บทที่ บทที่ 30 · Tom’s progress.

. Tom’s progress.

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.

When we saw him last, royalty was just beginning to have a bright side

for him.  This bright side went on brightening more and more every

day: in a very little while it was become almost all sunshine and

delightfulness.  He lost his fears; his misgivings faded out and died;

his embarrassments departed, and gave place to an easy and confident

bearing.  He worked the whipping-boy mine to ever-increasing profit.

He ordered my Lady Elizabeth and my Lady Jane Grey into his presence

when he wanted to play or talk, and dismissed them when he was done with

them, with the air of one familiarly accustomed to such performances.

It no longer confused him to have these lofty personages kiss his hand

at parting.

He came to enjoy being conducted to bed in state at night, and dressed

with intricate and solemn ceremony in the morning.  It came to be a

proud pleasure to march to dinner attended by a glittering procession

of officers of state and gentlemen-at-arms; insomuch, indeed, that he

doubled his guard of gentlemen-at-arms, and made them a hundred.  He

liked to hear the bugles sounding down the long corridors, and the

distant voices responding, “Way for the King!”

He even learned to enjoy sitting in throned state in council, and

seeming to be something more than the Lord Protector’s mouthpiece. He

liked to receive great ambassadors and their gorgeous trains, and listen

to the affectionate messages they brought from illustrious monarchs who

called him brother.  O happy Tom Canty, late of Offal Court!

He enjoyed his splendid clothes, and ordered more:  he found his four

hundred servants too few for his proper grandeur, and trebled them.  The

adulation of salaaming courtiers came to be sweet music to his ears.  He

remained kind and gentle, and a sturdy and determined champion of all

that were oppressed, and he made tireless war upon unjust laws:  yet

upon occasion, being offended, he could turn upon an earl, or even a

duke, and give him a look that would make him tremble.  Once, when his

royal ‘sister,’ the grimly holy Lady Mary, set herself to reason with

him against the wisdom of his course in pardoning so many people who

would otherwise be jailed, or hanged, or burned, and reminded him that

their august late father’s prisons had sometimes contained as high as

sixty thousand convicts at one time, and that during his admirable reign

he had delivered seventy-two thousand thieves and robbers over to death

by the executioner, {9} the boy was filled with generous indignation,

and commanded her to go to her closet, and beseech God to take away the

stone that was in her breast, and give her a human heart.

Did Tom Canty never feel troubled about the poor little rightful prince

who had treated him so kindly, and flown out with such hot zeal to

avenge him upon the insolent sentinel at the palace-gate? Yes; his first

royal days and nights were pretty well sprinkled with painful thoughts

about the lost prince, and with sincere longings for his return, and

happy restoration to his native rights and splendours.  But as time

wore on, and the prince did not come, Tom’s mind became more and more

occupied with his new and enchanting experiences, and by little and

little the vanished monarch faded almost out of his thoughts; and

finally, when he did intrude upon them at intervals, he was become an

unwelcome spectre, for he made Tom feel guilty and ashamed.

Tom’s poor mother and sisters travelled the same road out of his mind.

At first he pined for them, sorrowed for them, longed to see them, but

later, the thought of their coming some day in their rags and dirt, and

betraying him with their kisses, and pulling him down from his lofty

place, and dragging him back to penury and degradation and the slums,

made him shudder.  At last they ceased to trouble his thoughts almost

wholly.  And he was content, even glad:  for, whenever their mournful

and accusing faces did rise before him now, they made him feel more

despicable than the worms that crawl.

At midnight of the 19th of February, Tom Canty was sinking to sleep in

his rich bed in the palace, guarded by his loyal vassals, and surrounded

by the pomps of royalty, a happy boy; for tomorrow was the day appointed

for his solemn crowning as King of England. At that same hour, Edward,

the true king, hungry and thirsty, soiled and draggled, worn with

travel, and clothed in rags and shreds--his share of the results of the

riot--was wedged in among a crowd of people who were watching with deep

interest certain hurrying gangs of workmen who streamed in and out of

Westminster Abbey, busy as ants:  they were making the last preparation

for the royal coronation.