crossed till he should come to it. He was an
old campaigner, and used to inventing shifts and expedients:
no doubt he would be able to find a way. Yes,
he would strike for the capital. Maybe his father’s
old friend Sir Humphrey Marlow would help him—’good
old Sir Humphrey, Head Lieutenant of the late King’s
kitchen, or stables, or something’—Miles
could not remember just what or which. Now that
he had something to turn his energies to, a distinctly
defined object to accomplish, the fog of humiliation
and depression which had settled down upon his spirits
lifted and blew away, and he raised his head and looked
about him. He was surprised to see how far he
had come; the village was away behind him. The
King was jogging along in his wake, with his head
bowed; for he, too, was deep in plans and thinkings.
A sorrowful misgiving clouded Hendon’s new-born
cheerfulness: would the boy be willing to go
again to a city where, during all his brief life, he
had never known anything but ill-usage and pinching
want? But the 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.
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.
