“Not long since, for I rowed directly up the river after putting him aboard that ship in midstream. When ashore I came directly here.”
“That is all,” said Peele, and as the door was closed by the departing wherry man, he continued in audible voice, but solely for his own ear: “Poor Tamworth! and how much better off are the living? Poor Marlowe! but still this change is for thy best interests. Thy Jew of Malta is strong, but the crudeness of detail arises from unfamiliarity with the scenes where it is laid. The fire burning within thee, O noble friend and fellow dramatist, must blaze clearer and brighter from new fuel now to be furnished thee. Barabbas is great, but a greater Jew will arise from out thy meditations in the City of the Sea. This is the language of prophecy.”
THE RIDE TO TYBURN.
—“And where didst meet him?
Upon mine own freehold within forty feet of the gallows, conning his neck verse.”
—Jew of Malta.
—“Who doth (Time) gallop withal?
With a thief to the gallows; for though he goeth as softly as foot can fall, he thinks himself too soon there.”
—As You Like It.
At the house of the sheriff in Deptford, Anne waited many long days for Bame to appear with her father. No news of Bame’s arrest reached her ears, and no answer came to her message to Marlowe. At length an opportunity arose to send another messenger to Canterbury, this time by no circuitous route; but, despite its delivery, Manuel Crossford did not appear to secure her liberation. The wished-for reconciliation between father and daughter did not take place until many months later; but before the month of June had passed, the aid which Anne had sought from those nearest to her through blood and family ties, came in the person of a maid in the house of the sheriff. This maid had been deputized to attend upon the fair prisoner. As might have been expected she was easily won over, and on a dark night an escape was effected through unbolted doors, and a boat which lay ready on the Thames. The maid had enlisted the services of a lad who would have crossed the sea at her bidding, and by him they were conveyed up the river to London, where, in a quarter at some distance from her former home with her aunt, and in ignorance of what was transpiring with Bame and Marlowe, we must leave her and return to those characters who had become involved in a web from which there was no possible extrication.
The boy Pence had been set at liberty. His companions, Pento and Badly, had suffered capital punishment. Bame would have immediately met the same fate, but an extra effort was made in his behalf.
Eliot’s attempts to learn something of Tamworth, and of his companion whose name was still unknown, proved fruitless. With their disappearance, all hope of a new trial for Bame was extinguished. But a writ of error was taken, and the case, after swinging back and forth between the courts, was finally determined adversely to the appellant. Bame was resentenced, and the day fixed was December 6th, 1594. It had at length dawned in the streets of London.
Bame saw the morning only through bars never gilded by sunlight, and this was the last daybreak he would ever witness. It had not aroused him from sleep, for he had walked the cell for eighteen hours without an intermission of rest, except as he had paused for a bite at the bread or for a swallow of water handed in by the turnkey. No death watch had been in the corridor; for prisoners awaiting execution in those days were too numerous to command any particular attention. Thus his meditations had been undisturbed, except by the hourly passing by the guard, whose footsteps only diverted his thoughts of the approaching last hour, to the momentary apprehension that it was at hand. At such times he would pause in his walk; glance at the window to see if the night had passed, and failing to recognize any difference between the gloom within and the gloom without the bars, would brush the sudden beads of perspiration from his brow and await the dying away of the disturbing footsteps.