Foreword

No epoch in American history is more essentially romantic than that in which, for a few years, less than one hundred colonists from England lived on the island of Roanoke, off the coast of old Virginia. Nevertheless, although the history of our continent, from the landing of Columbus to the end of the Spanish-American war, has been exhaustively exploited in fiction, the pages dated 1587-1598 seem to have been left unturned. Yet the life of the Roanoke colony contained not only adventure, hazard, and privation in a far greater degree than the maturer settlements of later years, but also an underlying emblematical element, and in its end an insoluble riddle. In being thus both mystical and mysterious, it paramountly inspires romance.

The mystery has filled many pages of history, but always as an enigma without solution. The fate of the colony is utterly unknown, historians of necessity relegating it to the limbo of oblivion.

Bancroft, for one, concludes his account of the colonization thus:

“The conjecture has been hazarded [by Lawson and others] that the deserted colony, neglected by their own countrymen, were hospitably adopted into the tribe of Hatteras Indians, and became amalgamated with the sons of the forest. This was the tradition of the natives at a later day, and was thought to be confirmed by the physical character of the tribe in which the English and the Indian race seemed to have been blended. Raleigh[vi] long cherished the hope of discovering some vestiges of their existence, and though he had abandoned the design of colonizing Virginia, he yet sent, at his own charge, and, it is said, at five several times, to search for his liege-men. But it was all in vain; imagination received no help in its attempts to trace the fate of the colony of Roanoke.”

Opposing this view, many authorities believe that a massacre occurred by which many of the English suffered at the hands of hostile savages. In the ensuing story, however, I have ventured to explain the oblivion of the colony’s end in a way which I believe has not yet been suggested.

After this preamble I hasten to assure the reader—perhaps already surfeited with historical novels—that he shall find scarce more of history in the whole tale following than in the foreword just concluded. The “manners and customs” also are rigidly suppressed. I have made bold, though, to use several of the colonists’ names which have been preserved, but the conception of character is my own.

W. F. P.

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John Vytal A Tale of the Lost Colony

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CHAPTER I

It is not to yesterday that we would take you now, but to a day before innumerable yesterdays, across the dead sea of Time to a haven mutable yet immortal. For the Elizabethan era is essentially of the quick, although its dead have lain entombed for centuries. The world of that renascent period, alight with the spontaneous fire of intellectual and passionate life, shines through the space of ages as though then, for the first time, it had been cast off from a pregnant sun.

Overcoming the remoteness of the epoch by an appreciation of this vivid reality, we pause at the outset near the great south gate of London Bridge as it stood three centuries ago.

On a certain April afternoon the massive stones and harsh outlines served to heighten by contrast the effect of lithe grace and nonchalance apparent in the figure of a young man, who, leaning lightly against the barbacan, presented a memorable[4] picture of idleness and ease. Yet a fleeting expression in the youthful face belied the indolence of attitude. For in more ways than one “Kind Kyt Marlowe” resembled the spring-tide, whose tokens of approach he intuitively recognized. His eyes, usually soft and slumberous with the light of dreams, now and again shone brilliant like black diamonds. With all his careless incontinence, he possessed a latent power, a deep, indeterminable force, portending broad hot days and nights of storm.

His face, mobile dark and passionate, showed an almost alarming intensity. His brow, lofty but not massive, was surmounted by silken hair so black as to appear almost purple in the sunlight. He wore no beard, a small mustache adding to the refinement of his features, save for the fulness of his lips, which it could not hide. Taken as a whole, his face was the face of a man who had no common destiny; of a man who would drain the cup and leave no dregs, be the draught life-elixir or poison; of a man, in short, who might all but transcend his humanity by the fulness of life within him, or be suffocated and overwhelmed by the very superabundance of that life. For there are some seeming to be born with a double share of vitality, a portion far greater than was meant for man; and when this vitality, maturing, begins its re-creation, threatening all feebler forms with a new revolutionary condition, then the error is apparently discovered and the entire share of life recalled.

Christopher Marlowe was one of these men, but as he leaned against the Southwark Gate, that afternoon in early life, looking up the High Street through the gathering dusk, his eyes showed little more than the cheerful glow of a wood-fire, the mere hint of an unrestrainable flame underlying their expression.

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Soon, however, the poet’s reverie was broken. The afternoon’s bear-baiting being over, and Southwark’s amphitheatre empty of its throngs, a number of the earliest to leave were now upon the High Street, known then as Long Southwark. Seeing them approaching him on their way to London, Marlowe turned and walked in the same direction.

At the sign of “The Three Bibles” books and broadsides were for sale. It was this small, antiquated den on London Bridge that the author sought with the unconscious step of one who follows a familiar way.

He had but just entered the low-studded, gloomy shop, and greeted Paul Merfin, its owner, when the scabbard of a sword clanked on the threshold, and a man of great stature, accoutred as a soldier, darkened the doorway. With no prelude of salutation, the new-comer demanded of Merfin, in a voice of anxiety, “Tell me, hast seen—?” Then for the first time he became aware of Marlowe’s presence, and, lowering his heavy tones to a whisper, finished his query in the bookseller’s ear.

“Nay,” was Merfin’s answer, “I have seen nothing of him.”

The soldier’s face grew yet more uneasy. “Ill fortune!” he exclaimed; “it is always so,” and he would have left the shop had not Marlowe detained him.

“Stay,” said the poet, “I could not but hear your question, for your whisper, sir, being no gentler than a March wind, nips the ear whether we will or no. So you, I take it, are that giant, Hugh Rouse, who follows the Wolf. Of you twain I have heard much, and wondered if the tales from the South were true that told of so great a courage. I have seen the man, show me now the master.”

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“Would, sir, that I could, but I know not where the master is. And who, may I ask, are you, that show so deep an interest?”

“Not one to be feared,” returned Marlowe, smiling; “an idle poet who has sung of braver men than his eyes have yet beheld, and would see a man still braver than the song—Kyt Marlowe, at your service, good my Rouse,” and so saying, the poet, with a hand through the big soldier’s arm, led the way from the shop out to the High Street of Southwark. “Had you not another comrade in the wars, a vagabond of most preposterous paunch and waddling legs? I have heard that he, too, follows milord, the Wolf.”

“There is such an one,” said Rouse, “but, alack! he also is missing. I pray you, though, call not our leader ‘Wolf’ again; none save fools and his enemies so name him.”

“But I have heard that he is ferocious as a wolf, lean and very gray. The sobriquet is not ill-fitting.”

“Nay,” said the soldier, “in truth it fits most aptly in description of his looks, for though he is but five-and-thirty, his head and beard are grizzled, that before were black as night.”

“’Tis not strange,” observed the poet, leading his new acquaintance toward a favorite hostelry; “campaigning in the South ages many a man before his time.”

“Ay, but that is not all.”

“What more, then?”

“It is briefly told,” answered the soldier. “His father was sent by her Majesty, our queen, with messages to Henry of Navarre, in whose army we two fought side by side. The envoy and his wife, who were passing through Paris—”

“What!” interrupted the poet, “were they his parents? I had forgot the story. It was the night[7] when Papists murdered Huguenots, the night of St. Bartholomew. An Englishman and his wife were slain ere their son, who had come from the South to warn them, could intervene. He saw his mother struck down, saw the sword and the bared breast in the glare of a dozen torches, and saw his father killed, too, after a brief struggle. Then the youth, who had cut his way nearer to the scene, found himself beset on all sides by a bristling thicket of steel that no man could divide. He fell. The Catholics laughed and left him for dead across the bodies of his parents. But the lad was not so easily undone. He rose, despite a wound beneath the heart, and, dripping blood, carried the two dead forms to the Seine, where, in the shadow of the Pont Neuf, he weighted his burdens with stones and buried them beyond the reach of desecration. The tale came to me as come so many legends of the wars from nameless narrators. That youth, then, is—”

“John Vytal,” concluded the soldier, gravely. “He had fought before then at Jarnac and Moncontour; but now he warred against the Catholics with redoubled fury. ’Twas through him, I tell you, came the victorious peace of Beaulieu and Bergerac, and the fall of Cahors.”

“Find me this man!” The words burst from the young poet in a voice of eager, impetuous command. “I must see him!”

“He was to have been at the ‘Tabard’ two hours since,” returned the soldier, despondently, “but came not.”

“Then let us return thither and wait for him a year, if need be. He will come at last, ’tis sure.”

The narrow way on the bridge near by was now choked with its evening throngs, and, as daylight began to fade, a babble of many tongues rose[8] and fell in the streets of Southwark, with which the creaking song of tavern signs, aswing in the evening breeze, blent an invitation to innumerable stragglers from the bear-fight.

“Eh, now,” said Rouse to one of these who joined him, “do you honor the ‘Spurre,’ Tom Watkins, or the ‘King’s Head’?”

“Nay, neither, Hugh; they lack that mustiness and age which make the inn. For this there’s none like the ‘Tabard,’ that being a most ancient hostel. D’ye know what ‘Tabard’ is?”

“Nay, poorly; some kind o’ garment, I’ve heard.”

“It is, Hugh; a jacket with no sleeves, slit down from the armpits and winged on the shoulders. Thou’lt see it on the tavern sign. Only the heralds wear the things to-day, and call ’em coats-of-arms in service. Now, d’ye see, it’s meet that I, a breeches-maker, should mind me of other attire as well, and not go breast-bare about the town. So, Hugh Rouse, I make my breeches by day, and I put on my tabard by night, thank the Lord, and I’m a well-arrayed coxcomb, ye’ll allow. But here we are; get you in.”

The speaker, a thin fellow of middle age and height, laughed over this oft-repeated joke till his sallow face looked like a tangle of his own leathern thongs, showing all its premature wrinkles, and his bent shoulders shook convulsively; yet there was no sound in the laughter save a kind of whispered crackle like the tearing of stiff paper.

On entering the inn, Marlowe and the soldier sought an obscure corner, but Thomas Watkins, the breeches-maker, being a character of no small popularity among the worthies of the borough, and one who had the commiseration of many, for good and sufficient reasons, seeing the tap-room already well filled, remarked thereon to the host, after his usual[9] manner of forced joviality. “How now, have I allowed myself to be forestalled and beaten in our race from the gardens to your spigot?” He surveyed the tables, with their dice-boxes, cards, and foaming cups, feigning an astonished air. Several of the guests looked up at him, laughing, with a certain indulgent, almost pitying, amusement. Simon Groat, the tavern-keeper, smiled, too, in fat good-humor.

“’Tis not often so,” he returned; “you know the saying, Thomas, that the breeches you make yourself are unusual easy for quick running to the tavern, and uncommon broad and thick in the seat, that you may sit on our ale-bench by the hour with small wear to them.” The crowd laughed yet more heartily at this, though many had heard the same stock jest before. “But now, to tell truth, Tom, ye’re the very first from the gardens.” He lowered his voice. “These be soldiers, as you see. Some arrived at Portsmouth from the Low Countries last month, and already must sally forth again, most madly, methinks, on the perilous Virginia voyage.”

The breeches-maker glanced about him for the first time with a close attention to the room’s occupants. For the most part they were unknown to him, several wearing the unmistakable air of fighting men. But his scrutiny was suddenly interrupted by the entrance of others more familiar in appearance. Leading the new arrivals into the tap-room came a short, nervous man, very thin both of body and voice. As he saw Watkins, his face, which had been eager, showed disappointment. “Faugh!” he ejaculated, turning to Groat; “Tom’s told you.”

The host looked as surprised as a very bland, corpulent person can. “Nay, Peter, what’s he told me?”

The expression of Peter Sharp, needle-maker by trade, news-monger by preference, grew eager again.[10] “That’s like Tom,” he declared. “Some observation concerning the ale-tap instead of a good story, I’ll warrant.” He turned to his fellow-guests, with the exception of those who had entered behind him. “Were none of ye there,” he asked, “to see a most astounding bear-baiting?”

The soldiers looked up with interest from their games. Marlowe and Rouse in particular showed a keen attention to the speaker. “Alack!” whispered Rouse, “I knew he’d do it.” But his companion, all ears for what was coming, made a cautious gesture commanding silence, and said nothing.

“This is how it happened,” began the needle-maker, now sure of an attentive audience. “First, Old Sarcason—by Heaven, the gamest bear, as I thought, that ever entered ring!—came badly off. The wards must needs grab every dog’s tail and pull it might and main to hold them back from killing him. But Harry Hunks gave better fight, and nearly hugged a mastiff pup to death. And Little Bess of Bromley, too—ye should have seen her punish Queen Elgifa, a noble slut in her day. I’ve rarely seen so great sport at public baiting; but Bruin and his wards were on their mettle. The French ambassador was there. At the end they had a new pastime in store for us. And here came the trouble. Leading a small brute—him they call King Lud—faith, little more than cub, but strong as iron and uncommon savage, being a son of Old Sarcason and Little Bess—out they come with him, and blind his eyes. Then, tying him fast to the post, they flog his hide, each with a leathern whip, till the blood runs.[1] Whereat down jumps from a seat near the ring a man we knew not, tall and[11]

travel-stained, and says that they should stop their ‘wanton sport.’ And following him into the ring jumps a clownish fellow of low stature and round paunch, like a stage jester in appearance. They both carried arms, the first a rapier, the mountebank a broadsword half his own length. We thought, then, it was all arranged, some new-conceived buffoonery to finish the baiting. Quick as can be, the two, with drawn swords, went forward and untied the bear, about whose back a lash still whistled. ‘Tie him up,’ says the tall man, pointing to one of the floggers. And suddenly ’twas done before we knew it. There stood Sir Knight of the Whip tied to the post in place of King Lud, and writhing most horribly, while the pot-bellied little clown danced about him, plying the self-same lash for dear life. In the mean time the other—of high station, I take it, despite his weather-worn garb—calmly unblinds the bear and turns him toward the sight at the whipping-post. The wards stood speechless, for Master Long-man held his rapier ready, and a pistol stuck out at his belt.”

The needle-maker paused for breath, and, having a certain dramatic instinct, called for a flagon of ale, in order to postpone his climax. The other inmates of the tavern now listened to the nervous little storyteller with keen interest and some excitement. The pair in a corner waited breathlessly for the end. From time to time as the narrative had proceeded the bigger of the two could scarcely suppress his agitation, but, being restrained by Marlowe, he managed to voice the alarm he felt by no more than some occasional smothered ejaculation, such as, “I knew he’d do it!” or, “In troth, he was ever thus!”

“But the most astonishing incident is yet to come,” resumed Peter Sharp, wiping the ale-foam from his lips. “No sooner did King Lud see what was going[12] forward than along he shambled slowly toward the clownish fellow, and, standing up on his hind legs, put a great paw on each of the little man’s shoulders, and looked at him in a most friendly way as dogs do. Whereat the mountebank dropped his whip and spoke to his superior officer, as I took the other to be. Then Sir Soldier, drawing out a fat purse and turning to the Master of the Sports, who was even now coming into the ring in great dismay, nodded and delivered the purse into his hands. At that the stout retainer made a comical bow to all the people around the ring, as who should say, ‘I hope we have amused you,’ and, leading King Lud by his chain, calmly walked out of the arena. From this we felt all the more sure that it had been part of the performance. But I could not believe that the angry and amazed looks of him who had been flogged in Bruin’s place, and of the

wards, were feigned. Moreover, when the tall man left, he says to us all: ‘Call ye yourselves men and watch such sports as these? Get ye to your kennels with the other dogs.’ Whereupon he, too, walked from the ring slowly. It was all done with such despatch by him, and such a ready wit by his servant, that they befooled us utterly. Thinking it a comicality, no man in all the audience took action, and the few below us in the ring, being so terrified and bewildered by the sudden remonstrance and show of arms, stood dumfounded. But even then, I think, they might have regained their senses in time to send the twain to jail had not the Master of the Sports advised against pursuit, being, as I believe, well requited for King Lud and not unfamiliar with his purchaser.”

The needle-maker raised his cup and drank deep, while a buzz of conversation began about him. A look of unspeakable relief had come to the faces of the soldier and the poet in the corner.

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