Historical Vignettes,
2nd Series

Ten of the following sketches are reprints from a volume, Historical Vignettes, published by Mr. Fisher Unwin in 1910. The remaining twelve here appear in book-form for the first time. The author’s renewed thanks, for permission to reprint this fresh matter, are due to the Editor of Truth.

“Dead Man’s Plack”

Elfrida, wife of Athelwold, the King’s favourite, and daughter and heiress to Olgar Earl of Devonshire, was a beauty of the true Helena complexion. To see her, for most men, was to covet; to possess her, for the one, was to wear a crown of exquisite thorns. The orchard needs most watching when the fruit is ripe, and Elfrida hung at perpetual ripeness, maddening to parched lips without. The keeper of this garden of sweet things might hardly enjoy it for his fear of robbers. And the worst of it was that, to maintain so ravishing a possession in its perfection, no warning as to its own irresistible witchery must be so much as hinted to it, lest the blue innocence of two of the most lovely wondering eyes in the world should be impaired thereby, and self-consciousness usurp in them the place of naïveté. Gazing into those artless depths, if one had the privilege, one presently recognised in their little floating motes and shadows the souls of the many who had drowned themselves therein. Was Elfrida conscious of the tragic secrets hidden away under those azure waters? Her husband at least thought her the most loving, the most unsophisticated, the most trustworthy of wives; and if the wish was very particularly the father to the thought, the thought was none the less for that sincere.

One noon the young wife sat, yawning and a little ennuyée, in her bower of the Thanage house by Harewood Forest in Hampshire. Athelwold was with the Court at Winchester, and time hung heavy on her hands. She leaned back in her seat, listlessly conning the crumpled figure of Daukin, the Earl’s clerk or bookesman, as he squatted on his stool monotonously mouthing the Canons of Eusebius from an illuminated manuscript—the light literature of England when Dunstan was Primate. Like many ethereal women, Elfrida found a fascination in the deformed and grotesque. She petted little harsh Daukin; and he, while he took his full sardonic change of the licence allowed him, for ever in spirit kissed the beautiful feet that trampled on his soul. So, he thought, must feel the writhing, adoring, hopeless serpent under Mary’s feet in the chapel.

She broke in upon his reading, suddenly and irrelevantly.

“Will our lord return this night, think you, Master Bookesman?”

The dwarf, closing the manuscript, accepted grimly the moral of his own eloquence.

“Will a star shoot out of the east?” he said. “I’ll tell thee when the night hath come and gone.”

“Nay, say that you think he will—say it, say it!”

“The King loves the Earl, lady, and thou desirest him. Which passion shall pull the stronger?”

“Do not I love him, thou toad?”

“Well, then, pull, and in double harness; so, belike, the King, that holds to him, shall be drawn too.”

“I do not desire the King.”

“God give him strength to bear it!”

She laughed musically: “Insolent!” and so fell into thought.

“Thou knowest, Daukin,” she said presently, “I have never been to Court—nor desired it indeed. Of what complexion is the King?”

“Hot.”

“Is he not very young?”

“He hath learned to lisp and help himself to what he wants. The young husbands in his suite observe discretion.”

“Poor husbands! O, Daukin, O waly me, how the day loiters! If my love could draw so strong, I’d e’en take the worser for the better’s sake.”

“Which first?”

“Peace, fool!”

“Well, the comfort is the King’s heard of thee, and heard enough to satisfy him, it seems. He’ll not trouble thee with a visit.”

“He has not heard.”

“What! Did he not use his influence with the Earl thy father to promote this match?”

“Aye, on grounds of policy and fortune. Thank Heaven I am not beautiful!”

“It listens and will record.”

She sighed: “Alack a doleful day! O, I wish my lord would come!”

A bugle sounding without answered on her word. There was a thud of racing hoofs, a sudden turmoil in the court, a mingling of many voices, servile or peremptory. Elfrida rose ecstatic, clasping her hands.

“’Tis he himself!” she cried, and advancing, as the curtain parted, almost ran into the arms of her husband, Athelwold.

He was tall, sinewy, pale-haired and lashed. His tunic of fine cramoisy was torn, his gold garters trailed; he looked like a man in the last extreme of haste and agitation. He took the wondering beauty in his arms, and gazed into her face, searchingly, passionately.

“Wife,” he said, “I have something of wild urgency for thy ear. I must speak it ere my blood cools. Tell me that thy heart is mine?”

“Athelwold! What questions!”

“Tell it, tell it!”

“Am I not thy wife?”

“Priests’ business. I speak of love.”

“Why, did I not swear to love thee?”

“Elfrida, thy love’s my heaven; without it—hell. Hear my confession. There’s no moment to lose.”

“Thou strange husband!”

“When I first saw thee in thy father’s house I saw my destiny. Such immortal beauty, child—God, I was just man! Forgive the mad cunning jealousy that would deceive thee even in thyself. ‘I must possess,’ I thought, ‘this immortal thing or die.’ I bid for thy rank, thy fortune, in pretence, the King upholding my suit. His interest turned the scale, and we were wed. Elfrida, wife, dear love—I wronged the King in all; I was no more at first than his deputy for thy hand.”

A little spot of white had come to her cheek; but she smiled on him, not stirring.

“How, Athelwold?”

“I must confess it,” he said. “Edgar had heard speak of this lovely Devon rose; and, toying, only half inclined, with a thought of matrimony, sent me, on some feigned mission, to discover if the lady’s beauty really matched her nobility—in which case——”

“Yes, Athelwold?”

He held her convulsively. “O, forgive me, Elfrida, that I made thee Queen of love, not England! Thy wealth, thy name, I told him, were the charms that gilded servile eyes—enough, perhaps, for such as I, but for him, lacking the first and best of recommendations. And he believed me, and yielded thee to me. And now, and now”—he held her from him, his chest heaving, his voice breaking—“my sin hath found me out—some one hath betrayed me—and he is coming in person to put my report to the proof. Feigning to prepare for his visit, I fled but in time to forestall him by a few hours. Ah, love! all is lost unless thou lovest me.”

She answered quite softly: “What am I to do, Athelwold?”

“Do, be anything but Elfrida. Dress slovenly, speak rudely, soil and discredit thine own perfection.”

“Substitute another for thy lady.”

They both started, and fell apart. The dwarf, forgotten by the one, unnoticed by the other, had risen from his stool. The Thane’s hand whipped furiously to his sword-hilt.

“Nay,” said the girl, interposing—“Daukin is my dog; Daukin loves me; Daukin shall speak.”

“Let the Thane,” said the dwarf, cool and caustic, “seek his couch on pretence of fever, and let Alse, the cookmaid, receive the King. We be all devoted servants of our house. A little persuasion, a little guile, and the thing is carried.”

“I will go instruct the wench,” said Elfrida hurriedly.

She seemed charmed with the idea. She drove her lord to his hiding, with a peremptory laughing injunction that he was not to issue therefrom until summoned by herself; she refused to linger a moment by his side in her excitement. Her eyes had never looked so heavenly-bright and blue.

At eve came the King, with a little brilliant retinue.

But Alse did not receive him. Instead there advanced and knelt at his feet one of the most radiant young beauties his eyes had ever encountered. The violet Saxon hood fell back from her face as she raised it, revealing a sun of little curls bound by a golden fillet. The slender lifted hands, the bright parted lips, most of all the eyes, blue as lazulite and wide with innocence, seemed all as if posed for a picture of Love’s ecstasy. The King, young, and lustful, and handsome, with his strong, clean-cut face, stood the speechless one.

“Welcome, lord King,” she said in a half-articulate voice, like a child murmuring a lesson.

He raised and kissed her. “Welcome, wife of Athelwold!” he said, and let out a sigh like a man restored from drowning.

But apart stood the dwarf, amazed and sorrowful.

“She hath deceived us,” he thought. “What is to be the end?”

That night was spent in feasting; and in the morning came Elfrida to her husband’s couch. Worn with fatigue and anxiety—since she had given orders that none was to approach him—he had fallen asleep at last.

“Up, up, my Thane!” she cried. “The King is bent on hunting, and awaits thee in the court. Say nothing. All goes well.”

She would not linger, lest, as she whispered, she should risk discovery; but, running from him, sought her bower. There listening, a hand upon her bosom, she heard the chase ride forth; and presently the dwarf stole in to her.

“Thou hast done it,” he said. “The King will kill him.”

She began, “Dog! Thou darest——” but, checking herself, put her hands a moment to her face, then went up and down, up and down, like one distracted.

“Well, he wronged the King,” said Daukin.

She stopped before him, and his soul struggled against the fascination of the blue waters.

“What was that to his wrong of me?” she said passionately; and, as he gazed, he saw the waters brim. “O, Daukin!” she wept; “cannot you understand me?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And love me still?”

“I can love the truth,” he said, with a heartbroken sigh. “I have found it at last in the depths I have studied so long.”

When the King returned, the sternness of his white face belied his uttered commiseration. The Thane, he told his lady, had stumbled on his own boar-spear, and met with a mortal hurt.

“Long live the Queen!” said Daukin.

Edgar started, and his hand went to his dagger. Elfrida stumbled forward.

“No,” she said in a weak voice, “it is my dog, lord King. I will not have him killed because he barks.”

Fair Rosamond

A lady, accompanied by a small armed retinue, rode out of a forest glade near Woodstock, and, pausing beside the waters of the Glyme, which here came sliding in a little weir, smooth as a barrel of glass, over an artificial dam, reined in her steed, and sat gazing, in the full glow of noon, upon the scene before her.

It was a scene of perfect pastoral quiet—woodland and meadow as far as the eye could reach, broken by green hillocks and dominated by a solitary keep of stone set on a leafy height in the foreground. To the right a film of floating vapour showed where a hidden hamlet smoked. There was no other token of human life or habitation anywhere.

The lady, halting a little in advance of her party, made a preoccupied motion with her hand, whereupon there pushed forward to her a certain horseman, who dragged with him a churl roped to his saddle-bow. The knight was in bascinet and chainmail like the others, but his shield and pavon were emblazoned with arms betokening his higher rank.

“Messer de Polwarth,” said the lady, “is not this in sooth Love’s paradise?”

“Certes, madam,” he answered grimly; “it is the King’s Manor of Woodstock.”

She laughed; then, stiffening suddenly in her saddle, pointed upwards.

“Look!” she said.

A poising kite, as she spoke, had dropped to the wood-edge, and thence rose swiftly with a dove beating in its talons.

“Behold a fruitful omen,” she cried, and turned on the hind: “Dog! where lies the garden?”

De Polwarth struck the fellow a steely blow across the scruff.

“Answer, beast!”

The man, a sullen, unkempt savage, pointed with an arm like a snag.

“Down yon, a bowshot from the lodge. Boun by the waterside.”

The lady nodded, her eyes fixed in a sort of smiling trance. She was Eleanor of Aquitaine, no less, the divorced wife of France, the neglected and embittered Queen of England, and she was at this moment on the verge of flight to those rebellious sons of hers who conspired in Guienne against their father.

But, before she fled, she had just one deed of savage vengeance to perpetrate, and of that she would not be baulked, though to accomplish it she must ride across half England. Somewhere, she knew, in this place was situated that “house of wonderful working—wrought like unto a knot in a garden,” where lived her hated child-rival, that beautiful frail rose of the Cliffords who had borne the King a son. So much the worse for her—so much the worse.

The Queen descended to earth, spiritually and literally. She was dressed like a queen in a belted blue robe latticed with gold, and a long purple cloak over. A jewelled coronet embraced her headcloth and the headcloth her face. The rim of hair that showed under was still, for all her fifty odd years, crow black. Her colour was high, her frame masculine; the prominence of her lower lip gave her a cruel expression, and without belying her.

“Nay, de Polwarth,” she said, as the knight made a movement to dismount. “No hand in this but mine.”

He retorted gruffly: “The place is reputed impenetrable.”

She smiled. “Hate will find out a way. Rest you here till I return.”

Never to be gainsaid, she went off alone by the streamside, and soon disappeared among the trees beyond.

Her way took her under the slope of the hill which ran up to the King’s Manor. At first, looking through the branches, she could catch glimpses of the strong, irregular pile, butting like a mountain crag from the forehead of the green height; but, in a little, the density of the trees increasing, the house was hidden from her view, and she had only the thick, towering woods and the little stream for company.

On and on she went, resolute to her purpose, thrilled with some presentiment of its near accomplishment—and suddenly a white rabbit ran out from the green almost under her feet.

She stopped dead on the instant, and, as she stood motionless, the thicket parted near the bole of a great beech-tree hard by, and a little boy slipped out into the open. He was pink-cheeked, Saxon-haired and eyed—a shapely manikin of five or so. Intent on recapturing his pet, he did not at first notice the stranger; but when he turned, with the bunny hugged in his arms, he stood rosily transfixed. In a swift stride or two the Queen was upon him, cutting off his retreat.

She stooped, with a little exultant laugh.

“What is thy name, sweet imp?” she said.

He pouted, half frightened, but still essaying the man, rubbing one foot against the opposite calf.

“Willie Clifford, madam,” he said, wondering for a moment at her crown; but then panic overtook him.

“Nay, Willie,” said the Queen, holding him with a hand that belied its own softness; “I like thy tunic of white lawn and thy pretty shoon so latched with gold. Hast a fond mother, Willie—whose name I will guess of thee for Rosamond? And for thy father, Willie—do you see him often?”

“He hath a crown like thine, but finer,” said the child; “and when he comes he puts it on my head.” Something in the staring face above him awoke his sudden fear. He began to struggle.

“Let me go!” he cried—“I want to go back to my minny.”

“Thy minny?” said the Queen. “One moment, child. Is that thy secret way behind the tree there?”

“I will not tell thee,” cried the boy. “I want my minny! Let me go!”

With one swift movement she tore the rabbit from his arms, and, holding it aloft with her left hand, with her right whipped a jewelled bodkin from its sheath at her waist, and stabbed the little white body, stabbed it, stabbed it. Then she flung the convulsed encrimsoned thing to the ground, and, resheathing the weapon, held the child with a stare of fury.

The swiftness, the savagery, the dreadful novelty of the act had had their purposed effect on him. His eyes widened, his throat swelled; but the scream to which he was on the instant impelled never came. His little soul was paralysed; he was utter slave to horror. If she had told him at that moment to lie down and go to sleep, he would have tried to obey her will, though the unuttered sobs were half bursting his bosom.

“Now,” she said, “now!” panting a little. “Seest, thou harlot’s whelp? Cross me again, and so shalt thou be served. Wait here—move one step hence an thou darest—until I come again.”

She cast one final look of menace at him, then, stepping to the beech-tree, parted the green and disappeared.

It was a cunning blind, as she had expected. The great trunk was so packed amongst the thickets of the hillside that none would have guessed its concealment of a scarce-discernible track which threaded the matted growths above and behind it. Mounting by this, the malign creature came suddenly upon a broken opening in the rock, so mossy and so choked with foliage that its presence would have been quite unsuspected from the glade below. She stopped; she uttered a little gloating exclamation; for there, looped over a projection of the stone, was the end of a strong green thread hanging out of the darkness. The clue, of which she had heard whisper with but small faith, was actually in her hand. Providence had doomed the foolish mother to permit her child to sport with the very means designed against her own destruction.

The cavity led into a ramification of passages, roughly trenched and hewn out of the calcareous slate of the hill. Occasionally roofed, mostly open, always tangled in foliage, and so cunningly devised to mislead that it had been near humanly impossible to resolve its intricacies without such guide to follow, the labyrinth led the Queen by a complicated course to a sense of approaching light and release. And then all in a moment the thread had come to an end against a stake to which it was fastened; and there was a pleasant garden sunk in a hollow of the hill, and a fair young woman, with an awaiting, somewhat troubled expression on her face, standing hard by. She had evidently spun the clue, and returned the first by it from the glade, to make sport for her little man.

The intruder took all in at a glance—the expectant figure, the quiet, inaccessible pleasaunce, the roof of a gilt pavilion rising, a long stone’s-throw away, above the branches of a flowering orchard; dominating all, and hiding this lovely secret in its lap, the wooded hill crowned by its protecting keep.

The young woman, with one startled glance, turned to fly; but in the very act, staggered by a recollection, turned, and came towards the Queen, a hand pressed to her bosom. She was a frail thing, in the ethereal as well as the worldly sense—fragile, it seemed, as china, and as delicately tinted. All pink and cream, with pale golden hair, her darker eyebrows were the only definite note of colour in a thin face. Even her long robe of pale green suggested the anæmia of tulip leaves forced into premature growth.

“A weak craft to have borne so huge a sin,” said Eleanor, as the girl approached. She eyed her with malignant scorn, her under lip projecting. “So, wanton,” she said, “dost know the wife thou hast wronged?”

The other gave a little mortal start and cry “The Queen!” and could utter no more.

A small, hateful laugh answered her.

“The wife, fool! the she-wolf against whom you thought to guard your fold with straws. Why, look at you—I could peel you in my hands—a bloodless stalk, without heat or beauty!”

“Spare me!”

“Aye, as the wolf spares the lamb, the hawk the wren. Let me look on you. So this is a King’s fancy. I could have wrought him better from a kitchen-scrub. Quick! I am in; I have no time to lose, and thine has come. Poison or steel—make thy choice.”

“O, madam, in pity! My heart—I have been weak and ill—I shall not vex thee long!”

“God’s blood! And baulk my vengeance? Come—poison——”

“O! What poison?”

“Why, that thou art betrayed—supplanted. Another leman lies in thy bed—wife to one Blewit, a willing cuckold. Drink it, thy desertion, to the dregs.”

“Sin must not beshrew sin. It is bitter to the death; but I drink it.”

“O, thou toad! Thou wilt not die, for all thy stricken heart? Will this kill thee then?”

She whipped out the red stiletto. Rosamond uttered a faint shriek.

“Blood!”

The Queen brandished it before her eyes.

“I met thy whelp in the glade. It was he who betrayed the way to me.”

The girl gasped and tottered forward.

“I let him to his death. Monster, thou hast killed my Willie—my boy, my one darling!”

She made an effort to leap forward—swayed—and fell her full length upon the grass.

The Queen, softly replacing her blade, stood staring down. No sound or movement followed on the fall. Stooping, she gazed long and silently into the thin face, then, without a word, turned and retreated as she had come.

The boy was standing, white and tearless, by his dead rabbit as she parted the leaves and slunk forth.

“Go to thy mother, child,” she whispered, hoarse and small. “She is ill.”

Maid Marian

“Master Kay, are you my friend?”

“Hear me vow it, madam.”

“Alas! what vow?”

“That I am your friend.”

“Can you so perjure yourself? Are you not the King’s friend?”

“O yes, indeed!”

“How can you be his friend and mine?”

“Why, as the bee’s the flower’s friend. I carry messages of love.”

“Does he ask mine of me?”

“Just that, madam—only your love, no more.”

“No more? You say well. Why, truly my love were a little thing to be valued at no more than a man’s base desire.”

“The man is the King, madam. His desire is great like himself.”

“The King is the man, sir, and the man is hateful to me. Will you tell him so, and be indeed my friend?”

“It would serve you ill, madam.”

“Will he force me? Alack! I will kill myself.”

“Nay, that you shall not, save you hold your breath and die of your own sweetness like a rose. No other way, be assured. He will wear you in his bosom first.”

“God! Dear Master Kay, good Master Kay, sweet, gentle friend, let me kill myself!”

“I must not.”

“But to leap from the wall! It is a little way—but a step, and to save me hell! You would not have me burn for ever?”

“I would have you reasonable, madam.”

She had fallen on her knees to him, this Maud Fitzwalter, fair daughter of Robert the Baron, who was to come to head the revolt against the infamous King. Her long white fingers plucked at his sleeves; her eyes sought his eyes imploringly. He drank of them, lusting in their passionate appeal. She was called Madelon la Belle, and to see her was to think of spring, with its crab-blossoms against a blue sky, its glow and youth and waywardness. There is a lack of the sense of symmetry in Love that makes his sweetest faces out of drawing; and yet one never doubts but that they are Love’s faces, as endearing as they are faulty and for their very faultiness most lovable. His drawing, I say, may be defective, but he knows the trick of lip and eyelash to a curve and how to snare men’s hearts thereby. And so, while we criticise his work, saying that this or that line goes astray, we would not have it turned by a hair’s breadth nearer the truth, lest we should miss love in aiming at perfection.

Such a face was Maud’s, framed in its yellow braids so long that, parted from her forehead and plaited in with a cord of gold, they almost touched the ground when she stood up. For the rest her simple tunic was green, and clasped loosely at the hips by a belt of jewelled gold, the slack of which hung low. Madelon la Belle she was called, or Passerose, for the sweetness of her Saxon face and the Saxon blue of her eyes. But most of all she herself loved her name of Maid Marian, given her in those green holts and brakes of Sherwood whither she had followed her own true love, the outlawed Earl, and whence, in a dire moment, she had been ravished by the cursed King. He had seen her loveliness and coveted it, and where John coveted was no safety for wife or virgin. And so it had befallen that once, when abiding in her father’s castle of Dunmow, the Baron being absent, he had come, shedding in his hot haste his smooth phrases and courtly wiles, and had torn her from her shelter and carried her to London to his Tower on the Thames. And there he kept her fast, not doubting but that she would yield to him in time, and glooming ever a little and a little more as her obduracy held him aloof.

This Kay was one of the King’s minions, whom he would send to bribe or threaten the lovely captive into surrender. The fellow was no better than a maquereau, who tasted passion by deputy. He was confident, in the soft persuasiveness of his voice, in the irresistibility of his figure and finery, of the ultimate success of his mediation. His hair, rolled about his ears, was scented; his tunic, short beyond custom, was of gold-embroidered crimson, and his hose were like-hued. A curt-manteau, of cloth of gold lined with green, hung about his shoulders, and on his feet were boots of green cloth, the upper part of lattice-work, embossed at each crossing with a little leopard’s head in gold. He had no real heart of tenderness or mercy. He was a mere painted mask, as bowelless as the Elf-maiden herself.

“I would have you reasonable, madam,” he said.

She rose and stood away from him.

“Is it not in reason to guard one’s virtue?” she said, panting.

“Nay,” he answered; “but if you guard it alone and weaponless, and the thief come in well armed and strong of body? It were reason better to yield it with a good grace.”

She threw herself upon a bench wailing, “O hence, thou beast!” And so she lay writhing—“Only to die—and they will not let me die!”

She sought and cried for death perpetually; she knew she was lost, lacking that kind friend. Was it not pitiful? she whom life had so favoured and love so moulded. She sought him, moaning and wringing her hands, at barred windows, in dusky corners; she entreated her gaolers to have pity on her, to put poison into her food, to lend her a weapon, or a pathway to the battlements whence she might cast herself down. Her every prayer but increased their watchfulness; Death was excluded from her as jealously as if he had been her outlawed lover himself.

On this day her desperation had risen to a pitch scarce endurable. There had been signs that the royal patience was near exhausted. And it was late spring without—she could see it through her window across the green flats that stretched beyond the moat, beyond her prison. Its sweetness reminded her of past days in the forest, so that her heart came near to breaking. Her lips whispered the words of the little glad song that she and her Robin had often sung together:

“Summer is a comin’ in,

Loud sing cuckoo.

Groweth seed and bloweth mead,

And springeth the wood now.

Sing cuckoo, cuckoo.”

“Sing cuckoo,” she wept, “the wanton’s shame! O Robin, my Robin!” She would never see him again—could never wish to. In a few hours, perhaps, she would be a thing for his scorn, a thing that not death, found too late, could cleanse.

In the evening came the King himself, with his frowning eyes and grim jaw that, with the thick beard clipped close on it, looked like a bulldog’s. He was in a furious mood, his Queen having vexed him, and flashed and scintillated like a scaled devil in the light of the dozen torches he brought.

“How now,” he thundered, “thou rever’s doxy! Still obdurate?”

Her very heart shook; but she stood up to him bravely.

“Plunge thy knife into my breast, Sir King,” she said, “and with my last sigh I will praise thee.”

“What!” he snarled—“so much in love with Death? We’ll see to it thy desire’s whetted in his fondling. He shall prick thee here and there before ye close. Away with her to the Watch Tower!”

It was at least a respite, and she had dreaded the instant worst. This Watch, or Round Turret, rose from the north-east angle of the great Keep. He had her there at his mercy. Her cries might rise to heaven, but could not penetrate the dense fabric below. In this chill, high dungeon they imprisoned the girl. Its cold, its dreadful loneliness, scant food, and the silent guard should break her spirit, the wretch thought. He would taste her submission to the dregs, then fling her to his lackeys to teach her what it meant to flout her King. She answered by starving herself; on which came Kay, the silky-tongued, and warned her smoothly that such contumacy could only invite its swift reprisal. She would not be permitted so to slip through her royal lover’s hands. Whereat she ate all that they would give her, and despaired the more.

There was no escape, none. Locked in as she was, she knew that her every movement was canvassed by hidden eyes, her every sigh recorded. And Robin made no sign.

One day it moved her to hear unwonted sounds rising from the outer ward below, into which the public were admitted on occasion of State festivities, executions, and so forth. The multitudinous jollity of voices, soaring above the whine of bugle and tap of drum, proclaimed it a May-day revel, when the whole place was delivered over to sport and merriment.

She could not see from her high, narrow window, sunk deep in the wall; but the babble flowing in on a shaft of sunlight made her heart warm as it had never felt for days. Some spirit of release seemed to ride in on the happy music, some emotion that made her bosom heave and her eyes fill thick with tears.

She was standing, drinking in the merry noise, when her lids blinked involuntarily, and, with a swish and smack on the ceiling of her cell, something alighted at her feet. She fancied on the instant that a bird had flown in and struck against the stone; but, looking down quickly, she saw that it was a broken arrow—one of a dear, familiar pattern. With a gasp she stooped, snatched at it, and stood listening. There was no sign of anyone having observed. With swift trembling fingers she detached a strand of green worsted which was knotted about the shaft under the quill, and found beneath a folded scrap of parchment, which, on being opened, revealed a glutinous smear of brown substance, and just these four woeful words written above:

“Poor Robin’s Pledge. Farewell.”

It was her death-warrant.

So sweet and tragic, her heart near stopped from its sorrow as she read it. She knew at once what it was—a mortal Arab poison, given long years ago to her woodland lover by a follower of the Lion King. It might serve him in a sore need, had been the words accompanying the gift—to taste it was death. And once Robin had shown it to her, proposing, half playfully, that they should pledge one another in its Lethe were Fate ever to dispart them.

And so she knew that her last hope was dead before her. Robin could not come. He was hurt; he was ill; the guards were too many for them, the Fates too strong, and their only refuge at last was in death. He had sent some one of his cunning archers, Will Scarlet belike, to take advantage of this merrymaking to speed the message, and, when she had realised all that it meant to her, she fell on her knees with a bursting prayer of gratitude to the Providence, to the dear lover, between whom her honour was held safe from the despoiler.

She never doubted that her Robin meant to share the pledge. Likely his dear spirit was waiting for her now, eager to link with hers in the green woods where first their loves were spoken. Fearful of interruption, she put her lips to the poison, and died with his name on them.

That evening came Master Kay to the cell, with a sick smile on his mouth, and in his hands a tray of comfortable things, including a flask of drugged wine. The King’s patience was exhausted.

But when he saw what had happened he stole out, and fled to join the refractory Barons, of whom was Fitzwalter, father of Madelon la Belle.

And in the meantime Robin did not die. The poison that was to kill him came years later from the hand of his kinswoman, the Prioress of Kirklees. Women will take things so literally.

Raleigh

“Admit, Captain,” said the scholar, “that Opportunity signifieth by the lexicon a meet or convenient time; and what is time but an abstraction? Wherefore whoso seizeth opportunity seizeth an abstraction, the which has never been held, nor ever will or can be held, to constitute a violation of that social contract which is called the law.”

Two men were seated in a bower of the “Ship Aground” at Greenwich. The bright little garden at their feet ran down to a low parapet overlooking the river, whose waters, gay with shipping, sparkled merrily in the June sunshine. Behind them the tinkle and gossip of the inn sounded pleasantly; to their left a small plantation of trees led direct to the boundaries of the royal palace—“Placentia,” or the “Manor of Pleazaunce,” it was called—whose red roofs and bowed Italian windows were plainly visible through the green. A flight of wooden steps in the embankment to their right constituted the public landing-place; and for the rest and everywhere were climbing wood and lawn, tumbled with houses like warm red boulders, and gathered at their summit into that Lancastrian tower which was destined in future ages to blossom into the universal meridian.

The men sat on either side a rustic table, a stoup of warm ale with a toast in it between them. The soldier, strong and thickset, was Captain Nicholas Blount, of the Earl of Sussex’s guard. The other, a dissipated, whimsical-looking young man, dressed in black, with a plain falling band, and on his head the scholar’s biretta with embracing flaps, was Master John Sparrow, ex-graduate of Trinity and clerk to the same nobleman. The former sprawled with his doublet unbuttoned, and his rapier and bonnet laid aside. He was an honest, downright soul, more of a Davus than an Œdipus, and yet with a naïve humorous side to him that ingratiated. In common with some soldiers of his rare time he had a tremendous respect for learning.

“Jack Sparrow,” quoth he, “thou hast a damnable overplus of sophistication to answer a plain man withal. But I’ll have thee there. Is not theft an abstraction, and yet punishable by the law?”

“Well countered, Captain,” said the clerk; “but I will prove it otherwise.”

“How, sharp wit?”

“Why, look you; by the token that a theft is an abstraction, an abstraction is a theft. But I say an abstraction is no theft, sith it steals nothing but time, which is itself an abstraction. Is a thief a thief, therefore, who steals from himself?”

“Thou playest on the word, that hath another meaning.”

“God save your neck if you’ll insist on ’t. One day you’ll be caught in a reverie and hanged for an abstraction. For me, one word one meaning is enough.”

“What hanged—Nick hanged!” cried a voice, that of one of two gentlemen who at the moment came round the leafy angle of the bower. “What is his offence?”

Blount and the young man rose to their feet, the one with a jocund, the second with a respectful manner of salutation.

“Fair welcome, masters,” said the soldier. “Your wit shall save me a halter, or I’ll be hanged for it.”

The two new-comers were Mr. Greville and his alter ego Mr. Philip Sidney, the latter already the preux chevalier of his age. Though now in no more than his twenty-seventh year, his world-knowledge and accomplishments exceeded those of most contemporary gallants. Tall, spare, with a rather long melancholy face full of sweetness and intelligence, his whole aspect conveyed an assurance of reasonableness and liberality. His hair, warm yellow and somewhat sleek, was parted at one side into the long love-lock in vogue; his doublet and trunk-hose were of a sober grey but laced with a rich frilling of gold. So was his own quiet nature veined with light. A poet and scholar, a traveller and man of action, a courtier in the worthiest sense, some paltry squabble thrust upon him had banished him latterly from the side of the sovereign to whom his qualities were most endeared, and he was only present in Greenwich on a private affair during the absence of the Court. His friend and coetanian, the Lord Brooke to be—he who came to desire of posterity no greater recognition than that he had been Shakespeare’s friend—was a young man of like learning, sincerity, and skill in arms.

“Why, Nick,” quoth Sidney, “the alternative is certain. But whereby hangs the halter?”

“Round my neck,” answered Blount. “He seeks to throttle me, this learned clerk here, with his sophistications.”

The three gentlemen sat down, the student remaining standing.

“How throttle?” said Sidney.

Jack Sparrow took the answer out of the soldier’s mouth:

“We were discussing your friend, Master Raleigh, sirs, whom the Captain here will dub the very thief of opportunity.”

“And hold to it,” said Blount.

“Nay,” said the ex-graduate, “when, as I maintain and repeat, Opportunity is the common property, whereby to take it is no more offence in a man than the picking of blackberries on the highway.”

“Or the picking of pockets,” said Mr. Greville.

“Hold, Fulke,” said Sidney: “I do perceive a flaw there, in that the seizure or prehension is by its very terms held personal to the appropriator. Thus I may take my opportunity, but not another man’s.”

“Well decreed, Phil,” cried the soldier, with a shout of triumph, and smacked a hand to his knee. “How now, Master Quiddity? Wilt answer to that?”

“With submission, Mr. Sidney,” replied the student, “is not all opportunity yours when you see it? Oblatam occasionem tene: the warrant of Cicero is in the phrase.”

“The very offering, my friend, implies a priority of ownership by another; wherefore, if I seize another man’s opportunity uninvited, I am guilty of a moral felony.”

“But supposing he, that other, omits or refuses to make use of his own?” persisted the student, with his tongue in his cheek.

Nicholas Blount roared: “Omits, quotha! But what is mine is mine, rogue, though there be a thousand popinjays could convert the thing to their own more profitable usage. Wherefore I say, who takes my opportunity steals; wherefore I say, this Raleigh is a thief of opportunity.”

“Instance, instance!” cried the two young gentlemen, crowing; and Greville bawled for the drawer to bring wine.

The soldier grunted: “I’m no man for equivoque; I hold by what I say. You shall hear and judge between us. This Walter, sirs——”

“A very proper courtier of his inches,” said Greville.

“Your friend, sir,” answered Blount sarcastically; “and mine—God quit us of all such allies. He was my friend once, and took the privileges. There was little he would not take, including the wall, of any man. To do him justice, a sweet fighting Hector, full of courage as of grace. He was just home from Ireland when we met last year—fresh from carving of the Kerns. Yet a hand like milk. Nothing would ever stick to it but gold. I cry you mercy, gentles. He was my friend, I say.”

Greville broke into laughter, and Sidney smiled, his lips twitching.

“Castigo te non quod—eh, master clerk?” said the latter. “Perchance he chastised the Captain for very love.”

“You shall hear,” said Blount grimly. “A proper courtier, quoth Master Greville—a very proper courtier. I doubt it not. How looked he when you saw him last?”

“It was at Whitehall,” said Greville. “You know the man—the mirror of fashion, the prince of wit, the pink of assurance. One noon he met the Queen just stepping from her closet. ‘What time is it, good sir?’ quoth she. ‘What time your Highness pleases,’ he answered. ‘Then,’ says her Majesty, ‘I will have it the hour when men speak truth.’ ‘Alas, madam!’ says Raleigh, ‘do you seek a pretext for destroying me?’ ‘What pretext, sir?’ she asks. ‘Why,’ says he, ‘the enforced confession of my hopeless passion for a Queen.’”

The soldier snorted alarmingly. “I warrant he’d rehearsed it, preening and curling before his glass,” he said.

“Alack!” said Sidney; “his hair curls naturally—the worse for sleeker heads.”

“How went he?” said Blount—“a painted popinjay?”

“Always in silk and velvet,” answered Greville demurely—“white for choice, and his doublet jewelled in the seams. He becomes his dress, in sooth; knows how to shadow with ambrosial fleece the high pale culture of his forehead; wears his sword as if he used it; hangs his cloak——”

The soldier roared out:

“Hold! His cloak? God’s grace! It hangs—hang him, I say! So I picture him—all but the cloak. It was here we sat together, in this green arbour, but a year ago. Just home from bloody Ireland was he, yet as white and cool as swan’s-down. We were here, I say, we two, in this very spot, and the Court at Pleazaunce. The Queen was in her barge on the river. We saw her pass, and the rogue’s eyes dreamed. Some caprice—some premonition belike—engaged her Majesty to land at the common steps yonder. They were wet and foul, the morning having rained, and, perceiving his chance, my comrade snatched up cloak, and leaped and joined the throng that hovered on the royal advent. I came more leisurely behind, and saw the pretty Queen mount up and hesitate, pursing her lips in comical dismay before a pool of mud. And then, all in a moment—but you’ve heard the story?”

“He spread his cloak for her to step on?”

“Damn him!”

“Why so?”

“It was my cloak, that was all—new green velvet, and home that morning from the cutter’s. Own him now a thief of opportunity.”

Mr. Sidney and Mr. Greville looked at one another gravely a moment, then burst into a shout of laughter.

Marlowe

“Prithee, Kit, pay me the pound you owe me.”

Mr. Christopher Marlowe, Master of Arts, playwright and rakehell, sprawled his arms upon the tavern table, and leered inebriously across it at the speaker. Behind him an open red lattice gave upon a sunny street alive with swarthy gold-ear-ringed mariners; before his sleepy eyes glowed, framed in the end of a black passage, like a picture in a diorama, a square of green banks and flashing waters webbed with rigging. The waters were the waters of Deptford Creek, and the tackle, or at least part of it, belonged to Drake’s ship, the Golden Hind, already, in this June of the year 1593, laid by for perpetuity at her Majesty’s command, as a memorial of her nation’s characteristic prowess.

Marlowe tinkled with his fingers an empty flagon on the table.

“A pound, Frank Archer?” quoth he in a slurred derisive voice. “Listen here—as empty as my pocket or your head. An I had a pound, I should know better what to do with it.”

The man he addressed, a fellow-actor in Lord Strange’s company, stood up sulkily before him. He was a neurotic player of women’s parts, and somehow uncleanly attractive to the sex he paraphrased. Perhaps he understood it enough to be feared by it—a lithe vicious creature, as white-faced as a girl, and subject to feminine spites and hysterics. He hated the playwright just now, not only because the latter owed him money, but because the two were rival suitors for the favour of some riverside Thaïs. It was a pitiful association, as who, regarding that other figure of bright genius, could not but feel. Not yet thirty, with blue eyes and honey hair, the face of an angel, the forehead of a sage, the indulgence of insatiable appetites had already marked down this Christopher Marlowe for death or insanity. He seemed to find no adequate satisfaction for his passions’ hunger short of feeding their ravenous fires, as Cellini fed the molten arteries of his Perseus, with dishes and quart measures.

“An you had one?” protested the player. “What! with your Edward still mouthing it at the ‘Rose’?—a damned play.”

“A damned play lines no purses,” said Marlowe.

“Pay me my pound, I say.”

“For what? To frank you to the stews? A man were a fool so to accommodate his rival.”

“Ah! You fear my rivalry.”

“I fear the woman’s cupidity, sir. If Kit with gold, the better; but gold at any price, says she. So they compound. Will you take a post-obit?”

“I want my money, Kit Marlowe.”

“How the parrot repeats! No, on my honour, Frank, on my honour. I am drunk out. Should I not otherwise have been before you with the girl? I cannot pay.”

A shadow darkened the lattice, and Archer, on the point of retorting, paused with his mouth open. Some stranger, attracted by the colloquy, had stopped to listen. He came round now by the open porch and entered the room.

“By your favour, sirs,” he said, “I overheard a name to whose possessor methought I owed a duty. Was not it Master Marlowe’s, the playwright’s.”

Christopher nodded, without rising.

“Duty’s a dry debt,” said he. “I would you had ought the name that cup of burnt sack which my present poverty denies me.”

The new-comer was a young man—little more than his own age—of a very fine and distinguished appearance. His face was delicate and handsome, but a little irregular in its contour, as if its commanding intelligence were easily at the mercy of its humour. A chestnut moustache and beard, small but already strong, clothed a jaw a thought underhung. The eyes above were wonderful—brown vivacious lights of sagacity that seemed to take all observation for their province. A comely compact figure, of the average height, clothed sombrely but richly in purple velvet, a snowy ruff, a flexible black hat with a rolled band of silk above its brim—such completed a personality which was as attractive as it was compelling.

“Is that so?” said the stranger. “Genius insolvent? ‘Ingenium res adversæ nudare solent, celare secundæ.’ Your poverty should be your gain, sir.”

“As with the Horace you quote?” answered the playwright. “I ask for nothing better, sir, nor for a more enlightened Mæcenas than her Majesty’s Counsel-Extraordinary.”

Mr. Francis Bacon—for it was he, indeed—laughed, knowing himself detected, as if pleased.

“I am well answered,” he said. He was already, young as he was, in advance of his amazing promise—a Bencher and Reader of his Inn, a Member of Parliament, my Lord of Essex’s loved client. And his vast imagination had been the first to grasp the full significance of the dramatic revolution inaugurated by this scapegrace genius who sat revealed before him. “And by a scholar,” he added.

“An exhibitioner, an it please your worship,” cried the other. “Bachelor and Master of Arts of Benet’s College of your own University; translator of Helen’s Rape from Coluthus, and, since, a humble reformer of the Miracles, and, as some aver, even a worker of new ones.”

“I have been eye and ear-witness of your Tambourlaine,” said the stranger; “of your Faustus, of your Jew; lastly of your Edward the King; and I have no desire to traverse the statement. You have done things; you have revealed; you have opened out worlds which others, perchance, shall colonise. I doff my hat to that fine madness of your Muse—the hot passion that tears the ‘unities’ to rags and leaves her clothed in Nature. Withal, Master Marlowe, I have a bone or two to pick with you.”

“Alack!” cried the playwright: “this arid mirthless feast!”

“Anon, anon, my gentleman! Grace before meat.”

“But sack before all. Have you never mastered, learned sir, the five most excellent reasons for drinking?”

“I know them not.”

“Why, a friend’s visit, the thirst that is, the thirst that will be, the flavour of the wine, and any other reason.”

“They are reasons for. There is one more potent against.”

“What’s that?”

“Why reason itself, which, being robbed by wine, hath no reason to applaud it.”

He saw, indeed, that the man was irretrievably drunk, and that he was wasting time on him. He prepared to go on his way—which was to Greenwich, where the Court was being held.

“Not robbed, but transmuted,” cried Marlowe. “O liquid alchemy! So to be traduced! Have I not ought to thee all the golden treasures of my brain? And he prefers a bone! Well, sir, pick it, pick it.”

“It is german to the matter, I think. Thy golden treasures sink thee even like the shipwrecked miser’s laden belt. Not reason exalted is wine’s, but reason debased—so lowered in the mind’s balance that it sees all the world lopsided, deformed. Such is my quarrel, sir, with the author of the Jew of Malta. A man cannot lust with him but he can do naught else; a Jew cannot be a Jew but he is an unredeemed monster. It is not so in fact; we derive from the multitudinous past—are compact of a thousand inconsistencies. There is more good than ill in all men. The purpose of the drama should be to hold a mirror up to Nature—to give us truth, not anamorphosis. There is no truth in wine, despite the proverb.”

He moved to go, and the playwright sprang to his feet.

Historical Vignettes,2nd Series