CHAPTER VI
“My heart is as an anvil unto sorrow,
Which beats upon it like the Cyclops’ hammers,
And with the noise turns up my giddy brain.”
—Marlowe, in Edward the Second.
“Thus shall my heart be still combined with thine
Until our bodies turn to elements
And both our souls aspire celestial thrones.”
—Marlowe, in Tamburlaine.
Vytal turned automatically and, with his old martial tread, crossed the sand to Eleanor. At her side he knelt for a moment transfixedly in silence, then sank down upon her and grasped her to him as if in an effort to revivify her lifeless form by the sheer might of his love and grief.
But now a dark shadow, seemingly no more tangible than the shadow of Death, emerged from the forest and stood over them.
“My brother, grieve not; perchance life is yet within her.” The Indian bent down and listened. “I hear no breath,” said Manteo, at last, “nor heartbeat. Her kirtle is stained with blood.”
“Ay,” said Vytal, “she hath left me.”
The Indian pointed westward. “Come, my brother, let us bear her to my people. They have gone to the main, and your countrymen with them. There, far from the sea and evil ships, they will live in peace. Thy Spanish enemies all have retreated before my men. Come, my brother, the voice of the forest calls you. There is no other way. Did not the stars at thy birth foretell that thou shouldst be a queen’s defender and the brother of a king? A queen’s defender thou hast been; the brother of a king I beseech thee to be always. Am I not that king of the prophecy? Is not the depth of the forest, solitary and ever dark, the fitting home for one in whose soul all happiness lies buried? My brother, come!”
Vytal returned his gaze in silence, neither granting nor denying the earnest plea.
“John Vytal, you number but six Englishmen in all. To remain is to murder thyself, e’en though thine enemies, Ferdinando and St. Magil, have retreated hastily in a canoe to the Spanish vessel. On the mainland we shall be safe, if upon thee we can depend. The man of God and Margery Harvie, the White Doe and Dyonis, all have started thither under the guardianship of thy servant, Hugh Rouse, who believed you wholly safe with my people. Thus, with thee, there are but three warriors in all. Shall the greatest of these not go, as he hath always gone, to the place where he is most needed?”
“Ay,” said Vytal, vaguely; “that is here. Let us defend the town!”
But Manteo pointed to the palisade, across which the first dim light of dawn was slowly breaking. A gray mist or dust was rising from the enclosure and floating softly out to sea. “Those are the ashes of your Roanoke settlement,” said Manteo, “which the breeze would bury far away. The fortress lies smouldering, and much of the palisade as well. All is lifeless.”
Vytal watched the gray veil unwind itself across the headland. This, then, was a fitting symbol of the climax in which all the fortitude, patience, endeavor, exertion, prayer, and yearning of years had culminated. Ashes! All gray ashes—the hope of England and of himself.
Finally he turned to Manteo, with a deeper consciousness, and stooped to raise Eleanor in his arms. But the Indian, who had watched her face intently, restrained him. “Wait, my brother, there is yet hope. I will instantly seek two herbs in the forest. ’Tis possible the one will heal her wound, the other awake her from sleep,” and, so saying, he entered the woods.
Once more Vytal knelt beside her, while slowly the dismal drone of the surf seemed to creep nearer, until, entering his brain, it wore all thought away. To reason was impossible, to strive for reason a torture that racked him through and through.
Yet at last, appearing to have aroused somewhat from his stupor, he drew his rapier, and, passing his fingers over the blade, muttered: “The bodkin, the little bodkin!” with which—worse, far worse, more terrible than any cry or moan—a laugh, a loud, harsh laugh, came from the broken heart of the man who had rarely been heard to laugh before.
He let the rapier-hilt fall softly to the sand, yet held the point in one hand, and with it touched the artery of his wrist. He was conscious now of one thing only—utter failure! He felt certain that Eleanor, with all his hopes, had left him. It was but the natural result of his life-long battle against Fate.
“I am alone,” he said.
For many minutes the rapier-point, moving imperceptibly, scratched his skin. Yet he made no thrust, for the horribly incongruous hilarity of his expression gradually died away, leaving his face once more grave and unrelaxing.
Suddenly he rose and stood as if on guard, not against himself, but another. At this he called aloud, as though Rouse stood near. “Quick, seek Manteo and the tribesmen! Bid Dyonis protect his charges to the end. See to it that Frazer is shackled heavily. We win!” His eyes flashed. “Send to me Roger Prat and Marlowe. They are men. Ho! Marlowe, come, come quickly to my aid! Is ’t possible thou hast forgot that night on the bridge when side by side we fought to save her?” He paused, thrust into the darkness, then reeled and let fall his blade. “O my God—I dream.” And, sinking down once again beside Eleanor, he looked first into her pallid face, and then at the shroud of ashes that was borne out lightly to be folded with the veil of the sea. Both mists, gray and commingling on the water, seemed the cerements of his dead ambition. For not only the sea had failed him, but the land as well. And this was his only message to England—an ephemeral breeze, ash-laden, from the West he had come to win.
The cries of many birds, awakening, filled the air. The stars, paling slowly, died. The breeze stirred summer’s heavy foliage mournfully.
Vytal shut the light from his eyes, and from his ears the sounds of morning. With head bowed he then relived his life. And the moments when he had been with Eleanor rose pre-eminent above all other memories. He thought of the court, of how by his glance toward her he had been deprived of knighthood. He recalled vividly the fight on London Bridge, and once more saw her standing in the Southwark gateway. He remembered their meeting on the fly-boat, and first saw her praying in the lanthorn-light, then leaning on the bulwark, when they two had been alone in a world of mystery. At the last she was bending over him as he lay in the armory after the battle of the ships. Once again her voice was calling, “John Vytal.”
The repetition of that far-off tone seemed a living echo from his heart.
“John Vytal.”
He moved slightly, and, as if in a waking sleep, looked down at Eleanor; then started, and, bending closer, strove for an answer to the dream.
In very truth her eyes were open.
“Eleanor.”
“Yes, I live.”
His hand swept across his forehead. “O God, ’tis a dream—again a dream.”
Yet now another hand touched his brow, and, where sight had failed, that single touch convinced him.
“I am not alone,” he said.
She grasped his hand feebly. “Nay, not alone. I think ’twas a trance. All the grief, the sudden happiness, the terror, the joy, o’ercame me. Yet—yet—I am sore wounded.” Her eyes closed; she breathed with an effort. “Whence came the shot?”
“From Frazer, even as he died.”
An expression, first of pain, then of absolute peace, crossed her face; but she made no rejoinder, for strength again had failed.
He brushed back a strand of hair from her forehead, stifling a deep moan. For once his very soul seemed falling to an abyss of fear. Fatalism was overcome by yearning, the power of endurance by the acute agony of doubt. Uncertainty laid an icy chill upon his spirit—the spirit of a child lost in the universe. Essential grief stood face to face with essential joy, each expecting, yet despairing of the victory. And the result of this meeting seemed to ravage the elements of being.
Once more Eleanor gazed up to his anguished face.
“Strength returns,” she said, with a wan smile.
He trembled and turned toward the forest, consumed by impatience of the soul. “Manteo hath gone for healing herbs,” he said. “O God, spare her to me!”
Long he stood with head bowed and eyes gazing into her face; long he stood, a bleak rock of the shore, stern, rigid, fixed, striving to force upon himself the utter calm of self-surrender and finality.
But at the last she stretched out her arms and drew him closer to her. “God is good,” she said. “In my heart he tells me I shall live.”
Yet even now, as the spirit of promise seemed to be breathed into their souls, Eleanor, reading Vytal’s face, realized that beneath all his silent hope that word “failure” had not been obliterated from his great masculine heart. For the colony of Roanoke was no more.
“Dost not see,” she asked, brokenly, “that success is ours?… Of a surety, never again will Spaniards seek to land on this Virginia shore.” Her words were scarcely audible. “Their leader is dead, their lesson learned.… Future generations will find here a perfect security … because we, the first, have suffered … and yet won.” She raised herself to one elbow, bravely subduing her faintness, and pointed toward the headland. “Look.”
The two mists—the mist of ashes and of the ocean—were gray no longer. The first flush of morning suffused itself over sea and land.
Eleanor’s eyes sought Vytal’s, but now from the light he turned and looked steadfastly at the broad, deep forest of the west, with prophetic resignation in his gaze, as at a world not wholly lost, yet only by others to be won.
Her hand touched his gently.
“I am not alone,” he said; “nay, not alone.”
THE END