The Lost Prince (6 page)

‘They are a devout people and observe many an ancient rite and ceremony. They will chant prayers and burn altar-fires on their mountain sides,’ Loristan said. ‘But the end is not yet – the end is not yet. Sometimes it seems that perhaps it is near – but God knows!’

Then there leaped back upon Marco the story he had to tell, but which he had held back for the last – the story of the man who spoke Samavian and drove in the carriage with the King. He knew now that it might mean some important thing which he could not have before suspected.

‘There is something I must tell you,’ he said.

He had learned to relate incidents in few but clear words when he related them to his father. It had been part of his training. Loristan had said that he might sometime have a story to tell when he had but few moments to tell it in – some story which meant life or death to someone. He told this one quickly and well. He made Loristan see the well-dressed man with the deliberate manner and the keen eyes, and he made him hear his voice when he said, ‘Tell your father that you are a very well-trained lad.’

‘I am glad he said that. He is a man who knows what training is,’ said Loristan. ‘He is a person who knows what all Europe is doing, and almost all that it will do. He is an ambassador from a powerful and great country. If he saw that you are a well-trained and fine lad, it might – it might even be good for Samavia.’

‘Would it matter that I was well-trained?
Could
it matter to Samavia?’ Marco cried out.

Loristan paused for a moment – watching him gravely – looking him over – his big, well-built boy’s frame, his shabby clothes, and his eagerly burning eyes.

He smiled one of his slow wonderful smiles.

‘Yes. It might even matter to Samavia!’ he answered.

chapter six

the drill and the secret party

Loristan did not forbid Marco to pursue his
acquaintance
with The Rat and his followers.

‘You will find out for yourself whether they are friends for you or not,’ he said. ‘You will know in a few days, and then you can make your own decision. You have known lads in various countries, and you are a good judge of them, I think. You will soon see whether they are going to be
men
or mere rabble. The Rat now – how does he strike you?’

And the handsome eyes held their keen look of questioning.

‘He’d be a brave soldier if he could stand,’ said Marco, thinking him over. ‘But he might be cruel.’

‘A lad who might make a brave soldier cannot be disdained, but a man who is cruel is a fool. Tell him that from me,’ Loristan answered. ‘He wastes force – his own and the force of the one he treats cruelly. Only a fool wastes force.’

‘May I speak of you sometimes?’ asked Marco.

‘Yes. You will know how. You will remember the things about which silence is the order.’

‘I never forget them,’ said Marco. ‘I have been trying not to, for such a long time.’

‘You have succeeded well, Comrade!’ returned Loristan, from his writing table, to which he had gone and where he was turning over papers.

A strong impulse overpowered the boy. He marched over to the table and stood very straight, making his soldierly young salute, his whole body glowing.

‘Father!’ he said, ‘you don’t know how I love you! I wish you were a general and I might die in battle for you. When I look at you, I long and long to do something for you a boy could not do. I would die of a thousand wounds rather than disobey you – or Samavia!’

He seized Loristan’s hand, and knelt on one knee and kissed it. An English or American boy could not have done such a thing from unaffected natural impulse. But he was of warm Southern blood.

‘I took my oath of allegiance to you, Father, when I took it to Samavia. It seems as if you were Samavia, too,’ he said, and kissed his hand again.

Loristan had turned toward him with one of the movements which were full of dignity and grace. Marco, looking up at him, felt that there was always a certain remote stateliness in him which made it seem quite natural that anyone should bend the knee and kiss his hand.

A sudden great tenderness glowed in his father’s face as he raised the boy and put his hand on his shoulder.

‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘you don’t know how much I love you – and what reason there is that we should love each other! You don’t know how I have been watching you, and thanking God each year that here grew a man for Samavia. That I know you are – a
man
, though you have lived but twelve years. Twelve years may grow a
man – or prove that a man will never grow, though a human thing he may remain for ninety years. This year may be full of strange things for both of us. We cannot know
what
I may have to ask you to do for me – and for Samavia. Perhaps such a thing as no twelve-year-old boy has ever done before.’

‘Every night and every morning,’ said Marco, ‘I shall pray that I may be called to do it, and that I may do it well.’

‘You will do it well, Comrade, if you are called. That I could make oath,’ Loristan answered him.

The Squad had collected in the enclosure behind the church when Marco appeared at the arched end of the passage. The boys were drawn up with their rifles, but they all wore a rather dogged and sullen look. The explanation which darted into Marco’s mind was that this was because The Rat was in a bad humour. He sat crouched together on his platform biting his nails fiercely, his elbows on his updrawn knees, his face twisted into a hideous scowl. He did not look around, or even look up from the cracked flagstone of the
pavement
on which his eyes were fixed.

Marco went forward with military step and stopped opposite to him with prompt salute.

‘Sorry to be late, sir,’ he said, as if he had been a private speaking to his colonel.

‘It’s ’im, Rat! ’E’s come, Rat!’ the Squad shouted. ‘Look at ’im!’

But The Rat would not look, and did not even move.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Marco, with less ceremony than a private would have shown. ‘There’s no use in my coming here if you don’t want me.’

‘’E’s got a grouch on ’cos you’re late!’ called out the head of the line. ‘No doin’ nothin’ when ’e’s got a grouch on.’

‘I sha’n’t try to do anything,’ said Marco, his
boy-face
setting itself into good stubborn lines. ‘That’s not what I came here for. I came to drill. I’ve been with my father. He comes first. I can’t join the Squad if he doesn’t come first. We’re not on active service, and we’re not in barracks.’

Then The Rat moved sharply and turned to look at him.

‘I thought you weren’t coming at all!’ he snapped and growled at once. ‘My father said you wouldn’t. He said you were a young swell for all your patched clothes. He said your father would think he was a swell, even if he was only a penny-a-liner on newspapers, and he wouldn’t let you have anything to do with a vagabond and a nuisance. Nobody begged you to join. Your father can go to blazes!’

‘Don’t you speak in that way about my father,’ said Marco, quite quietly, ‘because I can’t knock you down.’

‘I’ll get up and let you!’ began The Rat, immediately white and raging. ‘I can stand up with two sticks. I’ll get up and let you!’

‘No, you won’t,’ said Marco. ‘If you want to know what my father said, I can tell you. He said I could come as often as I liked – till I found out whether we should be friends or not. He says I shall find that out for myself.’

It was a strange thing The Rat did. It must always be remembered of him that his wretched father, who had each year sunk lower and lower in the under-world,
had been a gentleman once, a man who had been familiar with good manners and had been educated in the customs of good breeding. Sometimes when he was drunk, and sometimes when he was partly sober, he talked to The Rat of many things the boy would
otherwise
never have heard of. That was why the lad was different from the other vagabonds. This, also, was why he suddenly altered the whole situation by doing this strange and unexpected thing. He utterly changed his expression and voice, fixing his sharp eyes shrewdly on Marco’s. It was almost as if he were asking him a conundrum. He knew it would have been one to most boys of the class he appeared outwardly to belong to. He would either know the answer or he wouldn’t.

‘I beg your pardon,’ The Rat said.

That was the conundrum. It was what a gentleman and an officer would have said, if he felt he had been mistaken or rude. He had heard that from his drunken father.

‘I beg yours – for being late,’ said Marco.

That was the right answer. It was the one another officer and gentleman would have made. It settled the matter at once, and it settled more than was apparent at the moment. It decided that Marco was one of those who knew the things The Rat’s father had once known – the things gentlemen do and say and think. Not another word was said. It was all right. Marco slipped into line with the Squad, and The Rat sat erect with his military bearing and began his drill:

‘Squad!

‘’Tention!

‘Number!

‘Slope arms!

‘Form fours!

‘Right!

‘Quick march!

‘Halt!

‘Left turn!

‘Order arms!

‘Stand at ease!

‘Stand easy!’

They did it so well that it was quite wonderful when one considered the limited space at their disposal. They had evidently done it often, and The Rat had been not only a smart, but a severe, officer. This morning they repeated the exercise a number of times, and even varied it with Review Drill, with which they seemed just as familiar.

‘Where did you learn it?’ The Rat asked, when the arms were stacked again and Marco was sitting by him as he had sat the previous day.

‘From an old soldier. And I like to watch it, as you do.’

‘If you were a young swell in the Guards, you couldn’t be smarter at it,’ The Rat said. ‘The way you hold yourself! The way you stand! You’ve got it! Wish I was you! It comes natural to you.’

‘I’ve always liked to watch it and try to do it myself. I did when I was a little fellow,’ answered Marco.

‘I’ve been trying to kick it into these chaps for more than a year,’ said The Rat. ‘A nice job I had of it! It nearly made me sick at first.’

The semicircle in front of him only giggled or laughed outright. The members of it seemed to take very little offense at his cavalier treatment of them. He had evidently something to give them which was entertaining enough to make up for his tyranny and indifference. He thrust his hand into one of the pockets of his ragged coat, and drew out a piece of newspaper.

‘My father brought home this, wrapped round a loaf of bread,’ he said. ‘See what it says there!’

He handed it to Marco, pointing to some words printed in large letters at the head of a column. Marco looked at it and sat very still.

The words he read were: ‘The Lost Prince.’

‘Silence is still the order,’ was the first thought which flashed through his mind. ‘Silence is still the order.’

‘What does it mean?’ he said aloud.

‘There isn’t much of it. I wish there was more,’ The Rat said fretfully. ‘Read and see. Of course they say it mayn’t be true – but I believe it is. They say that people think someone knows where he is – at least where one of his descendants is. It’d be the same thing. He’d be the real king. If he’d just show himself, it might stop all the fighting. Just read.’

Marco read, and his skin prickled as the blood went racing through his body. But his face did not change. There was a sketch of the story of the Lost Prince to begin with. It had been regarded by most people, the article said, as a sort of legend. Now there was a definite rumour that it was not a legend at all, but a part of the long past history of Samavia. It was said that through the centuries there had always been a party
secretly loyal to the memory of this worshiped and lost Fedorovitch. It was even said that from father to son, generation after generation after generation, had descended the oath of fealty to him and his descendants. The people had made a god of him, and now, romantic as it seemed, it was beginning to be an open secret that some persons believed that a descendant had been found – a Fedorovitch worthy of his young ancestor – and that a certain Secret Party also held that, if he were called back to the throne of Samavia, the interminable wars and bloodshed would reach an end.

The Rat had begun to bite his nails fast.

‘Do you believe he’s found?’ he asked feverishly.
‘Don’t you
? I do!’

‘I wonder where he is, if it’s true? I wonder! Where?’ exclaimed Marco. He could say that, and he might seem as eager as he felt.

The Squad all began to jabber at once. ‘Yus, where wos ’e? There is no knowin’. It’d be likely to be in some o’ these furrin places. England’d be too far from Samavia. ’Ow far off wos Samavia? Wos it in Roosha, or where the Frenchies were, or the Germans? But wherever ’e wos, ’e’d be the right sort, an’ ’e’d be the sort a chap’d turn and look at in the street.’

The Rat continued to bite his nails.

‘He might be anywhere,’ he said, his small fierce face glowing.

‘That’s what I like to think about. He might be passing in the street outside there; he might be up in one of those houses,’ jerking his head over his shoulder toward the backs of the inclosing dwellings. ‘Perhaps he knows
he’s a king, and perhaps he doesn’t. He’d know if what you said yesterday was true – about the king always being made ready for Samavia.’

‘Yes, he’d know,’ put in Marco.

‘Well, it’d be finer if he did,’ went on The Rat. ‘However poor and shabby he was, he’d know the secret all the time. And if people sneered at him, he’d sneer at them and laugh to himself. I dare say he’d walk tremendously straight and hold his head up. If I was him, I’d like to make people suspect a bit that I wasn’t like the common lot o’ them.’ He put out his hand and pushed Marco excitedly. ‘Let’s work out plots for him!’ he said. ‘That’d be a splendid game! Let’s pretend we’re the Secret Party!’