With bared heads they waited, these, my Lord's comrades, watching the ship, which like a blood-red star, glowed in the heights, and vanished even as the sparks fly upward.
May we all have strength at the last to serve as you served, to die as you died, Lord Sydney!
XVII
HER MAJESTY IN COUNCIL
The sun was rising, the keen still air had a tang of smoke from one or two parishes sacked and burned over-night. Under the barricaded windows of St. Stephen's Palace a starving street arab was at work with a few grains of banana meal and a string noose, trying to snare a pigeon. A man watched him furtively from beside one of the buttresses of the Abbey. That man had been a barrister before the World-Storm, now he was a tramp, and his coat was buttoned up because his underclothes had been sold for a meal. All night he had been with a crowd in the Strand wrecking the hotels in search of food. A dog or two had been dragged out of the flames, and torn to pieces; but the barrister won not so much as a taste of the blood, because some stronger desperadoes charged in a body and carried the food away. Now the Savoy district was a smouldering furnace, and the barrister watched the street arab, intending robbery if the lad got meat.
Something caught his wandering attention; the body of a man, which lay at the base of the statue of Richard Cœur de Lion, out in the bare paved square. The barrister stole across from the Abbey, but when he bent over the man, hoping for plunder, he found he had made a mistake. The supposed corpse proved to be alive, and remarked that he had nothing worth stealing.
The barrister shrank back, smiling vaguely. "Watching that boy in the hope of a pigeon, eh?"
"No," said the other; "it's better to rest and not use up one's tissue. That's economy."
The barrister sat down beside him, produced a pipe, and demanded tobacco.
The other shook his head, but the lawyer thought that a little friendly conversation might win him a fill for his pipe. So he looked at the starving wretch beside him.