“It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overrul’d by fate.”
—MARLOWE, in _Hero and Leander_.
As the poet made his way through the forest he came suddenly on a scene
that caused him to pause, laugh, quicken his pace, and turn aside to
another trail, by which he reached the shore. Here, shrugging his
shoulders, he sat down on the sand, looking back now and then as if
waiting to be joined by some one who occupied his thoughts. Whether or
not this person would come he could not be sure, since the scene just
witnessed had disclosed a new phase of the situation in which he had
placed himself.
In the clearing which he had just passed sat Gyll Croyden looking up
at Roger Prat, who stood before her in an attitude of indecision and
unaccustomed solemnity, while the bear regarded them drowsily from the
overhanging branches of a tree. What transpired between the man and
woman Marlowe could not definitely surmise, yet the result of their
conversation was to subvert completely his own future.
“Now, I tell you,” said Prat, after the sound of footsteps had died
away, “I am a peculiar personage.” He sank his chin deep into its triple
substructure surveyed her with perplexity. In his hand he held an Indian
pipe, whose wreaths of smoke rose and cast a veil before his face,
through which his troubled, protruding eyes looked out with ghostly
light.
“A peculiar hobgoblin,” corrected Gyll, laughing more from nervousness
than mirth—“a dear hobgoblin.”
He eyed her reproachfully. “Oh, you may deride me with unflattering
names,” he said, “but it makes no difference. Mark you, until now there
has been one thing only which could make Roger Prat turn on his heel and
run for dear life. This was the sight of a petticoat; but, alack! I am
changed, most miserably changed, and, by some perversity, my new courage
seems cowardice as well. For I take it that a really brave man nerves
himself to retreat before the bombardment of a wench’s eyes. ’Tis the
coward who succumbs.”
Gyll pouted. “Run away, then, and prove yourself a soldier.” But he shook
his head with ponderous gravity, and, curiously enough, the unprecedented
soberness of his manner spread to her. “Oh, you would stay. Now, I am
glad of that, Sir Goblin,” and, rising, she stood facing him, with a
hand on each of his bulky shoulders. “I am glad, Roger,” she repeated,
in a softer tone. “For dost know that, with all my gallants, with the
memory of all those faces upturned and kisses thrown to my window on the
Bankside, ’tis a common fighting man I would marry?—a great, cumbersome
roly-poly, a mountain, a heathen image, call him what you will, yet to
me he hath so light a heart, so quaint a way, so sturdy a courage, that
methinks he hath already won me.”
At this, either a recollection of her long-lost girlhood or a play
of mere wanton coquetry—she herself did not know which—caused her to
cast down her eyes, while the flush of her cheeks deepened vividly.
For an instant Prat seemed to sway, as though his legs with an effort
supported his corpulent body, and the perplexity of his look increased.
Instinctively he thrust the pipe-stem between his teeth, and, gazing up
at King Lud, blew a cloud of smoke into the branches. The bear looked
down through it, blinking and sniffing at his master, while for a moment
Roger himself was almost completely enveloped.
“Thou imp of Uppowac,” quoth Gyll, stepping back with a grimace, “is this
thy only response to my condescension?” and she made as though to start
away into the forest. But Roger, suddenly all-forgetful of his dilemma,
waddled after her.
“Nay, stay,” he called, apprehensively; “stay, and permit me to collect
my scattered wits.”
She turned and laughed with scornful badinage. “Stay?” she echoed; “and
wherefore, pray? Merely that you may blow tobacco fumes into my eyes and
blind them to the charm of your countenance?”
“Oh no,” he remonstrated. “In troth, I blew the smoke to hide the face of
his wondering majesty above. His red eyes and sniffing snout seemed to
condemn and scorn me. There, I’ll smoke no more,” and, knocking out the
pipe’s ashes, he restored it quickly to his belt.
Seeming to be mollified by this, Gyll sat down again on the grass, while
the new softness of her expression returned. “Prithee, Roger, make up
your mind on that which troubles it, for if again I start, I go, and
there’s the end.”
He gazed at her for a moment with solemn eyes, and now she smiled in an
almost womanly way instead of laughing wantonly. “Tell me, Gyll, dost
really—dost truly?—” but he broke off for want of a word.
“Truly what?” she asked, in a low voice.
His chin sank into its underfolds again, and he twirled a pair of
globular thumbs tentatively. “Dost truly have that feeling for me which
the poet would call ‘love’?”
The question touched her sense of the ludicrous keenly, yet his
astonishing earnestness underlying it must have reached a deeper sense,
for still she only smiled instead of laughing, and answered, “Yes.”
At this his rotund face grew brighter. “Come, then, to the Oxford
preacher, Gyll, before we change our minds;” and, nothing loath, she rose
quietly.
“Change our minds, Roger! I, for one, shall ne’er do that.”
“Nay,” he said, “nay, I pray you, do not change. Oh, that would be
dire misfortune;” whereon, picking up the end of King Lud’s chain,
which dangled from the tree, he tugged thereat until the beast, with a
good-humored growl, descended. For an instant the sight of her animal
friend brought the old, careless look to Gyll’s face—there was something
so drolly suggestive of Roger in the bear’s bandy legs and awkward gait.
A fit of devil-may-care recklessness seized her. The strain of even a
moment’s seriousness on such a nature being unendurable, breaks in the
end, and, as when a supporting rope is severed without warning the one
who has been held thereby falls suddenly, so the snapping of a moral stay
leaves one sprawling in abandonment.
Gyll went to the extreme of flippancy. “Come,” she said. “Look at King
Lud. Let him give us his blessing. Let him tie the knot with his great
paws upon our heads. I much mislike real parsons; we will have none o’
them. I’ll bind myself to no man. ‘Please one, please all,’ as the song
hath it—‘please one, please all.’” So saying, she was on the point of
profaning her troth by kneeling, with a laugh, before the bear, when
a glance at Prat restrained her. The soldier had started back with an
oath. His eyes, enraged as she had never seen them, were lowering, and
his breath came quickly. With one hand he ground the bear’s chain until
its links grated as if they must break in the tight-clinched fist, while
with the other he sought his hip, and the fat palm ignored his flute and
Uppowac pipe to cool itself on the metal of his sword.
Gyll drew back in amaze. “How now, goblin,” she asked, with not a little
terror; “art gone wholly mad?”
He said nothing, but slowly his expression altered until a mingling of
grief and cold repulsion told her of his inward change. “I would have
risked a wedding,” he said, at last, and drawing the bear to his side.
“I would have made you honest wife, and not ungladly, for I felt a kind
o’ love—ah, a deal o’ love—for you, Gyll; but I’m a peculiar personage,
and not irreverent to men o’ God and church-like things, be I rake or no.
Faith, ye’re a most heartless jade, who’ll ne’er be wife o’ mine. Ye’ve
shown yourself. For that I thank thee;” whereat he turned on his heel
and, leading away King Lud, disappeared in the forest.
For a moment Gyll stood listening, and once she called, but only the
clank, clank of the bear’s chain, growing fainter and more faint in the
distance, answered her unhappy cry. Finally, when the sound had died, a
flood of tears fell from her eyes, but quickly she brushed them away,
then, turning, walked in the direction of the shore, and forced from her
tremulous lips a song, popular at the time in Southwark:
“Be merry, friends, and take no thought;
For worldly cares now care ye naught,
For whoso doth, when all is fought,
Shall find that thought availeth not—
Be merry, friends.”
Her voice sounded low, its lilt for once seeming artificial. The friends
she strove to cheer were her own thoughts—new, discomforting thoughts—yet
perhaps more truly friends than all their predecessors. She persisted,
however, in drowning the inward mutter of their realization with her
voice’s melody:
“To take our sorrows mournfully,
Augmenteth but our malady;
But taking sorrows merrily
Maketh them smaller, verily—
Be merry, friends.”
And now the notes of a flute came to her from afar, half in accompaniment
of her tune:
“Let the world slide, let the world go;
A fig for care and a fig for woe!
If I can’t pay, why, I can owe;
And death makes equal the high and low—
Be merry, friends!”
The last words came in faltering tones that utterly belied their meaning,
while from the distance the flute’s music ended in that wild wail which
now, more than ever, denoted a _finale_.
In a few minutes Gyll joined Marlowe on the shore. “Ah, you have come,”
he said, rising.
She laughed. “So it seems; but wherefore, Kyt, did you so mysteriously
arrange this meeting?”
He made an impatient gesture. “Wilt swear to say nothing of my tidings to
any in the town?”
“Yea, if it pleases your poetic soul thus to weave mysteries, I make no
remonstrance.”
He scrutinized her silently until, at last, being satisfied, he spoke
again. “I leave for England, Gyll, this very day.”
Her eyes opened wide, and she stared at him as at one demented. “Leave
for England, Kyt! Thou’rt mad!”
“Nay,” he returned, calmly. “Listen. For I know not how many days and
months I have scanned the sea far to the northward. For an eternity I
have seen naught save gulls and waves, but at last a sail hath come, as I
knew it would. Nor is it surprising that I waited expectantly, for while
in England I had heard that every year as many as five hundred ships
found their way to the great country which Martin Frobisher explored.
’Tis called Newfoundland, and off its banks myriads of fish are caught
by the men of Brittany, Normandy, and nearly all the provinces of
France. Was it not likely, therefore, that one of these fishing-vessels,
returning with its catch, should follow the coast of this continent
until it came to southern waters? Well, likely or not, the thing hath
happened. A Breton shallop lies to the north and awaits me, for I builded
a fire and signalled to it. Three mariners came ashore, and, to one who
understood the French language, I explained that I was a castaway. Thus
they think me a shipwrecked sailor, and I have allayed their curiosity.
Otherwise, no doubt, they would have come prying about Croatan. These men
have promised to land me on the coast of France or Ireland.” He paused,
seeming to question her with a look, but for answer she only threw an arm
about his neck.
“Oh, Kyt, art really going? I cannot believe ’tis true.”
“Ay, ’tis very truth.”
She looked up into his dark eyes with a troubled expression. “Tell me,
dreamer, why do you depart so secretly, and why, indeed, at all?”
“Secretly,” he answered, with renewed vagueness, “because in secret
Destiny works; I for to-day am Fate, and keep these colonists to their
duty as Vytal and Mistress Dare have done. Were they to know of the
vessel’s proximity, they would in a moment be havoc-struck. Ananias would
start an insurrection and incite them to seize the shallop. This must not
be. I go alone, or with—”
She interrupted him. “Why, why do you go?”
He raised himself to his full height. “Because a voice, calling me in
whispers, so decrees. I shall seek audience with the queen and Raleigh to
demand the forwarding of supplies and men to Virginia.” He paused, a look
of despondency crossing his face. “But would I could foresee success.
Alas! I cannot. Some godless curse rests on this colony, whose spirit
is in the very air we breathe.” He looked darkly into the distance, as
though the hitherto invisible had come within the range of sight. Then,
however, as he heard a sob from the woman beside him, his expression
changed. The earnestness of the moment seemed to pall upon him, and he
laughed carelessly.
Untying a silken kerchief from her neck, he held it aloft so that it hung
lightly on the breeze, its soft ends fluttering toward the sea. “This is
the true reason,” he said, inconsequently. “The wind blows eastward.”
Her eyes were smiling now behind her tears. “May not I go thither also?”
she asked, breathlessly. “I cannot stay behind. ‘Faith, all the colony
hath turned against me. The parson would have me married or banished,
were there chance of either fate. Besides—I’d be more comfortable in
Southwark,” she added, with a note of hardness in her ever-changing voice.
He pressed her hand pityingly. “As you like, Gyll. ’Tis but natural you
desire to return. Neither you nor I were made for this. Our parts were
writ to be played in London. I go aboard the shallop within an hour, but
it waits too far for you. To-night we’ll anchor to the southward. Do you
slip away and await me on the southern shore. Whate’er you do, remember
one thing: none must know of our departure. Nay, postpone thy thanks,
Gyll, for here comes Vytal by appointment.”
She turned, and, on seeing the soldier, who alone of all men inspired her
with awe, made her way quickly to the town.
As Vytal joined Marlowe, they spoke at once of that which paramountly
filled their minds. “I am ready to start,” said Christopher. “The shallop
lies north of Hatarask.”
“Then,” returned Vytal, “let us go to it at once. I will accompany you
thither.”
They walked along the shore. “We can speedily reach the place,” said
Marlowe, who was oppressed with the other’s silence; “I have left a canoe
on the northern beach.”
Vytal inclined his head, as who should say, “I supposed so.”
The poet’s eyes saddened. “Your muteness is hard to brook.”
“Nay, Kyt, I count it kind to both of us.”
“Wherefore kind?”
“Because, when the heart is sick, words but pain it more.”
“You regret, then, my departure?”
“For my own sake, deeply. We have been friends.”
“Ay,” said the poet, “friends. Friendship’s the reality; love but a
pleasant dream. I look back over the past five years and think of our
conversations. I recall, too, those few hours when I talked with Mistress
Dare. The difference is plain. Man and man enjoy the freer reverie. No
personal distraction mars their elemental thought. They become unbiased
lookers-on at life, unfettered by the stage directions. To them the
lover’s star hath varied cosmic meanings which far transcend its amorous
spell. To them all nature shows her heart, and not the mere reflection of
their own. Ay, only with man and man is meditation free—unless—of course,
unless—the dream of love hath proven true.” The last words came in a
voice of pain, which, however, passed as he added, mechanically, “But
come, here is the canoe.”
Following the poet, Vytal stepped into the craft, and with a single
stroke of his paddle sent it far out across the inlet. With long, slow
sweeps he propelled it on in silence, while Marlowe, facing him, gazed at
the sharp-cut features with a kind of worship in his eyes.
“Hath any yet known you, Vytal? Hath one single man or woman probed your
depths?”
Vytal shrugged his shoulders for reply, then said, in a voice that
sounded harsh even to himself, “We are come to your starting-point,” and,
as they landed, “Where is the ship?”
“Five miles to the north.”
“Let us hasten, then, by the shore.”
They walked for many minutes mutely, until Vytal spoke as though half to
himself: “I would have made the sacrifice in your stead, but for these
children of Croatan, these helpless colonists, who are in my charge.”
The poet’s eyes lighted up with their old fervor. “I know it well, for
partly I know you.” His eyes wandered. “Yet I cannot say that, were I
you, I would have left her even for friendship’s sake. I read you, I read
myself—you as mighty prose, I, it sometimes seems, as vainly garnished
poetry. Marlowe would whisper to her, ‘My soul sings thine,’ but Vytal
would say, ‘I love thee.’ Methinks in these very words lie our inmost
selves contrasted.” Turning again to look at his companion, he found the
dark face averted, but when at last he saw its deep-graven, premature
lines again, he found no change in the expression.
“I trust you will make every effort,” said Vytal, “to gain audience with
the queen.”
“Yes, I swear it, but I fear ’twill prove of no avail. White hath not
returned, nor shall I, nor shall any man. Tell me, hast not felt that,
with all thy power, thou and these people are foredoomed?” But as he
received no answer, Marlowe became resigned to the taciturnity of his
friend. After all these years he was forced to confess that even now,
in what he believed to be the final parting, he could not touch his
comrade’s depths, or even, touching them, elicit response save the look
and intense voice that told him of Vytal’s friendship. “Nevertheless,
there is but one man,” he resumed at length, as though to himself, “who
of all merits your fear. I speak of—” He broke off suddenly. “Hark! what
was that?”
They stood still, intently listening.
A low “Whist!” reached their ears from the adjacent woods.
“Foh!” exclaimed Christopher. “’Twas but the hissing of a snake.”
“Nay,” said Vytal, “wait!”
The words were no sooner spoken than the dusky figure of Manteo emerged
from the forest, and the Indian approached them with noiseless step. “My
brother, have a care. I waited that I might warn thee. Two men, lying
concealed to the northward, curiously watch the ship at anchor. The one
is Towaye, the other your countryman who named himself ‘Ralph Contempt!’”