Читать книгу The Frances Hodgson Burnett MEGAPACK ® - Frances Hodgson Burnett - Страница 11

THE LOST PRINCE (Part 1)

I

THE NEW LODGERS AT NO. 7 PHILIBERT PLACE

There are many dreary and dingy rows of ugly houses in certain parts of London, but there certainly could not be any row more ugly or dingier than Philibert Place. There were stories that it had once been more attractive, but that had been so long ago that no one remembered the time. It stood back in its gloomy, narrow strips of uncared-for, smoky gardens, whose broken iron railings were supposed to protect it from the surging traffic of a road which was always roaring with the rattle of busses, cabs, drays, and vans, and the passing of people who were shabbily dressed and looked as if they were either going to hard work or coming from it, or hurrying to see if they could find some of it to do to keep themselves from going hungry. The brick fronts of the houses were blackened with smoke, their windows were nearly all dirty and hung with dingy curtains, or had no curtains at all; the strips of ground, which had once been intended to grow flowers in, had been trodden down into bare earth in which even weeds had forgotten to grow. One of them was used as a stone-cutter’s yard, and cheap monuments, crosses, and slates were set out for sale, bearing inscriptions beginning with “Sacred to the Memory of.” Another had piles of old lumber in it, another exhibited second-hand furniture, chairs with unsteady legs, sofas with horsehair stuffing bulging out of holes in their covering, mirrors with blotches or cracks in them. The insides of the houses were as gloomy as the outside. They were all exactly alike. In each a dark entrance passage led to narrow stairs going up to bedrooms, and to narrow steps going down to a basement kitchen. The back bedroom looked out on small, sooty, flagged yards, where thin cats quarreled, or sat on the coping of the brick walls hoping that sometime they might feel the sun; the front rooms looked over the noisy road, and through their windows came the roar and rattle of it. It was shabby and cheerless on the brightest days, and on foggy or rainy ones it was the most forlorn place in London.

At least that was what one boy thought as he stood near the iron railings watching the passers-by on the morning on which this story begins, which was also the morning after he had been brought by his father to live as a lodger in the back sitting-room of the house No. 7.

He was a boy about twelve years old, his name was Marco Loristan, and he was the kind of boy people look at a second time when they have looked at him once. In the first place, he was a very big boy—tall for his years, and with a particularly strong frame. His shoulders were broad and his arms and legs were long and powerful. He was quite used to hearing people say, as they glanced at him, “What a fine, big lad!” And then they always looked again at his face. It was not an English face or an American one, and was very dark in coloring. His features were strong, his black hair grew on his head like a mat, his eyes were large and deep set, and looked out between thick, straight, black lashes. He was as un-English a boy as one could imagine, and an observing person would have been struck at once by a sort of silent look expressed by his whole face, a look which suggested that he was not a boy who talked much.

This look was specially noticeable this morning as he stood before the iron railings. The things he was thinking of were of a kind likely to bring to the face of a twelve-year-old boy an unboyish expression.

He was thinking of the long, hurried journey he and his father and their old soldier servant, Lazarus, had made during the last few days—the journey from Russia. Cramped in a close third-class railway carriage, they had dashed across the Continent as if something important or terrible were driving them, and here they were, settled in London as if they were going to live forever at No. 7 Philibert Place. He knew, however, that though they might stay a year, it was just as probable that, in the middle of some night, his father or Lazarus might waken him from his sleep and say, “Get up—dress yourself quickly. We must go at once.” A few days later, he might be in St. Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna, or Budapest, huddled away in some poor little house as shabby and comfortless as No. 7 Philibert Place.

He passed his hand over his forehead as he thought of it and watched the busses. His strange life and his close association with his father had made him much older than his years, but he was only a boy, after all, and the mystery of things sometimes weighed heavily upon him, and set him to deep wondering.

In not one of the many countries he knew had he ever met a boy whose life was in the least like his own. Other boys had homes in which they spent year after year; they went to school regularly, and played with other boys, and talked openly of the things which happened to them, and the journeys they made. When he remained in a place long enough to make a few boy-friends, he knew he must never forget that his whole existence was a sort of secret whose safety depended upon his own silence and discretion.

This was because of the promises he had made to his father, and they had been the first thing he remembered. Not that he had ever regretted anything connected with his father. He threw his black head up as he thought of that. None of the other boys had such a father, not one of them. His father was his idol and his chief. He had scarcely ever seen him when his clothes had not been poor and shabby, but he had also never seen him when, despite his worn coat and frayed linen, he had not stood out among all others as more distinguished than the most noticeable of them. When he walked down a street, people turned to look at him even oftener than they turned to look at Marco, and the boy felt as if it was not merely because he was a big man with a handsome, dark face, but because he looked, somehow, as if he had been born to command armies, and as if no one would think of disobeying him. Yet Marco had never seen him command any one, and they had always been poor, and shabbily dressed, and often enough ill-fed. But whether they were in one country or another, and whatsoever dark place they seemed to be hiding in, the few people they saw treated him with a sort of deference, and nearly always stood when they were in his presence, unless he bade them sit down.

“It is because they know he is a patriot, and patriots are respected,” the boy had told himself.

He himself wished to be a patriot, though he had never seen his own country of Samavia. He knew it well, however. His father had talked to him about it ever since that day when he had made the promises. He had taught him to know it by helping him to study curious detailed maps of it—maps of its cities, maps of its mountains, maps of its roads. He had told him stories of the wrongs done its people, of their sufferings and struggles for liberty, and, above all, of their unconquerable courage. When they talked together of its history, Marco’s boy-blood burned and leaped in his veins, and he always knew, by the look in his father’s eyes, that his blood burned also. His countrymen had been killed, they had been robbed, they had died by thousands of cruelties and starvation, but their souls had never been conquered, and, through all the years during which more powerful nations crushed and enslaved them, they never ceased to struggle to free themselves and stand unfettered as Samavians had stood centuries before.

“Why do we not live there,” Marco had cried on the day the promises were made. “Why do we not go back and fight? When I am a man, I will be a soldier and die for Samavia.”

“We are of those who must live for Samavia—working day and night,” his father had answered; “denying ourselves, training our bodies and souls, using our brains, learning the things which are best to be done for our people and our country. Even exiles may be Samavian soldiers—I am one, you must be one.”

“Are we exiles?” asked Marco.

“Yes,” was the answer. “But even if we never set foot on Samavian soil, we must give our lives to it. I have given mine since I was sixteen. I shall give it until I die.”

“Have you never lived there?” said Marco.

A strange look shot across his father’s face.

“No,” he answered, and said no more. Marco watching him, knew he must not ask the question again.

The next words his father said were about the promises. Marco was quite a little fellow at the time, but he understood the solemnity of them, and felt that he was being honored as if he were a man.

“When you are a man, you shall know all you wish to know,” Loristan said. “Now you are a child, and your mind must not be burdened. But you must do your part. A child sometimes forgets that words may be dangerous. You must promise never to forget this. Wheresoever you are; if you have playmates, you must remember to be silent about many things. You must not speak of what I do, or of the people who come to see me. You must not mention the things in your life which make it different from the lives of other boys. You must keep in your mind that a secret exists which a chance foolish word might betray. You are a Samavian, and there have been Samavians who have died a thousand deaths rather than betray a secret. You must learn to obey without question, as if you were a soldier. Now you must take your oath of allegiance.”

He rose from his seat and went to a corner of the room. He knelt down, turned back the carpet, lifted a plank, and took something from beneath it. It was a sword, and, as he came back to Marco, he drew it out from its sheath. The child’s strong, little body stiffened and drew itself up, his large, deep eyes flashed. He was to take his oath of allegiance upon a sword as if he were a man. He did not know that his small hand opened and shut with a fierce understanding grip because those of his blood had for long centuries past carried swords and fought with them.

Loristan gave him the big bared weapon, and stood erect before him.

“Repeat these words after me sentence by sentence!” he commanded.

And as he spoke them Marco echoed each one loudly and clearly.

“The sword in my hand—for Samavia!

“The heart in my breast—for Samavia!

“The swiftness of my sight, the thought of my brain, the life of my life—for Samavia.

“Here grows a man for Samavia.

“God be thanked!”

Then Loristan put his hand on the child’s shoulder, and his dark face looked almost fiercely proud.

“From this hour,” he said, “you and I are comrades at arms.”

And from that day to the one on which he stood beside the broken iron railings of No. 7 Philibert Place, Marco had not forgotten for one hour.

II

A YOUNG CITIZEN OF THE WORLD

He had been in London more than once before, but not to the lodgings in Philibert Place. When he was brought a second or third time to a town or city, he always knew that the house he was taken to would be in a quarter new to him, and he should not see again the people he had seen before. Such slight links of acquaintance as sometimes formed themselves between him and other children as shabby and poor as himself were easily broken. His father, however, had never forbidden him to make chance acquaintances. He had, in fact, told him that he had reasons for not wishing him to hold himself aloof from other boys. The only barrier which must exist between them must be the barrier of silence concerning his wanderings from country to country. Other boys as poor as he was did not make constant journeys, therefore they would miss nothing from his boyish talk when he omitted all mention of his. When he was in Russia, he must speak only of Russian places and Russian people and customs. When he was in France, Germany, Austria, or England, he must do the same thing. When he had learned English, French, German, Italian, and Russian he did not know. He had seemed to grow up in the midst of changing tongues which all seemed familiar to him, as languages are familiar to children who have lived with them until one scarcely seems less familiar than another. He did remember, however, that his father had always been unswerving in his attention to his pronunciation and method of speaking the language of any country they chanced to be living in.

“You must not seem a foreigner in any country,” he had said to him. “It is necessary that you should not. But when you are in England, you must not know French, or German, or anything but English.”

Once, when he was seven or eight years old, a boy had asked him what his father’s work was.

“His own father is a carpenter, and he asked me if my father was one,” Marco brought the story to Loristan. “I said you were not. Then he asked if you were a shoemaker, and another one said you might be a bricklayer or a tailor—and I didn’t know what to tell them.” He had been out playing in a London street, and he put a grubby little hand on his father’s arm, and clutched and almost fiercely shook it. “I wanted to say that you were not like their fathers, not at all. I knew you were not, though you were quite as poor. You are not a bricklayer or a shoemaker, but a patriot—you could not be only a bricklayer—you!” He said it grandly and with a queer indignation, his black head held up and his eyes angry.

Loristan laid his hand against his mouth.

“Hush! hush!” he said. “Is it an insult to a man to think he may be a carpenter or make a good suit of clothes? If I could make our clothes, we should go better dressed. If I were a shoemaker, your toes would not be making their way into the world as they are now.” He was smiling, but Marco saw his head held itself high, too, and his eyes were glowing as he touched his shoulder. “I know you did not tell them I was a patriot,” he ended. “What was it you said to them?”

“I remembered that you were nearly always writing and drawing maps, and I said you were a writer, but I did not know what you wrote—and that you said it was a poor trade. I heard you say that once to Lazarus. Was that a right thing to tell them?”

“Yes. You may always say it if you are asked. There are poor fellows enough who write a thousand different things which bring them little money. There is nothing strange in my being a writer.”

So Loristan answered him, and from that time if, by any chance, his father’s means of livelihood were inquired into, it was simple enough and true enough to say that he wrote to earn his bread.

In the first days of strangeness to a new place, Marco often walked a great deal. He was strong and untiring, and it amused him to wander through unknown streets, and look at shops, and houses, and people. He did not confine himself to the great thoroughfares, but liked to branch off into the side streets and odd, deserted-looking squares, and even courts and alleyways. He often stopped to watch workmen and talk to them if they were friendly. In this way he made stray acquaintances in his strollings, and learned a good many things. He had a fondness for wandering musicians, and, from an old Italian who had in his youth been a singer in opera, he had learned to sing a number of songs in his strong, musical boy-voice. He knew well many of the songs of the people in several countries.

It was very dull this first morning, and he wished that he had something to do or some one to speak to. To do nothing whatever is a depressing thing at all times, but perhaps it is more especially so when one is a big, healthy boy twelve years old. London as he saw it in the Marylebone Road seemed to him a hideous place. It was murky and shabby-looking, and full of dreary-faced people. It was not the first time he had seen the same things, and they always made him feel that he wished he had something to do.

Suddenly he turned away from the gate and went into the house to speak to Lazarus. He found him in his dingy closet of a room on the fourth floor at the back of the house.

“I am going for a walk,” he announced to him. “Please tell my father if he asks for me. He is busy, and I must not disturb him.”

Lazarus was patching an old coat as he often patched things—even shoes sometimes. When Marco spoke, he stood up at once to answer him. He was very obstinate and particular about certain forms of manner. Nothing would have obliged him to remain seated when Loristan or Marco was near him. Marco thought it was because he had been so strictly trained as a soldier. He knew that his father had had great trouble to make him lay aside his habit of saluting when they spoke to him.

“Perhaps,” Marco had heard Loristan say to him almost severely, once when he had forgotten himself and had stood at salute while his master passed through a broken-down iron gate before an equally broken-down-looking lodging-house—“perhaps you can force yourself to remember when I tell you that it is not safe—it is not safe! You put us in danger!”

It was evident that this helped the good fellow to control himself. Marco remembered that at the time he had actually turned pale, and had struck his forehead and poured forth a torrent of Samavian dialect in penitence and terror. But, though he no longer saluted them in public, he omitted no other form of reverence and ceremony, and the boy had become accustomed to being treated as if he were anything but the shabby lad whose very coat was patched by the old soldier who stood “at attention” before him.

“Yes, sir,” Lazarus answered. “Where was it your wish to go?”

Marco knitted his black brows a little in trying to recall distinct memories of the last time he had been in London.

“I have been to so many places, and have seen so many things since I was here before, that I must begin to learn again about the streets and buildings I do not quite remember.”

“Yes, sir,” said Lazarus. “There have been so many. I also forget. You were but eight years old when you were last here.”

“I think I will go and find the royal palace, and then I will walk about and learn the names of the streets,” Marco said.

“Yes, sir,” answered Lazarus, and this time he made his military salute.

Marco lifted his right hand in recognition, as if he had been a young officer. Most boys might have looked awkward or theatrical in making the gesture, but he made it with naturalness and ease, because he had been familiar with the form since his babyhood. He had seen officers returning the salutes of their men when they encountered each other by chance in the streets, he had seen princes passing sentries on their way to their carriages, more august personages raising the quiet, recognizing hand to their helmets as they rode through applauding crowds. He had seen many royal persons and many royal pageants, but always only as an ill-clad boy standing on the edge of the crowd of common people. An energetic lad, however poor, cannot spend his days in going from one country to another without, by mere every-day chance, becoming familiar with the outer life of royalties and courts. Marco had stood in continental thoroughfares when visiting emperors rode by with glittering soldiery before and behind them, and a populace shouting courteous welcomes. He knew where in various great capitals the sentries stood before kingly or princely palaces. He had seen certain royal faces often enough to know them well, and to be ready to make his salute when particular quiet and unattended carriages passed him by.

“It is well to know them. It is well to observe everything and to train one’s self to remember faces and circumstances,” his father had said. “If you were a young prince or a young man training for a diplomatic career, you would be taught to notice and remember people and things as you would be taught to speak your own language with elegance. Such observation would be your most practical accomplishment and greatest power. It is as practical for one man as another—for a poor lad in a patched coat as for one whose place is to be in courts. As you cannot be educated in the ordinary way, you must learn from travel and the world. You must lose nothing—forget nothing.”

It was his father who had taught him everything, and he had learned a great deal. Loristan had the power of making all things interesting to fascination. To Marco it seemed that he knew everything in the world. They were not rich enough to buy many books, but Loristan knew the treasures of all great cities, the resources of the smallest towns. Together he and his boy walked through the endless galleries filled with the wonders of the world, the pictures before which through centuries an unbroken procession of almost worshiping eyes had passed uplifted. Because his father made the pictures seem the glowing, burning work of still-living men whom the centuries could not turn to dust, because he could tell the stories of their living and laboring to triumph, stories of what they felt and suffered and were, the boy became as familiar with the old masters—Italian, German, French, Dutch, English, Spanish—as he was with most of the countries they had lived in. They were not merely old masters to him, but men who were great, men who seemed to him to have wielded beautiful swords and held high, splendid lights. His father could not go often with him, but he always took him for the first time to the galleries, museums, libraries, and historical places which were richest in treasures of art, beauty, or story. Then, having seen them once through his eyes, Marco went again and again alone, and so grew intimate with the wonders of the world. He knew that he was gratifying a wish of his father’s when he tried to train himself to observe all things and forget nothing. These palaces of marvels were his school-rooms, and his strange but rich education was the most interesting part of his life. In time, he knew exactly the places where the great Rembrandts, Vandykes, Rubens, Raphaels, Tintorettos, or Frans Hals hung; he knew whether this masterpiece or that was in Vienna, in Paris, in Venice, or Munich, or Rome. He knew stories of splendid crown jewels, of old armor, of ancient crafts, and of Roman relics dug up from beneath the foundations of old German cities. Any boy wandering to amuse himself through museums and palaces on “free days” could see what he saw, but boys living fuller and less lonely lives would have been less likely to concentrate their entire minds on what they looked at, and also less likely to store away facts with the determination to be able to recall at any moment the mental shelf on which they were laid. Having no playmates and nothing to play with, he began when he was a very little fellow to make a sort of game out of his rambles through picture-galleries, and the places which, whether they called themselves museums or not, were storehouses or relics of antiquity. There were always the blessed “free days,” when he could climb any marble steps, and enter any great portal without paying an entrance fee. Once inside, there were plenty of plainly and poorly dressed people to be seen, but there were not often boys as young as himself who were not attended by older companions. Quiet and orderly as he was, he often found himself stared at. The game he had created for himself was as simple as it was absorbing. It was to try how much he could remember and clearly describe to his father when they sat together at night and talked of what he had seen. These night talks filled his happiest hours. He never felt lonely then, and when his father sat and watched him with a certain curious and deep attention in his dark, reflective eyes, the boy was utterly comforted and content. Sometimes he brought back rough and crude sketches of objects he wished to ask questions about, and Loristan could always relate to him the full, rich story of the thing he wanted to know. They were stories made so splendid and full of color in the telling that Marco could not forget them.

III

THE LEGEND OF THE LOST PRINCE

As he walked through the streets, he was thinking of one of these stories. It was one he had heard first when he was very young, and it had so seized upon his imagination that he had asked often for it. It was, indeed, a part of the long-past history of Samavia, and he had loved it for that reason. Lazarus had often told it to him, sometimes adding much detail, but he had always liked best his father’s version, which seemed a thrilling and living thing. On their journey from Russia, during an hour when they had been forced to wait in a cold wayside station and had found the time long, Loristan had discussed it with him. He always found some such way of making hard and comfortless hours easier to live through.

“Fine, big lad—for a foreigner,” Marco heard a man say to his companion as he passed them this morning. “Looks like a Pole or a Russian.”

It was this which had led his thoughts back to the story of the Lost Prince. He knew that most of the people who looked at him and called him a “foreigner” had not even heard of Samavia. Those who chanced to recall its existence knew of it only as a small fierce country, so placed upon the map that the larger countries which were its neighbors felt they must control and keep it in order, and therefore made incursions into it, and fought its people and each other for possession. But it had not been always so. It was an old, old country, and hundreds of years ago it had been as celebrated for its peaceful happiness and wealth as for its beauty. It was often said that it was one of the most beautiful places in the world. A favorite Samavian legend was that it had been the site of the Garden of Eden. In those past centuries, its people had been of such great stature, physical beauty, and strength, that they had been like a race of noble giants. They were in those days a pastoral people, whose rich crops and splendid flocks and herds were the envy of less fertile countries. Among the shepherds and herdsmen there were poets who sang their own songs when they piped among their sheep upon the mountain sides and in the flower-thick valleys. Their songs had been about patriotism and bravery, and faithfulness to their chieftains and their country. The simple courtesy of the poorest peasant was as stately as the manner of a noble. But that, as Loristan had said with a tired smile, had been before they had had time to outlive and forget the Garden of Eden. Five hundred years ago, there had succeeded to the throne a king who was bad and weak. His father had lived to be ninety years old, and his son had grown tired of waiting in Samavia for his crown. He had gone out into the world, and visited other countries and their courts. When he returned and became king, he lived as no Samavian king had lived before. He was an extravagant, vicious man of furious temper and bitter jealousies. He was jealous of the larger courts and countries he had seen, and tried to introduce their customs and their ambitions. He ended by introducing their worst faults and vices. There arose political quarrels and savage new factions. Money was squandered until poverty began for the first time to stare the country in the face. The big Samavians, after their first stupefaction, broke forth into furious rage. There were mobs and riots, then bloody battles. Since it was the king who had worked this wrong, they would have none of him. They would depose him and make his son king in his place. It was at this part of the story that Marco was always most deeply interested. The young prince was totally unlike his father. He was a true royal Samavian. He was bigger and stronger for his age than any man in the country, and he was as handsome as a young Viking god. More than this, he had a lion’s heart, and before he was sixteen, the shepherds and herdsmen had already begun to make songs about his young valor, and his kingly courtesy, and generous kindness. Not only the shepherds and herdsmen sang them, but the people in the streets. The king, his father, had always been jealous of him, even when he was only a beautiful, stately child whom the people roared with joy to see as he rode through the streets. When he returned from his journeyings and found him a splendid youth, he detested him. When the people began to clamor and demand that he himself should abdicate, he became insane with rage, and committed such cruelties that the people ran mad themselves. One day they stormed the palace, killed and overpowered the guards, and, rushing into the royal apartments, burst in upon the king as he shuddered green with terror and fury in his private room. He was king no more, and must leave the country, they vowed, as they closed round him with bared weapons and shook them in his face. Where was the prince? They must see him and tell him their ultimatum. It was he whom they wanted for a king. They trusted him and would obey him. They began to shout aloud his name, calling him in a sort of chant in unison, “Prince Ivor—Prince Ivor—Prince Ivor!” But no answer came. The people of the palace had hidden themselves, and the place was utterly silent.

The king, despite his terror, could not help but sneer.

“Call him again,” he said. “He is afraid to come out of his hole!”

A savage fellow from the mountain fastnesses struck him on the mouth.

“He afraid!” he shouted. “If he does not come, it is because thou hast killed him—and thou art a dead man!”

This set them aflame with hotter burning. They broke away, leaving three on guard, and ran about the empty palace rooms shouting the prince’s name. But there was no answer. They sought him in a frenzy, bursting open doors and flinging down every obstacle in their way. A page, found hidden in a closet, owned that he had seen His Royal Highness pass through a corridor early in the morning. He had been softly singing to himself one of the shepherd’s songs.

And in this strange way out of the history of Samavia, five hundred years before Marco’s day, the young prince had walked—singing softly to himself the old song of Samavia’s beauty and happiness. For he was never seen again.

In every nook and cranny, high and low, they sought for him, believing that the king himself had made him prisoner in some secret place, or had privately had him killed. The fury of the people grew to frenzy. There were new risings, and every few days the palace was attacked and searched again. But no trace of the prince was found. He had vanished as a star vanishes when it drops from its place in the sky. During a riot in the palace, when a last fruitless search was made, the king himself was killed. A powerful noble who headed one of the uprisings made himself king in his place. From that time, the once splendid little kingdom was like a bone fought for by dogs. Its pastoral peace was forgotten. It was torn and worried and shaken by stronger countries. It tore and worried itself with internal fights. It assassinated kings and created new ones. No man was sure in his youth what ruler his maturity would live under, or whether his children would die in useless fights, or through stress of poverty and cruel, useless laws. There were no more shepherds and herdsmen who were poets, but on the mountain sides and in the valleys sometimes some of the old songs were sung. Those most beloved were songs about a Lost Prince whose name had been Ivor. If he had been king, he would have saved Samavia, the verses said, and all brave hearts believed that he would still return. In the modern cities, one of the jocular cynical sayings was, “Yes, that will happen when Prince Ivor comes again.”

In his more childish days, Marco had been bitterly troubled by the unsolved mystery. Where had he gone—the Lost Prince? Had he been killed, or had he been hidden away in a dungeon? But he was so big and brave, he would have broken out of any dungeon. The boy had invented for himself a dozen endings to the story.

“Did no one ever find his sword or his cap—or hear anything or guess anything about him ever—ever—ever?” he would say restlessly again and again.

One winter’s night, as they sat together before a small fire in a cold room in a cold city in Austria, he had been so eager and asked so many searching questions, that his father gave him an answer he had never given him before, and which was a sort of ending to the story, though not a satisfying one:

“Everybody guessed as you are guessing. A few very old shepherds in the mountains who like to believe ancient histories relate a story which most people consider a kind of legend. It is that almost a hundred years after the prince was lost, an old shepherd told a story his long-dead father had confided to him in secret just before he died. The father had said that, going out in the early morning on the mountain side, he had found in the forest what he at first thought to be the dead body of a beautiful, boyish, young huntsman. Some enemy had plainly attacked him from behind and believed he had killed him. He was, however, not quite dead, and the shepherd dragged him into a cave where he himself often took refuge from storms with his flocks. Since there was such riot and disorder in the city, he was afraid to speak of what he had found; and, by the time he discovered that he was harboring the prince, the king had already been killed, and an even worse man had taken possession of his throne, and ruled Samavia with a blood-stained, iron hand. To the terrified and simple peasant the safest thing seemed to get the wounded youth out of the country before there was any chance of his being discovered and murdered outright, as he would surely be. The cave in which he was hidden was not far from the frontier, and while he was still so weak that he was hardly conscious of what befell him, he was smuggled across it in a cart loaded with sheepskins, and left with some kind monks who did not know his rank or name. The shepherd went back to his flocks and his mountains, and lived and died among them, always in terror of the changing rulers and their savage battles with each other. The mountaineers said among themselves, as the generations succeeded each other, that the Lost Prince must have died young, because otherwise he would have come back to his country and tried to restore its good, bygone days.”

“Yes, he would have come,” Marco said.

“He would have come if he had seen that he could help his people,” Loristan answered, as if he were not reflecting on a story which was probably only a kind of legend. “But he was very young, and Samavia was in the hands of the new dynasty, and filled with his enemies. He could not have crossed the frontier without an army. Still, I think he died young.”

It was of this story that Marco was thinking as he walked, and perhaps the thoughts that filled his mind expressed themselves in his face in some way which attracted attention. As he was nearing Buckingham Palace, a distinguished-looking well-dressed man with clever eyes caught sight of him, and, after looking at him keenly, slackened his pace as he approached him from the opposite direction. An observer might have thought he saw something which puzzled and surprised him. Marco didn’t see him at all, and still moved forward, thinking of the shepherds and the prince. The well-dressed man began to walk still more slowly. When he was quite close to Marco, he stopped and spoke to him—in the Samavian language.

“What is your name?” he asked.

Marco’s training from his earliest childhood had been an extraordinary thing. His love for his father had made it simple and natural to him, and he had never questioned the reason for it. As he had been taught to keep silence, he had been taught to control the expression of his face and the sound of his voice, and, above all, never to allow himself to look startled. But for this he might have started at the extraordinary sound of the Samavian words suddenly uttered in a London street by an English gentleman. He might even have answered the question in Samavian himself. But he did not. He courteously lifted his cap and replied in English:

“Excuse me?”

The gentleman’s clever eyes scrutinized him keenly. Then he also spoke in English.

“Perhaps you do not understand? I asked your name because you are very like a Samavian I know,” he said.

“I am Marco Loristan,” the boy answered him.

The man looked straight into his eyes and smiled.

“That is not the name,” he said. “I beg your pardon, my boy.”

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. Neighboring 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 gray 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 czar and the two emperors.”

There was a little movement among the tall men-servants 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.

IV

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 clamor 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 clamor of play or wrangling, and had found a temporary friend or so.

Half-way 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 gray 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 hunch back, 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 riffraff 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 inclosure. 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. Every one’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 new-comer 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.

“That torn magazine you found had more than one article about Samavia in it,” he said to The Rat. “The same man wrote four. I read them all in a free library. He had been to Samavia, and knew a great deal about it. He said it was one of the most beautiful countries he had ever traveled in—and the most fertile. That’s what they all say of it.”

The group before him knew nothing of fertility or open country. They only knew London back streets and courts. Most of them had never traveled as far as the public parks, and in fact scarcely believed in their existence. They were a rough lot, and as they had stared at Marco at first sight of him, so they continued to stare at him as he talked. When he told of the tall Samavians who had been like giants centuries ago, and who had hunted the wild horses and captured and trained them to obedience by a sort of strong and gentle magic, their mouths fell open. This was the sort of thing to allure any boy’s imagination.

“Blimme, if I wouldn’t ’ave liked ketchin’ one o’ them ’orses,” broke in one of the audience, and his exclamation was followed by a dozen of like nature from the others. Who wouldn’t have liked “ketchin’ one”?

When he told of the deep endless-seeming forests, and of the herdsmen and shepherds who played on their pipes and made songs about high deeds and bravery, they grinned with pleasure without knowing they were grinning. They did not really know that in this neglected, broken-flagged inclosure, shut in on one side by smoke-blackened, poverty-stricken houses, and on the other by a deserted and forgotten sunken graveyard, they heard the rustle of green forest boughs where birds nested close, the swish of the summer wind in the river reeds, and the tinkle and laughter and rush of brooks running.

They heard more or less of it all through the Lost Prince story, because Prince Ivor had loved lowland woods and mountain forests and all out-of-door life. When Marco pictured him tall and strong-limbed and young, winning all the people when he rode smiling among them, the boys grinned again with unconscious pleasure.

“Wisht ’e ’adn’t got lost!” some one cried out.

When they heard of the unrest and dissatisfaction of the Samavians, they began to get restless themselves. When Marco reached the part of the story in which the mob rushed into the palace and demanded their prince from the king, they ejaculated scraps of bad language. “The old geezer had got him hidden somewhere in some dungeon, or he’d killed him out an’ out—that’s what he’d been up to!” they clamored. “Wisht the lot of us had been there then—wisht we ’ad. We’d ’ave give’ ’im wot for, anyway!”

“An’ ’im walkin’ out o’ the place so early in the mornin’ just singin’ like that! ’E ’ad ’im follered an’ done for!” they decided with various exclamations of boyish wrath. Somehow, the fact that the handsome royal lad had strolled into the morning sunshine singing made them more savage. Their language was extremely bad at this point.

But if it was bad here, it became worse when the old shepherd found the young huntsman’s half-dead body in the forest. He had “bin ‘done for’ in the back! ’E’d bin give’ no charnst. G-r-r-r!” they groaned in chorus. “Wisht they’d bin there when ’e’d bin ’it! They’d ’ave done fur somebody” themselves. It was a story which had a queer effect on them. It made them think they saw things; it fired their blood; it set them wanting to fight for ideals they knew nothing about—adventurous things, for instance, and high and noble young princes who were full of the possibility of great and good deeds. Sitting upon the broken flagstones of the bit of ground behind the deserted graveyard, they were suddenly dragged into the world of romance, and noble young princes and great and good deeds became as real as the sunken gravestones, and far more interesting.

And then the smuggling across the frontier of the unconscious prince in the bullock cart loaded with sheepskins! They held their breaths. Would the old shepherd get him past the line! Marco, who was lost in the recital himself, told it as if he had been present. He felt as if he had, and as this was the first time he had ever told it to thrilled listeners, his imagination got him in its grip, and his heart jumped in his breast as he was sure the old man’s must have done when the guard stopped his cart and asked him what he was carrying out of the country. He knew he must have had to call up all his strength to force his voice into steadiness.

And then the good monks! He had to stop to explain what a monk was, and when he described the solitude of the ancient monastery, and its walled gardens full of flowers and old simples to be used for healing, and the wise monks walking in the silence and the sun, the boys stared a little helplessly, but still as if they were vaguely pleased by the picture.

And then there was no more to tell—no more. There it broke off, and something like a low howl of dismay broke from the semicircle.

“Aw!” they protested, “it ’adn’t ought to stop there! Ain’t there no more? Is that all there is?”

“It’s all that was ever known really. And that last part might only be a sort of story made up by somebody. But I believe it myself.”

The Rat had listened with burning eyes. He had sat biting his finger-nails, as was a trick of his when he was excited or angry.

“Tell you what!” he exclaimed suddenly. “This was what happened. It was some of the Maranovitch fellows that tried to kill him. They meant to kill his father and make their own man king, and they knew the people wouldn’t stand it if young Ivor was alive. They just stabbed him in the back, the fiends! I dare say they heard the old shepherd coming, and left him for dead and ran.”

“Right, oh! That was it!” the lads agreed. “Yer right there, Rat!”

“When he got well,” The Rat went on feverishly, still biting his nails, “he couldn’t go back. He was only a boy. The other fellow had been crowned, and his followers felt strong because they’d just conquered the country. He could have done nothing without an army, and he was too young to raise one. Perhaps he thought he’d wait till he was old enough to know what to do. I dare say he went away and had to work for his living as if he’d never been a prince at all. Then perhaps sometime he married somebody and had a son, and told him as a secret who he was and all about Samavia.” The Rat began to look vengeful. “If I’d bin him I’d have told him not to forget what the Maranovitch had done to me. I’d have told him that if I couldn’t get back the throne, he must see what he could do when he grew to be a man. And I’d have made him swear, if he got it back, to take it out of them or their children or their children’s children in torture and killing. I’d have made him swear not to leave a Maranovitch alive. And I’d have told him that, if he couldn’t do it in his life, he must pass the oath on to his son and his son’s son, as long as there was a Fedorovitch on earth. Wouldn’t you?” he demanded hotly of Marco.

Marco’s blood was also hot, but it was a different kind of blood, and he had talked too much to a very sane man.

“No,” he said slowly. “What would have been the use? It wouldn’t have done Samavia any good, and it wouldn’t have done him any good to torture and kill people. Better keep them alive and make them do things for the country. If you’re a patriot, you think of the country.” He wanted to add “That’s what my father says,” but he did not.

“Torture ’em first and then attend to the country,” snapped The Rat. “What would you have told your son if you’d been Ivor?”

“I’d have told him to learn everything about Samavia—and all the things kings have to know—and study things about laws and other countries—and about keeping silent—and about governing himself as if he were a general commanding soldiers in battle—so that he would never do anything he did not mean to do or could be ashamed of doing after it was over. And I’d have asked him to tell his son’s sons to tell their sons to learn the same things. So, you see, however long the time was, there would always be a king getting ready for Samavia—when Samavia really wanted him. And he would be a real king.”

He stopped himself suddenly and looked at the staring semicircle.

“I didn’t make that up myself,” he said. “I have heard a man who reads and knows things say it. I believe the Lost Prince would have had the same thoughts. If he had, and told them to his son, there has been a line of kings in training for Samavia for five hundred years, and perhaps one is walking about the streets of Vienna, or Budapest, or Paris, or London now, and he’d be ready if the people found out about him and called him.”

“Wisht they would!” some one yelled.

“It would be a queer secret to know all the time when no one else knew it,” The Rat communed with himself as it were, “that you were a king and you ought to be on a throne wearing a crown. I wonder if it would make a chap look different?”

He laughed his squeaky laugh, and then turned in his sudden way to Marco:

“But he’d be a fool to give up the vengeance. What is your name?”

“Marco Loristan. What’s yours? It isn’t The Rat really.”

“It’s Jem Ratcliffe. That’s pretty near. Where do you live?”

“No. 7 Philibert Place.”

“This club is a soldiers’ club,” said The Rat. “It’s called the Squad. I’m the captain. ’Tention, you fellows! Let’s show him.”

The semicircle sprang to its feet. There were about twelve lads altogether, and, when they stood upright, Marco saw at once that for some reason they were accustomed to obeying the word of command with military precision.

“Form in line!” ordered The Rat.

They did it at once, and held their backs and legs straight and their heads up amazingly well. Each had seized one of the sticks which had been stacked together like guns.

The Rat himself sat up straight on his platform. There was actually something military in the bearing of his lean body. His voice lost its squeak and its sharpness became commanding.

He put the dozen lads through the drill as if he had been a smart young officer. And the drill itself was prompt and smart enough to have done credit to practiced soldiers in barracks. It made Marco involuntarily stand very straight himself, and watch with surprised interest.

“That’s good!” he exclaimed when it was at an end. “How did you learn that?”

The Rat made a savage gesture.

“If I’d had legs to stand on, I’d have been a soldier!” he said. “I’d have enlisted in any regiment that would take me. I don’t care for anything else.”

Suddenly his face changed, and he shouted a command to his followers.

“Turn your backs!” he ordered.

And they did turn their backs and looked through the railings of the old churchyard. Marco saw that they were obeying an order which was not new to them. The Rat had thrown his arm up over his eyes and covered them. He held it there for several moments, as if he did not want to be seen. Marco turned his back as the rest had done. All at once he understood that, though The Rat was not crying, yet he was feeling something which another boy would possibly have broken down under.

“All right!” he shouted presently, and dropped his ragged-sleeved arm and sat up straight again.

“I want to go to war!” he said hoarsely. “I want to fight! I want to lead a lot of men into battle! And I haven’t got any legs. Sometimes it takes the pluck out of me.”

“You’ve not grown up yet!” said Marco. “You might get strong. No one knows what is going to happen. How did you learn to drill the club?”

“I hang about barracks. I watch and listen. I follow soldiers. If I could get books, I’d read about wars. I can’t go to libraries as you can. I can do nothing but scuffle about like a rat.”

“I can take you to some libraries,” said Marco. “There are places where boys can get in. And I can get some papers from my father.”

“Can you?” said The Rat. “Do you want to join the club?”

“Yes!” Marco answered. “I’ll speak to my father about it.”

He said it because the hungry longing for companionship in his own mind had found a sort of response in the queer hungry look in The Rat’s eyes. He wanted to see him again. Strange creature as he was, there was attraction in him. Scuffling about on his low wheeled platform, he had drawn this group of rough lads to him and made himself their commander. They obeyed him; they listened to his stories and harangues about war and soldiering; they let him drill them and give them orders. Marco knew that, when he told his father about him, he would be interested. The boy wanted to hear what Loristan would say.

“I’m going home now,” he said. “If you’re going to be here tomorrow, I will try to come.”

“We shall be here,” The Rat answered. “It’s our barracks.”

Marco drew himself up smartly and made his salute as if to a superior officer. Then he wheeled about and marched through the brick archway, and the sound of his boyish tread was as regular and decided as if he had been a man keeping time with his regiment.

“He’s been drilled himself,” said The Rat. “He knows as much as I do.”

And he sat up and stared down the passage with new interest.

V

“SILENCE IS STILL THE ORDER”

They were even poorer than usual just now, and the supper Marco and his father sat down to was scant enough. Lazarus stood upright behind his master’s chair and served him with strictest ceremony. Their poor lodgings were always kept with a soldierly cleanliness and order. When an object could be polished it was forced to shine, no grain of dust was allowed to lie undisturbed, and this perfection was not attained through the ministrations of a lodging house slavey. Lazarus made himself extremely popular by taking the work of caring for his master’s rooms entirely out of the hands of the overburdened maids of all work. He had learned to do many things in his young days in barracks. He carried about with him coarse bits of table-cloths and towels, which he laundered as if they had been the finest linen. He mended, he patched, he darned, and in the hardest fight the poor must face—the fight with dirt and dinginess—he always held his own. They had nothing but dry bread and coffee this evening, but Lazarus had made the coffee and the bread was good.

As Marco ate, he told his father the story of The Rat and his followers. Loristan listened, as the boy had known he would, with the far-off, intently-thinking smile in his dark eyes. It was a look which always fascinated Marco because it meant that he was thinking so many things. Perhaps he would tell some of them and perhaps he would not. His spell over the boy lay in the fact that to him he seemed like a wonderful book of which one had only glimpses. It was full of pictures and adventures which were true, and one could not help continually making guesses about them. Yes, the feeling that Marco had was that his father’s attraction for him was a sort of spell, and that others felt the same thing. When he stood and talked to commoner people, he held his tall body with singular quiet grace which was like power. He never stirred or moved himself as if he were nervous or uncertain. He could hold his hands (he had beautiful slender and strong hands) quite still; he could stand on his fine arched feet without shuffling them. He could sit without any ungrace or restlessness. His mind knew what his body should do, and gave it orders without speaking, and his fine limbs and muscles and nerves obeyed. So he could stand still and at ease and look at the people he was talking to, and they always looked at him and listened to what he said, and somehow, courteous and uncondescending as his manner unfailingly was, it used always to seem to Marco as if he were “giving an audience” as kings gave them.

He had often seen people bow very low when they went away from him, and more than once it had happened that some humble person had stepped out of his presence backward, as people do when retiring before a sovereign. And yet his bearing was the quietest and least assuming in the world.

“And they were talking about Samavia? And he knew the story of the Lost Prince?” he said ponderingly. “Even in that place!”

“He wants to hear about wars—he wants to talk about them,” Marco answered. “If he could stand and were old enough, he would go and fight for Samavia himself.”

“It is a blood-drenched and sad place now!” said Loristan. “The people are mad when they are not heartbroken and terrified.”

Suddenly Marco struck the table with a sounding slap of his boy’s hand. He did it before he realized any intention in his own mind.

“Why should either one of the Iarovitch or one of the Maranovitch be king!” he cried. “They were only savage peasants when they first fought for the crown hundreds of years ago. The most savage one got it, and they have been fighting ever since. Only the Fedorovitch were born kings. There is only one man in the world who has the right to the throne—and I don’t know whether he is in the world or not. But I believe he is! I do!”

Loristan looked at his hot twelve-year-old face with a reflective curiousness. He saw that the flame which had leaped up in him had leaped without warning—just as a fierce heart-beat might have shaken him.

“You mean—?” he suggested softly.

“Ivor Fedorovitch. King Ivor he ought to be. And the people would obey him, and the good days would come again.”

“It is five hundred years since Ivor Fedorovitch left the good monks.” Loristan still spoke softly.

“But, Father,” Marco protested, “even The Rat said what you said—that he was too young to be able to come back while the Maranovitch were in power. And he would have to work and have a home, and perhaps he is as poor as we are. But when he had a son he would call him Ivor and tell him—and his son would call his son Ivor and tell him—and it would go on and on. They could never call their eldest sons anything but Ivor. And what you said about the training would be true. There would always be a king being trained for Samavia, and ready to be called.” In the fire of his feelings he sprang from his chair and stood upright. “Why! There may be a king of Samavia in some city now who knows he is king, and, when he reads about the fighting among his people, his blood gets red-hot. They’re his own people—his very own! He ought to go to them—he ought to go and tell them who he is! Don’t you think he ought, Father?”

“It would not be as easy as it seems to a boy,” Loristan answered. “There are many countries which would have something to say—Russia would have her word, and Austria, and Germany; and England never is silent. But, if he were a strong man and knew how to make strong friends in silence, he might sometime be able to declare himself openly.”

“But if he is anywhere, some one—some Samavian—ought to go and look for him. It ought to be a Samavian who is very clever and a patriot—” He stopped at a flash of recognition. “Father!” he cried out. “Father! You—you are the one who could find him if any one in the world could. But perhaps—” and he stopped a moment again because new thoughts rushed through his mind. “Have you ever looked for him?” he asked hesitating.

Perhaps he had asked a stupid question—perhaps his father had always been looking for him, perhaps that was his secret and his work.

But Loristan did not look as if he thought him stupid. Quite the contrary. He kept his handsome eyes fixed on him still in that curious way, as if he were studying him—as if he were much more than twelve years old, and he were deciding to tell him something.

“Comrade at arms,” he said, with the smile which always gladdened Marco’s heart, “you have kept your oath of allegiance like a man. You were not seven years old when you took it. You are growing older. Silence is still the order, but you are man enough to be told more.” He paused and looked down, and then looked up again, speaking in a low tone. “I have not looked for him,” he said, “because—I believe I know where he is.”

Marco caught his breath.

“Father!” He said only that word. He could say no more. He knew he must not ask questions. “Silence is still the order.” But as they faced each other in their dingy room at the back of the shabby house on the side of the roaring common road—as Lazarus stood stock-still behind his father’s chair and kept his eyes fixed on the empty coffee cups and the dry bread plate, and everything looked as poor as things always did—there was a king of Samavia—an Ivor Fedorovitch with the blood of the Lost Prince in his veins—alive in some town or city this moment! And Marco’s own father knew where he was!

He glanced at Lazarus, but, though the old soldier’s face looked as expressionless as if it were cut out of wood, Marco realized that he knew this thing and had always known it. He had been a comrade at arms all his life. He continued to stare at the bread plate.

Loristan spoke again and in an even lower voice. “The Samavians who are patriots and thinkers,” he said, “formed themselves into a secret party about eighty years ago. They formed it when they had no reason for hope, but they formed it because one of them discovered that an Ivor Fedorovitch was living. He was head forester on a great estate in the Austrian Alps. The nobleman he served had always thought him a mystery because he had the bearing and speech of a man who had not been born a servant, and his methods in caring for the forests and game were those of a man who was educated and had studied his subject. But he never was familiar or assuming, and never professed superiority over any of his fellows. He was a man of great stature, and was extraordinarily brave and silent. The nobleman who was his master made a sort of companion of him when they hunted together. Once he took him with him when he traveled to Samavia to hunt wild horses. He found that he knew the country strangely well, and that he was familiar with Samavian hunting and customs. Before he returned to Austria, the man obtained permission to go to the mountains alone. He went among the shepherds and made friends among them, asking many questions.

“One night around a forest fire he heard the songs about the Lost Prince which had not been forgotten even after nearly five hundred years had passed. The shepherds and herdsmen talked about Prince Ivor, and told old stories about him, and related the prophecy that he would come back and bring again Samavia’s good days. He might come only in the body of one of his descendants, but it would be his spirit which came, because his spirit would never cease to love Samavia. One very old shepherd tottered to his feet and lifted his face to the myriad stars bestrewn like jewels in the blue sky above the forest trees, and he wept and prayed aloud that the great God would send their king to them. And the stranger huntsman stood upright also and lifted his face to the stars. And, though he said no word, the herdsman nearest to him saw tears on his cheeks—great, heavy tears. The next day, the stranger went to the monastery where the order of good monks lived who had taken care of the Lost Prince. When he had left Samavia, the secret society was formed, and the members of it knew that an Ivor Fedorovitch had passed through his ancestors’ country as the servant of another man. But the secret society was only a small one, and, though it has been growing ever since and it has done good deeds and good work in secret, the huntsman died an old man before it was strong enough even to dare to tell Samavia what it knew.”

“Had he a son?” cried Marco. “Had he a son?”

“Yes. He had a son. His name was Ivor. And he was trained as I told you. That part I knew to be true, though I should have believed it was true even if I had not known. There has always been a king ready for Samavia—even when he has labored with his hands and served others. Each one took the oath of allegiance.”

“As I did?” said Marco, breathless with excitement. When one is twelve years old, to be so near a Lost Prince who might end wars is a thrilling thing.

“The same,” answered Loristan.

Marco threw up his hand in salute.

“‘Here grows a man for Samavia! God be thanked!’” he quoted. “And he is somewhere? And you know?”

Loristan bent his head in acquiescence.

“For years much secret work has been done, and the Fedorovitch party has grown until it is much greater and more powerful than the other parties dream. The larger countries are tired of the constant war and disorder in Samavia. Their interests are disturbed by them, and they are deciding that they must have peace and laws which can be counted on. There have been Samavian patriots who have spent their lives in trying to bring this about by making friends in the most powerful capitals, and working secretly for the future good of their own land. Because Samavia is so small and uninfluential, it has taken a long time but when King Maran and his family were assassinated and the war broke out, there were great powers which began to say that if some king of good blood and reliable characteristics were given the crown, he should be upheld.”

“His blood,”—Marco’s intensity made his voice drop almost to a whisper,—“his blood has been trained for five hundred years, Father! If it comes true—” though he laughed a little, he was obliged to wink his eyes hard because suddenly he felt tears rush into them, which no boy likes—“the shepherds will have to make a new song—it will have to be a shouting one about a prince going away and a king coming back!”

“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 some one. 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.

VI

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 any one 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 inclosure 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 humor. 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 some one 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 rumor 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!”

He was tremendously excited. Out of the ragged pocket he fished a piece of chalk. Then he leaned forward and began to draw something quickly on the flagstones closest to his platform. The Squad leaned forward also, quite breathlessly, and Marco leaned forward. The chalk was sketching a roughly outlined map, and he knew what map it was, before The Rat spoke.

“That’s a map of Samavia,” he said. “It was in that piece of magazine I told you about—the one where I read about Prince Ivor. I studied it until it fell to pieces. But I could draw it myself by that time, so it didn’t matter. I could draw it with my eyes shut. That’s the capital city,” pointing to a spot. “It’s called Melzarr. The palace is there. It’s the place where the first of the Maranovitch killed the last of the Fedorovitch—the bad chap that was Ivor’s father. It’s the palace Ivor wandered out of singing the shepherds’ song that early morning. It’s where the throne is that his descendant would sit upon to be crowned—that he’s going to sit upon. I believe he is! Let’s swear he shall!” He flung down his piece of chalk and sat up. “Give me two sticks. Help me to get up.”

Two of the Squad sprang to their feet and came to him. Each snatched one of the sticks from the stacked rifles, evidently knowing what he wanted. Marco rose too, and watched with sudden, keen curiosity. He had thought that The Rat could not stand up, but it seemed that he could, in a fashion of his own, and he was going to do it. The boys lifted him by his arms, set him against the stone coping of the iron railings of the churchyard, and put a stick in each of his hands. They stood at his side, but he supported himself.

“’E could get about if ’e ’ad the money to buy crutches!” said one whose name was Cad, and he said it quite proudly. The queer thing that Marco had noticed was that the ragamuffins were proud of The Rat, and regarded him as their lord and master. “—’E could get about an’ stand as well as any one,” added the other, and he said it in the tone of one who boasts. His name was Ben.

“I’m going to stand now, and so are the rest of you,” said The Rat. “Squad! ’Tention! You at the head of the line,” to Marco. They were in line in a moment—straight, shoulders back, chins up. And Marco stood at the head.

“We’re going to take an oath,” said The Rat. “It’s an oath of allegiance. Allegiance means faithfulness to a thing—a king or a country. Ours means allegiance to the King of Samavia. We don’t know where he is, but we swear to be faithful to him, to fight for him, to plot for him, to die for him, and to bring him back to his throne!” The way in which he flung up his head when he said the word “die” was very fine indeed. “We are the Secret Party. We will work in the dark and find out things—and run risks—and collect an army no one will know anything about until it is strong enough to suddenly rise at a secret signal, and overwhelm the Maranovitch and Iarovitch, and seize their forts and citadels. No one even knows we are alive. We are a silent, secret thing that never speaks aloud!”

Silent and secret as they were, however, they spoke aloud at this juncture. It was such a grand idea for a game, and so full of possible larks, that the Squad broke into a howl of an exultant cheer.

“Hooray!” they yelled. “Hooray for the oath of ’legiance! ’Ray! ’ray! ’ray!”

“Shut up, you swine!” shouted The Rat. “Is that the way you keep yourself secret? You’ll call the police in, you fools! Look at him!” pointing to Marco. “He’s got some sense.”

Marco, in fact, had not made any sound.

“Come here, you Cad and Ben, and put me back on my wheels,” raged the Squad’s commander. “I’ll not make up the game at all. It’s no use with a lot of fat-head, raw recruits like you.”

The line broke and surrounded him in a moment, pleading and urging.

“Aw, Rat! We forgot. It’s the primest game you’ve ever thought out! Rat! Rat! Don’t get a grouch on! We’ll keep still, Rat! Primest lark of all’ll be the sneakin’ about an’ keepin’ quiet. Aw, Rat! Keep it up!”

“Keep it up yourselves!” snarled The Rat.

“Not another cove of us could do it but you! Not one! There’s no other cove could think it out. You’re the only chap that can think out things. You thought out the Squad! That’s why you’re captain!”

This was true. He was the one who could invent entertainment for them, these street lads who had nothing. Out of that nothing he could create what excited them, and give them something to fill empty, useless, often cold or wet or foggy, hours. That made him their captain and their pride.

The Rat began to yield, though grudgingly. He pointed again to Marco, who had not moved, but stood still at attention.

“Look at him!” he said. “He knows enough to stand where he’s put until he’s ordered to break line. He’s a soldier, he is—not a raw recruit that don’t know the goose-step. He’s been in barracks before.”

But after this outburst, he deigned to go on.

“Here’s the oath,” he said. “We swear to stand any torture and submit in silence to any death rather than betray our secret and our king. We will obey in silence and in secret. We will swim through seas of blood and fight our way through lakes of fire, if we are ordered. Nothing shall bar our way. All we do and say and think is for our country and our king. If any of you have anything to say, speak out before you take the oath.”

He saw Marco move a little, and he made a sign to him.

“You,” he said. “Have you something to say?”

Marco turned to him and saluted.

“Here stand ten men for Samavia. God be thanked!” he said. He dared say that much, and he felt as if his father himself would have told him that they were the right words.

The Rat thought they were. Somehow he felt that they struck home. He reddened with a sudden emotion.

“Squad!” he said. “I’ll let you give three cheers on that. It’s for the last time. We’ll begin to be quiet afterward.”

And to the Squad’s exultant relief he led the cheer, and they were allowed to make as much uproar as they liked. They liked to make a great deal, and when it was at an end, it had done them good and made them ready for business.

The Rat opened the drama at once. Never surely had there ever before been heard a conspirator’s whisper as hollow as his.

“Secret Ones,” he said, “it is midnight. We meet in the depths of darkness. We dare not meet by day. When we meet in the daytime, we pretend not to know each other. We are meeting now in a Samavian city where there is a fortress. We shall have to take it when the secret sign is given and we make our rising. We are getting everything ready, so that, when we find the king, the secret sign can be given.”

“What is the name of the city we are in?” whispered Cad.

“It is called Larrina. It is an important seaport. We must take it as soon as we rise. The next time we meet I will bring a dark lantern and draw a map and show it to you.”

It would have been a great advantage to the game if Marco could have drawn for them the map he could have made, a map which would have shown every fortress—every stronghold and every weak place. Being a boy, he knew what excitement would have thrilled each breast, how they would lean forward and pile question on question, pointing to this place and to that. He had learned to draw the map before he was ten, and he had drawn it again and again because there had been times when his father had told him that changes had taken place. Oh, yes! he could have drawn a map which would have moved them to a frenzy of joy. But he sat silent and listened, only speaking when he asked a question, as if he knew nothing more about Samavia than The Rat did. What a Secret Party they were! They drew themselves together in the closest of circles; they spoke in unearthly whispers.

“A sentinel ought to be posted at the end of the passage,” Marco whispered.

“Ben, take your gun!” commanded The Rat.

Ben rose stealthily, and, shouldering his weapon, crept on tiptoe to the opening. There he stood on guard.

“My father says there’s been a Secret Party in Samavia for a hundred years,” The Rat whispered.

“Who told him?” asked Marco.

“A man who has been in Samavia,” answered The Rat. “He said it was the most wonderful Secret Party in the world, because it has worked and waited so long, and never given up, though it has had no reason for hoping. It began among some shepherds and charcoal-burners who bound themselves by an oath to find the Lost Prince and bring him back to the throne. There were too few of them to do anything against the Maranovitch, and when the first lot found they were growing old, they made their sons take the same oath. It has been passed on from generation to generation, and in each generation the band has grown. No one really knows how large it is now, but they say that there are people in nearly all the countries in Europe who belong to it in dead secret, and are sworn to help it when they are called. They are only waiting. Some are rich people who will give money, and some are poor ones who will slip across the frontier to fight or to help to smuggle in arms. They even say that for all these years there have been arms made in caves in the mountains, and hidden there year after year. There are men who are called Forgers of the Sword, and they, and their fathers, and grandfathers, and great-grandfathers have always made swords and stored them in caverns no one knows of, hidden caverns underground.”

Marco spoke aloud the thought which had come into his mind as he listened, a thought which brought fear to him. “If the people in the streets talk about it, they won’t be hidden long.”

“It isn’t common talk, my father says. Only very few have guessed, and most of them think it is part of the Lost Prince legend,” said The Rat. “The Maranovitch and Iarovitch laugh at it. They have always been great fools. They’re too full of their own swagger to think anything can interfere with them.”

“Do you talk much to your father?” Marco asked him.

The Rat showed his sharp white teeth in a grin.

“I know what you’re thinking of,” he said. “You’re remembering that I said he was always drunk. So he is, except when he’s only half drunk. And when he’s half drunk, he’s the most splendid talker in London. He remembers everything he has ever learned or read or heard since he was born. I get him going and listen. He wants to talk and I want to hear. I found out almost everything I know in that way. He didn’t know he was teaching me, but he was. He goes back into being a gentleman when he’s half drunk.”

“If—if you care about the Samavians, you’d better ask him not to tell people about the Secret Party and the Forgers of the Sword,” suggested Marco.

The Rat started a little.

“That’s true!” he said. “You’re sharper than I am. It oughtn’t to be blabbed about, or the Maranovitch might hear enough to make them stop and listen. I’ll get him to promise. There’s one queer thing about him,” he added very slowly, as if he were thinking it over, “I suppose it’s part of the gentleman that’s left in him. If he makes a promise, he never breaks it, drunk or sober.”

“Ask him to make one,” said Marco. The next moment he changed the subject because it seemed the best thing to do. “Go on and tell us what our own Secret Party is to do. We’re forgetting,” he whispered.

The Rat took up his game with renewed keenness. It was a game which attracted him immensely because it called upon his imagination and held his audience spellbound, besides plunging him into war and strategy.

“We’re preparing for the rising,” he said. “It must come soon. We’ve waited so long. The caverns are stacked with arms. The Maranovitch and the Iarovitch are fighting and using all their soldiers, and now is our time.” He stopped and thought, his elbows on his knees. He began to bite his nails again.

“The Secret Signal must be given,” he said. Then he stopped again, and the Squad held its breath and pressed nearer with a softly shuffling sound. “Two of the Secret Ones must be chosen by lot and sent forth,” he went on; and the Squad almost brought ruin and disgrace upon itself by wanting to cheer again, and only just stopping itself in time. “Must be chosen by lot,” The Rat repeated, looking from one face to another. “Each one will take his life in his hand when he goes forth. He may have to die a thousand deaths, but he must go. He must steal in silence and disguise from one country to another. Wherever there is one of the Secret Party, whether he is in a hovel or on a throne, the messengers must go to him in darkness and stealth and give him the sign. It will mean, ‘The hour has come. God save Samavia!’”

“God save Samavia!” whispered the Squad, excitedly. And, because they saw Marco raise his hand to his forehead, every one of them saluted.

They all began to whisper at once.

“Let’s draw lots now. Let’s draw lots, Rat. Don’t let’s ’ave no waitin’.”

The Rat began to look about him with dread anxiety. He seemed to be examining the sky.

“The darkness is not as thick as it was,” he whispered. “Midnight has passed. The dawn of day will be upon us. If any one has a piece of paper or a string, we will draw the lots before we part.”

Cad had a piece of string, and Marco had a knife which could be used to cut it into lengths. This The Rat did himself. Then, after shutting his eyes and mixing them, he held them in his hand ready for the drawing.

“The Secret One who draws the longest lot is chosen. The Secret One who draws the shortest is chosen,” he said solemnly.

The drawing was as solemn as his tone. Each boy wanted to draw either the shortest lot or the longest one. The heart of each thumped somewhat as he drew his piece of string.

When the drawing was at an end, each showed his lot. The Rat had drawn the shortest piece of string, and Marco had drawn the longest one.

“Comrade!” said The Rat, taking his hand. “We will face death and danger together!”

“God save Samavia!” answered Marco.

And the game was at an end for the day. The primest thing, the Squad said, The Rat had ever made up for them. “’E wos a wonder, he wos!”

VII

“THE LAMP IS LIGHTED!”

On his way home, Marco thought of nothing but the story he must tell his father, the story the stranger who had been to Samavia had told The Rat’s father. He felt that it must be a true story and not merely an invention. The Forgers of the Sword must be real men, and the hidden subterranean caverns stacked through the centuries with arms must be real, too. And if they were real, surely his father was one of those who knew the secret. His thoughts ran very fast. The Rat’s boyish invention of the rising was only part of a game, but how natural it would be that sometime—perhaps before long—there would be a real rising! Surely there would be one if the Secret Party had grown so strong, and if many weapons and secret friends in other countries were ready and waiting. During all these years, hidden work and preparation would have been going on continually, even though it was preparation for an unknown day. A party which had lasted so long—which passed its oath on from generation to generation—must be of a deadly determination.

What might it not have made ready in its caverns and secret meeting-places! He longed to reach home and tell his father, at once, all he had heard. He recalled to mind, word for word, all that The Rat had been told, and even all he had added in his game, because—well, because that seemed so real too, so real that it actually might be useful.

But when he reached No. 7 Philibert Place, he found Loristan and Lazarus very much absorbed in work. The door of the back sitting-room was locked when he first knocked on it, and locked again as soon as he had entered. There were many papers on the table, and they were evidently studying them. Several of them were maps. Some were road maps, some maps of towns and cities, and some of fortifications; but they were all maps of places in Samavia. They were usually kept in a strong box, and when they were taken out to be studied, the door was always kept locked.

Before they had their evening meal, these were all returned to the strong box, which was pushed into a corner and had newspapers piled upon it.

“When he arrives,” Marco heard Loristan say to Lazarus, “we can show him clearly what has been planned. He can see for himself.”

His father spoke scarcely at all during the meal, and, though it was not the habit of Lazarus to speak at such times unless spoken to, this evening it seemed to Marco that he looked more silent than he had ever seen him look before. They were plainly both thinking anxiously of deeply serious things. The story of the stranger who had been to Samavia must not be told yet. But it was one which would keep.

Loristan did not say anything until Lazarus had removed the things from the table and made the room as neat as possible. While that was being done, he sat with his forehead resting on his hand, as if absorbed in thought. Then he made a gesture to Marco.

“Come here, Comrade,” he said.

Marco went to him.

“Tonight some one may come to talk with me about grave things,” he said. “I think he will come, but I cannot be quite sure. It is important that he should know that, when he comes, he will find me quite alone. He will come at a late hour, and Lazarus will open the door quietly that no one may hear. It is important that no one should see him. Some one must go and walk on the opposite side of the street until he appears. Then the one who goes to give warning must cross the pavement before him and say in a low voice, ‘The Lamp is lighted!’ and at once turn quietly away.”

What boy’s heart would not have leaped with joy at the mystery of it! Even a common and dull boy who knew nothing of Samavia would have felt jerky. Marco’s voice almost shook with the thrill of his feeling.

“How shall I know him?” he said at once. Without asking at all, he knew he was the “some one” who was to go.

“You have seen him before,” Loristan answered. “He is the man who drove in the carriage with the King.”

“I shall know him,” said Marco. “When shall I go?”

“Not until it is half-past one o’clock. Go to bed and sleep until Lazarus calls you.” Then he added, “Look well at his face before you speak. He will probably not be dressed as well as he was when you saw him first.”

Marco went up-stairs to his room and went to bed as he was told, but it was hard to go to sleep. The rattle and roaring of the road did not usually keep him awake, because he had lived in the poorer quarter of too many big capital cities not to be accustomed to noise. But tonight it seemed to him that, as he lay and looked out at the lamplight, he heard every bus and cab which went past. He could not help thinking of the people who were in them, and on top of them, and of the people who were hurrying along on the pavement outside the broken iron railings. He was wondering what they would think if they knew that things connected with the battles they read of in the daily papers were going on in one of the shabby houses they scarcely gave a glance to as they went by them. It must be something connected with the war, if a man who was a great diplomat and the companion of kings came in secret to talk alone with a patriot who was a Samavian. Whatever his father was doing was for the good of Samavia, and perhaps the Secret Party knew he was doing it. His heart almost beat aloud under his shirt as he lay on the lumpy mattress thinking it over. He must indeed look well at the stranger before he even moved toward him. He must be sure he was the right man. The game he had amused himself with so long—the game of trying to remember pictures and people and places clearly and in detail—had been a wonderful training. If he could draw, he knew he could have made a sketch of the keen-eyed, clever, aquiline face with the well-cut and delicately close mouth, which looked as if it had been shut upon secrets always—always. If he could draw, he found himself saying again. He could draw, though perhaps only roughly. He had often amused himself by making sketches of things he wanted to ask questions about. He had even drawn people’s faces in his untrained way, and his father had said that he had a crude gift for catching a likeness. Perhaps he could make a sketch of this face which would show his father that he knew and would recognize it.

He jumped out of bed and went to a table near the window. There was paper and a pencil lying on it. A street lamp exactly opposite threw into the room quite light enough for him to see by. He half knelt by the table and began to draw. He worked for about twenty minutes steadily, and he tore up two or three unsatisfactory sketches. The poor drawing would not matter if he could catch that subtle look which was not slyness but something more dignified and important. It was not difficult to get the marked, aristocratic outline of the features. A common-looking man with less pronounced profile would have been less easy to draw in one sense. He gave his mind wholly to the recalling of every detail which had photographed itself on his memory through its trained habit. Gradually he saw that the likeness was becoming clearer. It was not long before it was clear enough to be a striking one. Any one who knew the man would recognize it. He got up, drawing a long and joyful breath.

He did not put on his shoes, but crossed his room as noiselessly as possible, and as noiselessly opened the door. He made no ghost of a sound when he went down the stairs. The woman who kept the lodging-house had gone to bed, and so had the other lodgers and the maid of all work. All the lights were out except the one he saw a glimmer of under the door of his father’s room. When he had been a mere baby, he had been taught to make a special sign on the door when he wished to speak to Loristan. He stood still outside the back sitting-room and made it now. It was a low scratching sound—two scratches and a soft tap. Lazarus opened the door and looked troubled.

“It is not yet time, sir,” he said very low.

“I know,” Marco answered. “But I must show something to my father.” Lazarus let him in, and Loristan turned round from his writing-table questioningly.

Marco went forward and laid the sketch down before him.

“Look at it,” he said. “I remember him well enough to draw that. I thought of it all at once—that I could make a sort of picture. Do you think it is like him?” Loristan examined it closely.

“It is very like him,” he answered. “You have made me feel entirely safe. Thanks, Comrade. It was a good idea.”

There was relief in the grip he gave the boy’s hand, and Marco turned away with an exultant feeling. Just as he reached the door, Loristan said to him:

“Make the most of this gift. It is a gift. And it is true your mind has had good training. The more you draw, the better. Draw everything you can.”

Neither the street lamps, nor the noises, nor his thoughts kept Marco awake when he went back to bed. But before he settled himself upon his pillow he gave himself certain orders. He had both read, and heard Loristan say, that the mind can control the body when people once find out that it can do so. He had tried experiments himself, and had found out some curious things. One was that if he told himself to remember a certain thing at a certain time, he usually found that he did remember it. Something in his brain seemed to remind him. He had often tried the experiment of telling himself to awaken at a particular hour, and had awakened almost exactly at the moment by the clock.

“I will sleep until one o’clock,” he said as he shut his eyes. “Then I will awaken and feel quite fresh. I shall not be sleepy at all.”

He slept as soundly as a boy can sleep. And at one o’clock exactly he awakened, and found the street lamp still throwing its light through the window. He knew it was one o’clock, because there was a cheap little round clock on the table, and he could see the time. He was quite fresh and not at all sleepy. His experiment had succeeded again.

He got up and dressed. Then he went down-stairs as noiselessly as before. He carried his shoes in his hands, as he meant to put them on only when he reached the street. He made his sign at his father’s door, and it was Loristan who opened it.

“Shall I go now?” Marco asked.

“Yes. Walk slowly to the other side of the street. Look in every direction. We do not know where he will come from. After you have given him the sign, then come in and go to bed again.”

Marco saluted as a soldier would have done on receiving an order.

Then, without a second’s delay, he passed noiselessly out of the house.

Loristan turned back into the room and stood silently in the center of it. The long lines of his handsome body looked particularly erect and stately, and his eyes were glowing as if something deeply moved him.

“There grows a man for Samavia,” he said to Lazarus, who watched him. “God be thanked!”

Lazarus’s voice was low and hoarse, and he saluted quite reverently.

“Your—sir!” he said. “God save the Prince!”

“Yes,” Loristan answered, after a moment’s hesitation,—“when he is found.” And he went back to his table smiling his beautiful smile.

The wonder of silence in the deserted streets of a great city, after midnight has hushed all the roar and tumult to rest, is an almost unbelievable thing. The stillness in the depths of a forest or on a mountain top is not so strange. A few hours ago, the tumult was rushing past; in a few hours more, it will be rushing past again.

But now the street is a naked thing; a distant policeman’s tramp on the bare pavement has a hollow and almost fearsome sound. It seemed especially so to Marco as he crossed the road. Had it ever been so empty and deadly silent before? Was it so every night? Perhaps it was, when he was fast asleep on his lumpy mattress with the light from a street lamp streaming into the room. He listened for the step of the policeman on night-watch, because he did not wish to be seen. There was a jutting wall where he could stand in the shadow while the man passed. A policeman would stop to look questioningly at a boy who walked up and down the pavement at half-past one in the morning. Marco could wait until he had gone by, and then come out into the light and look up and down the road and the cross streets.

He heard his approaching footsteps in a few minutes, and was safely in the shadows before he could be seen. When the policeman passed, he came out and walked slowly down the road, looking on each side, and now and then looking back. At first no one was in sight. Then a late hansom-cab came tinkling along. But the people in it were returning from some festivity, and were laughing and talking, and noticed nothing but their own joking. Then there was silence again, and for a long time, as it seemed to Marco, no one was to be seen. It was not really so long as it appeared, because he was anxious. Then a very early vegetable-wagon on the way from the country to Covent Garden Market came slowly lumbering by with its driver almost asleep on his piles of potatoes and cabbages. After it had passed, there was stillness and emptiness once more, until the policeman showed himself again on his beat, and Marco slipped into the shadow of the wall as he had done before.

When he came out into the light, he had begun to hope that the time would not seem long to his father. It had not really been long, he told himself, it had only seemed so. But his father’s anxiousness would be greater than his own could be. Loristan knew all that depended on the coming of this great man who sat side by side with a king in his carriage and talked to him as if he knew him well.

“It might be something which all Samavia is waiting to know—at least all the Secret Party,” Marco thought. “The Secret Party is Samavia,”—he started at the sound of footsteps. “Some one is coming!” he said. “It is a man.”

It was a man who was walking up the road on the same side of the pavement as his own. Marco began to walk toward him quietly but rather rapidly. He thought it might be best to appear as if he were some boy sent on a midnight errand—perhaps to call a doctor. Then, if it was a stranger he passed, no suspicion would be aroused. Was this man as tall as the one who had driven with the King? Yes, he was about the same height, but he was too far away to be recognizable otherwise. He drew nearer, and Marco noticed that he also seemed slightly to hasten his footsteps. Marco went on. A little nearer, and he would be able to make sure. Yes, now he was near enough. Yes, this man was the same height and not unlike in figure, but he was much younger. He was not the one who had been in the carriage with His Majesty. He was not more than thirty years old. He began swinging his cane and whistling a music-hall song softly as Marco passed him without changing his pace.

It was after the policeman had walked round his beat and disappeared for the third time, that Marco heard footsteps echoing at some distance down a cross street. After listening to make sure that they were approaching instead of receding in another direction, he placed himself at a point where he could watch the length of the thoroughfare. Yes, some one was coming. It was a man’s figure again. He was able to place himself rather in the shadow so that the person approaching would not see that he was being watched. The solitary walker reached a recognizable distance in about two minutes’ time. He was dressed in an ordinary shop-made suit of clothes which was rather shabby and quite unnoticeable in its appearance. His common hat was worn so that it rather shaded his face. But even before he had crossed to Marco’s side of the road, the boy had clearly recognized him. It was the man who had driven with the King!

Chance was with Marco. The man crossed at exactly the place which made it easy for the boy to step lightly from behind him, walk a few paces by his side, and then pass directly before him across the pavement, glancing quietly up into his face as he said in a low voice but distinctly, the words “The Lamp is lighted,” and without pausing a second walk on his way down the road. He did not slacken his pace or look back until he was some distance away. Then he glanced over his shoulder, and saw that the figure had crossed the street and was inside the railings. It was all right. His father would not be disappointed. The great man had come.

He walked for about ten minutes, and then went home and to bed. But he was obliged to tell himself to go to sleep several times before his eyes closed for the rest of the night.

VIII

AN EXCITING GAME

Loristan referred only once during the next day to what had happened.

“You did your errand well. You were not hurried or nervous,” he said. “The Prince was pleased with your calmness.”

No more was said. Marco knew that the quiet mention of the stranger’s title had been made merely as a designation. If it was necessary to mention him again in the future, he could be referred to as “the Prince.” In various Continental countries there were many princes who were not royal or even serene highnesses—who were merely princes as other nobles were dukes or barons. Nothing special was revealed when a man was spoken of as a prince. But though nothing was said on the subject of the incident, it was plain that much work was being done by Loristan and Lazarus. The sitting-room door was locked, and the maps and documents, usually kept in the iron box, were being used.

Marco went to the Tower of London and spent part of the day in living again the stories which, centuries past, had been inclosed within its massive and ancient stone walls. In this way, he had throughout boyhood become intimate with people who to most boys seemed only the unreal creatures who professed to be alive in school-books of history. He had learned to know them as men and women because he had stood in the palaces they had been born in and had played in as children, had died in at the end. He had seen the dungeons they had been imprisoned in, the blocks on which they had laid their heads, the battlements on which they had fought to defend their fortressed towers, the thrones they had sat upon, the crowns they had worn, and the jeweled scepters they had held. He had stood before their portraits and had gazed curiously at their “Robes of Investiture,” sewn with tens of thousands of seed-pearls. To look at a man’s face and feel his pictured eyes follow you as you move away from him, to see the strangely splendid garments he once warmed with his living flesh, is to realize that history is not a mere lesson in a school-book, but is a relation of the life stories of men and women who saw strange and splendid days, and sometimes suffered strange and terrible things.

There were only a few people who were being led about sight-seeing. The man in the ancient Beef-eaters’ costume, who was their guide, was good-natured, and evidently fond of talking. He was a big and stout man, with a large face and a small, merry eye. He was rather like pictures of Henry the Eighth, himself, which Marco remembered having seen. He was specially talkative when he stood by the tablet that marks the spot where stood the block on which Lady Jane Grey had laid her young head. One of the sightseers who knew little of English history had asked some questions about the reasons for her execution.

“If her father-in-law, the Duke of Northumberland, had left that young couple alone—her and her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley—they’d have kept their heads on. He was bound to make her a queen, and Mary Tudor was bound to be queen herself. The duke wasn’t clever enough to manage a conspiracy and work up the people. These Samavians we’re reading about in the papers would have done it better. And they’re half-savages.”

“They had a big battle outside Melzarr yesterday,” the sight-seer standing next to Marco said to the young woman who was his companion. “Thousands of ’em killed. I saw it in big letters on the boards as I rode on the top of the bus. They’re just slaughtering each other, that’s what they’re doing.”

The talkative Beef-eater heard him.

“They can’t even bury their dead fast enough,” he said. “There’ll be some sort of plague breaking out and sweeping into the countries nearest them. It’ll end by spreading all over Europe as it did in the Middle Ages. What the civilized countries have got to do is to make them choose a decent king and begin to behave themselves.”

“I’ll tell my father that too,” Marco thought. “It shows that everybody is thinking and talking of Samavia, and that even the common people know it must have a real king. This must be the time!” And what he meant was that this must be the time for which the Secret Party had waited and worked so long—the time for the Rising. But his father was out when he went back to Philibert Place, and Lazarus looked more silent than ever as he stood behind his chair and waited on him through his insignificant meal. However plain and scant the food they had to eat, it was always served with as much care and ceremony as if it had been a banquet.

“A man can eat dry bread and drink cold water as if he were a gentleman,” his father had said long ago. “And it is easy to form careless habits. Even if one is hungry enough to feel ravenous, a man who has been well bred will not allow himself to look so. A dog may, a man may not. Just as a dog may howl when he is angry or in pain and a man may not.”

It was only one of the small parts of the training which had quietly made the boy, even as a child, self-controlled and courteous, had taught him ease and grace of boyish carriage, the habit of holding his body well and his head erect, and had given him a certain look of young distinction which, though it assumed nothing, set him apart from boys of carelessly awkward bearing.

“Is there a newspaper here which tells of the battle, Lazarus?” he asked, after he had left the table.

“Yes, sir,” was the answer. “Your father said that you might read it. It is a black tale!” he added, as he handed him the paper.

It was a black tale. As he read, Marco felt as if he could scarcely bear it. It was as if Samavia swam in blood, and as if the other countries must stand aghast before such furious cruelties.

“Lazarus,” he said, springing to his feet at last, his eyes burning, “something must stop it! There must be something strong enough. The time has come. The time has come.” And he walked up and down the room because he was too excited to stand still.

How Lazarus watched him! What a strong and glowing feeling there was in his own restrained face!

“Yes, sir. Surely the time has come,” he answered. But that was all he said, and he turned and went out of the shabby back sitting-room at once. It was as if he felt it were wiser to go before he lost power over himself and said more.

Marco made his way to the meeting-place of the Squad, to which The Rat had in the past given the name of the Barracks. The Rat was sitting among his followers, and he had been reading the morning paper to them, the one which contained the account of the battle of Melzarr. The Squad had become the Secret Party, and each member of it was thrilled with the spirit of dark plot and adventure. They all whispered when they spoke.

“This is not the Barracks now,” The Rat said. “It is a subterranean cavern. Under the floor of it thousands of swords and guns are buried, and it is piled to the roof with them. There is only a small place left for us to sit and plot in. We crawl in through a hole, and the hole is hidden by bushes.”

To the rest of the boys this was only an exciting game, but Marco knew that to The Rat it was more. Though The Rat knew none of the things he knew, he saw that the whole story seemed to him a real thing. The struggles of Samavia, as he had heard and read of them in the newspapers, had taken possession of him. His passion for soldiering and warfare and his curiously mature brain had led him into following every detail he could lay hold of. He had listened to all he had heard with remarkable results. He remembered things older people forgot after they had mentioned them. He forgot nothing. He had drawn on the flagstones a map of Samavia which Marco saw was actually correct, and he had made a rough sketch of Melzarr and the battle which had had such disastrous results.

“The Maranovitch had possession of Melzarr,” he explained with feverish eagerness. “And the Iarovitch attacked them from here,” pointing with his finger. “That was a mistake. I should have attacked them from a place where they would not have been expecting it. They expected attack on their fortifications, and they were ready to defend them. I believe the enemy could have stolen up in the night and rushed in here,” pointing again. Marco thought he was right. The Rat had argued it all out, and had studied Melzarr as he might have studied a puzzle or an arithmetical problem. He was very clever, and as sharp as his queer face looked.

“I believe you would make a good general if you were grown up,” said Marco. “I’d like to show your maps to my father and ask him if he doesn’t think your stratagem would have been a good one.”

“Does he know much about Samavia?” asked The Rat.

“He has to read the newspapers because he writes things,” Marco answered. “And every one is thinking about the war. No one can help it.”

The Rat drew a dingy, folded paper out of his pocket and looked it over with an air of reflection.

“I’ll make a clean one,” he said. “I’d like a grown-up man to look at it and see if it’s all right. My father was more than half-drunk when I was drawing this, so I couldn’t ask him questions. He’ll kill himself before long. He had a sort of fit last night.”

“Tell us, Rat, wot you an’ Marco’ll ’ave ter do. Let’s ’ear wot you’ve made up,” suggested Cad. He drew closer, and so did the rest of the circle, hugging their knees with their arms.

“This is what we shall have to do,” began The Rat, in the hollow whisper of a Secret Party. “The hour has come. To all the Secret Ones in Samavia, and to the friends of the Secret Party in every country, the sign must be carried. It must be carried by some one who could not be suspected. Who would suspect two boys—and one of them a cripple? The best thing of all for us is that I am a cripple. Who would suspect a cripple? When my father is drunk and beats me, he does it because I won’t go out and beg in the streets and bring him the money I get. He says that people will nearly always give money to a cripple. I won’t be a beggar for him—the swine—but I will be one for Samavia and the Lost Prince. Marco shall pretend to be my brother and take care of me. I say,” speaking to Marco with a sudden change of voice, “can you sing anything? It doesn’t matter how you do it.”

“Yes, I can sing,” Marco replied.

“Then Marco will pretend he is singing to make people give him money. I’ll get a pair of crutches somewhere, and part of the time I will go on crutches and part of the time on my platform. We’ll live like beggars and go wherever we want to. I can whiz past a man and give the sign and no one will know. Some times Marco can give it when people are dropping money into his cap. We can pass from one country to another and rouse everybody who is of the Secret Party. We’ll work our way into Samavia, and we’ll be only two boys—and one a cripple—and nobody will think we could be doing anything. We’ll beg in great cities and on the highroad.”

“Where’ll you get the money to travel?” said Cad.

“The Secret Party will give it to us, and we sha’n’t need much. We could beg enough, for that matter. We’ll sleep under the stars, or under bridges, or archways, or in dark corners of streets. I’ve done it myself many a time when my father drove me out of doors. If it’s cold weather, it’s bad enough but if it’s fine weather, it’s better than sleeping in the kind of place I’m used to. Comrade,” to Marco, “are you ready?”

He said “Comrade” as Loristan did, and somehow Marco did not resent it, because he was ready to labor for Samavia. It was only a game, but it made them comrades—and was it really only a game, after all? His excited voice and his strange, lined face made it singularly unlike one.

“Yes, Comrade, I am ready,” Marco answered him.

“We shall be in Samavia when the fighting for the Lost Prince begins.” The Rat carried on his story with fire. “We may see a battle. We might do something to help. We might carry messages under a rain of bullets—a rain of bullets!” The thought so elated him that he forgot his whisper and his voice rang out fiercely. “Boys have been in battles before. We might find the Lost King—no, the Found King—and ask him to let us be his servants. He could send us where he couldn’t send bigger people. I could say to him, ‘Your Majesty, I am called “The Rat,” because I can creep through holes and into corners and dart about. Order me into any danger and I will obey you. Let me die like a soldier if I can’t live like one.’”

Suddenly he threw his ragged coat sleeve up across his eyes. He had wrought himself up tremendously with the picture of the rain of bullets. And he felt as if he saw the King who had at last been found. The next moment he uncovered his face.

“That’s what we’ve got to do,” he said. “Just that, if you want to know. And a lot more. There’s no end to it!”

Marco’s thoughts were in a whirl. It ought not to be nothing but a game. He grew quite hot all over. If the Secret Party wanted to send messengers no one would think of suspecting, who could be more harmless-looking than two vagabond boys wandering about picking up their living as best they could, not seeming to belong to any one? And one a cripple. It was true—yes, it was true, as The Rat said, that his being a cripple made him look safer than any one else. Marco actually put his forehead in his hands and pressed his temples.

“What’s the matter?” exclaimed The Rat. “What are you thinking about?”

“I’m thinking what a general you would make. I’m thinking that it might all be real—every word of it. It mightn’t be a game at all,” said Marco.

“No, it mightn’t,” The Rat answered. “If I knew where the Secret Party was, I’d like to go and tell them about it. What’s that!” he said, suddenly turning his head toward the street. “What are they calling out?”

Some newsboy with a particularly shrill voice was shouting out something at the topmost of his lungs.

Tense and excited, no member of the circle stirred or spoke for a few seconds. The Rat listened, Marco listened, the whole Squad listened, pricking up their ears.

“Startling news from Samavia,” the newsboy was shrilling out. “Amazing story! Descendant of the Lost Prince found! Descendant of the Lost Prince found!”

“Any chap got a penny?” snapped The Rat, beginning to shuffle toward the arched passage.

“I have!” answered Marco, following him.

“Come on!” The Rat yelled. “Let’s go and get a paper!” And he whizzed down the passage with his swiftest rat-like dart, while the Squad followed him, shouting and tumbling over each other.

IX

“IT IS NOT A GAME”

Loristan walked slowly up and down the back sitting-room and listened to Marco, who sat by the small fire and talked.

“Go on,” he said, whenever the boy stopped. “I want to hear it all. He’s a strange lad, and it’s a splendid game.”

Marco was telling him the story of his second and third visits to the inclosure behind the deserted church-yard. He had begun at the beginning, and his father had listened with a deep interest.

A year later, Marco recalled this evening as a thrilling memory, and as one which would never pass away from him throughout his life. He would always be able to call it all back. The small and dingy back room, the dimness of the one poor gas-burner, which was all they could afford to light, the iron box pushed into the corner with its maps and plans locked safely in it, the erect bearing and actual beauty of the tall form, which the shabbiness of worn and mended clothes could not hide or dim. Not even rags and tatters could have made Loristan seem insignificant or undistinguished. He was always the same. His eyes seemed darker and more wonderful than ever in their remote thoughtfulness and interest as he spoke.

“Go on,” he said. “It is a splendid game. And it is curious. He has thought it out well. The lad is a born soldier.”

“It is not a game to him,” Marco said. “And it is not a game to me. The Squad is only playing, but with him it’s quite different. He knows he’ll never really get what he wants, but he feels as if this was something near it. He said I might show you the map he made. Father, look at it.”

He gave Loristan the clean copy of The Rat’s map of Samavia. The city of Melzarr was marked with certain signs. They were to show at what points The Rat—if he had been a Samavian general—would have attacked the capital. As Marco pointed them out, he explained The Rat’s reasons for his planning.

Loristan held the paper for some minutes. He fixed his eyes on it curiously, and his black brows drew themselves together.

“This is very wonderful!” he said at last. “He is quite right. They might have got in there, and for the very reasons he hit on. How did he learn all this?”

“He thinks of nothing else now,” answered Marco. “He has always thought of wars and made plans for battles. He’s not like the rest of the Squad. His father is nearly always drunk, but he is very well educated, and, when he is only half drunk, he likes to talk.”

The Rat asks him questions then, and leads him on until he finds out a great deal. Then he begs old newspapers, and he hides himself in corners and listens to what people are saying. He says he lies awake at night thinking it out, and he thinks about it all the day. That was why he got up the Squad.

Loristan had continued examining the paper.

“Tell him,” he said, when he refolded and handed it back, “that I studied his map, and he may be proud of it. You may also tell him—” and he smiled quietly as he spoke—“that in my opinion he is right. The Iarovitch would have held Melzarr today if he had led them.”

Marco was full of exultation.

“I thought you would say he was right. I felt sure you would. That is what makes me want to tell you the rest,” he hurried on.

“If you think he is right about the rest too—” He stopped awkwardly because of a sudden wild thought which rushed upon him. “I don’t know what you will think,” he stammered. “Perhaps it will seem to you as if the game—as if that part of it could—could only be a game.”

He was so fervent in spite of his hesitation that Loristan began to watch him with sympathetic respect, as he always did when the boy was trying to express something he was not sure of. One of the great bonds between them was that Loristan was always interested in his boyish mental processes—in the way in which his thoughts led him to any conclusion.

“Go on,” he said again. “I am like The Rat and I am like you. It has not seemed quite like a game to me, so far.”

He sat down at the writing-table and Marco, in his eagerness, drew nearer and leaned against it, resting on his arms and lowering his voice, though it was always their habit to speak at such a pitch that no one outside the room they were in could distinguish what they said.

“It is The Rat’s plan for giving the signal for a Rising,” he said.

Loristan made a slight movement.

“Does he think there will be a Rising?” he asked.

“He says that must be what the Secret Party has been preparing for all these years. And it must come soon. The other nations see that the fighting must be put an end to even if they have to stop it themselves. And if the real King is found—but when The Rat bought the newspaper there was nothing in it about where he was. It was only a sort of rumor. Nobody seemed to know anything.” He stopped a few seconds, but he did not utter the words which were in his mind. He did not say: “But you know.”

“And The Rat has a plan for giving the signal?” Loristan said.

Marco forgot his first feeling of hesitation. He began to see the plan again as he had seen it when The Rat talked. He began to speak as The Rat had spoken, forgetting that it was a game. He made even a clearer picture than The Rat had made of the two vagabond boys—one of them a cripple—making their way from one place to another, quite free to carry messages or warnings where they chose, because they were so insignificant and poor-looking that no one could think of them as anything but waifs and strays, belonging to nobody and blown about by the wind of poverty and chance. He felt as if he wanted to convince his father that the plan was a possible one. He did not quite know why he felt so anxious to win his approval of the scheme—as if it were real—as if it could actually be done. But this feeling was what inspired him to enter into new details and suggest possibilities.

“A boy who was a cripple and one who was only a street singer and a sort of beggar could get almost anywhere,” he said. “Soldiers would listen to a singer if he sang good songs—and they might not be afraid to talk before him. A strolling singer and a cripple would perhaps hear a great many things it might be useful for the Secret Party to know. They might even hear important things. Don’t you think so?”

Before he had gone far with his story, the faraway look had fallen upon Loristan’s face—the look Marco had known so well all his life. He sat turned a little sidewise from the boy, his elbow resting on the table and his forehead on his hand. He looked down at the worn carpet at his feet, and so he looked as he listened to the end. It was as if some new thought were slowly growing in his mind as Marco went on talking and enlarging on The Rat’s plan. He did not even look up or change his position as he answered, “Yes. I think so.”

But, because of the deep and growing thought in his face, Marco’s courage increased. His first fear that this part of the planning might seem so bold and reckless that it would only appear to belong to a boyish game, gradually faded away for some strange reason. His father had said that the first part of The Rat’s imaginings had not seemed quite like a game to him, and now—even now—he was not listening as if he were listening to the details of mere exaggerated fancies. It was as if the thing he was hearing was not wildly impossible. Marco’s knowledge of Continental countries and of methods of journeying helped him to enter into much detail and give realism to his plans.

“Sometimes we could pretend we knew nothing but English,” he said. “Then, though The Rat could not understand, I could. I should always understand in each country. I know the cities and the places we should want to go to. I know how boys like us live, and so we should not do anything which would make the police angry or make people notice us. If any one asked questions, I would let them believe that I had met The Rat by chance, and we had made up our minds to travel together because people gave more money to a boy who sang if he was with a cripple. There was a boy who used to play the guitar in the streets of Rome, and he always had a lame girl with him, and every one knew it was for that reason. When he played, people looked at the girl and were sorry for her and gave her soldi. You remember.”

“Yes, I remember. And what you say is true,” Loristan answered.

Marco leaned forward across the table so that he came closer to him. The tone in which the words were said made his courage leap like a flame. To be allowed to go on with this boldness was to feel that he was being treated almost as if he were a man. If his father had wished to stop him, he could have done it with one quiet glance, without uttering a word. For some wonderful reason he did not wish him to cease talking. He was willing to hear what he had to say—he was even interested.

“You are growing older,” he had said the night he had revealed the marvelous secret. “Silence is still the order, but you are man enough to be told more.”

Was he man enough to be thought worthy to help Samavia in any small way—even with boyish fancies which might contain a germ of some thought which older and wiser minds might make useful? Was he being listened to because the plan, made as part of a game, was not an impossible one—if two boys who could be trusted could be found? He caught a deep breath as he went on, drawing still nearer and speaking so low that his tone was almost a whisper.

“If the men of the Secret Party have been working and thinking for so many years—they have prepared everything. They know by this time exactly what must be done by the messengers who are to give the signal. They can tell them where to go and how to know the secret friends who must be warned. If the orders could be written and given to—to some one who has—who has learned to remember things!” He had begun to breathe so quickly that he stopped for a moment.

Loristan looked up. He looked directly into his eyes.

“Some one who has been trained to remember things?” he said.

“Some one who has been trained,” Marco went on, catching his breath again. “Some one who does not forget—who would never forget—never! That one, even if he were only twelve—even if he were only ten—could go and do as he was told.”

Loristan put his hand on his shoulder.

“Comrade,” he said, “you are speaking as if you were ready to go yourself.”

Marco’s eyes looked bravely straight into his, but he said not one word.

“Do you know what it would mean, Comrade?” his father went on. “You are right. It is not a game. And you are not thinking of it as one. But have you thought how it would be if something betrayed you—and you were set up against a wall to be shot?”

Marco stood up quite straight. He tried to believe he felt the wall against his back.

“If I were shot, I should be shot for Samavia,” he said. “And for you, Father.”

Even as he was speaking, the front door-bell rang and Lazarus evidently opened it. He spoke to some one, and then they heard his footsteps approaching the back sitting-room.

“Open the door,” said Loristan, and Marco opened it.

“There is a boy who is a cripple here, sir,” the old soldier said. “He asked to see Master Marco.”

“If it is The Rat,” said Loristan, “bring him in here. I wish to see him.”

Marco went down the passage to the front door. The Rat was there, but he was not upon his platform. He was leaning upon an old pair of crutches, and Marco thought he looked wild and strange. He was white, and somehow the lines of his face seemed twisted in a new way. Marco wondered if something had frightened him, or if he felt ill.

“Rat,” he began, “my father—”

“I’ve come to tell you about my father,” The Rat broke in without waiting to hear the rest, and his voice was as strange as his pale face. “I don’t know why I’ve come, but I—I just wanted to. He’s dead!”

“Your father?” Marco stammered. “He’s—”

“He’s dead,” The Rat answered shakily. “I told you he’d kill himself. He had another fit and he died in it. I knew he would, one of these days. I told him so. He knew he would himself. I stayed with him till he was dead—and then I got a bursting headache and I felt sick—and I thought about you.”

Marco made a jump at him because he saw he was suddenly shaking as if he were going to fall. He was just in time, and Lazarus, who had been looking on from the back of the passage, came forward. Together they held him up.

“I’m not going to faint,” he said weakly, “but I felt as if I was. It was a bad fit, and I had to try and hold him. I was all by myself. The people in the other attic thought he was only drunk, and they wouldn’t come in. He’s lying on the floor there, dead.”

“Come and see my father,” Marco said. “He’ll tell us what do do. Lazarus, help him.”

“I can get on by myself,” said The Rat. “Do you see my crutches? I did something for a pawnbroker last night, and he gave them to me for pay.”

But though he tried to speak carelessly, he had plainly been horribly shaken and overwrought. His queer face was yellowish white still, and he was trembling a little.

Marco led the way into the back sitting-room. In the midst of its shabby gloom and under the dim light Loristan was standing in one of his still, attentive attitudes. He was waiting for them.

“Father, this is The Rat,” the boy began. The Rat stopped short and rested on his crutches, staring at the tall, reposeful figure with widened eyes.

“Is that your father?” he said to Marco. And then added, with a jerky half-laugh, “He’s not much like mine, is he?”