It Was Marlowe: A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries

by Wilbur Gleason Zeigler

The man in the cassock and black hat rode close to the edge of the railing and took the glass from the tapster’s hand. As he raised it to his lips, he bowed in mock cheer to the sad-faced man in the tumbril as though to say, “This is to your good health.” However, he said nothing, except to the driver whom he admonished to drive more rapidly.

About three miles from the west wall of London, on what is now Oxford street, close at the foot of a small declivity, there stood at the time of our narrative a solitary building of two stories. Near this structure was a cluster of elm trees, and from them the place had received the title of “The Elms.” The building had been designed for an inn, but the locality was in such ill favor that very few occasions arose for its landlord to welcome the coming, and speed the parting guest. One side of the steep mossed roof sloped toward the muddy road; the other side touched the top of a lofty board fence. This fence surrounded the “triple tree of Tyburn,” as the gallows was called. The obnoxious structure whereon felonies were expiated was invisible to all travelers except those coming down the hill from where the bourne of Tye found its source; but the enclosing fence was such a subject of notice and inquiry, that strangers, as well as neighboring farmers, were glad to pass quickly by it. The tenant of the Elms, however, did not depend for livelihood upon the profits of the inn bar, its table or its beds. The key to the great gates of the fence hung within the tap-room, and there was revenue to the landlord for being its custodian. In the enclosure were raised seats and on “state” occasions these were in demand at fair prices, all of which were collected and retained by the keeper. This keeper was a woman, nicknamed Mother Peter.

As usual, Mother Peter had the gates open long before the procession arrived; and so, without a pause, into the enclosure passed the stern, compact and mounted body, representative of order, and after it the loose and disorderly mob. The latter filled the space between the widely separated gate posts as it poured in, a body of ill-clad flesh, of all ages and of both sexes, with brutal and repulsive faces, and audible from jeers, curses and loud laughter.

The enclosure was one of three acres with a flat open space in the center around whose edges rose tiers of seats sloping upward and backward to the fence’s top. In the center was a triangular platform, raised twenty feet above the ground, and having at each of its three corners an upright post each with a beam extending horizontally from its top. Broad steps led up to this platform, and on it was a bench and a table. On the table was an earthen jug and beside it an earthen bowl. In the table was a Bible. From the three horizontal arms, black ropes suspended, and every breeze swayed them.

The tumbril had stopped at the foot of the broad steps. Its footboard was let down and Bame descended from it. He stood there with a guard on each side, and the crowd drawn backward to standing places on the encircling seats. A feeling of weakness pervaded him as he glanced upward at the posts and their suspended ropes so ominous of evil to himself. He partially recovered his control while the guard and executioner were attending to their horses, and then, with them, he ascended the steps to the platform.

From the raised platform Bame could see across the top of the gates of the enclosure toward London. He looked absently in that direction, and at first saw nothing because of the tumult in his mind. Suddenly the scene swept into his field of consciousness, and under a dark canopy of smoke and cloud, he saw the distant city. No sunlight lay upon the myriad of walls that formed the picture. No gilded dome, nor window in visible towers, flashed to him a welcome or a warning. In the gloom, it seemed a city of death or sleep, and he felt it to be a vision, impalpable and evanescent. The broken steeple of St. Paul, the crumbling Roman wall, the fronts of familiar buildings, brought a rush of tender memories and a flood of tears. He could not brush this evidence of weakness aside, for his hands were bound; and so with outer vision blurred, the inner, or spiritual, became the real. The fields of morning appeared, and he passed through them as with the rapid wings of an angel, catching their scents and a sweetness of life like that known only to the barefooted boy when the grass is green and the day perfect and no duties confront him. Then the fire of the period of ambition filled him, and he saw his home, the deserted bench at which he once labored, the patient face of his wife and then the figure of Marlowe as he appeared to him under the blazing lights of the chantry. Ah! was it he? Yes. “And are not the charges false?” rises the question from a thousand voices.

He recognizes them all, and he attempts to say, “Yes, and let it be so recorded!” but he finds himself without voice. There is a darkness that is never to be lifted about him. He has a faint comprehension of the reason, but it grows into no verity. Verities are beyond him, so is the world with all its falseness. There is a close cloth over his face which stifles him. He feels bungling fingers about his neck, then the scraping of a rough substance in the same place. He imagines he cries:

“Unloose! Air, air! My God, save me!”

But in fact he had said nothing, and with these unuttered words upon his burning lips, he feels a terrific jar that seems an explosion in his own brain. All the world is aflame. Was there ever such an illumination? But, O God! what thrust was that through the center of life itself? This is pain in its purity. But, wait, hold but a moment, O ye fires! It groweth dark and darker. An absolute blackness is gathering with a swiftness incomprehensible; and a roar, as mighty and continuous as the ocean at steep headlands, fills his ears, increases and then dies utterly.

Bame was hanging under the Tyburn gallows.