The Lost Prince (4 page)

He was about to go on, and had indeed taken a couple of steps away, when he paused and turned to him again.

‘You may tell your father that you are a very well-trained lad. I wanted to find out for myself.’ And he went on.

Marco felt that his heart beat a little quickly. This was one of several incidents which had happened during the last three years, and made him feel that he was living among things so mysterious that their very mystery hinted at danger. But he himself had never before seemed involved in them. Why should it matter that he was well-behaved? Then he remembered something. The man had not said ‘well-behaved,’ he had said ‘well-
trained
’. Well-trained in what way? He felt his forehead prickle slightly as he thought of the smiling, keen look which set itself so straight upon him. Had he spoken to him in Samavian for an experiment, to see if he would be startled into forgetting that he had been trained to seem to know only the language of the country he was temporarily living in? But he had not forgotten. He had remembered well, and was thankful that he had betrayed nothing. ‘Even exiles may be Samavian soldiers. I am one. You must be one,’ his father had said on that day long ago when he had made him take his oath. Perhaps remembering his training was being a soldier. Never had Samavia needed help as she needed it today. Two years before, a rival claimant to the throne had assassinated the then-reigning king and his sons, and since then, bloody war and tumult had raged. The new king was a powerful man, and had a great following of the worst and most self-seeking of the people. Neighbouring countries had interfered for their own welfare’s sake, and the newspapers had been
full of stories of savage fighting and atrocities, and of starving peasants.

Marco had late one evening entered their lodgings to find Loristan walking to and fro like a lion in a cage, a paper crushed and torn in his hands, and his eyes blazing. He had been reading of cruelties wrought upon innocent peasants and women and children. Lazarus was standing staring at him with huge tears running down his cheeks. When Marco opened the door, the old soldier strode over to him, turned him about, and led him out of the room.

‘Pardon, sir, pardon!’ he sobbed. ‘No one must see him, not even you. He suffers so horribly.’

He stood by a chair in Marco’s own small bedroom, where he half pushed, half led him. He bent his grizzled head, and wept like a beaten child.

‘Dear God of those who are in pain, assuredly it is now the time to give back to us our Lost Prince!’ he said, and Marco knew the words were a prayer, and wondered at the frenzied intensity of it, because it seemed so wild a thing to pray for the return of a youth who had died five hundred years before.

When he reached the palace, he was still thinking of the man who had spoken to him. He was thinking of him even as he looked at the majestic grey stone building and counted the number of its stories and windows. He walked round it that he might make a note in his memory of its size and form and its entrances, and guess at the size of its gardens. This he did because it was part of his game, and part of his strange training.

When he came back to the front, he saw that in the great entrance court within the high iron railings an elegant but quiet-looking closed carriage was drawing up before the doorway. Marco stood and watched with interest to see who would come out and enter it. He knew that kings and emperors who were not on parade looked merely like well-dressed private gentlemen, and often chose to go out as simply and quietly as other men. So he thought that, perhaps, if he waited, he might see one of those well-known faces which represent the highest rank and power in a monarchical country, and which in times gone by had also represented the power over human life and death and liberty.

‘I should like to be able to tell my father that I have seen the King and know his face, as I know the faces of the tsar and the two emperors.’

There was a little movement among the tall menservants in the royal scarlet liveries, and an elderly man descended the steps attended by another who walked behind him. He entered the carriage, the other man followed him, the door was closed, and the carriage drove through the entrance gates, where the sentries saluted.

Marco was near enough to see distinctly. The two men were talking as if interested. The face of the one farthest from him was the face he had often seen in shop-windows and newspapers. The boy made his quick, formal salute. It was the King; and, as he smiled and acknowledged his greeting, he spoke to his companion.

‘That fine lad salutes as if he belonged to the army,’ was what he said, though Marco could not hear him.

His companion leaned forward to look through the window. When he caught sight of Marco, a singular expression crossed his face.

‘He does belong to an army, sir,’ he answered, ‘though he does not know it. His name is Marco Loristan.’

Then Marco saw him plainly for the first time. He was the man with the keen eyes who had spoken to him in Samavian.

chapter four

the rat

Marco would have wondered very much if he had heard the words, but, as he did not hear them, he turned toward home wondering at something else. A man who was in intimate attendance on a king must be a person of importance. He no doubt knew many things not only of his own ruler’s country, but of the countries of other kings. But so few had really known anything of poor little Samavia until the newspapers had begun to tell them of the horrors of its war – and who but a Samavian could speak its language? It would be an interesting thing to tell his father – that a man who knew the King had spoken to him in Samavian, and had sent that curious message.

Later he found himself passing a side street and looked up it. It was so narrow, and on either side of it were such old, tall, and sloping-walled houses that it attracted his attention. It looked as if a bit of old London had been left to stand while newer places grew up and hid it from view. This was the kind of street he liked to pass through for curiosity’s sake. He knew many of them in the old quarters of many cities. He had lived in some of them. He could find his way home from the other end
of it. Another thing than its queerness attracted him. He heard a clamour of boys’ voices, and he wanted to see what they were doing. Sometimes, when he had reached a new place and had had that lonely feeling, he had followed some boyish clamour of play or wrangling, and had found a temporary friend or so.

Halfway to the street’s end there was an arched brick passage. The sound of the voices came from there – one of them high, and thinner and shriller than the rest. Marco tramped up to the arch and looked down through the passage. It opened on to a grey flagged space, shut in by the railings of a black, deserted, and ancient graveyard behind a venerable church which turned its face toward some other street. The boys were not playing, but listening to one of their number who was reading to them from a newspaper.

Marco walked down the passage and listened also, standing in the dark arched outlet at its end and watching the boy who read. He was a strange little creature with a big forehead, and deep eyes which were curiously sharp. But this was not all. He had a hunchback, his legs seemed small and crooked. He sat with them crossed before him on a rough wooden platform set on low wheels, on which he evidently pushed himself about. Near him were a number of sticks stacked together as if they were rifles. One of the first things that Marco noticed was that he had a savage little face marked with lines as if he had been angry all his life.

‘Hold your tongues, you fools!’ he shrilled out to some boys who interrupted him. ‘Don’t you want to know anything, you ignorant swine?’

He was as ill-dressed as the rest of them, but he did not speak in the Cockney dialect. If he was of the riff-raff of the streets, as his companions were, he was somehow different.

Then he, by chance, saw Marco, who was standing in the arched end of the passage.

‘What are you doing there listening?’ he shouted, and at once stooped to pick up a stone and threw it at him. The stone hit Marco’s shoulder, but it did not hurt him much. What he did not like was that another lad should want to throw something at him before they had even exchanged boy-signs. He also did not like the fact that two other boys promptly took the matter up by bending down to pick up stones also.

He walked forward straight into the group and stopped close to the hunchback.

‘What did you do that for?’ he asked, in his rather deep young voice.

He was big and strong-looking enough to suggest that he was not a boy it would be easy to dispose of, but it was not that which made the group stand still a moment to stare at him. It was something in himself – half of it a kind of impartial lack of anything like irritation at the stone-throwing. It was as if it had not mattered to him in the least. It had not made him feel angry or insulted. He was only rather curious about it. Because he was clean, and his hair and his shabby clothes were brushed, the first impression given by his appearance as he stood in the archway was that he was a young ‘toff’ poking his nose where it was not wanted; but, as he drew near, they saw that the well-brushed clothes were worn, and there were patches on his shoes.

‘What did you do that for?’ he asked, and he asked it merely as if he wanted to find out the reason.

‘I’m not going to have you swells dropping in to my club as if it was your own,’ said the hunchback.

‘I’m not a swell, and I didn’t know it was a club,’ Marco answered. ‘I heard boys, and I thought I’d come and look. When I heard you reading about Samavia, I wanted to hear.’

He looked at the reader with his silent-expressioned eyes.

‘You needn’t have thrown a stone,’ he added. ‘They don’t do it at men’s clubs. I’ll go away.’

He turned about as if he were going, but, before he had taken three steps, the hunchback hailed him unceremoniously.

‘Hi!’ he called out. ‘Hi, you!’

‘What do you want?’ said Marco.

‘I bet you don’t know where Samavia is, or what they’re fighting about.’ The hunchback threw the words at him.

‘Yes, I do. It’s north of Beltrazo and east of Jiardasia, and they are fighting because one party has assassinated King Maran, and the other will not let them crown Nicola Iarovitch. And why should they? He’s a brigand, and hasn’t a drop of royal blood in him.’

‘Oh!’ reluctantly admitted the hunchback. ‘You do know that much, do you? Come back here.’

Marco turned back, while the boys still stared. It was as if two leaders or generals were meeting for the first time, and the rabble, looking on, wondered what would come of their encounter.

‘The Samavians of the Iarovitch party are a bad lot and want only bad things,’ said Marco, speaking first. ‘They care nothing for Samavia. They only care for money and the power to make laws which will serve them and crush everybody else. They know Nicola is a weak man, and that, if they can crown him king, they can make him do what they like.’

The fact that he spoke first, and that, though he spoke in a steady boyish voice without swagger, he somehow seemed to take it for granted that they would listen, made his place for him at once. Boys are impressionable creatures, and they know a leader when they see him. The hunchback fixed glittering eyes on him. The rabble began to murmur.

‘Rat! Rat!’ several voices cried at once in good strong Cockney. ‘Arst ’im some more, Rat!’

‘Is that what they call you?’ Marco asked the hunchback.

‘It’s what I called myself,’ he answered resentfully. ‘“The Rat.” Look at me! Crawling round on the ground like this! Look at me!’

He made a gesture ordering his followers to move aside, and began to push himself rapidly, with queer darts this side and that round the enclosure. He bent his head and body, and twisted his face, and made strange animal-like movements. He even uttered sharp squeaks as he rushed here and there – as a rat might have done when it was being hunted. He did it as if he were displaying an accomplishment, and his followers’ laughter was applause.

‘Wasn’t I like a rat?’ he demanded, when he suddenly stopped.

‘You made yourself like one on purpose,’ Marco answered. ‘You do it for fun.’

‘Not so much fun,’ said The Rat. ‘I feel like one. Everyone’s my enemy. I’m vermin. I can’t fight or defend myself unless I bite. I can bite, though.’ And he showed two rows of fierce, strong, white teeth, sharper at the points than human teeth usually are. ‘I bite my father when he gets drunk and beats me. I’ve bitten him till he’s learned to remember.’ He laughed a shrill, squeaking laugh. ‘He hasn’t tried it for three months – even when he was drunk – and he’s always drunk.’ Then he laughed again still more shrilly. ‘He’s a gentleman,’ he said. ‘I’m a gentleman’s son. He was a Master at a big school until he was kicked out – that was when I was four and my mother died. I’m thirteen now. How old are you?’

‘I’m twelve,’ answered Marco.

The Rat twisted his face enviously.

‘I wish I was your size! Are you a gentleman’s son? You look as if you were.’

‘I’m a very poor man’s son,’ was Marco’s answer. ‘My father is a writer.’

‘Then, ten to one, he’s a sort of gentleman,’ said The Rat. Then quite suddenly he threw another question at him. ‘What’s the name of the other Samavian party?’

‘The Maranovitch. The Maranovitch and the Iarovitch have been fighting with each other for five hundred years. First one dynasty rules, and then the other gets in when it has killed somebody as it killed King Maran,’ Marco answered without hesitation.

‘What was the name of the dynasty that ruled before they began fighting? The first Maranovitch assassinated the last of them,’ The Rat asked him.

‘The Fedorovitch,’ said Marco. ‘The last one was a bad king.’

‘His son was the one they never found again,’ said The Rat. ‘The one they call the Lost Prince.’

Marco would have started but for his long training in exterior self-control. It was so strange to hear his dream-hero spoken of in this back alley in a slum, and just after he had been thinking of him.

‘What do you know about him?’ he asked, and, as he did so, he saw the group of vagabond lads draw nearer.

‘Not much. I only read something about him in a torn magazine I found in the street,’ The Rat answered. ‘The man that wrote about him said he was only part of a legend, and he laughed at people for believing in him. He said it was about time that he should turn up again if he intended to. I’ve invented things about him because these chaps like to hear me tell them. They’re only stories.’

‘We likes ’im,’ a voice called out, ‘becos ’e wos the right sort; ’e’d fight, ’e would, if ’e was in Samavia now.’

Marco rapidly asked himself how much he might say. He decided and spoke to them all.

‘He is not part of a legend. He’s part of Samavian history,’ he said. ‘I know something about him too.’

‘How did you find it out?’ asked The Rat.

‘Because my father’s a writer, he’s obliged to have books and papers, and he knows things. I like to read, and I go into the free libraries. You can always get books
and papers there. Then I ask my father questions. All the newspapers are full of things about Samavia just now.’ Marco felt that this was an explanation which betrayed nothing. It was true that no one could open a newspaper at this period without seeing news and stories of Samavia.

The Rat saw possible vistas of information opening up before him.

‘Sit down here,’ he said, ‘and tell us what you know about him. Sit down, you fellows.’

There was nothing to sit on but the broken flagged pavement, but that was a small matter. Marco himself had sat on flags or bare ground often enough before, and so had the rest of the lads. He took his place near The Rat, and the others made a semicircle in front of them. The two leaders had joined forces, so to speak, and the followers fell into line at ‘attention’.

Then the newcomer began to talk. It was a good story, that of the Lost Prince, and Marco told it in a way which gave it reality. How could he help it? He knew, as they could not, that it was real. He who had pored over maps of little Samavia since his seventh year, who had studied them with his father, knew it as a country he could have found his way to any part of if he had been dropped in any forest or any mountain of it. He knew every highway and byway, and in the capital city of Melzarr could almost have made his way blindfolded. He knew the palaces and the forts, the churches, the poor streets and the rich ones. His father had once shown him a plan of the royal palace which they had studied together until the boy knew each apartment and corridor in it by heart. But this he
did not speak of. He knew it was one of the things to be silent about. But of the mountains and the emerald velvet meadows climbing their sides and only ending where huge bare crags and peaks began, he could speak. He could make pictures of the wide fertile plains where herds of wild horses fed, or raced and sniffed the air; he could describe the fertile valleys where clear rivers ran and flocks of sheep pastured on deep sweet grass. He could speak of them because he could offer a good enough reason for his knowledge of them. It was not the only reason he had for his knowledge, but it was one which would serve well enough.