“And entered without turning so much as a knob or lifting a latch,” responded Marlowe.
“Here we climb the King’s staircase,” said Tamworth, as one of his advancing feet struck against an obstacle.
The morn was breaking, but the interior of the building, although open and windswept, was wrapped in utter darkness. Nought could be distinguished of the broken columns down the long hall, the tesselated pavement under foot, the marred frescoes of the walls, the blackened stucco of the ceilings, the solid staircase with heavy stone balustrade ascending to a middle landing. Once the principal palace of King Henry VI, it had long since been remodeled and adapted to plebeian uses. It has even survived its fitness for the latter shifts, and partially dismantled by man and ruined by time it stood simply as a landmark of the fourteenth century.
The few words of the lawyer set moving through the poet’s mind a vision of splendid pageantry. The great hall rose out of shadow, bright with the illumination of a thousand lamps, and across its shining floor and up and down the marble stairway moved figures resplendent in the pomp of royalty—men of magnificent mien in cloaks of cloth of gold and waving plumes; court sycophants with cringing shoulders under their rich mantles; clowns in cap and bells and spangles; fair ladies in regal robes, their faces beautiful in youth, or growing queenly with the marks of age. All were raised as at a masque under the signal of the Master of the Revels.
And this interior scene, from which kings, courtiers and the fairest and most womanly of women were to be drawn for all time, was not his only vision of the tumultuous past. Outside, again, Jack Cade, with his rebels, Kentish peasants, ragged mendicants and starvelings of the alleys, swept defiantly through the Old Jewry and halted with deafening uproar before the barricaded entrance. There at their head, he saw the “shag-haired crafty kerne” and, close pressing him, the leather-aproned smiths and hedge-born hinds, awkward soldiers of the day’s enlistment, from whose base lips all the drolleries of the seamy side of life were to issue.
And he, the magic creator of forms more palpable and enduring than those of clay, groping in the darkness which might never be lifted, was thus beginning the conjuration of the everlasting.
“Marlowe,” exclaimed Tamworth, noticing the lack of pressure on his arm, and his friend’s faltering footsteps. “You drag your feet as though in sleep. See, the clouds are breaking and the gray of the dawn is about us.”
They were passing along an upper corridor, and at its end, through the glassless spaces between the mullions of a lancet window, a glow was spreading so that the rear gables of the row of houses on the Lothbury could be seen shaking themselves free of the murky air. Above their steaming roofs, slender columns of smoke were rising from the cold mouths of chimneys, and early fires made gleaming spots on many of the distant walls. The last wet gust of the storm had splashed upon the open casement through which now came, like a benison, the pure breath of morning.
Down the corridor they turned, and, at length halted, while Tamworth with a great key which he had taken from a sunken niche in the wall, unlocked and swung open a narrow door. Through this they entered an apartment whose single window did not yet admit enough light to render distinctly visible the interior. The air was cold and damp, and for the moment the place seemed as gloomy as a vault. Tamworth hastily lighted a lamp, which at first flamed upward with black smoke, and as it did so Marlowe glancing around him, uttered an exclamation of surprise.
“You notice that something more than a mere vestige of past regal splendor remains here,” said Tamworth, smiling.