
of angry rebellion, while usually with Eleanor, and always with Manteo’s
son, she seemed perfectly in accord.
“Mistress Dare, I would speak to you now beyond the town, where no
interruption can break in upon my sorrow.”
Before Eleanor could reply, the child, looking up into Marlowe’s face,
asked, half wistfully, “What is sorrow?”
The poet gazed down at her and smoothed her hair. “That is a secret,” he
answered, kindly.
“Whose secret?” she demanded, pouting. “My mother’s?”
“Yes.”
“And yours?”
“Yes.”
“And my father’s?”
“Yes, perhaps.”
“And Captain Vytal’s?”
The poet inclined his head. “Ay, truly, his as well.”
“And is it the dark boy’s?”
“Nay, not yet.”
“Ah, then I am glad,” said Virginia, with a satisfied air, “for it would
not be nice if he, too, had a secret that I did not know. But please tell
me the secret about sorrow, Master Christopher.” She tripped over the
long name, pronouncing it with difficulty.
The poet smiled. “Sorrow is the secret of happiness, little White Doe;
and some day, when you have lived perhaps a million years up near the sun
and are entirely happy, you will say, ‘’Tis all because I guessed the
secret far down there.’”
She looked up at him, her eyes sparkling with pleasure. “Tell me now,”
she pleaded; but seeing that he had already forgotten, she turned and,
with a pout, ran off to seek her dusky playfellow. “Dark boy,” she said,
on finding him near by, “I am glad you do not know the secrets I don’t
know.”
For a moment Eleanor watched her as here and there in the distance she
flitted about the bronze figure.
“I can in no way comprehend her, Master Marlowe.”
“Nay, nor shall the day come in all the earthly future when she shall
understand herself. Thus are some of us prescient with meaning, yet
forever enigmatical, save to—save to—shall I say God?”
“Yes, to God,” replied Eleanor, simply; and, rising, she walked with
Marlowe into the fields beyond the town.
For several minutes they went on in silence, she in wonder waiting to
hear what he would say, he melancholy and wrapped in meditation. At last
they came to the edge of a wide wheat-field, over which the surface of
the sunlit grain swayed and rippled like a lake of pale and molten gold.
As the poet looked across it he smiled sadly, yet with a certain light
recklessness of manner that belied the former seriousness of his look.
“See,” he said, “the wheat inclines eastward; the wind is from the west.
I’d have thee remember, Mistress Dare, that if in the near future I am no
more to be seen, there is no deeper reason in’t than in this course the
wind doth follow. To America I came, for the wind blew hither from the
east. The wind is changed, madam, and so my way. ’Tis Fate ordains this
brief farewell.”
At these words Eleanor started perceptibly, her eyes opening wide
in amazement. “Farewell!” she exclaimed. “O sir, what mean you by
‘farewell’?”
He took her hand and, bending low, kissed it reverently. “I cannot say,
for, alas! many know the present meaning, but none the hidden prophecy,
of that word ‘farewell.’”
“Yet surely, Master Marlowe, you contemplate no—”
“Nay,” he rejoined, with a vague smile; “I shackle the Fates with their
own thread for but a single day, and not forever.” Turning, he walked
away on the margin of the wheat-field that now, no longer golden, swayed
and whispered beneath an umbrous pall; and Eleanor, seeming to be bound
by the spell of his mysticism, could only watch in silence his graceful,
receding figure while the tall wheat-blades bent forward and touched him
as he passed. When at last he was about to disappear, she would have
started after him, but at this instant Virginia, flitting as though from
nowhere to her mother’s side, called out to him, “Come back!” He turned.
“Please, Master Kyt, come back and tell me the secret.”
But Marlowe only shook his head, and, waving his hand, went forward with
light footsteps into the woods.