“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 of the venerable Presence-chamber are the initials of Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn, intertwisted in a loving tangle. They should have been fashioned in wax instead of the sterner substance that had hardly left the carver’s hand for the place of honor in the royal drawing-room before the vane of Henry’s affections veered from Anne to Jane. It is said that he congratulated himself and the new queen upon the involutions of the cipher that might be read almost as plainly “H. J.” as “H. A.” So, there it stands—the sad satire upon wedded love that mocked the eyes of discreet Jane, the one consort who died a natural death while in possession of his very temporary devotion,—and the two Katherines who succeeded her.
By contrast with sombre St. James’s, Buckingham Palace is a meretricious mushroom, scarcely deserving a passing glance. The air was bland for early November, and we sat upon a bench under a tree that let slow, faded leaves down upon our heads while we “thought it all over,” until the gathering glooms in the deep archway, flanked by sentry-boxes, shaped themselves into a procession of the “born and died” in the low-browed chambers. To recite their names would be to give an abstract of the history of the mightiest realm of the earth for four centuries.
And, set apart by supreme sorrow from his fellows, ever foremost in our dream-pictures, walked he, who “made trim,” by his own command, “for his second marriage-day,” hastened through the snowy avenues of the park to find a pillow for the Lord’s anointed upon the headsman’s block before the windows of the banqueting-room of Whitehall.