The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain (desktop ebook reader TXT) 📖

question

must be asked; it could not be avoided; so Hendon reined up, and called

out—

 

“I had forgotten to inquire whither we are bound. Thy commands, my

liege!”

 

“To London!”

 

Hendon moved on again, mightily contented with the answer—but astounded

at it too.

 

The whole journey was made without an adventure of importance. But it

ended with one. About ten o’clock on the night of the 19th of February

they stepped upon London Bridge, in the midst of a writhing, struggling

jam of howling and hurrahing people, whose beer-jolly faces stood out

strongly in the glare from manifold torches—and at that instant the

decaying head of some former duke or other grandee tumbled down between

them, striking Hendon on the elbow and then bounding off among the

hurrying confusion of feet. So evanescent and unstable are men’s works in

this world!—the late good King is but three weeks dead and three days in

his grave, and already the adornments which he took such pains to select

from prominent people for his noble bridge are falling. A citizen

stumbled over that head, and drove his own head into the back of somebody

in front of him, who turned and knocked down the first person that came

handy, and was promptly laid out himself by that person’s friend. It was

the right ripe time for a free fight, for the festivities of the morrow—

Coronation Day—were already beginning; everybody was full of strong

drink and patriotism; within five minutes the free fight was occupying a

good deal of ground; within ten or twelve it covered an acre of so, and

was become a riot. By this time Hendon and the King were hopelessly

separated from each other and lost in the rush and turmoil of the roaring

masses of humanity. And so we leave them.

 

Chapter XXX. Tom’s progress.

 

Whilst the true King wandered about the land poorly clad, poorly fed,

cuffed and derided by tramps one while, herding with thieves and

murderers in a jail another, and called idiot and impostor by all

impartially, the mock King Tom Canty enjoyed quite a different

experience.

 

When we saw him last, royalty was just beginning to have a bright side

for him. This bright side went on brightening more and more every day:

in a very little while it was become almost all sunshine and

delightfulness. He lost his fears; his misgivings faded out and died;

his embarrassments departed, and gave place to an easy and confident

bearing. He worked the whipping-boy mine to ever-increasing profit.

 

He ordered my Lady Elizabeth and my Lady Jane Grey into his presence when

he wanted to play or talk, and dismissed them when he was done with them,

with the air of one familiarly accustomed to such performances. It no

longer confused him to have these lofty personages kiss his hand at

parting.

 

He came to enjoy being conducted to bed in state at night, and dressed

with intricate and solemn ceremony in the morning. It came to be a proud

pleasure to march to dinner attended by a glittering procession of

officers of state and gentlemen-at-arms; insomuch, indeed, that he

doubled his guard of gentlemen-at-arms, and made them a hundred. He

liked to hear the bugles sounding down the long corridors, and the

distant voices responding, “Way for the King!”

 

He even learned to enjoy sitting in throned state in council, and seeming

to be something more than the Lord Protector’s mouthpiece. He liked to

receive great ambassadors and their gorgeous trains, and listen to the

affectionate messages they brought from illustrious monarchs who called

him brother. O happy Tom Canty, late of Offal Court!

 

He enjoyed his splendid clothes, and ordered more: he found his four

hundred servants too few for his proper grandeur, and trebled them. The

adulation of salaaming courtiers came to be sweet music to his ears. He

remained kind and gentle, and a sturdy and determined champion of all

that were oppressed, and he made tireless war upon unjust laws: yet upon

occasion, being offended, he could turn upon an earl, or even a duke, and

give him a look that would make him tremble. Once, when his royal

‘sister,’ the grimly holy Lady Mary, set herself to reason with him

against the wisdom of his course in pardoning so many people who would

otherwise be jailed, or hanged, or burned, and reminded him that their

august late father’s prisons had sometimes contained as high as sixty

thousand convicts at one time, and that during his admirable reign he had

delivered seventy-two thousand thieves and robbers over to death by the

executioner, {9} the boy was filled with generous indignation, and

commanded her to go to her closet, and beseech God to take away the stone

that was in her breast, and give her a human heart.

 

Did Tom Canty never feel troubled about the poor little rightful prince

who had treated him so kindly, and flown out with such hot zeal to avenge

him upon the insolent sentinel at the palace-gate? Yes; his first royal

days and nights were pretty well sprinkled with painful thoughts about

the lost prince, and with sincere longings for his return, and happy

restoration to his native rights and splendours. But as time wore on,

and the prince did not come, Tom’s mind became more and more occupied

with his new and enchanting experiences, and by little and little the

vanished monarch faded almost out of his thoughts; and finally, when he

did intrude upon them at intervals, he was become an unwelcome spectre,

for he made Tom feel guilty and ashamed.

 

Tom’s poor mother and sisters travelled the same road out of his mind.

At first he pined for them, sorrowed for them, longed to see them, but

later, the thought of their coming some day in their rags and dirt, and

betraying him with their kisses, and pulling him down from his lofty

place, and dragging him back to penury and degradation and the slums,

made him shudder. At last they ceased to trouble his thoughts almost

wholly. And he was content, even glad: for, whenever their mournful and

accusing faces did rise before him now, they made him feel more

despicable than the worms that crawl.

 

At midnight of the 19th of February, Tom Canty was sinking to sleep in

his rich bed in the palace, guarded by his loyal vassals, and surrounded

by the pomps of royalty, a happy boy; for tomorrow was the day appointed

for his solemn crowning as King of England. At that same hour, Edward,

the true king, hungry and thirsty, soiled and draggled, worn with travel,

and clothed in rags and shreds—his share of the results of the riot—was

wedged in among a crowd of people who were watching with deep interest

certain hurrying gangs of workmen who streamed in and out of Westminster

Abbey, busy as ants: they were making the last preparation for the royal

coronation.

 

Chapter XXXI. The Recognition procession.

 

When Tom Canty awoke the next morning, the air was heavy with a

thunderous murmur: all the distances were charged with it. It was music

to him; for it meant that the English world was out in its strength to

give loyal welcome to the great day.

 

Presently Tom found himself once more the chief figure in a wonderful

floating pageant on the Thames; for by ancient custom the ‘recognition

procession’ through London must start from the Tower, and he was bound

thither.

 

When he arrived there, the sides of the venerable fortress seemed

suddenly rent in a thousand places, and from every rent leaped a red

tongue of flame and a white gush of smoke; a deafening explosion

followed, which drowned the shoutings of the multitude, and made the

ground tremble; the flame-jets, the smoke, and the explosions, were

repeated over and over again with marvellous celerity, so that in a few

moments the old Tower disappeared in the vast fog of its own smoke, all

but the very top of the tall pile called the White Tower; this, with its

banners, stood out above the dense bank of vapour as a mountain-peak

projects above a cloud-rack.

 

Tom Canty, splendidly arrayed, mounted a prancing war-steed, whose rich

trappings almost reached to the ground; his ‘uncle,’ the Lord Protector

Somerset, similarly mounted, took place in his rear; the King’s Guard

formed in single ranks on either side, clad in burnished armour; after

the Protector followed a seemingly interminable procession of resplendent

nobles attended by their vassals; after these came the lord mayor and the

aldermanic body, in crimson velvet robes, and with their gold chains

across their breasts; and after these the officers and members of all the

guilds of London, in rich raiment, and bearing the showy banners of the

several corporations. Also in the procession, as a special guard of

honour through the city, was the Ancient and Honourable Artillery

Company—an organisation already three hundred years old at that time,

and the only military body in England possessing the privilege (which it

still possesses in our day) of holding itself independent of the commands

of Parliament. It was a brilliant spectacle, and was hailed with

acclamations all along the line, as it took its stately way through the

packed multitudes of citizens. The chronicler says, ‘The King, as he

entered the city, was received by the people with prayers, welcomings,

cries, and tender words, and all signs which argue an earnest love of

subjects toward their sovereign; and the King, by holding up his glad

countenance to such as stood afar off, and most tender language to those

that stood nigh his Grace, showed himself no less thankful to receive the

people’s goodwill than they to offer it. To all that wished him well, he

gave thanks. To such as bade “God save his Grace,” he said in return,

“God save you all!” and added that “he thanked them with all his heart.”

Wonderfully transported were the people with the loving answers and

gestures of their King.’

 

In Fenchurch Street a ‘fair child, in costly apparel,’ stood on a stage

to welcome his Majesty to the city. The last verse of his greeting was

in these words—

 

‘Welcome, O King! as much as hearts can think; Welcome, again, as much as

tongue can tell,—Welcome to joyous tongues, and hearts that will not

shrink: God thee preserve, we pray, and wish thee ever well.’

 

The people burst forth in a glad shout, repeating with one voice what the

child had said. Tom Canty gazed abroad over the surging sea of eager

faces, and his heart swelled with exultation; and he felt that the one

thing worth living for in this world was to be a king, and a nation’s

idol. Presently he caught sight, at a distance, of a couple of his

ragged Offal Court comrades—one of them the lord high admiral in his

late mimic court, the other the first lord of the bedchamber in the same

pretentious fiction; and his pride swelled higher than ever. Oh, if they

could only recognise him now! What unspeakable glory it would be, if

they could recognise him, and realise that the derided mock king of the

slums and back alleys was become a real King, with illustrious dukes and

princes for his humble menials, and the English world at his feet! But

he had to deny himself, and choke down his desire, for such a recognition

might cost more than it would come to: so he turned away his head, and

left the two soiled lads to go on with their shoutings and glad

adulations, unsuspicious of whom it was they were lavishing them upon.

 

Every now and then rose the cry, “A largess! a largess!” and Tom

responded by scattering a handful of bright new coins abroad