The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain [fantasy novels to read .TXT] 📗

the palm inward, but always with the palm turned outward—I have

seen it a hundred times, and it hath never varied nor ever failed. Yes,

I shall soon know, now!”

 

By this time she had crept to the slumbering boy’s side, with the candle,

shaded, in her hand. She bent heedfully and warily over him, scarcely

breathing in her suppressed excitement, and suddenly flashed the light in

his face and struck the floor by his ear with her knuckles. The

sleeper’s eyes sprang wide open, and he cast a startled stare about him—

but he made no special movement with his hands.

 

The poor woman was smitten almost helpless with surprise and grief; but

she contrived to hide her emotions, and to soothe the boy to sleep again;

then she crept apart and communed miserably with herself upon the

disastrous result of her experiment. She tried to believe that her Tom’s

madness had banished this habitual gesture of his; but she could not do

it. “No,” she said, “his HANDS are not mad; they could not unlearn so

old a habit in so brief a time. Oh, this is a heavy day for me!”

 

Still, hope was as stubborn now as doubt had been before; she could not

bring herself to accept the verdict of the test; she must try the thing

again—the failure must have been only an accident; so she startled the

boy out of his sleep a second and a third time, at intervals—with the

same result which had marked the first test; then she dragged herself to

bed, and fell sorrowfully asleep, saying, “But I cannot give him up—oh

no, I cannot, I cannot—he MUST be my boy!”

 

The poor mother’s interruptions having ceased, and the Prince’s pains

having gradually lost their power to disturb him, utter weariness at last

sealed his eyes in a profound and restful sleep. Hour after hour slipped

away, and still he slept like the dead. Thus four or five hours passed.

Then his stupor began to lighten. Presently, while half asleep and half

awake, he murmured—

 

“Sir William!”

 

After a moment—

 

“Ho, Sir William Herbert! Hie thee hither, and list to the strangest

dream that ever … Sir William! dost hear? Man, I did think me

changed to a pauper, and … Ho there! Guards! Sir William! What! is

there no groom of the chamber in waiting? Alack! it shall go hard with—”

 

“What aileth thee?” asked a whisper near him. “Who art thou calling?”

 

“Sir William Herbert. Who art thou?”

 

“I? Who should I be, but thy sister Nan? Oh, Tom, I had forgot! Thou’rt

mad yet—poor lad, thou’rt mad yet: would I had never woke to know it

again! But prithee master thy tongue, lest we be all beaten till we

die!”

 

The startled Prince sprang partly up, but a sharp reminder from his

stiffened bruises brought him to himself, and he sank back among his foul

straw with a moan and the ejaculation—

 

“Alas! it was no dream, then!”

 

In a moment all the heavy sorrow and misery which sleep had banished were

upon him again, and he realised that he was no longer a petted prince in

a palace, with the adoring eyes of a nation upon him, but a pauper, an

outcast, clothed in rags, prisoner in a den fit only for beasts, and

consorting with beggars and thieves.

 

In the midst of his grief he began to be conscious of hilarious noises

and shoutings, apparently but a block or two away. The next moment there

were several sharp raps at the door; John Canty ceased from snoring and

said—

 

“Who knocketh? What wilt thou?”

 

A voice answered—

 

“Know’st thou who it was thou laid thy cudgel on?”

 

“No. Neither know I, nor care.”

 

“Belike thou’lt change thy note eftsoons. An thou would save thy neck,

nothing but flight may stead thee. The man is this moment delivering up

the ghost. ‘Tis the priest, Father Andrew!”

 

“God-a-mercy!” exclaimed Canty. He roused his family, and hoarsely

commanded, “Up with ye all and fly—or bide where ye are and perish!”

 

Scarcely five minutes later the Canty household were in the street and

flying for their lives. John Canty held the Prince by the wrist, and

hurried him along the dark way, giving him this caution in a low voice—

 

“Mind thy tongue, thou mad fool, and speak not our name. I will choose

me a new name, speedily, to throw the law’s dogs off the scent. Mind thy

tongue, I tell thee!”

 

He growled these words to the rest of the family—

 

“If it so chance that we be separated, let each make for London Bridge;

whoso findeth himself as far as the last linen-draper’s shop on the

bridge, let him tarry there till the others be come, then will we flee

into Southwark together.”

 

At this moment the party burst suddenly out of darkness into light; and

not only into light, but into the midst of a multitude of singing,

dancing, and shouting people, massed together on the river frontage.

There was a line of bonfires stretching as far as one could see, up and

down the Thames; London Bridge was illuminated; Southwark Bridge

likewise; the entire river was aglow with the flash and sheen of coloured

lights; and constant explosions of fireworks filled the skies with an

intricate commingling of shooting splendours and a thick rain of dazzling

sparks that almost turned night into day; everywhere were crowds of

revellers; all London seemed to be at large.

 

John Canty delivered himself of a furious curse and commanded a retreat;

but it was too late. He and his tribe were swallowed up in that swarming

hive of humanity, and hopelessly separated from each other in an instant.

We are not considering that the Prince was one of his tribe; Canty still

kept his grip upon him. The Prince’s heart was beating high with hopes

of escape, now. A burly waterman, considerably exalted with liquor,

found himself rudely shoved by Canty in his efforts to plough through the

crowd; he laid his great hand on Canty’s shoulder and said—

 

“Nay, whither so fast, friend? Dost canker thy soul with sordid business

when all that be leal men and true make holiday?”

 

“Mine affairs are mine own, they concern thee not,” answered Canty,

roughly; “take away thy hand and let me pass.”

 

“Sith that is thy humour, thou’lt NOT pass, till thou’st drunk to the

Prince of Wales, I tell thee that,” said the waterman, barring the way

resolutely.

 

“Give me the cup, then, and make speed, make speed!”

 

Other revellers were interested by this time. They cried out—

 

“The loving-cup, the loving-cup! make the sour knave drink the loving-cup, else will we feed him to the fishes.”

 

So a huge loving-cup was brought; the waterman, grasping it by one of its

handles, and with the other hand bearing up the end of an imaginary

napkin, presented it in due and ancient form to Canty, who had to grasp

the opposite handle with one of his hands and take off the lid with the

other, according to ancient custom. {1} This left the Prince hand-free

for a second, of course. He wasted no time, but dived among the forest

of legs about him and disappeared. In another moment he could not have

been harder to find, under that tossing sea of life, if its billows had

been the Atlantic’s and he a lost sixpence.

 

He very soon realised this fact, and straightway busied himself about his

own affairs without further thought of John Canty. He quickly realised

another thing, too. To wit, that a spurious Prince of Wales was being

feasted by the city in his stead. He easily concluded that the pauper

lad, Tom Canty, had deliberately taken advantage of his stupendous

opportunity and become a usurper.

 

Therefore there was but one course to pursue—find his way to the

Guildhall, make himself known, and denounce the impostor. He also made

up his mind that Tom should be allowed a reasonable time for spiritual

preparation, and then be hanged, drawn and quartered, according to the

law and usage of the day in cases of high treason.

 

Chapter XI. At Guildhall.

 

The royal barge, attended by its gorgeous fleet, took its stately way

down the Thames through the wilderness of illuminated boats. The air was

laden with music; the river banks were beruffled with joy-flames; the

distant city lay in a soft luminous glow from its countless invisible

bonfires; above it rose many a slender spire into the sky, incrusted with

sparkling lights, wherefore in their remoteness they seemed like jewelled

lances thrust aloft; as the fleet swept along, it was greeted from the

banks with a continuous hoarse roar of cheers and the ceaseless flash and

boom of artillery.

 

To Tom Canty, half buried in his silken cushions, these sounds and this

spectacle were a wonder unspeakably sublime and astonishing. To his

little friends at his side, the Princess Elizabeth and the Lady Jane

Grey, they were nothing.

 

Arrived at the Dowgate, the fleet was towed up the limpid Walbrook (whose

channel has now been for two centuries buried out of sight under acres of

buildings) to Bucklersbury, past houses and under bridges populous with

merry-makers and brilliantly lighted, and at last came to a halt in a

basin where now is Barge Yard, in the centre of the ancient city of

London. Tom disembarked, and he and his gallant procession crossed

Cheapside and made a short march through the Old Jewry and Basinghall

Street to the Guildhall.

 

Tom and his little ladies were received with due ceremony by the Lord

Mayor and the Fathers of the City, in their gold chains and scarlet robes

of state, and conducted to a rich canopy of state at the head of the

great hall, preceded by heralds making proclamation, and by the Mace and

the City Sword. The lords and ladies who were to attend upon Tom and his

two small friends took their places behind their chairs.

 

At a lower table the Court grandees and other guests of noble degree were

seated, with the magnates of the city; the commoners took places at a

multitude of tables on the main floor of the hall. From their lofty

vantage-ground the giants Gog and Magog, the ancient guardians of the

city, contemplated the spectacle below them with eyes grown familiar to

it in forgotten generations. There was a bugle-blast and a proclamation,

and a fat butler appeared in a high perch in the leftward wall, followed

by his servitors bearing with impressive solemnity a royal baron of beef,

smoking hot and ready for the knife.

 

After grace, Tom (being instructed) rose—and the whole house with him—

and drank from a portly golden loving-cup with the Princess Elizabeth;

from her it passed to the Lady Jane, and then traversed the general

assemblage. So the banquet began.

 

By midnight the revelry was at its height. Now came one of those

picturesque spectacles so admired in that old day. A description of it

is still extant in the quaint wording of a chronicler who witnessed it:

 

‘Space being made, presently entered a baron and an earl appareled after

the Turkish fashion in long robes of bawdkin powdered with gold; hats on

their heads of crimson velvet, with great rolls of gold, girded with two

swords, called scimitars, hanging by great bawdricks of gold. Next came

yet another baron and another earl, in two long gowns of yellow satin,

traversed with white satin, and in every bend of white was a bend of

crimson satin, after the fashion of Russia, with furred hats of gray on

their heads; either of them