Prat, watching them with a wry face, turned to Marlowe, who stood beside him. “Damned portents!” he exclaimed.
“Nay, Roger, they are but vultures awaiting to bear away the corpse of Courage.” Prat eyed him with a kind of wonder. “Or,” pursued the poet, carelessly, “those sails are the flags of truce we wave to Destiny.”
“Master Kyt,” asked Roger, with a look of unprecedented embarrassment, “is ’t a hard thing to write poesy?”
Marlowe, still in abstraction, failed to note the preposterous suggestion that underlay the query. He made answer seemingly to himself. “’Tis easy to indite the ‘Jigging Conceits of Rhyming Mother Wits,’” he observed, quoting from the prelude to his “Tamburlaine.”[6] “It is within man’s compass to make a ‘mighty line’ or so; but to write poetry is impossible.”
“Nay, but you yourself, Master Christopher—”
“No, not I, nor any one can scan the lines engrailed by a golden pen on the scroll of sunset, or echo the music of a breeze.”
The soldier looked mournful, his chin sinking on his chest until a triple fold submerged it. “I would fain have invented a poem myself,” he avowed, gloomily. “And, indeed, have written a song of the men of Roanoke. Lack-a-day! ’tis but a jigging mother of rhyme, I fear, and poorly done.”
Marlowe surveyed him in silence for a moment, then laughed gayly and turned away.
At the same moment a flutter of white scraps, like torn paper, fell to Roger’s boots.
The gathering that lined the water’s edge was now divided in the centre, and Governor White walked between the ranks, smiling to one and another on either side to conceal the sadness of his farewell. As he came half-way to the shore, Marlowe went forward and stopped him. Holding out a heavy packet, the poet spoke in a low voice. “I pray you see to it that this is delivered to Edward Alleyn, an actor of plays, who dwells in the Blackfriars, or, if he be not readily found, then, I pray you, leave it at the sign of ‘The Three Bibles,’ in charge of Paul Merfin, a bookseller. It was from his shop that I joined John Vytal in the fight for your daughter’s honor. I doubt not you will leave this there as my reward. The packet contains certain stage conceits begun in England and finished here.”