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.”