CHAPTER XXIII
“But who comes here?
How now?”
—Marlowe, in The Jew of Malta.
“Master Christopher Marlowe hath disappeared.” The assertion came from Ananias Dare, who at noon joined a number of his fellows idling in the town.
“Ay,” said a gossip following him, “and Gyll Croyden is nowhere to be found.”
“Marlowe gone!” exclaimed one.
“Gyll Croyden missing!” ejaculated another.
“The poet and his love,” insinuated the gossip. The women exchanged glances; the men were grave with apprehension.
“By St. George, ’tis a strange hap,” said a soldier.
“Some ill hath overtaken them as retribution,” declared the Oxford preacher.
“Let us institute a search,” suggested several simultaneously. “We may find them.”
“Nay, they’ve not been seen for many hours.”
“But we should try.”
“Well, then, ’twill keep us fro’ twiddling our thumbs. Ho, Prat! Give us aid. ’Ods precious! Where’s the merry-andrew gone? Was she not his light o’ love as well?”
“Yes,” laughed the gossip, “but saw you not Prat’s look when I told you she had disappeared? He and his bear have gone a-roaming in the forest. Poor clown!”
Many shook their heads with indulgent pity. “Come, let us go in search.”
But Ananias Dare, who, being in the turmoil of a struggle against himself, had said little, now stayed them. “They are not in jeopardy. We ourselves have more to fear. Last night I saw a ship bear away to the east. My masters, I doubt not they have clandestinely deserted us. They have gone.”
“Deserted us!” The exclamation was not from one only, but all, and an angry muttering ran through the company.
“These poets have no courage.”
“She was afraid to stay. The parson bade her marry.”
“We are well rid of them.”
“Ay, but ’tis an outrage.”
Then a new-comer spoke in sharp, condemnatory tones, not against the subjects of their talk, but against their own contumely. It was Vytal. “Yes, Christopher Marlowe hath gone,” he said, “for your sake, not his own. A Breton shallop came from the north, and he, for a cause beyond your ken, hath taken passage therein. In England, he will gain audience with the queen, and persuade her Majesty to send us aid. The thing is done. Now make the best of it.”
Ananias started forward. “And you knew he was going?”
“I knew it.”
“Yet you dared to withhold the knowledge from us?”
Vytal’s lip curled. “’Twas no great daring, but only kindness. I held you to your trust, and so shall till death.” They started toward him, wrathful, riotous. “Oh, you seek to end the matter now? I am at your service. Here, Hugh, to my side!” The giant, hurling aside all who sought to oppose him, obeyed, with broadsword drawn.
Ananias fell back from the front ranks swearing, his retreat seeming to affect the others with a like discretion.
“I have fought for you and by your side,” said Vytal, a new note of grief in his voice; “yet with death you would repay me.”
“Ay, he fought for us well,” cried Rouse, fervently, and the words were echoed in embarrassed whispers through the crowd.
Slowly they turned and left him.
For several hours a stout vagabond wandered aimlessly through the woods, now and then addressing an unresponsive companion. “She’s gone; my laughing Gyll is gone! Come, your Majesty, get you into the barge; we’ll go to Roanoke.” The heavy craft, bulky and awkward as its occupants, moved on and on through the night until at last it touched the southern shore of Roanoke. “Behold that glade, your Majesty; it is the very spot where you danced with her while I piped, and the Indians looked on with wonder. But, body o’ me! those days are gone. King Lud, thou’lt dance no more.” And the vagabond clasped arms with his comrade. “Those days are dead; let ’em be forgot.”
Thus together, hither and thither, round and about, the strange pair wandered, until they came to a ravine margined with a natural arbor of grapes whose tangled vines clambered to the trees and lay like sleeping snakes in a near-by opening. To these the bear paid no attention, but sniffed about the trunks of trees for fruit of another kind. One of the arbors, however, interested the soldier.
“It was here,” he said, “that her wit right bravely saved her from Towaye, and she clipped the locks o’ her sunny head a-weeping. Lack-a-day, those times are mine no longer. Let ’em be bygones, Roger Prat, and think no more on ’t, I do beseech you.”
Suddenly he paused and leaned forward. A long rope shone lustrous amid the tendrils of the arbor. “Body o’ me! ’tis the very strand!” and, extricating it, he looked about to make sure that even the bear had not discovered his secret. Then, as King Lud disappeared in the woods, he sat down for a moment on the ground, and, gently laying the shining curls across his knees, stroked them again and again, murmuring inaudibly as they moved restlessly in the breeze or caught in his clumsy fingers, while, with a bewildered expression, he rolled his eyes. At last he thrust the golden braid into the bosom of his doublet, and for once the new mournfulness of his round, red face was not absurd. But presently he frowned and rose jerkily to his feet. “Yes, that pygmy Rouse is right,” he muttered. “Ye’re daft, Roger Prat—daft, indeed.”
Thereafter, calling to the bear, he spent the day in returning laboriously to Croatan, on whose shore the animal, sufficiently tamed to rove at large, left him, and, still with an unsatisfied appetite, loped off into the forest.
In the evening Eleanor Dare sat in her dining-room with Vytal. “Then he has actually gone?”
“Yes, on a Breton shallop. He waited for months, hoping that the chance would come at last.”
“But he never told me,” said Eleanor.
“Nay, for perhaps the power was not in him.”
She looked deeply thoughtful. “Oh, I comprehend it all now, but then I considered the farewell one of his vagaries. I thought he was bidding good-bye to me only—you understand—yet now his words come back to me with double force. Captain Vytal, we have lost a friend.”
“Yes,” said the soldier, “in truth a friend. It is my duty, however, to tell you that we have regained an enemy;” with which he told her briefly of their meeting with Frazer, of the latter’s pretensions, trickery, and escape. At mention of the duel’s climax, he coldly chid himself without forbearance as he would have censured any other in his place. “There will be a second attempted invasion,” he said, “to repel which we must harbor all our strength. In some unaccountable way this fellow hath escaped Manteo, who but just now has returned, after a futile search. Moreover, Mistress Dare—” But he paused abruptly. He would say no more. From her and from all he must withhold for always the conviction that, by some terrible mischance, John White had come to Roanoke again and gone.
For a moment her eyes questioned him, but, finding no answer, she forbore to voice the query, and quickly dismissed the subject as he willed. Her eyes flashed. “We must, at all cost, defeat them, and assert our rights so strongly as to preclude the possibility of repeated threats.”
“We shall.”
“Oh, captain, I pray you give me work to do in our defence. Idleness palls upon me in times like these. Give me opportunity, if needs be, to suffer for the common good.”
He looked deep into her eyes. “You are one of the few,” he said, slowly, “who are worthy to suffer, and, therefore, ’tis for you I fear.”
To this she would have replied in all the bravery of her hopeful womanhood, but suddenly her expression changed. “Who is that?” she whispered, gazing at a near-by window; and then, as a head was thrust in at a casement, she laughed with evident relief, for the long nose of King Lud, who stood without on his hind-legs, was sniffing the air of the dining-hall.
In another second the animal had dropped to his natural posture, and was for shambling off to Roger’s cabin, but Vytal’s quick eyes had caught sight of a whitish object suspended from the animal’s neck. Uttering a short call by which Prat was wont to summon his pet, Vytal opened the door, and saw King Lud irresolutely awaiting him. With a warning gesture to Eleanor, bidding her remain in the house, he went out and stroked the bear’s head; then, bending down, untied a thong of deerskin and took from under the shaggy throat the object he had noticed. Returning, he held it in the light, while his brow, contracting, darkened. “It is the very horn,” he said, “of Frazer’s using. But there is more, too,” and he drew a crumpled scrap of paper from the muzzle of the instrument. Spreading it out on the table, he read the first words, whose letters, all small capitals, were formed by innumerable perforated dots pricked through the paper evidently by the sharp point of a weapon.
“To Mistress Dare—”
Vytal looked up at Eleanor. “It is probably unfit for your perusal; therefore, with your permission, I will read it first myself,” and, as she inclined her head, he did so.
“To Mistress Dare,—This promise writ with my poniard: I will return anon, my love. The king lives, waiting for his royal consort. It may be a day, it may be a year, or several years, but in the end, I swear to you, that I will come and claim mine own. Yet, if at any time our friend, Captain Vytal, seeks to capitulate and surrender the colony to my liege sovereignty, let him blow thrice upon this horn—which he will remember is an effective signal in time of need. Written, or rather perforated, in some haste, but no flurry, very near you at Croatan, by the Crown Prince of England, yet your humble slave,
“Arthur Dudley.”
Vytal tore the paper into shreds. “Once more,” he said, “this mountebank hath grossly insulted my queen.” Eleanor’s cheeks flushed vividly.
By a supreme effort he withdrew his eyes from the crimson token of her love and stared fixedly through the casement into the outer darkness of night. “Our queen,” he added, in a low, metallic voice, “Elizabeth.”