Loitering in Pleasant Paths. Marion Harland
variety of phraseology, of which the subject was susceptible, but always to the same effect. Where stood the scaffold of Charles the First, Charles Stuart, Charles the Martyr, Charles, father of the Merry Monarch, the grandparent of Mary of Orange and Good Queen Anne? Could any man of British mould designate to us the terminus of that quick step over the snowy park on the morning of the 30th of January, 1649, the next stage to that “which, though turbulent and troublesome, would be a very short one, yet would carry him a great way—even from earth to Heaven?”
Eight intelligent Londoners said, “I really carnt say!” more or less drawlingly. Two answered bluntly, “Dawnt know!” over their shoulders, without staying or breaking their saunter. Finally, we espied a youth sitting under a tree—one of those from which the melting snow might have dropped upon the prisoner’s head—why not the thrifty oak he had pointed out to Bishop Juxon in nearing Whitehall, as “the tree planted by my brother Henry?” The youth was neatly dressed, comely of countenance, and he held an open book, his eyes riveted upon the open page.
“That looks promising!” ejaculated Caput. There was genuine respect in his address:
“I beg your pardon for interrupting you, but can you inform me, etc., etc.?”
The student raised his head, and looked at us with lacklustre or abstracted eyes.
“Hey?”
Caput repeated the query distinctly and with emphasis.
“Chawles the First?”
“Yes!” less patiently. “The king whose head was cut off by order of Cromwell’s parliament, under the windows of Whitehall, in 1649?”
“Never heard of him!” rejoined the countryman of Hume, Macaulay, and Froude, resuming his studies.
Caput recoiled as from an electric eel. “I wouldn’t have believed it, had any one else heard and repeated it to me!” gasped he, when out of ear-shot. “Do you suppose there is a hod-carrier in Boston who does not know the history of Faneuil Hall?”
“Hundreds! Hod-carriers are usually of foreign birth.”
“Or a school-boy in America who never heard of Arnold’s treason and André’s fate? Or, for that matter, who cannot, when twelve years old, tell the whole story of King Charles’s death, even to the ‘Remember!’ as he laid his head upon the block?”
I had a new difficulty to present.
“While you have been catechizing the enlightened British public, I have been thinking—and I am afraid we are sentimentalizing in the wrong place. I have harrowing doubts as to this being the real Whitehall. The palace was burned in the time of William and Mary—or a portion of it—and but partially rebuilt by Inigo Jones. There is altogether too much of this to be the genuine article. And it is startlingly modern!”
It was a spacious building, and did not look as if it had a story. The exterior was stuccoed and smoke-blackened, but the London air would have dyed it to such complexion in ten years. A belvidere or cupola finished it above. Beneath this, on the ground-floor, separating the wings, was an archway leading into St. James Street. The citizens whom we had questioned had, with the exception of the student, emerged from or disappeared in this passage from park to thoroughfare. We saw now a sentinel, in red coat and helmet, turn in his beat up and down under the arch.
“Is this Old Whitehall?” we asked.
He shook his head without halting.
“Where is it?”
He pointed to a building on the opposite side of the street. It was two stories—lofty ones—high above the basement. Twenty-one windows shone in the handsome front. We traversed the arched passage, planted ourselves upon the sidewalk and gazed, bewildered, at the one-and-twenty windows. Through which of them had passed the kingly form we seemed to have seen for ourselves, so familiar were the oval face and pointed beard, the great eyes darkened all his life long with prophecy of doom? Through which had been borne the outraged corpse, the bloody drippings staining the sill? Upon what spot of the pavement trodden by the throng of Sabbath idlers had fallen the purple rain from a monarch’s heart? For sweet pity’s sake, had none marked the place by so much as a cross in the flagging? All else around us bore the stamp of a later age. Were the apparently venerable walls pointed out by the sentinel the banqueting-hall where the granddaughter held her court, or was this Inigo Jones’s (the Inevitable) restoration?
“One might imagine regicide so common a crime in England as not to be considered worthy of special note!” we grumbled, a strong sense of injury upon our foiled souls.
Just then down the street strode a policeman, and, at sight of our puzzled faces, hesitated with an inquiring look. I cheerfully offer my testimony here to the civility, intelligence, and general benevolence of the London police. We met them always when we needed their services, and as invariably found them ready and able to do all we required of them, sometimes insisting upon going a block out of their way to show us our route. Perfunctory politeness? It may have been, but it was so much better than none at all, or surly familiarity! The man to whom we now addressed ourselves was tall and brawny, with features that lighted pleasantly in the hearing of our tale of defeat.
“My father used to tell me,” he said, respectful still, but dropping into the easy conversational strain an exceptionally obliging New York “Bobby” might use in like circumstances, “that the king was led out through that window,” indicating, not one of the triple row in the banqueting-room, but a smaller in a lower and older wing, “and executed in front of the main hall. Some say the banqueting-chamber was not burned with the rest of the palace. Others that it was. My father was inclined to believe that this is the original building. I have heard him tell the tale over and over until you might have thought he had been there himself. The Park ran clear up to Old Whitehall then, you see—where this street is now. The crowd covered all this ground where we are standing, the soldiers being nearest the scaffold. That stood, as nearly as I can make out, about there!” tapping the sidewalk with his stick. “A few feet to the right or the left don’t make much difference, you know, sir. It does seem queer, and a little sad, there’s not so much as a stone let into the wall, or a bit of an inscription. But those were rough times, you know.”
“We are very much obliged to you!” Caput said heartily, holding out his hand, the palm significantly inverted.
The man shook his head. “Not at all, sir! Against the rules of the force! I have done nothing worth talking about. If my father were living, now! But people nowadays care less and less for old stories.”
He touched his cap in moving away.
“The truest gentleman we have met this afternoon!” pronounced Caput. “Now, we will go back into the park, out of this bustle, and think it all over!”
This had become already a pet phrase and a pet practice with us. The amateur dramatization, sometimes partially spoken, for the most part silent, was our way of appropriating and assimilating as our very own what we saw and learned. It was a family trick, understood among ourselves. Quiet, freedom from platitudinal queries and comment, and comparative solitude, were the favorable conditions for fullest enjoyment of it.
The student was so absorbed in his book—I hope it was history!—as not to see us when we passed. The sunlight fell aslant upon the dark-red walls of the old palace, lying low, long, and gloomy, across the end of the walk. A stiff, dismal place—yet Elizabeth, in all her glory, had been moderately contented with it. Within a state bed-chamber, yet to be seen, the equivocal circumstances—or the coincidences interpreted as equivocal by the faction hostile to the crown—attending the birth of the son of James II. and Mary of Modena laid the first stone of the mass of distrust that in the end crushed the hopes of “The Pretender.” The “first gentleman of Europe” opened his baby eyes in this vulgar world under the roof of the house his father had already begun to consider unfit for a king’s dwelling, and to meditate taxation of his American colonies for funds with which to build a greater. Queen Victoria was married in the Chapel of St. James, adjoining the palace. Upon the mantel