Читать книгу The Frances Hodgson Burnett MEGAPACK ® - Frances Hodgson Burnett - Страница 13

THE LOST PRINCE (Part 3)

XX

MARCO GOES TO THE OPERA

Their next journey was to Munich, but the night before they left Paris an unexpected thing happened.

To reach the narrow staircase which led to their bedroom it was necessary to pass through the baker’s shop itself.

The baker’s wife was a friendly woman who liked the two boy lodgers who were so quiet and gave no trouble. More than once she had given them a hot roll or so or a freshly baked little tartlet with fruit in the center. When Marco came in this evening, she greeted him with a nod and handed him a small parcel as he passed through.

“This was left for you this afternoon,” she said. “I see you are making purchases for your journey. My man and I are very sorry you are going.”

“Thank you, Madame. We also are sorry,” Marco answered, taking the parcel. “They are not large purchases, you see.”

But neither he nor The Rat had bought anything at all, though the ordinary-looking little package was plainly addressed to him and bore the name of one of the big cheap shops. It felt as if it contained something soft.

When he reached their bedroom, The Rat was gazing out of the window watching every living thing which passed in the street below. He who had never seen anything but London was absorbed by the spell of Paris and was learning it by heart.

“Something has been sent to us. Look at this,” said Marco.

The Rat was at his side at once. “What is it? Where did it come from?”

They opened the package and at first sight saw only several pairs of quite common woolen socks. As Marco took up the sock in the middle of the parcel, he felt that there was something inside it—something laid flat and carefully. He put his hand in and drew out a number of five-franc notes—not new ones, because new ones would have betrayed themselves by crackling. These were old enough to be soft. But there were enough of them to amount to a substantial sum.

“It is in small notes because poor boys would have only small ones. No one will be surprised when we change these,” The Rat said.

Each of them believed the package had been sent by the great lady, but it had been done so carefully that not the slightest clue was furnished.

To The Rat, part of the deep excitement of “the Game” was the working out of the plans and methods of each person concerned. He could not have slept without working out some scheme which might have been used in this case. It thrilled him to contemplate the difficulties the great lady might have found herself obliged to overcome.

“Perhaps,” he said, after thinking it over for some time, “she went to a big common shop dressed as if she were an ordinary woman and bought the socks and pretended she was going to carry them home herself. She would do that so that she could take them into some corner and slip the money in. Then, as she wanted to have them sent from the shop, perhaps she bought some other things and asked the people to deliver the packages to different places. The socks were sent to us and the other things to some one else. She would go to a shop where no one knew her and no one would expect to see her and she would wear clothes which looked neither rich nor too poor.”

He created the whole episode with all its details and explained them to Marco. It fascinated him for the entire evening and he felt relieved after it and slept well.

Even before they had left London, certain newspapers had swept out of existence the story of the descendant of the Lost Prince. This had been done by derision and light handling—by treating it as a romantic legend.

At first, The Rat had resented this bitterly, but one day at a meal, when he had been producing arguments to prove that the story must be a true one, Loristan somehow checked him by his own silence.

“If there is such a man,” he said after a pause, “it is well for him that his existence should not be believed in—for some time at least.”

The Rat came to a dead stop. He felt hot for a moment and then felt cold. He saw a new idea all at once. He had been making a mistake in tactics.

No more was said but, when they were alone afterwards, he poured himself forth to Marco.

“I was a fool!” he cried out. “Why couldn’t I see it for myself! Shall I tell you what I believe has been done? There is some one who has influence in England and who is a friend to Samavia. They’ve got the newspapers to make fun of the story so that it won’t be believed. If it was believed, both the Iarovitch and the Maranovitch would be on the lookout, and the Secret Party would lose their chances. What a fool I was not to think of it! There’s some one watching and working here who is a friend to Samavia.”

“But there is some one in Samavia who has begun to suspect that it might be true,” Marco answered. “If there were not, I should not have been shut in the cellar. Some one thought my father knew something. The spies had orders to find out what it was.”

“Yes. Yes. That’s true, too!” The Rat answered anxiously. “We shall have to be very careful.”

In the lining of the sleeve of Marco’s coat there was a slit into which he could slip any small thing he wished to conceal and also wished to be able to reach without trouble. In this he had carried the sketch of the lady which he had torn up in Paris. When they walked in the streets of Munich, the morning after their arrival, he carried still another sketch. It was the one picturing the genial-looking old aristocrat with the sly smile.

One of the things they had learned about this one was that his chief characteristic was his passion for music. He was a patron of musicians and he spent much time in Munich because he loved its musical atmosphere and the earnestness of its opera-goers.

“The military band plays in the Feldherrn-halle at midday. When something very good is being played, sometimes people stop their carriages so that they can listen. We will go there,” said Marco.

“It’s a chance,” said The Rat. “We mustn’t lose anything like a chance.”

The day was brilliant and sunny, the people passing through the streets looked comfortable and homely, the mixture of old streets and modern ones, of ancient corners and shops and houses of the day was picturesque and cheerful. The Rat swinging through the crowd on his crutches was full of interest and exhilaration. He had begun to grow, and the change in his face and expression which had begun in London had become more noticeable. He had been given his “place,” and a work to do which entitled him to hold it.

No one could have suspected them of carrying a strange and vital secret with them as they strolled along together. They seemed only two ordinary boys who looked in at shop windows and talked over their contents, and who loitered with upturned faces in the Marien-Platz before the ornate Gothic Rathaus to hear the eleven o’clock chimes play and see the painted figures of the King and Queen watch from their balcony the passing before them of the automatic tournament procession with its trumpeters and tilting knights. When the show was over and the automatic cock broke forth into his lusty farewell crow, they laughed just as any other boys would have laughed. Sometimes it would have been easy for The Rat to forget that there was anything graver in the world than the new places and new wonders he was seeing, as if he were a wandering minstrel in a story.

But in Samavia bloody battles were being fought, and bloody plans were being wrought out, and in anguished anxiety the Secret Party and the Forgers of the Sword waited breathlessly for the Sign for which they had waited so long. And inside the lining of Marco’s coat was hidden the sketched face, as the two unnoticed lads made their way to the Feldherrn-halle to hear the band play and see who might chance to be among the audience.

Because the day was sunny, and also because the band was playing a specially fine programme, the crowd in the square was larger than usual. Several vehicles had stopped, and among them were one or two which were not merely hired cabs but were the carriages of private persons.

One of them had evidently arrived early, as it was drawn up in a good position when the boys reached the corner. It was a big open carriage and a grand one, luxuriously upholstered in green. The footman and coachman wore green and silver liveries and seemed to know that people were looking at them and their master.

He was a stout, genial-looking old aristocrat with a sly smile, though, as he listened to the music, it almost forgot to be sly. In the carriage with him were a young officer and a little boy, and they also listened attentively. Standing near the carriage door were several people who were plainly friends or acquaintances, as they occasionally spoke to him. Marco touched The Rat’s coat sleeve as the two boys approached.

“It would not be easy to get near him,” he said. “Let us go and stand as close to the carriage as we can get without pushing. Perhaps we may hear some one say something about where he is going after the music is over.”

Yes, there was no mistaking him. He was the right man. Each of them knew by heart the creases on his stout face and the sweep of his gray moustache. But there was nothing noticeable in a boy looking for a moment at a piece of paper, and Marco sauntered a few steps to a bit of space left bare by the crowd and took a last glance at his sketch. His rule was to make sure at the final moment. The music was very good and the group about the carriage was evidently enthusiastic. There was talk and praise and comment, and the old aristocrat nodded his head repeatedly in applause.

“The Chancellor is music mad,” a looker-on near the boys said to another. “At the opera every night unless serious affairs keep him away! There you may see him nodding his old head and bursting his gloves with applauding when a good thing is done. He ought to have led an orchestra or played a ’cello. He is too big for first violin.”

There was a group about the carriage to the last, when the music came to an end and it drove away. There had been no possible opportunity of passing close to it even had the presence of the young officer and the boy not presented an insurmountable obstacle.

Marco and The Rat went on their way and passed by the Hof-Theater and read the bills. “Tristan and Isolde” was to be presented at night and a great singer would sing Isolde.

“He will go to hear that,” both boys said at once. “He will be sure to go.”

It was decided between them that Marco should go on his quest alone when night came. One boy who hung around the entrance of the Opera would be observed less than two.

“People notice crutches more than they notice legs,” The Rat said. “I’d better keep out of the way unless you need me. My time hasn’t come yet. Even if it doesn’t come at all I’ve—I’ve been on duty. I’ve gone with you and I’ve been ready—that’s what an aide-de-camp does.”

He stayed at home and read such English papers as he could lay hands on and he drew plans and re-fought battles on paper.

Marco went to the opera. Even if he had not known his way to the square near the place where the Hof-Theater stood, he could easily have found it by following the groups of people in the streets who all seemed walking in one direction. There were students in their odd caps walking three or four abreast, there were young couples and older ones, and here and there whole families; there were soldiers of all ages, officers and privates; and, when talk was to be heard in passing, it was always talk about music.

For some time Marco waited in the square and watched the carriages roll up and pass under the huge pillared portico to deposit their contents at the entrance and at once drive away in orderly sequence. He must make sure that the grand carriage with the green and silver liveries rolled up with the rest. If it came, he would buy a cheap ticket and go inside.

It was rather late when it arrived. People in Munich are not late for the opera if it can be helped, and the coachman drove up hurriedly. The green and silver footman leaped to the ground and opened the carriage door almost before it stopped. The Chancellor got out looking less genial than usual because he was afraid that he might lose some of the overture. A rosy-cheeked girl in a white frock was with him and she was evidently trying to soothe him.

“I do not think we are really late, Father,” she said. “Don’t feel cross, dear. It will spoil the music for you.”

This was not a time in which a man’s attention could be attracted quietly. Marco ran to get the ticket which would give him a place among the rows of young soldiers, artists, male and female students, and musicians who were willing to stand four or five deep throughout the performance of even the longest opera. He knew that, unless they were in one of the few boxes which belonged only to the court, the Chancellor and his rosy-cheeked daughter would be in the best seats in the front curve of the balcony which were the most desirable of the house. He soon saw them. They had secured the central places directly below the large royal box where two quiet princesses and their attendants were already seated.

When he found he was not too late to hear the overture, the Chancellor’s face become more genial than ever. He settled himself down to an evening of enjoyment and evidently forgot everything else in the world. Marco did not lose sight of him. When the audience went out between acts to promenade in the corridors, he might go also and there might be a chance to pass near to him in the crowd. He watched him closely. Sometimes his fine old face saddened at the beautiful woe of the music, sometimes it looked enraptured, and it was always evident that every note reached his soul.

The pretty daughter who sat beside him was attentive but not so enthralled. After the first act two glittering young officers appeared and made elegant and low bows, drawing their heels together as they kissed her hand. They looked sorry when they were obliged to return to their seats again.

After the second act the Chancellor sat for a few minutes as if he were in a dream. The people in the seats near him began to rise from their seats and file out into the corridors. The young officers were to be seen rising also. The rosy daughter leaned forward and touched her father’s arm gently.

“She wants him to take her out,” Marco thought. “He will take her because he is good-natured.”

He saw him recall himself from his dream with a smile and then he rose and, after helping to arrange a silvery blue scarf round the girl’s shoulders, gave her his arm just as Marco skipped out of his fourth-row standing-place.

It was a rather warm night and the corridors were full. By the time Marco had reached the balcony floor, the pair had issued from the little door and were temporarily lost in the moving numbers.

Marco quietly made his way among the crowd trying to look as if he belonged to somebody. Once or twice his strong body and his dense black eyes and lashes made people glance at him, but he was not the only boy who had been brought to the opera so he felt safe enough to stop at the foot of the stairs and watch those who went up and those who passed by. Such a miscellaneous crowd as it was made up of—good unfashionable music-lovers mixed here and there with grand people of the court and the gay world.

Suddenly he heard a low laugh and a moment later a hand lightly touched him.

“You did get out, then?” a soft voice said.

When he turned he felt his muscles stiffen. He ceased to slouch and did not smile as he looked at the speaker. What he felt was a wave of fierce and haughty anger. It swept over him before he had time to control it.

A lovely person who seemed swathed in several shades of soft violet drapery was smiling at him with long, lovely eyes.

It was the woman who had trapped him into No. 10 Brandon Terrace.

XXI

“HELP!”

“Did it take you so long to find it?” asked the Lovely Person with the smile. “Of course I knew you would find it in the end. But we had to give ourselves time. How long did it take?”

Marco removed himself from beneath the touch of her hand. It was quietly done, but there was a disdain in his young face which made her wince though she pretended to shrug her shoulders amusedly.

“You refuse to answer?” she laughed.

“I refuse.”

At that very moment he saw at the curve of the corridor the Chancellor and his daughter approaching slowly. The two young officers were talking gaily to the girl. They were on their way back to their box. Was he going to lose them? Was he?

The delicate hand was laid on his shoulder again, but this time he felt that it grasped him firmly.

“Naughty boy!” the soft voice said. “I am going to take you home with me. If you struggle I shall tell these people that you are my bad boy who is here without permission. What will you answer? My escort is coming down the staircase and will help me. Do you see?” And in fact there appeared in the crowd at the head of the staircase the figure of the man he remembered.

He did see. A dampness broke out on the palms of his hands. If she did this bold thing, what could he say to those she told her lie to? How could he bring proof or explain who he was—and what story dare he tell? His protestations and struggles would merely amuse the lookers-on, who would see in them only the impotent rage of an insubordinate youngster.

There swept over him a wave of remembrance which brought back, as if he were living through it again, the moment when he had stood in the darkness of the wine cellar with his back against the door and heard the man walk away and leave him alone. He felt again as he had done then—but now he was in another land and far away from his father. He could do nothing to help himself unless Something showed him a way.

He made no sound, and the woman who held him saw only a flame leap under his dense black lashes.

But something within him called out. It was as if he heard it. It was that strong self—the self that was Marco, and it called—it called as if it shouted.

“Help!” it called—to that Unknown Stranger Thing which had made worlds and which he and his father so often talked of and in whose power they so believed. “Help!”

The Chancellor was drawing nearer. Perhaps! Should he—?

“You are too proud to kick and shout,” the voice went on. “And people would only laugh. Do you see?”

The stairs were crowded and the man who was at the head of them could only move slowly. But he had seen the boy.

Marco turned so that he could face his captor squarely as if he were going to say something in answer to her. But he was not.

Even as he made the movement of turning, the help he had called for came and he knew what he should do. And he could do two things at once—save himself and give his Sign—because, the Sign once given, the Chancellor would understand.

“He will be here in a moment. He has recognized you,” the woman said.

As he glanced up the stairs, the delicate grip of her hand unconsciously slackened.

Marco whirled away from her. The bell rang which was to warn the audience that they must return to their seats and he saw the Chancellor hasten his pace.

A moment later, the old aristocrat found himself amazedly looking down at the pale face of a breathless lad who spoke to him in German and in such a manner that he could not but pause and listen.

“Sir,” he was saying, “the woman in violet at the foot of the stairs is a spy. She trapped me once and she threatens to do it again. Sir, may I beg you to protect me?”

He said it low and fast. No one else could hear his words.

“What! What!” the Chancellor exclaimed.

And then, drawing a step nearer and quite as low and rapidly but with perfect distinctness, Marco uttered four words:

“The Lamp is lighted.”

The Help cry had been answered instantly. Marco saw it at once in the old man’s eyes, notwithstanding that he turned to look at the woman at the foot of the staircase as if she only concerned him.

“What! What!” he said again, and made a movement toward her, pulling his large moustache with a fierce hand.

Then Marco recognized that a curious thing happened. The Lovely Person saw the movement and the gray moustache, and that instant her smile died away and she turned quite white—so white, that under the brilliant electric light she was almost green and scarcely looked lovely at all. She made a sign to the man on the staircase and slipped through the crowd like an eel. She was a slim flexible creature and never was a disappearance more wonderful in its rapidity. Between stout matrons and their thin or stout escorts and families she made her way and lost herself—but always making toward the exit. In two minutes there was no sight of her violet draperies to be seen. She was gone and so, evidently, was her male companion.

It was plain to Marco that to follow the profession of a spy was not by any means a safe thing. The Chancellor had recognized her—she had recognized the Chancellor who turned looking ferociously angry and spoke to one of the young officers.

“She and the man with her are two of the most dangerous spies in Europe. She is a Rumanian and he is a Russian. What they wanted of this innocent lad I don’t pretend to know. What did she threaten?” to Marco.

Marco was feeling rather cold and sick and had lost his healthy color for the moment.

“She said she meant to take me home with her and would pretend I was her son who had come here without permission,” he answered. “She believes I know something I do not.” He made a hesitating but grateful bow. “The third act, sir—I must not keep you. Thank you! Thank you!”

The Chancellor moved toward the entrance door of the balcony seats, but he did it with his hand on Marco’s shoulder.

“See that he gets home safely,” he said to the younger of the two officers. “Send a messenger with him. He’s young to be attacked by creatures of that kind.”

Polite young officers naturally obey the commands of Chancellors and such dignitaries. This one found without trouble a young private who marched with Marco through the deserted streets to his lodgings. He was a stolid young Bavarian peasant and seemed to have no curiosity or even any interest in the reason for the command given him. He was in fact thinking of his sweetheart who lived near Konigsee and who had skated with him on the frozen lake last winter. He scarcely gave a glance to the schoolboy he was to escort, he neither knew nor wondered why.

The Rat had fallen asleep over his papers and lay with his head on his folded arms on the table. But he was awakened by Marco’s coming into the room and sat up blinking his eyes in the effort to get them open.

“Did you see him? Did you get near enough?” he drowsed.

“Yes,” Marco answered. “I got near enough.”

The Rat sat upright suddenly.

“It’s not been easy,” he exclaimed. “I’m sure something happened—something went wrong.”

“Something nearly went wrong—very nearly,” answered Marco. But as he spoke he took the sketch of the Chancellor out of the slit in his sleeve and tore it and burned it with a match. “But I did get near enough. And that’s two.”

They talked long, before they went to sleep that night. The Rat grew pale as he listened to the story of the woman in violet.

“I ought to have gone with you!” he said. “I see now. An aide-de-camp must always be in attendance. It would have been harder for her to manage two than one. I must always be near to watch, even if I am not close by you. If you had not come back—if you had not come back!” He struck his clenched hands together fiercely. “What should I have done!”

When Marco turned toward him from the table near which he was standing, he looked like his father.

“You would have gone on with the Game just as far as you could,” he said. “You could not leave it. You remember the places, and the faces, and the Sign. There is some money; and when it was all gone, you could have begged, as we used to pretend we should. We have not had to do it yet; and it was best to save it for country places and villages. But you could have done it if you were obliged to. The Game would have to go on.”

The Rat caught at his thin chest as if he had been struck breathless.

“Without you?” he gasped. “Without you?”

“Yes,” said Marco. “And we must think of it, and plan in case anything like that should happen.”

He stopped himself quite suddenly, and sat down, looking straight before him, as if at some far away thing he saw.

“Nothing will happen,” he said. “Nothing can.”

“What are you thinking of?” The Rat gulped, because his breath had not quite come back. “Why will nothing happen?”

“Because—” the boy spoke in an almost matter-of-fact tone—in quite an unexalted tone at all events, “you see I can always make a strong call, as I did tonight.”

“Did you shout?” The Rat asked. “I didn’t know you shouted.”

“I didn’t. I said nothing aloud. But I—the myself that is in me,” Marco touched himself on the breast, “called out, ‘Help! Help!’ with all its strength. And help came.”

The Rat regarded him dubiously.

“What did it call to?” he asked.

“To the Power—to the Strength-place—to the Thought that does things. The Buddhist hermit, who told my father about it, called it ‘The Thought that thought the World.’”

A reluctant suspicion betrayed itself in The Rat’s eyes.

“Do you mean you prayed?” he inquired, with a slight touch of disfavor.

Marco’s eyes remained fixed upon him in vague thoughtfulness for a moment or so of pause.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “Perhaps it’s the same thing—when you need something so much that you cry out loud for it. But it’s not words, it’s a strong thing without a name. I called like that when I was shut in the wine-cellar. I remembered some of the things the old Buddhist told my father.”

The Rat moved restlessly.

“The help came that time,” he admitted. “How did it come tonight?”

“In that thought which flashed into my mind almost the next second. It came like lightning. All at once I knew if I ran to the Chancellor and said the woman was a spy, it would startle him into listening to me; and that then I could give him the Sign; and that when I gave him the Sign, he would know I was speaking the truth and would protect me.”

“It was a splendid thought!” The Rat said. “And it was quick. But it was you who thought of it.”

“All thinking is part of the Big Thought,” said Marco slowly. “It knows—It knows. And the outside part of us somehow broke the chain that linked us to It. And we are always trying to mend the chain, without knowing it. That is what our thinking is—trying to mend the chain. But we shall find out how to do it sometime. The old Buddhist told my father so—just as the sun was rising from behind a high peak of the Himalayas.” Then he added hastily, “I am only telling you what my father told me, and he only told me what the old hermit told him.”

“Does your father believe what he told him?” The Rat’s bewilderment had become an eager and restless thing.

“Yes, he believes it. He always thought something like it, himself. That is why he is so calm and knows so well how to wait.”

“Is that it!” breathed The Rat. “Is that why? Has—has he mended the chain?” And there was awe in his voice, because of this one man to whom he felt any achievement was possible.

“I believe he has,” said Marco. “Don’t you think so yourself?”

“He has done something,” The Rat said.

He seemed to be thinking things over before he spoke again—and then even more slowly than Marco.

“If he could mend the chain,” he said almost in a whisper, “he could find out where the descendant of the Lost Prince is. He would know what to do for Samavia!”

He ended the words with a start, and his whole face glowed with a new, amazed light.

“Perhaps he does know!” he cried. “If the help comes like thoughts—as yours did—perhaps his thought of letting us give the Sign was part of it. We—just we two every-day boys—are part of it!”

“The old Buddhist said—” began Marco.

“Look here!” broke in The Rat. “Tell me the whole story. I want to hear it.”

It was because Loristan had heard it, and listened and believed, that The Rat had taken fire. His imagination seized upon the idea, as it would have seized on some theory of necromancy proved true and workable.

With his elbows on the table and his hands in his hair, he leaned forward, twisting a lock with restless fingers. His breath quickened.

“Tell it,” he said, “I want to hear it all!”

“I shall have to tell it in my own words,” Marco said. “And it won’t be as wonderful as it was when my father told it to me. This is what I remember:

“My father had gone through much pain and trouble. A great load was upon him, and he had been told he was going to die before his work was done. He had gone to India, because a man he was obliged to speak to had gone there to hunt, and no one knew when he would return. My father followed him for months from one wild place to another, and, when he found him, the man would not hear or believe what he had come so far to say. Then he had jungle-fever and almost died. Once the natives left him for dead in a bungalow in the forest, and he heard the jackals howling round him all the night. Through all the hours he was only alive enough to be conscious of two things—all the rest of him seemed gone from his body: his thought knew that his work was unfinished—and his body heard the jackals howl!”

“Was the work for Samavia?” The Rat put in quickly. “If he had died that night, the descendant of the Lost Prince never would have been found—never!” The Rat bit his lip so hard that a drop of blood started from it.

“When he was slowly coming alive again, a native, who had gone back and stayed to wait upon him, told him that near the summit of a mountain, about fifty miles away, there was a ledge which jutted out into space and hung over the valley, which was thousands of feet below. On the ledge there was a hut in which there lived an ancient Buddhist, who was a holy man, as they called him, and who had been there during time which had not been measured. They said that their grandparents and great-grandparents had known of him, though very few persons had ever seen him. It was told that the most savage beast was tame before him. They said that a man-eating tiger would stop to salute him, and that a thirsty lioness would bring her whelps to drink at the spring near his hut.”

“That was a lie,” said The Rat promptly.

Marco neither laughed nor frowned.

“How do we know?” he said. “It was a native’s story, and it might be anything. My father neither said it was true nor false. He listened to all that was told him by natives. They said that the holy man was the brother of the stars. He knew all things past and to come, and could heal the sick. But most people, especially those who had sinful thoughts, were afraid to go near him.”

“I’d like to have seen—” The Rat pondered aloud, but he did not finish.

“Before my father was well, he had made up his mind to travel to the ledge if he could. He felt as if he must go. He thought that if he were going to die, the hermit might tell him some wise thing to do for Samavia.”

“He might have given him a message to leave to the Secret Ones,” said The Rat.

“He was so weak when he set out on his journey that he wondered if he would reach the end of it. Part of the way he traveled by bullock cart, and part, he was carried by natives. But at last the bearers came to a place more than halfway up the mountain, and would go no further. Then they went back and left him to climb the rest of the way himself. They had traveled slowly and he had got more strength, but he was weak yet. The forest was more wonderful than anything he had ever seen. There were tropical trees with foliage like lace, and some with huge leaves, and some of them seemed to reach the sky. Sometimes he could barely see gleams of blue through them. And vines swung down from their high branches, and caught each other, and matted together; and there were hot scents, and strange flowers, and dazzling birds darting about, and thick moss, and little cascades bursting out. The path grew narrower and steeper, and the flower scents and the sultriness made it like walking in a hothouse. He heard rustlings in the undergrowth, which might have been made by any kind of wild animal; once he stepped across a deadly snake without seeing it. But it was asleep and did not hurt him. He knew the natives had been convinced that he would not reach the ledge; but for some strange reason he believed he should. He stopped and rested many times, and he drank some milk he had brought in a canteen. The higher he climbed, the more wonderful everything was, and a strange feeling began to fill him. He said his body stopped being tired and began to feel very light. And his load lifted itself from his heart, as if it were not his load any more but belonged to something stronger. Even Samavia seemed to be safe. As he went higher and higher, and looked down the abyss at the world below, it appeared as if it were not real but only a dream he had wakened from—only a dream.”

The Rat moved restlessly.

“Perhaps he was light-headed with the fever,” he suggested.

“The fever had left him, and the weakness had left him,” Marco answered. “It seemed as if he had never really been ill at all—as if no one could be ill, because things like that were only dreams, just as the world was.”

“I wish I’d been with him! Perhaps I could have thrown these away—down into the abyss!” And The Rat shook his crutches which rested against the table. “I feel as if I was climbing, too. Go on.”

Marco had become more absorbed than The Rat. He had lost himself in the memory of the story.

“I felt that I was climbing, when he told me,” he said. “I felt as if I were breathing in the hot flower-scents and pushing aside the big leaves and giant ferns. There had been a rain, and they were wet and shining with big drops, like jewels, that showered over him as he thrust his way through and under them. And the stillness and the height—the stillness and the height! I can’t make it real to you as he made it to me! I can’t! I was there. He took me. And it was so high—and so still—and so beautiful that I could scarcely bear it.”

But the truth was, that with some vivid boy-touch he had carried his hearer far. The Rat was deadly quiet. Even his eyes had not moved. He spoke almost as if he were in a sort of trance. “It’s real,” he said. “I’m there now. As high as you—go on—go on. I want to climb higher.”

And Marco, understanding, went on.

“The day was over and the stars were out when he reached the place were the ledge was. He said he thought that during the last part of the climb he never looked on the earth at all. The stars were so immense that he could not look away from them. They seemed to be drawing him up. And all overhead was like violet velvet, and they hung there like great lamps of radiance. Can you see them? You must see them. My father saw them all night long. They were part of the wonder.”

“I see them,” The Rat answered, still in his trance-like voice and without stirring, and Marco knew he did.

“And there, with the huge stars watching it, was the hut on the ledge. And there was no one there. The door was open. And outside it was a low bench and table of stone. And on the table was a meal of dates and rice, waiting. Not far from the hut was a deep spring, which ran away in a clear brook. My father drank and bathed his face there. Then he went out on the ledge, and sat down and waited, with his face turned up to the stars. He did not lie down, and he thought he saw the stars all the time he waited. He was sure he did not sleep. He did not know how long he sat there alone. But at last he drew his eyes from the stars, as if he had been commanded to do it. And he was not alone any more. A yard or so away from him sat the holy man. He knew it was the hermit because his eyes were different from any human eyes he had ever beheld. They were as still as the night was, and as deep as the shadows covering the world thousands of feet below, and they had a far, far look, and a strange light was in them.”

“What did he say?” asked The Rat hoarsely.

“He only said, ‘Rise, my son. I awaited thee. Go and eat the food I prepared for thee, and then we will speak together.’ He didn’t move or speak again until my father had eaten the meal. He only sat on the moss and let his eyes rest on the shadows over the abyss. When my father went back, he made a gesture which meant that he should sit near him.

“Then he sat still for several minutes, and let his eyes rest on my father, until he felt as if the light in them were set in the midst of his own body and his soul. Then he said, ‘I cannot tell thee all thou wouldst know. That I may not do.’ He had a wonderful gentle voice, like a deep soft bell. ‘But the work will be done. Thy life and thy son’s life will set it on its way.’

“They sat through the whole night together. And the stars hung quite near, as if they listened. And there were sounds in the bushes of stealthy, padding feet which wandered about as if the owners of them listened too. And the wonderful, low, peaceful voice of the holy man went on and on, telling of wonders which seemed like miracles but which were to him only the ‘working of the Law.’”

“What is the Law?” The Rat broke in.

“There were two my father wrote down, and I learned them. The first was the law of The One. I’ll try to say that,” and he covered his eyes and waited through a moment of silence.

It seemed to The Rat as if the room held an extraordinary stillness.

“Listen!” came next. “This is it:

“‘There are a myriad worlds. There is but One Thought out of which they grew. Its Law is Order which cannot swerve. Its creatures are free to choose. Only they can create Disorder, which in itself is Pain and Woe and Hate and Fear. These they alone can bring forth. The Great One is a Golden Light. It is not remote but near. Hold thyself within its glow and thou wilt behold all things clearly. First, with all thy breathing being, know one thing! That thine own thought—when so thou standest—is one with That which thought the Worlds!’”

“What?” gasped The Rat. “My thought—the things I think!”

“Your thoughts—boys’ thoughts—anybody’s thoughts.”

“You’re giving me the jim-jams!”

“He said it,” answered Marco. “And it was then he spoke about the broken Link—and about the greatest books in the world—that in all their different ways, they were only saying over and over again one thing thousands of times. Just this thing—‘Hate not, Fear not, Love.’ And he said that was Order. And when it was disturbed, suffering came—poverty and misery and catastrophe and wars.”

“Wars!” The Rat said sharply. “The World couldn’t do without war—and armies and defences! What about Samavia?”

“My father asked him that. And this is what he answered. I learned that too. Let me think again,” and he waited as he had waited before. Then he lifted his head. “Listen! This is it:

“‘Out of the blackness of Disorder and its outpouring of human misery, there will arise the Order which is Peace. When Man learns that he is one with the Thought which itself creates all beauty, all power, all splendor, and all repose, he will not fear that his brother can rob him of his heart’s desire. He will stand in the Light and draw to himself his own.’”

“Draw to himself?” The Rat said. “Draw what he wants? I don’t believe it!”

“Nobody does,” said Marco. “We don’t know. He said we stood in the dark of the night—without stars—and did not know that the broken chain swung just above us.”

“I don’t believe it!” said The Rat. “It’s too big!”

Marco did not say whether he believed it or not. He only went on speaking.

“My father listened until he felt as if he had stopped breathing. Just at the stillest of the stillness the Buddhist stopped speaking. And there was a rustling of the undergrowth a few yards away, as if something big was pushing its way through—and there was the soft pad of feet. The Buddhist turned his head and my father heard him say softly: ‘Come forth, Sister.’

“And a huge leopardess with two cubs walked out on to the ledge and came to him and threw herself down with a heavy lunge near his feet.”

“Your father saw that!” cried out The Rat. “You mean the old fellow knew something that made wild beasts afraid to touch him or any one near him?”

“Not afraid. They knew he was their brother, and that he was one with the Law. He had lived so long with the Great Thought that all darkness and fear had left him forever. He had mended the Chain.”

The Rat had reached deep waters. He leaned forward—his hands burrowing in his hair, his face scowling and twisted, his eyes boring into space. He had climbed to the ledge at the mountain-top; he had seen the luminous immensity of the stars, and he had looked down into the shadows filling the world thousands of feet below. Was there some remote deep in him from whose darkness a slow light was rising? All that Loristan had said he knew must be true. But the rest of it—?

Marco got up and came over to him. He looked like his father again.

“If the descendant of the Lost Prince is brought back to rule Samavia, he will teach his people the Law of the One. It was for that the holy man taught my father until the dawn came.”

“Who will—who will teach the Lost Prince—the new King—when he is found?” The Rat cried. “Who will teach him?”

“The hermit said my father would. He said he would also teach his son—and that son would teach his son—and he would teach his. And through such as they were, the whole world would come to know the Order and the Law.”

Never had The Rat looked so strange and fierce a thing. A whole world at peace! No tactics—no battles—no slaughtered heroes—no clash of arms, and fame! It made him feel sick. And yet—something set his chest heaving.

“And your father would teach him that—when he was found! So that he could teach his sons. Your father believes in it?”

“Yes,” Marco answered. He said nothing but “Yes.” The Rat threw himself forward on the table, face downward.

“Then,” he said, “he must make me believe it. He must teach me—if he can.”

They heard a clumping step upon the staircase, and, when it reached the landing, it stopped at their door. Then there was a solid knock.

When Marco opened the door, the young soldier who had escorted him from the Hof-Theater was standing outside. He looked as uninterested and stolid as before, as he handed in a small flat package.

“You must have dropped it near your seat at the Opera,” he said. “I was to give it into your own hands. It is your purse.”

After he had clumped down the staircase again, Marco and The Rat drew a quick breath at one and the same time.

“I had no seat and I had no purse,” Marco said. “Let us open it.”

There was a flat limp leather note-holder inside. In it was a paper, at the head of which were photographs of the Lovely Person and her companion. Beneath were a few lines which stated that they were the well known spies, Eugenia Karovna and Paul Varel, and that the bearer must be protected against them. It was signed by the Chief of the Police. On a separate sheet was written the command: “Carry this with you as protection.”

“That is help,” The Rat said. “It would protect us, even in another country. The Chancellor sent it—but you made the strong call—and it’s here!”

There was no street lamp to shine into their windows when they went at last to bed. When the blind was drawn up, they were nearer the sky than they had been in the Marylebone Road. The last thing each of them saw, as he went to sleep, was the stars—and in their dreams, they saw them grow larger and larger, and hang like lamps of radiance against the violet-velvet sky above a ledge of a Himalayan Mountain, where they listened to the sound of a low voice going on and on and on.

XXII

A NIGHT VIGIL

On a hill in the midst of a great Austrian plain, around which high Alps wait watching through the ages, stands a venerable fortress, almost more beautiful than anything one has ever seen. Perhaps, if it were not for the great plain flowering broadly about it with its wide-spread beauties of meadow-land, and wood, and dim toned buildings gathered about farms, and its dream of a small ancient city at its feet, it might—though it is to be doubted—seem something less a marvel of medieval picturesqueness. But out of the plain rises the low hill, and surrounding it at a stately distance stands guard the giant majesty of Alps, with shoulders in the clouds and god-like heads above them, looking on—always looking on—sometimes themselves ethereal clouds of snow-whiteness, some times monster bare crags which pierce the blue, and whose unchanging silence seems to know the secret of the everlasting. And on the hill which this august circle holds in its embrace, as though it enclosed a treasure, stands the old, old, towered fortress built as a citadel for the Prince Archbishops, who were kings in their domain in the long past centuries when the splendor and power of ecclesiastical princes was among the greatest upon earth.

And as you approach the town—and as you leave it—and as you walk through its streets, the broad calm empty-looking ones, or the narrow thoroughfares whose houses seem so near to each other, whether you climb or descend—or cross bridges, or gaze at churches, or step out on your balcony at night to look at the mountains and the moon—always it seems that from some point you can see it gazing down at you—the citadel of Hohen-Salzburg.

It was to Salzburg they went next, because at Salzburg was to be found the man who looked like a hair-dresser and who worked in a barber’s shop. Strange as it might seem, to him also must be carried the Sign.

“There may be people who come to him to be shaved—soldiers, or men who know things,” The Rat worked it out, “and he can speak to them when he is standing close to them. It will be easy to get near him. You can go and have your hair cut.”

The journey from Munich was not a long one, and during the latter part of it they had the wooden-seated third-class carriage to themselves. Even the drowsy old peasant who nodded and slept in one corner got out with his bundles at last. To Marco the mountains were long-known wonders which could never grow old. They had always and always been so old! Surely they had been the first of the world! Surely they had been standing there waiting when it was said “Let there be Light.” The Light had known it would find them there. They were so silent, and yet it seemed as if they said some amazing thing—something which would take your breath from you if you could hear it. And they never changed. The clouds changed, they wreathed them, and hid them, and trailed down them, and poured out storm torrents on them, and thundered against them, and darted forked lightnings round them. But the mountains stood there afterwards as if such things had not been and were not in the world. Winds roared and tore at them, centuries passed over them—centuries of millions of lives, of changing of kingdoms and empires, of battles and world-wide fame which grew and died and passed away; and temples crumbled, and kings’ tombs were forgotten, and cities were buried and others built over them after hundreds of years—and perhaps a few stones fell from a mountain side, or a fissure was worn, which the people below could not even see. And that was all. There they stood, and perhaps their secret was that they had been there for ever and ever. That was what the mountains said to Marco, which was why he did not want to talk much, but sat and gazed out of the carriage window.

The Rat had been very silent all the morning. He had been silent when they got up, and he had scarcely spoken when they made their way to the station at Munich and sat waiting for their train. It seemed to Marco that he was thinking so hard that he was like a person who was far away from the place he stood in. His brows were drawn together and his eyes did not seem to see the people who passed by. Usually he saw everything and made shrewd remarks on almost all he saw. But today he was somehow otherwise absorbed. He sat in the train with his forehead against the window and stared out. He moved and gasped when he found himself staring at the Alps, but afterwards he was even strangely still. It was not until after the sleepy old peasant had gathered his bundles and got out at a station that he spoke, and he did it without turning his head.

“You only told me one of the two laws,” he said. “What was the other one?”

Marco brought himself back from his dream of reaching the highest mountain-top and seeing clouds float beneath his feet in the sun. He had to come back a long way.

“Are you thinking of that? I wondered what you had been thinking of all the morning,” he said.

“I couldn’t stop thinking of it. What was the second one?” said The Rat, but he did not turn his head.

“It was called the Law of Earthly Living. It was for every day,” said Marco. “It was for the ordering of common things—the small things we think don’t matter, as well as the big ones. I always remember that one without any trouble. This was it:

“‘Let pass through thy mind, my son, only the image thou wouldst desire to see become a truth. Meditate only upon the wish of thy heart—seeing first that it is such as can wrong no man and is not ignoble. Then will it take earthly form and draw near to thee.

“‘This is the Law of That which Creates.’”

Then The Rat turned round. He had a shrewdly reasoning mind.

“That sounds as if you could get anything you wanted, if you think about it long enough and in the right way,” he said. “But perhaps it only means that, if you do it, you’ll be happy after you’re dead. My father used to shout with laughing when he was drunk and talked about things like that and looked at his rags.”

He hugged his knees for a few minutes. He was remembering the rags, and the fog-darkened room in the slums, and the loud, hideous laughter.

“What if you want something that will harm somebody else?” he said next. “What if you hate some one and wish you could kill him?”

“That was one of the questions my father asked that night on the ledge. The holy man said people always asked it,” Marco answered. “This was the answer:

“‘Let him who stretcheth forth his hand to draw the lightning to his brother recall that through his own soul and body will pass the bolt.’”

“Wonder if there’s anything in it?” The Rat pondered. “It’d make a chap careful if he believed it! Revenging yourself on a man would be like holding him against a live wire to kill him and getting all the volts through yourself.”

A sudden anxiety revealed itself in his face.

“Does your father believe it?” he asked. “Does he?”

“He knows it is true,” Marco said.

“I’ll own up,” The Rat decided after further reflection—“I’ll own up I’m glad that there isn’t any one left that I’ve a grudge against. There isn’t any one—now.”

Then he fell again into silence and did not speak until their journey was at an end. As they arrived early in the day, they had plenty of time to wander about the marvelous little old city. But through the wide streets and through the narrow ones, under the archways into the market gardens, across the bridge and into the square where the “glockenspiel” played its old tinkling tune, everywhere the Citadel looked down and always The Rat walked on in his dream.

They found the hair-dresser’s shop in one of the narrow streets. There were no grand shops there, and this particular shop was a modest one. They walked past it once, and then went back. It was a shop so humble that there was nothing remarkable in two common boys going into it to have their hair cut. An old man came forward to receive them. He was evidently glad of their modest patronage. He undertook to attend to The Rat himself, but, having arranged him in a chair, he turned about and called to some one in the back room.

“Heinrich,” he said.

In the slit in Marco’s sleeve was the sketch of the man with smooth curled hair, who looked like a hair-dresser. They had found a corner in which to take their final look at it before they turned back to come in. Heinrich, who came forth from the small back room, had smooth curled hair. He looked extremely like a hair-dresser. He had features like those in the sketch—his nose and mouth and chin and figure were like what Marco had drawn and committed to memory. But—

He gave Marco a chair and tied the professional white covering around his neck. Marco leaned back and closed his eyes a moment.

“That is not the man!” he was saying to himself. “He is not the man.”

How he knew he was not, he could not have explained, but he felt sure. It was a strong conviction. But for the sudden feeling, nothing would have been easier than to give the Sign. And if he could not give it now, where was the one to whom it must be spoken, and what would be the result if that one could not be found? And if there were two who were so much alike, how could he be sure?

Each owner of each of the pictured faces was a link in a powerful secret chain; and if a link were missed, the chain would be broken. Each time Heinrich came within the line of his vision, he recorded every feature afresh and compared it with the remembered sketch. Each time the resemblance became more close, but each time some persistent inner conviction repeated, “No; the Sign is not for him!”

It was disturbing, also, to find that The Rat was all at once as restless as he had previously been silent and preoccupied. He moved in his chair, to the great discomfort of the old hair-dresser. He kept turning his head to talk. He asked Marco to translate divers questions he wished him to ask the two men. They were questions about the Citadel—about the Monchsberg—the Residenz—the Glockenspiel—the mountains. He added one query to another and could not sit still.

“The young gentleman will get an ear snipped,” said the old man to Marco. “And it will not be my fault.”

“What shall I do?” Marco was thinking. “He is not the man.”

He did not give the Sign. He must go away and think it out, though where his thoughts would lead him he did not know. This was a more difficult problem than he had ever dreamed of facing. There was no one to ask advice of. Only himself and The Rat, who was nervously wriggling and twisting in his chair.

“You must sit still,” he said to him. “The hair-dresser is afraid you will make him cut you by accident.”

“But I want to know who lives at the Residenz?” said The Rat. “These men can tell us things if you ask them.”

“It is done now,” said the old hair-dresser with a relieved air. “Perhaps the cutting of his hair makes the young gentleman nervous. It is sometimes so.”

The Rat stood close to Marco’s chair and asked questions until Heinrich also had done his work. Marco could not understand his companion’s change of mood. He realized that, if he had wished to give the Sign, he had been allowed no opportunity. He could not have given it. The restless questioning had so directed the older man’s attention to his son and Marco that nothing could have been said to Heinrich without his observing it.

“I could not have spoken if he had been the man,” Marco said to himself.

Their very exit from the shop seemed a little hurried. When they were fairly in the street, The Rat made a clutch at Marco’s arm.

“You didn’t give it?” he whispered breathlessly. “I kept talking and talking to prevent you.”

Marco tried not to feel breathless, and he tried to speak in a low and level voice with no hint of exclamation in it.

“Why did you say that?” he asked.

The Rat drew closer to him.

“That was not the man!” he whispered. “It doesn’t matter how much he looks like him, he isn’t the right one.”

He was pale and swinging along swiftly as if he were in a hurry.

“Let’s get into a quiet place,” he said. “Those queer things you’ve been telling me have got hold of me. How did I know? How could I know—unless it’s because I’ve been trying to work that second law? I’ve been saying to myself that we should be told the right things to do—for the Game and for your father—and so that I could be the right sort of aide-de-camp. I’ve been working at it, and, when he came out, I knew he was not the man in spite of his looks. And I couldn’t be sure you knew, and I thought, if I kept on talking and interrupting you with silly questions, you could be prevented from speaking.”

“There’s a place not far away where we can get a look at the mountains. Let’s go there and sit down,” said Marco. “I knew it was not the right one, too. It’s the Help over again.”

“Yes, it’s the Help—it’s the Help—it must be,” muttered The Rat, walking fast and with a pale, set face. “It could not be anything else.”

They got away from the streets and the people and reached the quiet place where they could see the mountains. There they sat down by the wayside. The Rat took off his cap and wiped his forehead, but it was not only the quick walking which had made it damp.

“The queerness of it gave me a kind of fright,” he said. “When he came out and he was near enough for me to see him, a sudden strong feeling came over me. It seemed as if I knew he wasn’t the man. Then I said to myself—‘but he looks like him’—and I began to get nervous. And then I was sure again—and then I wanted to try to stop you from giving him the Sign. And then it all seemed foolishness—and the next second all the things you had told me rushed back to me at once—and I remembered what I had been thinking ever since—and I said—‘Perhaps it’s the Law beginning to work,’ and the palms of my hands got moist.”

Marco was very quiet. He was looking at the farthest and highest peaks and wondering about many things.

“It was the expression of his face that was different,” he said. “And his eyes. They are rather smaller than the right man’s are. The light in the shop was poor, and it was not until the last time he bent over me that I found out what I had not seen before. His eyes are gray—the other ones are brown.”

“Did you see that!” The Rat exclaimed. “Then we’re sure! We’re safe!”

“We’re not safe till we’ve found the right man,” Marco said. “Where is he? Where is he? Where is he?”

He said the words dreamily and quietly, as if he were lost in thought—but also rather as if he expected an answer. And he still looked at the far-off peaks. The Rat, after watching him a moment or so, began to look at them also. They were like a loadstone to him too. There was something stilling about them, and when your eyes had rested upon them a few moments they did not want to move away.

“There must be a ledge up there somewhere,” he said at last.

“Let’s go up and look for it and sit there and think and think—about finding the right man.”

There seemed nothing fantastic in this to Marco. To go into some quiet place and sit and think about the thing he wanted to remember or to find out was an old way of his. To be quiet was always the best thing, his father had taught him. It was like listening to something which could speak without words.

“There is a little train which goes up the Gaisberg,” he said. “When you are at the top, a world of mountains spreads around you. Lazarus went once and told me. And we can lie out on the grass all night. Let us go, Aide-de-camp.”

So they went, each one thinking the same thought, and each boy-mind holding its own vision. Marco was the calmer of the two, because his belief that there was always help to be found was an accustomed one and had ceased to seem to partake of the supernatural. He believed quite simply that it was the working of a law, not the breaking of one, which gave answer and led him in his quests. The Rat, who had known nothing of laws other than those administered by police-courts, was at once awed and fascinated by the suggestion of crossing some borderland of the Unknown. The law of the One had baffled and overthrown him, with its sweeping away of the enmities of passions which created wars and called for armies. But the Law of Earthly Living seemed to offer practical benefits if you could hold on to yourself enough to work it.

“You wouldn’t get everything for nothing, as far as I can make out,” he had said to Marco. “You’d have to sweep all the rubbish out of your mind—sweep it as if you did it with a broom—and then keep on thinking straight and believing you were going to get things—and working for them—and they’d come.”

Then he had laughed a short ugly laugh because he recalled something.

“There was something in the Bible that my father used to jeer about—something about a man getting what he prayed for if he believed it,” he said.

“Oh, yes, it’s there,” said Marco. “That if a man pray believing he shall receive what he asks it shall be given him. All the books say something like it. It’s been said so often it makes you believe it.”

“He didn’t believe it, and I didn’t,” said The Rat.

“Nobody does—really,” answered Marco, as he had done once before. “It’s because we don’t know.”

They went up the Gaisberg in the little train, which pushed and dragged and panted slowly upward with them. It took them with it stubbornly and gradually higher and higher until it had left Salzburg and the Citadel below and had reached the world of mountains which rose and spread and lifted great heads behind each other and beside each other and beyond each other until there seemed no other land on earth but that on mountain sides and backs and shoulders and crowns. And also one felt the absurdity of living upon flat ground, where life must be an insignificant thing.

There were only a few sight-seers in the small carriages, and they were going to look at the view from the summit. They were not in search of a ledge.

The Rat and Marco were. When the little train stopped at the top, they got out with the rest. They wandered about with them over the short grass on the treeless summit and looked out from this viewpoint and the other. The Rat grew more and more silent, and his silence was not merely a matter of speechlessness but of expression. He looked silent and as if he were no longer aware of the earth. They left the sight-seers at last and wandered away by themselves. They found a ledge where they could sit or lie and where even the world of mountains seemed below them. They had brought some simple food with them, and they laid it behind a jutting bit of rock. When the sight-seers boarded the laboring little train again and were dragged back down the mountain, their night of vigil would begin.

That was what it was to be. A night of stillness on the heights, where they could wait and watch and hold themselves ready to hear any thought which spoke to them.

The Rat was so thrilled that he would not have been surprised if he had heard a voice from the place of the stars. But Marco only believed that in this great stillness and beauty, if he held his boy-soul quiet enough, he should find himself at last thinking of something that would lead him to the place which held what it was best that he should find. The people returned to the train and it set out upon its way down the steepness.

They heard it laboring on its way, as though it was forced to make as much effort to hold itself back as it had made to drag itself upward.

Then they were alone, and it was a loneness such as an eagle might feel when it held itself poised high in the curve of blue. And they sat and watched. They saw the sun go down and, shade by shade, deepen and make radiant and then draw away with it the last touches of color—rose-gold, rose-purple, and rose-gray.

One mountain-top after another held its blush a few moments and lost it. It took long to gather them all but at length they were gone and the marvel of night fell.

The breath of the forests below was sweet about them, and soundlessness enclosed them which was of unearthly peace. The stars began to show themselves, and presently the two who waited found their faces turned upward to the sky and they both were speaking in whispers.

“The stars look large here,” The Rat said.

“Yes,” answered Marco. “We are not as high as the Buddhist was, but it seems like the top of the world.”

“There is a light on the side of the mountain yonder which is not a star,” The Rat whispered.

“It is a light in a hut where the guides take the climbers to rest and to spend the night,” answered Marco.

“It is so still,” The Rat whispered again after a silence, and Marco whispered back:

“It is so still.”

They had eaten their meal of black bread and cheese after the setting of the sun, and now they lay down on their backs and looked up until the first few stars had multiplied themselves into myriads. They began a little low talk, but the soundlessness was stronger than themselves.

“How am I going to hold on to that second law?” The Rat said restlessly. “‘Let pass through thy mind only the image thou wouldst see become a truth.’ The things that are passing through my mind are not the things I want to come true. What if we don’t find him—don’t find the right one, I mean!”

“Lie still—still—and look up at the stars,” whispered Marco. “They give you a sure feeling.”

There was something in the curious serenity of him which calmed even his aide-de-camp. The Rat lay still and looked—and looked—and thought. And what he thought of was the desire of his heart. The soundlessness enwrapped him and there was no world left. That there was a spark of light in the mountain-climbers’ rest-hut was a thing forgotten.

They were only two boys, and they had begun their journey on the earliest train and had been walking about all day and thinking of great and anxious things.

“It is so still,” The Rat whispered again at last.

“It is so still,” whispered Marco.

And the mountains rising behind each other and beside each other and beyond each other in the night, and also the myriads of stars which had so multiplied themselves, looking down knew that they were asleep—as sleep the human things which do not watch forever.

“Some one is smoking,” Marco found himself saying in a dream. After which he awakened and found that the smoke was not part of a dream at all. It came from the pipe of a young man who had an alpenstock and who looked as if he had climbed to see the sun rise. He wore the clothes of a climber and a green hat with a tuft at the back. He looked down at the two boys, surprised.

“Good day,” he said. “Did you sleep here so that you could see the sun get up?”

“Yes,” answered Marco.

“Were you cold?”

“We slept too soundly to know. And we brought our thick coats.”

“I slept half-way down the mountains,” said the smoker. “I am a guide in these days, but I have not been one long enough to miss a sunrise it is no work to reach. My father and brother think I am mad about such things. They would rather stay in their beds. Oh! he is awake, is he?” turning toward The Rat, who had risen on one elbow and was staring at him. “What is the matter? You look as if you were afraid of me.”

Marco did not wait for The Rat to recover his breath and speak.

“I know why he looks at you so,” he answered for him. “He is startled. Yesterday we went to a hair-dresser’s shop down below there, and we saw a man who was almost exactly like you—only—” he added, looking up, “his eyes were gray and yours are brown.”

“He was my twin brother,” said the guide, puffing at his pipe cheerfully. “My father thought he could make hair-dressers of us both, and I tried it for four years. But I always wanted to be climbing the mountains and there were not holidays enough. So I cut my hair, and washed the pomade out of it, and broke away. I don’t look like a hair-dresser now, do I?”

He did not. Not at all. But Marco knew him. He was the man. There was no one on the mountain-top but themselves, and the sun was just showing a rim of gold above the farthest and highest giant’s shoulders. One need not be afraid to do anything, since there was no one to see or hear. Marco slipped the sketch out of the slit in his sleeve. He looked at it and he looked at the guide, and then he showed it to him.

“That is not your brother. It is you!” he said.

The man’s face changed a little—more than any other face had changed when its owner had been spoken to. On a mountain-top as the sun rises one is not afraid.

“The Lamp is lighted,” said Marco. “The Lamp is lighted.”

“God be thanked!” burst forth the man. And he took off his hat and bared his head. Then the rim behind the mountain’s shoulder leaped forth into a golden torrent of splendor.

And The Rat stood up, resting his weight on his crutches in utter silence, and stared and stared.

“That is three!” said Marco.

XXIII

THE SILVER HORN

During the next week, which they spent in journeying towards Vienna, they gave the Sign to three different persons at places which were on the way. In a village across the frontier in Bavaria they found a giant of an old man sitting on a bench under a tree before his mountain “Gasthaus” or inn; and when the four words were uttered, he stood up and bared his head as the guide had done. When Marco gave the Sign in some quiet place to a man who was alone, he noticed that they all did this and said their “God be thanked” devoutly, as if it were part of some religious ceremony. In a small town a few miles away he had to search some hours before he found a stalwart young shoemaker with bright red hair and a horseshoe-shaped scar on his forehead. He was not in his workshop when the boys first passed it, because, as they found out later, he had been climbing a mountain the day before, and had been detained in the descent because his companion had hurt himself.

When Marco went in and asked him to measure him for a pair of shoes, he was quite friendly and told them all about it.

“There are some good fellows who should not climb,” he said. “When they find themselves standing on a bit of rock jutting out over emptiness, their heads begin to whirl round—and then, if they don’t turn head over heels a few thousand feet, it is because some comrade is near enough to drag them back. There can be no ceremony then and they sometimes get hurt—as my friend did yesterday.”

“Did you never get hurt yourself?” The Rat asked.

“When I was eight years old I did that,” said the young shoemaker, touching the scar on his forehead. “But it was not much. My father was a guide and took me with him. He wanted me to begin early. There is nothing like it—climbing. I shall be at it again. This won’t do for me. I tried shoemaking because I was in love with a girl who wanted me to stay at home. She married another man. I am glad of it. Once a guide, always a guide.” He knelt down to measure Marco’s foot, and Marco bent a little forward.

“The Lamp is lighted,” he said.

There was no one in the shop, but the door was open and people were passing in the narrow street; so the shoemaker did not lift his red head. He went on measuring.

“God be thanked!” he said, in a low voice. “Do you want these shoes really, or did you only want me to take your measure?”

“I cannot wait until they are made,” Marco answered. “I must go on.”

“Yes, you must go on,” answered the shoemaker. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do—I’ll make them and keep them. Some great day might come when I shall show them to people and swagger about them.” He glanced round cautiously, and then ended, still bending over his measuring. “They will be called the shoes of the Bearer of the Sign. And I shall say, ‘He was only a lad. This was the size of his foot.’” Then he stood up with a great smile.

“There’ll be climbing enough to be done now,” he said, “and I look to see you again somewhere.”

When the boys went away, they talked it over.

“The hair-dresser didn’t want to be a hair-dresser, and the shoemaker didn’t want to make shoes,” said The Rat. “They both wanted to be mountain-climbers. There are mountains in Samavia and mountains on the way to it. You showed them to me on the map.

“Yes; and secret messengers who can climb anywhere, and cross dangerous places, and reconnoiter from points no one else can reach, can find out things and give signals other men cannot,” said Marco.

“That’s what I thought out,” The Rat answered. “That was what he meant when he said, ‘There will be climbing enough to be done now.’”

Strange were the places they went to and curiously unlike each other were the people to whom they carried their message. The most singular of all was an old woman who lived in so remote a place that the road which wound round and round the mountain, wound round it for miles and miles. It was not a bad road and it was an amazing one to travel, dragged in a small cart by a mule, when one could be dragged, and clambering slowly with rests between when one could not: the tree-covered precipices one looked down, the tossing whiteness of waterfalls, or the green foaming of rushing streams, and the immensity of farm- and village-scattered plains spreading themselves to the feet of other mountains shutting them in were breath-taking beauties to look down on, as the road mounted and wound round and round and higher and higher.

“How can any one live higher than this?” said The Rat as they sat on the thick moss by the wayside after the mule and cart had left them. “Look at the bare crags looming up above there. Let us look at her again. Her picture looked as if she were a hundred years old.”

Marco took out his hidden sketch. It seemed surely one of the strangest things in the world that a creature as old as this one seemed could reach such a place, or, having reached it, could ever descend to the world again to give aid to any person or thing.

Her old face was crossed and recrossed with a thousand wrinkles. Her profile was splendid yet and she had been a beauty in her day. Her eyes were like an eagle’s—and not an old eagle’s. And she had a long neck which held her old head high.

“How could she get here?” exclaimed The Rat.

“Those who sent us know, though we don’t,” said Marco. “Will you sit here and rest while I go on further?”

“No!” The Rat answered stubbornly. “I didn’t train myself to stay behind. But we shall come to bare-rock climbing soon and then I shall be obliged to stop,” and he said the last bitterly. He knew that, if Marco had come alone, he would have ridden in no cart but would have trudged upward and onward sturdily to the end of his journey.

But they did not reach the crags, as they had thought must be inevitable. Suddenly half-way to the sky, as it seemed, they came to a bend in the road and found themselves mounting into a new green world—an astonishing marvel of a world, with green velvet slopes and soft meadows and thick woodland, and cows feeding in velvet pastures, and—as if it had been snowed down from the huge bare mountain crags which still soared above into heaven—a mysterious, ancient, huddled village which, being thus snowed down, might have caught among the rocks and rested there through all time.

There it stood. There it huddled itself. And the monsters in the blue above it themselves looked down upon it as if it were an incredible thing—this ancient, steep-roofed, hanging-balconied, crumbling cluster of human nests, which seemed a thousand miles from the world. Marco and The Rat stood and stared at it. Then they sat down and stared at it.

“How did it get here?” The Rat cried.

Marco shook his head. He certainly could see no explanation of its being there. Perhaps some of the oldest villagers could tell stories of how its first chalets had gathered themselves together.

An old peasant driving a cow came down a steep path. He looked with a dull curiosity at The Rat and his crutches; but when Marco advanced and spoke to him in German, he did not seem to understand, but shook his head saying something in a sort of dialect Marco did not know.

“If they all speak like that, we shall have to make signs when we want to ask anything,” The Rat said. “What will she speak?”

“She will know the German for the Sign or we should not have been sent here,” answered Marco. “Come on.”

They made their way to the village, which huddled itself together evidently with the object of keeping itself warm when through the winter months the snows strove to bury it and the winds roared down from the huge mountain crags and tried to tear it from among its rocks. The doors and windows were few and small, and glimpses of the inside of the houses showed earthen floors and dark rooms. It was plain that it was counted a more comfortable thing to live without light than to let in the cold.

It was easy enough to reconnoiter. The few people they saw were evidently not surprised that strangers who discovered their unexpected existence should be curious and want to look at them and their houses.

The boys wandered about as if they were casual explorers, who having reached the place by chance were interested in all they saw. They went into the little Gasthaus and got some black bread and sausage and some milk. The mountaineer owner was a brawny fellow who understood some German. He told them that few strangers knew of the village but that bold hunters and climbers came for sport. In the forests on the mountain sides were bears and, in the high places, chamois. Now and again, some great gentlemen came with parties of the daring kind—very great gentlemen indeed, he said, shaking his head with pride. There was one who had castles in other mountains, but he liked best to come here. Marco began to wonder if several strange things might not be true if great gentlemen sometimes climbed to the mysterious place. But he had not been sent to give the Sign to a great gentleman. He had been sent to give it to an old woman with eyes like an eagle which was young.

He had a sketch in his sleeve, with that of her face, of her steep-roofed, black-beamed, balconied house. If they walked about a little, they would be sure to come upon it in this tiny place. Then he could go in and ask her for a drink of water.

They roamed about for an hour after they left the Gasthaus. They went into the little church and looked at the graveyard and wondered if it was not buried out of all sight in the winter. After they had done this, they sauntered out and walked through the huddled clusters of houses, examining each one as they drew near it and passed.

“I see it!” The Rat exclaimed at last. “It is that very old-looking one standing a little way from the rest. It is not as tumbled down as most of them. And there are some red flowers on the balcony.”

“Yes! That’s it!” said Marco.

They walked up to the low black door and, as he stopped on the threshold, Marco took off his cap. He did this because, sitting in the doorway on a low wooden chair, the old, old woman with the eagle eyes was sitting knitting.

There was no one else in the room and no one anywhere within sight. When the old, old woman looked up at him with her young eagle’s eyes, holding her head high on her long neck, Marco knew he need not ask for water or for anything else.

“The Lamp is lighted,” he said, in his low but strong and clear young voice.

She dropped her knitting upon her knees and gazed at him a moment in silence. She knew German it was clear, for it was in German she answered him.

“God be thanked!” she said. “Come in, young Bearer of the Sign, and bring your friend in with you. I live alone and not a soul is within hearing.”

She was a wonderful old woman. Neither Marco nor The Rat would live long enough to forget the hours they spent in her strange dark house. She kept them and made them spend the night with her.

“It is quite safe,” she said. “I live alone since my man fell into the crevasse and was killed because his rope broke when he was trying to save his comrade. So I have two rooms to spare and sometimes climbers are glad to sleep in them. Mine is a good warm house and I am well known in the village. You are very young,” she added shaking her head. “You are very young. You must have good blood in your veins to be trusted with this.”

“I have my father’s blood,” answered Marco.

“You are like some one I once saw,” the old woman said, and her eagle eyes set themselves hard upon him. “Tell me your name.”

There was no reason why he should not tell it to her.

“It is Marco Loristan,” he said.

“What! It is that!” she cried out, not loud but low.

To Marco’s amazement she got up from her chair and stood before him, showing what a tall old woman she really was. There was a startled, even an agitated, look in her face. And suddenly she actually made a sort of curtsey to him—bending her knee as peasants do when they pass a shrine.

“It is that!” she said again. “And yet they dare let you go on a journey like this! That speaks for your courage and for theirs.”

But Marco did not know what she meant. Her strange obeisance made him feel awkward. He stood up because his training had told him that when a woman stands a man also rises.

“The name speaks for the courage,” he said, “because it is my father’s.”

She watched him almost anxiously.

“You do not even know!” she breathed—and it was an exclamation and not a question.

“I know what I have been told to do,” he answered. “I do not ask anything else.”

“Who is that?” she asked, pointing to The Rat.

“He is the friend my father sent with me,” said Marco smiling. “He called him my aide-de-camp. It was a sort of joke because we had played soldiers together.”

It seemed as if she were obliged to collect her thoughts. She stood with her hand at her mouth, looking down at the earth floor.

“God guard you!” she said at last. “You are very—very young!”

“But all his years,” The Rat broke in, “he has been in training for just this thing. He did not know it was training, but it was. A soldier who had been trained for thirteen years would know his work.”

He was so eager that he forgot she could not understand English. Marco translated what he said into German and added: “What he says is true.”

She nodded her head, still with questioning and anxious eyes.

“Yes. Yes,” she muttered. “But you are very young.” Then she asked in a hesitating way:

“Will you not sit down until I do?”

“No,” answered Marco. “I would not sit while my mother or grandmother stood.”

“Then I must sit—and forget,” she said.

She passed her hand over her face as though she were sweeping away the sudden puzzled trouble in her expression. Then she sat down, as if she had obliged herself to become again the old peasant she had been when they entered.

“All the way up the mountain you wondered why an old woman should be given the Sign,” she said. “You asked each other how she could be of use.”

Neither Marco nor The Rat said anything.

“When I was young and fresh,” she went on. “I went to a castle over the frontier to be foster-mother to a child who was born a great noble—one who was near the throne. He loved me and I loved him. He was a strong child and he grew up a great hunter and climber. When he was not ten years old, my man taught him to climb. He always loved these mountains better than his own. He comes to see me as if he were only a young mountaineer. He sleeps in the room there,” with a gesture over her shoulder into the darkness. “He has great power and, if he chooses to do a thing, he will do it—just as he will attack the biggest bear or climb the most dangerous peak. He is one who can bring things about. It is very safe to talk in this room.”

Then all was quite clear. Marco and The Rat understood.

No more was said about the Sign. It had been given and that was enough. The old woman told them that they must sleep in one of her bedrooms. The next morning one of her neighbors was going down to the valley with a cart and he would help them on their way. The Rat knew that she was thinking of his crutches and he became restless.

“Tell her,” he said to Marco, “how I have trained myself until I can do what any one else can. And tell her I am growing stronger every day. Tell her I’ll show her what I can do. Your father wouldn’t have let me come as your aide if I hadn’t proved to him that I wasn’t a cripple. Tell her. She thinks I’m no use.”

Marco explained and the old woman listened attentively. When The Rat got up and swung himself about up and down the steep path near her house she seemed relieved. His extraordinary dexterity and firm swiftness evidently amazed her and gave her a confidence she had not felt at first.

“If he has taught himself to be like that just for love of your father, he will go to the end,” she said. “It is more than one could believe, that a pair of crutches could do such things.”

The Rat was pacified and could afterwards give himself up to watching her as closely as he wished to. He was soon “working out” certain things in his mind. What he watched was her way of watching Marco. It was as if she were fascinated and could not keep her eyes from him. She told them stories about the mountains and the strangers who came to climb with guides or to hunt. She told them about the storms, which sometimes seemed about to put an end to the little world among the crags. She described the winter when the snow buried them and the strong ones were forced to dig out the weak and some lived for days under the masses of soft whiteness, glad to keep their cows or goats in their rooms that they might share the warmth of their bodies. The villages were forced to be good neighbors to each other, for the man who was not ready to dig out a hidden chimney or buried door today might be left to freeze and starve in his snow tomb next week. Through the worst part of the winter no creature from the world below could make way to them to find out whether they were all dead or alive.

While she talked, she watched Marco as if she were always asking herself some question about him. The Rat was sure that she liked him and greatly admired his strong body and good looks. It was not necessary for him to carry himself slouchingly in her presence and he looked glowing and noble. There was a sort of reverence in her manner when she spoke to him. She reminded him of Lazarus more than once. When she gave them their evening meal, she insisted on waiting on him with a certain respectful ceremony. She would not sit at table with him, and The Rat began to realize that she felt that he himself should be standing to serve him.

“She thinks I ought to stand behind your chair as Lazarus stands behind your father’s,” he said to Marco. “Perhaps an aide ought to do it. Shall I? I believe it would please her.”

“A Bearer of the Sign is not a royal person,” answered Marco. “My father would not like it—and I should not. We are only two boys.”

It was very wonderful when, after their supper was over, they all three sat together before the fire.

The red glow of the bed of wood-coal and the orange yellow of the flame from the big logs filled the room with warm light, which made a mellow background for the figure of the old woman as she sat in her low chair and told them more and more enthralling stories.

Her eagle eyes glowed and her long neck held her head splendidly high as she described great feats of courage and endurance or almost superhuman daring in aiding those in awesome peril, and, when she glowed most in the telling, they always knew that the hero of the adventure had been her foster-child who was the baby born a great noble and near the throne. To her, he was the most splendid and adorable of human beings. Almost an emperor, but so warm and tender of heart that he never forgot the long-past days when she had held him on her knee and told him tales of chamois- and bear-hunting, and of the mountain-tops in mid-winter. He was her sun-god.

“Yes! Yes!” she said. “‘Good Mother,’ he calls me. And I bake him a cake on the hearth, as I did when he was ten years old and my man was teaching him to climb. And when he chooses that a thing shall be done—done it is! He is a great lord.”

The flames had died down and only the big bed of red coal made the room glow, and they were thinking of going to bed when the old woman started very suddenly, turning her head as if to listen.

Marco and The Rat heard nothing, but they saw that she did and they sat so still that each held his breath. So there was utter stillness for a few moments. Utter stillness.

Then they did hear something—a clear silver sound, piercing the pure mountain air.

The old woman sprang upright with the fire of delight in her eyes.

“It is his silver horn!” she cried out striking her hands together. “It is his own call to me when he is coming. He has been hunting somewhere and wants to sleep in his good bed here. Help me to put on more faggots,” to The Rat, “so that he will see the flame of them through the open door as he comes.”

“Shall we be in the way?” said Marco. “We can go at once.”

She was going towards the door to open it and she stopped a moment and turned.

“No, no!” she said. “He must see your face. He will want to see it. I want him to see—how young you are.”

She threw the door wide open and they heard the silver horn send out its gay call again. The brushwood and faggots The Rat had thrown on the coals crackled and sparkled and roared into fine flames, which cast their light into the road and threw out in fine relief the old figure which stood on the threshold and looked so tall.

And in but a few minutes her great lord came to her. And in his green hunting-suit with its green hat and eagle’s feather he was as splendid as she had said he was. He was big and royal-looking and laughing and he bent and kissed her as if he had been her own son.

“Yes, good Mother,” they heard him say. “I want my warm bed and one of your good suppers. I sent the others to the Gasthaus.”

He came into the redly glowing room and his head almost touched the blackened rafters. Then he saw the two boys.

“Who are these, good Mother?” he asked.

She lifted his hand and kissed it.

“They are the Bearers of the Sign,” she said rather softly. “‘The Lamp is lighted.’”

Then his whole look changed. His laughing face became quite grave and for a moment looked even anxious. Marco knew it was because he was startled to find them only boys. He made a step forward to look at them more closely.

“The Lamp is lighted! And you two bear the Sign!” he exclaimed. Marco stood out in the fire glow that he might see him well. He saluted with respect.

“My name is Marco Loristan, Highness,” he said. “And my father sent me.”

The change which came upon his face then was even greater than at first. For a second, Marco even felt that there was a flash of alarm in it. But almost at once that passed.

“Loristan is a great man and a great patriot,” he said. “If he sent you, it is because he knows you are the one safe messenger. He has worked too long for Samavia not to know what he does.”

Marco saluted again. He knew what it was right to say next.

“If we have your Highness’s permission to retire,” he said, “we will leave you and go to bed. We go down the mountain at sunrise.”

“Where next?” asked the hunter, looking at him with curious intentness.

“To Vienna, Highness,” Marco answered.

His questioner held out his hand, still with the intent interest in his eyes.

“Good night, fine lad,” he said. “Samavia has need to vaunt itself on its Sign-bearer. God go with you.”

He stood and watched him as he went toward the room in which he and his aide-de-camp were to sleep. The Rat followed him closely. At the little back door the old, old woman stood, having opened it for them. As Marco passed and bade her good night, he saw that she again made the strange obeisance, bending the knee as he went by.

XXIV

“HOW SHALL WE FIND HIM?”

In Vienna they came upon a pageant. In celebration of a century-past victory the Emperor drove in state and ceremony to attend at the great cathedral and to do honor to the ancient banners and laurel-wreathed statue of a long-dead soldier-prince. The broad pavements of the huge chief thoroughfare were crowded with a cheering populace watching the martial pomp and splendor as it passed by with marching feet, prancing horses, and glitter of scabbard and chain, which all seemed somehow part of music in triumphant bursts.

The Rat was enormously thrilled by the magnificence of the imperial place. Its immense spaces, the squares and gardens, reigned over by statues of emperors, and warriors, and queens made him feel that all things on earth were possible. The palaces and stately piles of architecture, whose surmounting equestrian bronzes ramped high in the air clear cut and beautiful against the sky, seemed to sweep out of his world all atmosphere but that of splendid cities down whose broad avenues emperors rode with waving banners, tramping, jangling soldiery before and behind, and golden trumpets blaring forth. It seemed as if it must always be like this—that lances and cavalry and emperors would never cease to ride by. “I should like to stay here a long time,” he said almost as if he were in a dream. “I should like to see it all.”

He leaned on his crutches in the crowd and watched the glitter of the passing pageant. Now and then he glanced at Marco, who watched also with a steady eye which, The Rat saw, nothing would escape: How absorbed he always was in the Game! How impossible it was for him to forget it or to remember it only as a boy would! Often it seemed that he was not a boy at all. And the Game, The Rat knew in these days, was a game no more but a thing of deep and deadly earnest—a thing which touched kings and thrones, and concerned the ruling and swaying of great countries. And they—two lads pushed about by the crowd as they stood and stared at the soldiers—carried with them that which was even now lighting the Lamp. The blood in The Rat’s veins ran quickly and made him feel hot as he remembered certain thoughts which had forced themselves into his mind during the past weeks. As his brain had the trick of “working things out,” it had, during the last fortnight at least, been following a wonderful even if rather fantastic and feverish fancy. A mere trifle had set it at work, but, its labor once begun, things which might have once seemed to be trifles appeared so no longer. When Marco was asleep, The Rat lay awake through thrilled and sometimes almost breathless midnight hours, looking backward and recalling every detail of their lives since they had known each other. Sometimes it seemed to him that almost everything he remembered—the Game from first to last above all—had pointed to but one thing. And then again he would all at once feel that he was a fool and had better keep his head steady. Marco, he knew, had no wild fancies. He had learned too much and his mind was too well balanced. He did not try to “work out things.” He only thought of what he was under orders to do.

“But,” said The Rat more than once in these midnight hours, “if it ever comes to a draw whether he is to be saved or I am, he is the one that must come to no harm. Killing can’t take long—and his father sent me with him.”

This thought passed through his mind as the tramping feet went by. As a sudden splendid burst of approaching music broke upon his ear, a queer look twisted his face. He realized the contrast between this day and that first morning behind the churchyard, when he had sat on his platform among the Squad and looked up and saw Marco in the arch at the end of the passage. And because he had been good-looking and had held himself so well, he had thrown a stone at him. Yes—blind gutter-bred fool that he’d been:—his first greeting to Marco had been a stone, just because he was what he was. As they stood here in the crowd in this far-off foreign city, it did not seem as if it could be true that it was he who had done it.

He managed to work himself closer to Marco’s side. “Isn’t it splendid?” he said, “I wish I was an emperor myself. I’d have these fellows out like this every day.” He said it only because he wanted to say something, to speak, as a reason for getting closer to him. He wanted to be near enough to touch him and feel that they were really together and that the whole thing was not a sort of magnificent dream from which he might awaken to find himself lying on his heap of rags in his corner of the room in Bone Court.

The crowd swayed forward in its eagerness to see the principal feature of the pageant—the Emperor in his carriage. The Rat swayed forward with the rest to look as it passed.

A handsome white-haired and mustached personage in splendid uniform decorated with jeweled orders and with a cascade of emerald-green plumes nodding in his military hat gravely saluted the shouting people on either side. By him sat a man uniformed, decorated, and emerald-plumed also, but many years younger.

Marco’s arm touched The Rat’s almost at the same moment that his own touched Marco. Under the nodding plumes each saw the rather tired and cynical pale face, a sketch of which was hidden in the slit in Marco’s sleeve.

“Is the one who sits with the Emperor an Archduke?” Marco asked the man nearest to him in the crowd. The man answered amiably enough. No, he was not, but he was a certain Prince, a descendant of the one who was the hero of the day. He was a great favorite of the Emperor’s and was also a great personage, whose palace contained pictures celebrated throughout Europe.

“He pretends it is only pictures he cares for,” he went on, shrugging his shoulders and speaking to his wife, who had begun to listen, “but he is a clever one, who amuses himself with things he professes not to concern himself about—big things. It’s his way to look bored, and interested in nothing, but it’s said he’s a wizard for knowing dangerous secrets.”

“Does he live at the Hofburg with the Emperor?” asked the woman, craning her neck to look after the imperial carriage.

“No, but he’s often there. The Emperor is lonely and bored too, no doubt, and this one has ways of making him forget his troubles. It’s been told me that now and then the two dress themselves roughly, like common men, and go out into the city to see what it’s like to rub shoulders with the rest of the world. I daresay it’s true. I should like to try it myself once in a while, if I had to sit on a throne and wear a crown.”

The two boys followed the celebration to its end. They managed to get near enough to see the entrance to the church where the service was held and to get a view of the ceremonies at the banner-draped and laurel-wreathed statue. They saw the man with the pale face several times, but he was always so enclosed that it was not possible to get within yards of him. It happened once, however, that he looked through a temporary break in the crowding people and saw a dark strong-featured and remarkably intent boy’s face, whose vivid scrutiny of him caught his eye. There was something in the fixedness of its attention which caused him to look at it curiously for a few seconds, and Marco met his gaze squarely.

“Look at me! Look at me!” the boy was saying to him mentally. “I have a message for you. A message!”

The tired eyes in the pale face rested on him with a certain growing light of interest and curiosity, but the crowding people moved and the temporary break closed up, so that the two could see each other no more. Marco and The Rat were pushed backward by those taller and stronger than themselves until they were on the outskirts of the crowd.

“Let us go to the Hofburg,” said Marco. “They will come back there, and we shall see him again even if we can’t get near.”

To the Hofburg they made their way through the less crowded streets, and there they waited as near to the great palace as they could get. They were there when, the ceremonies at an end, the imperial carriages returned, but, though they saw their man again, they were at some distance from him and he did not see them.

Then followed four singular days. They were singular days because they were full of tantalizing incidents. Nothing seemed easier than to hear talk of, and see the Emperor’s favorite, but nothing was more impossible than to get near to him. He seemed rather a favorite with the populace, and the common people of the shopkeeping or laboring classes were given to talking freely of him—of where he was going and what he was doing. Tonight he would be sure to be at this great house or that, at this ball or that banquet. There was no difficulty in discovering that he would be sure to go to the opera, or the theatre, or to drive to Schonbrunn with his imperial master. Marco and The Rat heard casual speech of him again and again, and from one part of the city to the other they followed and waited for him. But it was like chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. He was evidently too brilliant and important a person to be allowed to move about alone. There were always people with him who seemed absorbed in his languid cynical talk. Marco thought that he never seemed to care much for his companions, though they on their part always seemed highly entertained by what he was saying. It was noticeable that they laughed a great deal, though he himself scarcely even smiled.

“He’s one of those chaps with the trick of saying witty things as if he didn’t see the fun in them himself,” The Rat summed him up. “Chaps like that are always cleverer than the other kind.”

“He’s too high in favor and too rich not to be followed about,” they heard a man in a shop say one day, “but he gets tired of it. Sometimes, when he’s too bored to stand it any longer, he gives it out that he’s gone into the mountains somewhere, and all the time he’s shut up alone with his pictures in his own palace.”

That very night The Rat came in to their attic looking pale and disappointed. He had been out to buy some food after a long and arduous day in which they had covered much ground, had seen their man three times, and each time under circumstances which made him more inaccessible than ever. They had come back to their poor quarters both tired and ravenously hungry.

The Rat threw his purchase on to the table and himself into a chair.

“He’s gone to Budapest,” he said. “Now how shall we find him?”

Marco was rather pale also, and for a moment he looked paler. The day had been a hard one, and in their haste to reach places at a long distance from each other they had forgotten their need of food.

They sat silent for a few moments because there seemed to be nothing to say. “We are too tired and hungry to be able to think well,” Marco said at last. “Let us eat our supper and then go to sleep. Until we’ve had a rest, we must ‘let go.’”

“Yes. There’s no good in talking when you’re tired,” The Rat answered a trifle gloomily. “You don’t reason straight. We must ‘let go.’”

Their meal was simple but they ate well and without words.

Even when they had finished and undressed for the night, they said very little.

“Where do our thoughts go when we are asleep?” The Rat inquired casually after he was stretched out in the darkness. “They must go somewhere. Let’s send them to find out what to do next.”

“It’s not as still as it was on the Gaisberg. You can hear the city roaring,” said Marco drowsily from his dark corner. “We must make a ledge—for ourselves.”

Sleep made it for them—deep, restful, healthy sleep. If they had been more resentful of their ill luck and lost labor, it would have come less easily and have been less natural. In their talks of strange things they had learned that one great secret of strength and unflagging courage is to know how to “let go”—to cease thinking over an anxiety until the right moment comes. It was their habit to “let go” for hours sometimes, and wander about looking at places and things—galleries, museums, palaces, giving themselves up with boyish pleasure and eagerness to all they saw. Marco was too intimate with the things worth seeing, and The Rat too curious and feverishly wide-awake to allow of their missing much.

The Rat’s image of the world had grown until it seemed to know no boundaries which could hold its wealth of wonders. He wanted to go on and on and see them all.

When Marco opened his eyes in the morning, he found The Rat lying looking at him. Then they both sat up in bed at the same time.

“I believe we are both thinking the same thing,” Marco said.

They frequently discovered that they were thinking the same things.

“So do I,” answered The Rat. “It shows how tired we were that we didn’t think of it last night.”

“Yes, we are thinking the same thing,” said Marco. “We have both remembered what we heard about his shutting himself up alone with his pictures and making people believe he had gone away.”

“He’s in his palace now,” The Rat announced.

“Do you feel sure of that, too?” asked Marco. “Did you wake up and feel sure of it the first thing?”

“Yes,” answered The Rat. “As sure as if I’d heard him say it himself.”

“So did I,” said Marco.

“That’s what our thoughts brought back to us,” said The Rat, “when we ‘let go’ and sent them off last night.” He sat up hugging his knees and looking straight before him for some time after this, and Marco did not interrupt his meditations.

The day was a brilliant one, and, though their attic had only one window, the sun shone in through it as they ate their breakfast. After it, they leaned on the window’s ledge and talked about the Prince’s garden. They talked about it because it was a place open to the public and they had walked round it more than once. The palace, which was not a large one, stood in the midst of it. The Prince was good-natured enough to allow quiet and well-behaved people to saunter through. It was not a fashionable promenade but a pleasant retreat for people who sometimes took their work or books and sat on the seats placed here and there among the shrubs and flowers.

“When we were there the first time, I noticed two things,” Marco said. “There is a stone balcony which juts out from the side of the palace which looks on the Fountain Garden. That day there were chairs on it as if the Prince and his visitors sometimes sat there. Near it, there was a very large evergreen shrub and I saw that there was a hollow place inside it. If some one wanted to stay in the gardens all night to watch the windows when they were lighted and see if any one came out alone upon the balcony, he could hide himself in the hollow place and stay there until the morning.”

“Is there room for two inside the shrub?” The Rat asked.

“No. I must go alone,” said Marco.

XXV

A VOICE IN THE NIGHT

Late that afternoon there wandered about the gardens two quiet, inconspicuous, rather poorly dressed boys. They looked at the palace, the shrubs, and the flower-beds, as strangers usually did, and they sat on the seats and talked as people were accustomed to seeing boys talk together. It was a sunny day and exceptionally warm, and there were more saunterers and sitters than usual, which was perhaps the reason why the portier at the entrance gates gave such slight notice to the pair that he did not observe that, though two boys came in, only one went out. He did not, in fact, remember, when he saw The Rat swing by on his crutches at closing-time, that he had entered in company with a dark-haired lad who walked without any aid. It happened that, when The Rat passed out, the portier at the entrance was much interested in the aspect of the sky, which was curiously threatening. There had been heavy clouds hanging about all day and now and then blotting out the sunshine entirely, but the sun had refused to retire altogether. Just now, however, the clouds had piled themselves in thunderous, purplish mountains, and the sun had been forced to set behind them.

“It’s been a sort of battle since morning,” the portier said. “There will be some crashes and cataracts tonight.” That was what The Rat had thought when they had sat in the Fountain Garden on a seat which gave them a good view of the balcony and the big evergreen shrub, which they knew had the hollow in the middle, though its circumference was so imposing. “If there should be a big storm, the evergreen will not save you much, though it may keep off the worst,” The Rat said. “I wish there was room for two.”

He would have wished there was room for two if he had seen Marco marching to the stake. As the gardens emptied, the boys rose and walked round once more, as if on their way out. By the time they had sauntered toward the big evergreen, nobody was in the Fountain Garden, and the last loiterers were moving toward the arched stone entrance to the streets.

When they drew near one side of the evergreen, the two were together. When The Rat swung out on the other side of it, he was alone! No one noticed that anything had happened; no one looked back. So The Rat swung down the walks and round the flower-beds and passed into the street. And the portier looked at the sky and made his remark about the “crashes” and “cataracts.”

As the darkness came on, the hollow in the shrub seemed a very safe place. It was not in the least likely that any one would enter the closed gardens; and if by rare chance some servant passed through, he would not be in search of people who wished to watch all night in the middle of an evergreen instead of going to bed and to sleep. The hollow was well inclosed with greenery, and there was room to sit down when one was tired of standing.

Marco stood for a long time because, by doing so, he could see plainly the windows opening on the balcony if he gently pushed aside some flexible young boughs. He had managed to discover in his first visit to the gardens that the windows overlooking the Fountain Garden were those which belonged to the Prince’s own suite of rooms. Those which opened on to the balcony lighted his favorite apartment, which contained his best-loved books and pictures and in which he spent most of his secluded leisure hours.

Marco watched these windows anxiously. If the Prince had not gone to Budapest,—if he were really only in retreat, and hiding from his gay world among his treasures,—he would be living in his favorite rooms and lights would show themselves. And if there were lights, he might pass before a window because, since he was inclosed in his garden, he need not fear being seen. The twilight deepened into darkness and, because of the heavy clouds, it was very dense. Faint gleams showed themselves in the lower part of the palace, but none was lighted in the windows Marco watched. He waited so long that it became evident that none was to be lighted at all. At last he loosed his hold on the young boughs and, after standing a few moments in thought, sat down upon the earth in the midst of his embowered tent. The Prince was not in his retreat; he was probably not in Vienna, and the rumor of his journey to Budapest had no doubt been true. So much time lost through making a mistake—but it was best to have made the venture. Not to have made it would have been to lose a chance. The entrance was closed for the night and there was no getting out of the gardens until they were opened for the next day. He must stay in his hiding-place until the time when people began to come and bring their books and knitting and sit on the seats. Then he could stroll out without attracting attention. But he had the night before him to spend as best he could. That would not matter at all. He could tuck his cap under his head and go to sleep on the ground. He could command himself to waken once every half-hour and look for the lights. He would not go to sleep until it was long past midnight—so long past that there would not be one chance in a hundred that anything could happen. But the clouds which made the night so dark were giving forth low rumbling growls. At intervals a threatening gleam of light shot across them and a sudden swish of wind rushed through the trees in the garden. This happened several times, and then Marco began to hear the patter of raindrops. They were heavy and big drops, but few at first, and then there was a new and more powerful rush of wind, a jagged dart of light in the sky, and a tremendous crash. After that the clouds tore themselves open and poured forth their contents in floods. After the protracted struggle of the day it all seemed to happen at once, as if a horde of huge lions had at one moment been let loose: flame after flame of lightning, roar and crash and sharp reports of thunder, shrieks of hurricane wind, torrents of rain, as if some tidal-wave of the skies had gathered and rushed and burst upon the earth. It was such a storm as people remember for a lifetime and which in few lifetimes is seen at all.

Marco stood still in the midst of the rage and flooding, blinding roar of it. After the first few minutes he knew he could do nothing to shield himself. Down the garden paths he heard cataracts rushing. He held his cap pressed against his eyes because he seemed to stand in the midst of darting flames. The crashes, cannon reports and thunderings, and the jagged streams of light came so close to one another that he seemed deafened as well as blinded. He wondered if he should ever be able to hear human voices again when it was over. That he was drenched to the skin and that the water poured from his clothes as if he were himself a cataract was so small a detail that he was scarcely aware of it. He stood still, bracing his body, and waited. If he had been a Samavian soldier in the trenches and such a storm had broken upon him and his comrades, they could only have braced themselves and waited. This was what he found himself thinking when the tumult and downpour were at their worst. There were men who had waited in the midst of a rain of bullets.

It was not long after this thought had come to him that there occurred the first temporary lull in the storm. Its fury perhaps reached its height and broke at that moment. A yellow flame had torn its jagged way across the heavens, and an earth-rending crash had thundered itself into rumblings which actually died away before breaking forth again. Marco took his cap from his eyes and drew a long breath. He drew two long breaths. It was as he began drawing a third and realizing the strange feeling of the almost stillness about him that he heard a new kind of sound at the side of the garden nearest his hiding-place. It sounded like the creak of a door opening somewhere in the wall behind the laurel hedge. Some one was coming into the garden by a private entrance. He pushed aside the young boughs again and tried to see, but the darkness was too dense. Yet he could hear if the thunder would not break again. There was the sound of feet on the wet gravel, the footsteps of more than one person coming toward where he stood, but not as if afraid of being heard; merely as if they were at liberty to come in by what entrance they chose. Marco remained very still. A sudden hope gave him a shock of joy. If the man with the tired face chose to hide himself from his acquaintances, he might choose to go in and out by a private entrance. The footsteps drew near, crushing the wet gravel, passed by, and seemed to pause somewhere near the balcony; and then flame lit up the sky again and the thunder burst forth once more.

But this was its last great peal. The storm was at an end. Only fainter and fainter rumblings and mutterings and paler and paler darts followed. Even they were soon over, and the cataracts in the paths had rushed themselves silent. But the darkness was still deep.

It was deep to blackness in the hollow of the evergreen. Marco stood in it, streaming with rain, but feeling nothing because he was full of thought. He pushed aside his greenery and kept his eyes on the place in the blackness where the windows must be, though he could not see them. It seemed that he waited a long time, but he knew it only seemed so really. He began to breathe quickly because he was waiting for something.

Suddenly he saw exactly where the windows were—because they were all lighted!

His feeling of relief was great, but it did not last very long. It was true that something had been gained in the certainty that his man had not left Vienna. But what next? It would not be so easy to follow him if he chose only to go out secretly at night. What next? To spend the rest of the night watching a lighted window was not enough. Tomorrow night it might not be lighted. But he kept his gaze fixed upon it. He tried to fix all his will and thought-power on the person inside the room. Perhaps he could reach him and make him listen, even though he would not know that any one was speaking to him. He knew that thoughts were strong things. If angry thoughts in one man’s mind will create anger in the mind of another, why should not sane messages cross the line?

“I must speak to you. I must speak to you!” he found himself saying in a low intense voice. “I am outside here waiting. Listen! I must speak to you!”

He said it many times and kept his eyes fixed upon the window which opened on to the balcony. Once he saw a man’s figure cross the room, but he could not be sure who it was. The last distant rumblings of thunder had died away and the clouds were breaking. It was not long before the dark mountainous billows broke apart, and a brilliant full moon showed herself sailing in the rift, suddenly flooding everything with light. Parts of the garden were silver white, and the tree shadows were like black velvet. A silvery lance pierced even into the hollow of Marco’s evergreen and struck across his face.

Perhaps it was this sudden change which attracted the attention of those inside the balconied room. A man’s figure appeared at the long windows. Marco saw now that it was the Prince. He opened the windows and stepped out on to the balcony.

“It is all over,” he said quietly. And he stood with his face lifted, looking at the great white sailing moon.

He stood very still and seemed for the moment to forget the world and himself. It was a wonderful, triumphant queen of a moon. But something brought him back to earth. A low, but strong and clear, boy-voice came up to him from the garden path below.

“The Lamp is lighted. The Lamp is lighted,” it said, and the words sounded almost as if some one were uttering a prayer. They seemed to call to him, to arrest him, to draw him.

He stood still a few seconds in dead silence. Then he bent over the balustrade. The moonlight had not broken the darkness below.

“That is a boy’s voice,” he said in a low tone, “but I cannot see who is speaking.”

“Yes, it is a boy’s voice,” it answered, in a way which somehow moved him, because it was so ardent. “It is the son of Stefan Loristan. The Lamp is lighted.”

“Wait. I am coming down to you,” the Prince said.

In a few minutes Marco heard a door open gently not far from where he stood. Then the man he had been following so many days appeared at his side.

“How long have you been here?” he asked.

“Before the gates closed. I hid myself in the hollow of the big shrub there, Highness,” Marco answered.

“Then you were out in the storm?”

“Yes, Highness.”

The Prince put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I cannot see you—but it is best to stand in the shadow. You are drenched to the skin.”

“I have been able to give your Highness—the Sign,” Marco whispered. “A storm is nothing.”

There was a silence. Marco knew that his companion was pausing to turn something over in his mind.

“So-o?” he said slowly, at length. “The Lamp is lighted, And you are sent to bear the Sign.” Something in his voice made Marco feel that he was smiling.

“What a race you are! What a race—you Samavian Loristans!”

He paused as if to think the thing over again.

“I want to see your face,” he said next. “Here is a tree with a shaft of moonlight striking through the branches. Let us step aside and stand under it.”

Marco did as he was told. The shaft of moonlight fell upon his uplifted face and showed its young strength and darkness, quite splendid for the moment in a triumphant glow of joy in obstacles overcome. Raindrops hung on his hair, but he did not look draggled, only very wet and picturesque. He had reached his man. He had given the Sign.

The Prince looked him over with interested curiosity.

“Yes,” he said in his cool, rather dragging voice. “You are the son of Stefan Loristan. Also you must be taken care of. You must come with me. I have trained my household to remain in its own quarters until I require its service. I have attached to my own apartments a good safe little room where I sometimes keep people. You can dry your clothes and sleep there. When the gardens are opened again, the rest will be easy.”

But though he stepped out from under the trees and began to move towards the palace in the shadow, Marco noticed that he moved hesitatingly, as if he had not quite decided what he should do. He stopped rather suddenly and turned again to Marco, who was following him.

“There is some one in the room I just now left,” he said, “an old man—whom it might interest to see you. It might also be a good thing for him to feel interest in you. I choose that he shall see you—as you are.”

“I am at your command, Highness,” Marco answered. He knew his companion was smiling again.

“You have been in training for more centuries than you know,” he said; “and your father has prepared you to encounter the unexpected without surprise.”

They passed under the balcony and paused at a low stone doorway hidden behind shrubs. The door was a beautiful one, Marco saw when it was opened, and the corridor disclosed was beautiful also, though it had an air of quiet and aloofness which was not so much secret as private. A perfect though narrow staircase mounted from it to the next floor. After ascending it, the Prince led the way through a short corridor and stopped at the door at the end of it. “We are going in here,” he said.

It was a wonderful room—the one which opened on to the balcony. Each piece of furniture in it, the hangings, the tapestries, and pictures on the wall were all such as might well have found themselves adorning a museum. Marco remembered the common report of his escort’s favorite amusement of collecting wonders and furnishing his house with the things others exhibited only as marvels of art and handicraft. The place was rich and mellow with exquisitely chosen beauties.

In a massive chair upon the hearth sat a figure with bent head. It was a tall old man with white hair and moustache. His elbows rested upon the arm of his chair and he leaned his forehead on his hand as if he were weary.

Marco’s companion crossed the room and stood beside him, speaking in a lowered voice. Marco could not at first hear what he said. He himself stood quite still, waiting. The white-haired man lifted his head and listened. It seemed as though almost at once he was singularly interested. The lowered voice was slightly raised at last and Marco heard the last two sentences:

“The only son of Stefan Loristan. Look at him.”

The old man in the chair turned slowly and looked, steadily, and with questioning curiosity touched with grave surprise. He had keen and clear blue eyes.

Then Marco, still erect and silent, waited again. The Prince had merely said to him, “an old man whom it might interest to see you.” He had plainly intended that, whatsoever happened, he must make no outward sign of seeing more than he had been told he would see—“an old man.” It was for him to show no astonishment or recognition. He had been brought here not to see but to be seen. The power of remaining still under scrutiny, which The Rat had often envied him, stood now in good stead because he had seen the white head and tall form not many days before, surmounted by brilliant emerald plumes, hung with jeweled decorations, in the royal carriage, escorted by banners, and helmets, and following troops whose tramping feet kept time to bursts of military music while the populace bared their heads and cheered.

“He is like his father,” this personage said to the Prince. “But if any one but Loristan had sent him—His looks please me.” Then suddenly to Marco, “You were waiting outside while the storm was going on?”

“Yes, sir,” Marco answered.

Then the two exchanged some words still in the lowered voice.

“You read the news as you made your journey?” he was asked. “You know how Samavia stands?”

“She does not stand,” said Marco. “The Iarovitch and the Maranovitch have fought as hyenas fight, until each has torn the other into fragments—and neither has blood or strength left.”

The two glanced at each other.

“A good simile,” said the older person. “You are right. If a strong party rose—and a greater power chose not to interfere—the country might see better days.” He looked at him a few moments longer and then waved his hand kindly.

“You are a fine Samavian,” he said. “I am glad of that. You may go. Good night.”

Marco bowed respectfully and the man with the tired face led him out of the room.

It was just before he left him in the small quiet chamber in which he was to sleep that the Prince gave him a final curious glance. “I remember now,” he said. “In the room, when you answered the question about Samavia, I was sure that I had seen you before. It was the day of the celebration. There was a break in the crowd and I saw a boy looking at me. It was you.”

“Yes,” said Marco, “I have followed you each time you have gone out since then, but I could never get near enough to speak. Tonight seemed only one chance in a thousand.”

“You are doing your work more like a man than a boy,” was the next speech, and it was made reflectively. “No man could have behaved more perfectly than you did just now, when discretion and composure were necessary.” Then, after a moment’s pause, “He was deeply interested and deeply pleased. Good night.”

* * * *

When the gardens had been thrown open the next morning and people were passing in and out again, Marco passed out also. He was obliged to tell himself two or three times that he had not wakened from an amazing dream. He quickened his pace after he had crossed the street, because he wanted to get home to the attic and talk to The Rat. There was a narrow side-street it was necessary for him to pass through if he wished to make a short cut. As he turned into it, he saw a curious figure leaning on crutches against a wall. It looked damp and forlorn, and he wondered if it could be a beggar. It was not. It was The Rat, who suddenly saw who was approaching and swung forward. His face was pale and haggard and he looked worn and frightened. He dragged off his cap and spoke in a voice which was hoarse as a crow’s.

“God be thanked!” he said. “God be thanked!” as people always said it when they received the Sign, alone. But there was a kind of anguish in his voice as well as relief.

“Aide-de-camp!” Marco cried out—The Rat had begged him to call him so. “What have you been doing? How long have you been here?”

“Ever since I left you last night,” said The Rat clutching tremblingly at his arm as if to make sure he was real. “If there was not room for two in the hollow, there was room for one in the street. Was it my place to go off duty and leave you alone—was it?”

“You were out in the storm?”

“Weren’t you?” said The Rat fiercely. “I huddled against the wall as well as I could. What did I care? Crutches don’t prevent a fellow waiting. I wouldn’t have left you if you’d given me orders. And that would have been mutiny. When you did not come out as soon as the gates opened, I felt as if my head got on fire. How could I know what had happened? I’ve not the nerve and backbone you have. I go half mad.” For a second or so Marco did not answer. But when he put his hand on the damp sleeve, The Rat actually started, because it seemed as though he were looking into the eyes of Stefan Loristan.

“You look just like your father!” he exclaimed, in spite of himself. “How tall you are!”

“When you are near me,” Marco said, in Loristan’s own voice, “when you are near me, I feel—I feel as if I were a royal prince attended by an army. You are my army.” And he pulled off his cap with quick boyishness and added, “God be thanked!”

The sun was warm in the attic window when they reached their lodging, and the two leaned on the rough sill as Marco told his story. It took some time to relate; and when he ended, he took an envelope from his pocket and showed it to The Rat. It contained a flat package of money.

“He gave it to me just before he opened the private door,” Marco explained. “And he said to me, ‘It will not be long now. After Samavia, go back to London as quickly as you can—as quickly as you can!’”

“I wonder—what he meant?” The Rat said, slowly. A tremendous thought had shot through his mind. But it was not a thought he could speak of to Marco.

“I cannot tell. I thought that it was for some reason he did not expect me to know,” Marco said. “We will do as he told us. As quickly as we can.” They looked over the newspapers, as they did every day. All that could be gathered from any of them was that the opposing armies of Samavia seemed each to have reached the culmination of disaster and exhaustion. Which party had the power left to take any final step which could call itself a victory, it was impossible to say. Never had a country been in a more desperate case.

“It is the time!” said The Rat, glowering over his map. “If the Secret Party rises suddenly now, it can take Melzarr almost without a blow. It can sweep through the country and disarm both armies. They’re weakened—they’re half starved—they’re bleeding to death; they want to be disarmed. Only the Iarovitch and the Maranovitch keep on with the struggle because each is fighting for the power to tax the people and make slaves of them. If the Secret Party does not rise, the people will, and they’ll rush on the palaces and kill every Maranovitch and Iarovitch they find. And serve them right!”

“Let us spend the rest of the day in studying the road-map again,” said Marco. “Tonight we must be on the way to Samavia!”

XXVI

ACROSS THE FRONTIER

That one day, a week later, two tired and travel-worn boy-mendicants should drag themselves with slow and weary feet across the frontier line between Jiardasia and Samavia, was not an incident to awaken suspicion or even to attract attention. War and hunger and anguish had left the country stunned and broken. Since the worst had happened, no one was curious as to what would befall them next. If Jiardasia herself had become a foe, instead of a friendly neighbor, and had sent across the border galloping hordes of soldiery, there would only have been more shrieks, and home-burnings, and slaughter which no one dare resist. But, so far, Jiardasia had remained peaceful. The two boys—one of them on crutches—had evidently traveled far on foot. Their poor clothes were dusty and travel-stained, and they stopped and asked for water at the first hut across the line. The one who walked without crutches had some coarse bread in a bag slung over his shoulder, and they sat on the roadside and ate it as if they were hungry. The old grandmother who lived alone in the hut sat and stared at them without any curiosity. She may have vaguely wondered why any one crossed into Samavia in these days. But she did not care to know their reason. Her big son had lived in a village which belonged to the Maranovitch and he had been called out to fight for his lords. He had not wanted to fight and had not known what the quarrel was about, but he was forced to obey. He had kissed his handsome wife and four sturdy children, blubbering aloud when he left them. His village and his good crops and his house must be left behind. Then the Iarovitch swept through the pretty little cluster of homesteads which belonged to their enemy. They were mad with rage because they had met with great losses in a battle not far away, and, as they swooped through, they burned and killed, and trampled down fields and vineyards. The old woman’s son never saw either the burned walls of his house or the bodies of his wife and children, because he had been killed himself in the battle for which the Iarovitch were revenging themselves. Only the old grandmother who lived in the hut near the frontier line and stared vacantly at the passers-by remained alive. She wearily gazed at people and wondered why she did not hear news from her son and her grandchildren. But that was all.

When the boys were over the frontier and well on their way along the roads, it was not difficult to keep out of sight if it seemed necessary. The country was mountainous and there were deep and thick forests by the way—forests so far-reaching and with such thick undergrowth that full-grown men could easily have hidden themselves. It was because of this, perhaps, that this part of the country had seen little fighting. There was too great opportunity for secure ambush for a foe. As the two travelers went on, they heard of burned villages and towns destroyed, but they were towns and villages nearer Melzarr and other fortress-defended cities, or they were in the country surrounding the castles and estates of powerful nobles and leaders. It was true, as Marco had said to the white-haired personage, that the Maranovitch and Iarovitch had fought with the savageness of hyenas until at last the forces of each side lay torn and bleeding, their strength, their resources, their supplies exhausted.

Each day left them weaker and more desperate. Europe looked on with small interest in either party but with growing desire that the disorder should end and cease to interfere with commerce. All this and much more Marco and The Rat knew, but, as they made their cautious way through byways of the maimed and tortured little country, they learned other things. They learned that the stories of its beauty and fertility were not romances. Its heaven-reaching mountains, its immense plains of rich verdure on which flocks and herds might have fed by thousands, its splendor of deep forest and broad clear rushing rivers had a primeval majesty such as the first human creatures might have found on earth in the days of the Garden of Eden. The two boys traveled through forest and woodland when it was possible to leave the road. It was safe to thread a way among huge trees and tall ferns and young saplings. It was not always easy but it was safe. Sometimes they saw a charcoal-burner’s hut or a shelter where a shepherd was hiding with the few sheep left to him. Each man they met wore the same look of stony suffering in his face; but, when the boys begged for bread and water, as was their habit, no one refused to share the little he had. It soon became plain to them that they were thought to be two young fugitives whose homes had probably been destroyed and who were wandering about with no thought but that of finding safety until the worst was over. That one of them traveled on crutches added to their apparent helplessness, and that he could not speak the language of the country made him more an object of pity. The peasants did not know what language he spoke. Sometimes a foreigner came to find work in this small town or that. The poor lad might have come to the country with his father and mother and then have been caught in the whirlpool of war and tossed out on the world parent-less. But no one asked questions. Even in their desolation they were silent and noble people who were too courteous for curiosity.

“In the old days they were simple and stately and kind. All doors were open to travelers. The master of the poorest hut uttered a blessing and a welcome when a stranger crossed his threshold. It was the custom of the country,” Marco said. “I read about it in a book of my father’s. About most of the doors the welcome was carved in stone. It was this—‘The Blessing of the Son of God, and Rest within these Walls.’”

“They are big and strong,” said The Rat. “And they have good faces. They carry themselves as if they had been drilled—both men and women.”

It was not through the blood-drenched part of the unhappy land their way led them, but they saw hunger and dread in the villages they passed. Crops which should have fed the people had been taken from them for the use of the army; flocks and herds had been driven away, and faces were gaunt and gray. Those who had as yet only lost crops and herds knew that homes and lives might be torn from them at any moment. Only old men and women and children were left to wait for any fate which the chances of war might deal out to them.

When they were given food from some poor store, Marco would offer a little money in return. He dare not excite suspicion by offering much. He was obliged to let it be imagined that in his flight from his ruined home he had been able to snatch at and secrete some poor hoard which might save him from starvation. Often the women would not take what he offered. Their journey was a hard and hungry one. They must make it all on foot and there was little food to be found. But each of them knew how to live on scant fare. They traveled mostly by night and slept among the ferns and undergrowth through the day. They drank from running brooks and bathed in them. Moss and ferns made soft and sweet-smelling beds, and trees roofed them. Sometimes they lay long and talked while they rested. And at length a day came when they knew they were nearing their journey’s end.

“It is nearly over now,” Marco said, after they had thrown themselves down in the forest in the early hours of one dewy morning. “He said ‘After Samavia, go back to London as quickly as you can—as quickly as you can.’ He said it twice. As if—something were going to happen.”

“Perhaps it will happen more suddenly than we think—the thing he meant,” answered The Rat.

Suddenly he sat up on his elbow and leaned towards Marco.

“We are in Samavia!” he said “We two are in Samavia! And we are near the end!”

Marco rose on his elbow also. He was very thin as a result of hard travel and scant feeding. His thinness made his eyes look immense and black as pits. But they burned and were beautiful with their own fire.

“Yes,” he said, breathing quickly. “And though we do not know what the end will be, we have obeyed orders. The Prince was next to the last one. There is only one more. The old priest.”

“I have wanted to see him more than I have wanted to see any of the others,” The Rat said.

“So have I,” Marco answered. “His church is built on the side of this mountain. I wonder what he will say to us.”

Both had the same reason for wanting to see him. In his youth he had served in the monastery over the frontier—the one which, till it was destroyed in a revolt, had treasured the five-hundred-year-old story of the beautiful royal lad brought to be hidden among the brotherhood by the ancient shepherd. In the monastery the memory of the Lost Prince was as the memory of a saint. It had been told that one of the early brothers, who was a decorator and a painter, had made a picture of him with a faint halo shining about his head. The young acolyte who had served there must have heard wonderful legends. But the monastery had been burned, and the young acolyte had in later years crossed the frontier and become the priest of a few mountaineers whose little church clung to the mountain side. He had worked hard and faithfully and was worshipped by his people. Only the secret Forgers of the Sword knew that his most ardent worshippers were those with whom he prayed and to whom he gave blessings in dark caverns under the earth, where arms piled themselves and men with dark strong faces sat together in the dim light and laid plans and wrought schemes.

This Marco and The Rat did not know as they talked of their desire to see him.

“He may not choose to tell us anything,” said Marco. “When we have given him the Sign, he may turn away and say nothing as some of the others did. He may have nothing to say which we should hear. Silence may be the order for him, too.”

It would not be a long or dangerous climb to the little church on the rock. They could sleep or rest all day and begin it at twilight. So after they had talked of the old priest and had eaten their black bread, they settled themselves to sleep under cover of the thick tall ferns.

It was a long and deep sleep which nothing disturbed. So few human beings ever climbed the hill, except by the narrow rough path leading to the church, that the little wild creatures had not learned to be afraid of them. Once, during the afternoon, a hare hopping along under the ferns to make a visit stopped by Marco’s head, and, after looking at him a few seconds with his lustrous eyes, began to nibble the ends of his hair. He only did it from curiosity and because he wondered if it might be a new kind of grass, but he did not like it and stopped nibbling almost at once, after which he looked at it again, moving the soft sensitive end of his nose rapidly for a second or so, and then hopped away to attend to his own affairs. A very large and handsome green stag-beetle crawled from one end of The Rat’s crutches to the other, but, having done it, he went away also. Two or three times a bird, searching for his dinner under the ferns, was surprised to find the two sleeping figures, but, as they lay so quietly, there seemed nothing to be frightened about. A beautiful little field mouse running past discovered that there were crumbs lying about and ate all she could find on the moss. After that she crept into Marco’s pocket and found some excellent ones and had quite a feast. But she disturbed nobody and the boys slept on.

It was a bird’s evening song which awakened them both. The bird alighted on the branch of a tree near them and her trill was rippling clear and sweet. The evening air had freshened and was fragrant with hillside scents. When Marco first rolled over and opened his eyes, he thought the most delicious thing on earth was to waken from sleep on a hillside at evening and hear a bird singing. It seemed to make exquisitely real to him the fact that he was in Samavia—that the Lamp was lighted and his work was nearly done. The Rat awakened when he did, and for a few minutes both lay on their backs without speaking. At last Marco said, “The stars are coming out. We can begin to climb, Aide-de-camp.”

Then they both got up and looked at each other.

“The last one!” The Rat said. “Tomorrow we shall be on our way back to London—Number 7 Philibert Place. After all the places we’ve been to—what will it look like?”

“It will be like wakening out of a dream,” said Marco. “It’s not beautiful—Philibert Place. But he will be there,” And it was as if a light lighted itself in his face and shone through the very darkness of it.

And The Rat’s face lighted in almost exactly the same way. And he pulled off his cap and stood bare-headed. “We’ve obeyed orders,” he said. “We’ve not forgotten one. No one has noticed us, no one has thought of us. We’ve blown through the countries as if we had been grains of dust.”

Marco’s head was bared, too, and his face was still shining. “God be thanked!” he said. “Let us begin to climb.”

They pushed their way through the ferns and wandered in and out through trees until they found the little path. The hill was thickly clothed with forest and the little path was sometimes dark and steep; but they knew that, if they followed it, they would at last come out to a place where there were scarcely any trees at all, and on a crag they would find the tiny church waiting for them. The priest might not be there. They might have to wait for him, but he would be sure to come back for morning Mass and for vespers, wheresoever he wandered between times.

There were many stars in the sky when at last a turn of the path showed them the church above them. It was little and built of rough stone. It looked as if the priest himself and his scattered flock might have broken and carried or rolled bits of the hill to put it together. It had the small, round, mosque-like summit the Turks had brought into Europe in centuries past. It was so tiny that it would hold but a very small congregation—and close to it was a shed-like house, which was of course the priest’s.

The two boys stopped on the path to look at it.

“There is a candle burning in one of the little windows,” said Marco.

“There is a well near the door—and some one is beginning to draw water,” said The Rat, next. “It is too dark to see who it is. Listen!”

They listened and heard the bucket descend on the chains, and splash in the water. Then it was drawn up, and it seemed some one drank long. Then they saw a dim figure move forward and stand still. Then they heard a voice begin to pray aloud, as if the owner, being accustomed to utter solitude, did not think of earthly hearers.

“Come,” Marco said. And they went forward.

Because the stars were so many and the air so clear, the priest heard their feet on the path, and saw them almost as soon as he heard them. He ended his prayer and watched them coming. A lad on crutches, who moved as lightly and easily as a bird—and a lad who, even yards away, was noticeable for a bearing of his body which was neither haughty nor proud but set him somehow aloof from every other lad one had ever seen. A magnificent lad—though, as he drew near, the starlight showed his face thin and his eyes hollow as if with fatigue or hunger.

“And who is this one?” the old priest murmured to himself. “Who?”

Marco drew up before him and made a respectful reverence. Then he lifted his black head, squared his shoulders and uttered his message for the last time.

“The Lamp is lighted, Father,” he said. “The Lamp is lighted.”

The old priest stood quite still and gazed into his face. The next moment he bent his head so that he could look at him closely. It seemed almost as if he were frightened and wanted to make sure of something. At the moment it flashed through The Rat’s mind that the old, old woman on the mountain-top had looked frightened in something the same way.

“I am an old man,” he said. “My eyes are not good. If I had a light”—and he glanced towards the house.

It was The Rat who, with one whirl, swung through the door and seized the candle. He guessed what he wanted. He held it himself so that the flare fell on Marco’s face.

The old priest drew nearer and nearer. He gasped for breath. “You are the son of Stefan Loristan!” he cried. “It is his son who brings the Sign.”

He fell upon his knees and hid his face in his hands. Both the boys heard him sobbing and praying—praying and sobbing at once.

They glanced at each other. The Rat was bursting with excitement, but he felt a little awkward also and wondered what Marco would do. An old fellow on his knees, crying, made a chap feel as if he didn’t know what to say. Must you comfort him or must you let him go on?

Marco only stood quite still and looked at him with understanding and gravity.

“Yes, Father,” he said. “I am the son of Stefan Loristan, and I have given the Sign to all. You are the last one. The Lamp is lighted. I could weep for gladness, too.”

The priest’s tears and prayers ended. He rose to his feet—a rugged-faced old man with long and thick white hair which fell on his shoulders—and smiled at Marco while his eyes were still wet.

“You have passed from one country to another with the message?” he said. “You were under orders to say those four words?”

“Yes, Father,” answered Marco.

“That was all? You were to say no more?”

“I know no more. Silence has been the order since I took my oath of allegiance when I was a child. I was not old enough to fight, or serve, or reason about great things. All I could do was to be silent, and to train myself to remember, and be ready when I was called. When my father saw I was ready, he trusted me to go out and give the Sign. He told me the four words. Nothing else.”

The old man watched him with a wondering face.

“If Stefan Loristan does not know best,” he said, “who does?”

“He always knows,” answered Marco proudly. “Always.” He waved his hand like a young king toward The Rat. He wanted each man they met to understand the value of The Rat. “He chose for me this companion,” he added. “I have done nothing alone.”

“He let me call myself his aide-de-camp!” burst forth The Rat. “I would be cut into inch-long strips for him.”

Marco translated.

Then the priest looked at The Rat and slowly nodded his head. “Yes,” he said. “He knew best. He always knows best. That I see.”

“How did you know I was my father’s son?” asked Marco. “You have seen him?”

“No,” was the answer; “but I have seen a picture which is said to be his image—and you are the picture’s self. It is, indeed, a strange thing that two of God’s creatures should be so alike. There is a purpose in it.” He led them into his bare small house and made them rest, and drink goat’s milk, and eat food. As he moved about the hut-like place, there was a mysterious and exalted look on his face.

“You must be refreshed before we leave here,” he said at last. “I am going to take you to a place hidden in the mountains where there are men whose hearts will leap at the sight of you. To see you will give them new power and courage and new resolve. Tonight they meet as they or their ancestors have met for centuries, but now they are nearing the end of their waiting. And I shall bring them the son of Stefan Loristan, who is the Bearer of the Sign!”

They ate the bread and cheese and drank the goat’s milk he gave them, but Marco explained that they did not need rest as they had slept all day. They were prepared to follow him when he was ready.

The last faint hint of twilight had died into night and the stars were at their thickest when they set out together. The white-haired old man took a thick knotted staff in his hand and led the way. He knew it well, though it was a rugged and steep one with no track to mark it. Sometimes they seemed to be walking around the mountain, sometimes they were climbing, sometimes they dragged themselves over rocks or fallen trees, or struggled through almost impassable thickets; more than once they descended into ravines and, almost at the risk of their lives, clambered and drew themselves with the aid of the undergrowth up the other side. The Rat was called upon to use all his prowess, and sometimes Marco and the priest helped him across obstacles with the aid of his crutch.

“Haven’t I shown tonight whether I’m a cripple or not?” he said once to Marco. “You can tell him about this, can’t you? And that the crutches helped instead of being in the way?”

They had been out nearly two hours when they came to a place where the undergrowth was thick and a huge tree had fallen crashing down among it in some storm. Not far from the tree was an outcropping rock. Only the top of it was to be seen above the heavy tangle.

They had pushed their way through the jungle of bushes and young saplings, led by their companion. They did not know where they would be led next and were supposed to push forward further when the priest stopped by the outcropping rock. He stood silent a few minutes—quite motionless—as if he were listening to the forest and the night. But there was utter stillness. There was not even a breeze to stir a leaf, or a half-wakened bird to sleepily chirp.

He struck the rock with his staff—twice, and then twice again.

Marco and The Rat stood with bated breath.

They did not wait long. Presently each of them found himself leaning forward, staring with almost unbelieving eyes, not at the priest or his staff, but at the rock itself!

It was moving! Yes, it moved. The priest stepped aside and it slowly turned, as if worked by a lever. As it turned, it gradually revealed a chasm of darkness dimly lighted, and the priest spoke to Marco. “There are hiding-places like this all through Samavia,” he said. “Patience and misery have waited long in them. They are the caverns of the Forgers of the Sword. Come!”

XXVII

“IT IS THE LOST PRINCE! IT IS IVOR!”

Many times since their journey had begun the boys had found their hearts beating with the thrill and excitement of things. The story of which their lives had been a part was a pulse-quickening experience. But as they carefully made their way down the steep steps leading seemingly into the bowels of the earth, both Marco and The Rat felt as though the old priest must hear the thudding in their young sides.

“‘The Forgers of the Sword.’ Remember every word they say,” The Rat whispered, “so that you can tell it to me afterwards. Don’t forget anything! I wish I knew Samavian.”

At the foot of the steps stood the man who was evidently the sentinel who worked the lever that turned the rock. He was a big burly peasant with a good watchful face, and the priest gave him a greeting and a blessing as he took from him the lantern he held out.

They went through a narrow and dark passage, and down some more steps, and turned a corner into another corridor cut out of rock and earth. It was a wider corridor, but still dark, so that Marco and The Rat had walked some yards before their eyes became sufficiently accustomed to the dim light to see that the walls themselves seemed made of arms stacked closely together.

“The Forgers of the Sword!” The Rat was unconsciously mumbling to himself, “The Forgers of the Sword!”

It must have taken years to cut out the rounding passage they threaded their way through, and longer years to forge the solid, bristling walls. But The Rat remembered the story the stranger had told his drunken father, of the few mountain herdsmen who, in their savage grief and wrath over the loss of their prince, had banded themselves together with a solemn oath which had been handed down from generation to generation. The Samavians were a long-memoried people, and the fact that their passion must be smothered had made it burn all the more fiercely. Five hundred years ago they had first sworn their oath; and kings had come and gone, had died or been murdered, and dynasties had changed, but the Forgers of the Sword had not changed or forgotten their oath or wavered in their belief that some time—some time, even after the long dark years—the soul of their Lost Prince would be among them once more, and that they would kneel at the feet and kiss the hands of him for whose body that soul had been reborn. And for the last hundred years their number and power and their hiding places had so increased that Samavia was at last honeycombed with them. And they only waited, breathless,—for the Lighting of the Lamp.

The old priest knew how breathlessly, and he knew what he was bringing them. Marco and The Rat, in spite of their fond boy-imaginings, were not quite old enough to know how fierce and full of flaming eagerness the breathless waiting of savage full-grown men could be. But there was a tense-strung thrill in knowing that they who were being led to them were the Bearers of the Sign. The Rat went hot and cold; he gnawed his fingers as he went. He could almost have shrieked aloud, in the intensity of his excitement, when the old priest stopped before a big black door!

Marco made no sound. Excitement or danger always made him look tall and quite pale. He looked both now.

The priest touched the door, and it opened.

They were looking into an immense cavern. Its walls and roof were lined with arms—guns, swords, bayonets, javelins, daggers, pistols, every weapon a desperate man might use. The place was full of men, who turned towards the door when it opened. They all made obeisance to the priest, but Marco realized almost at the same instant that they started on seeing that he was not alone.

They were a strange and picturesque crowd as they stood under their canopy of weapons in the lurid torchlight. Marco saw at once that they were men of all classes, though all were alike roughly dressed. They were huge mountaineers, and plainsmen young and mature in years. Some of the biggest were men with white hair but with bodies of giants, and with determination in their strong jaws. There were many of these, Marco saw, and in each man’s eyes, whether he were young or old, glowed a steady unconquered flame. They had been beaten so often, they had been oppressed and robbed, but in the eyes of each one was this unconquered flame which, throughout all the long tragedy of years had been handed down from father to son. It was this which had gone on through centuries, keeping its oath and forging its swords in the caverns of the earth, and which today was—waiting.

The old priest laid his hand on Marco’s shoulder, and gently pushed him before him through the crowd which parted to make way for them. He did not stop until the two stood in the very midst of the circle, which fell back gazing wonderingly. Marco looked up at the old man because for several seconds he did not speak. It was plain that he did not speak because he also was excited, and could not. He opened his lips and his voice seemed to fail him. Then he tried again and spoke so that all could hear—even the men at the back of the gazing circle.

“My children,” he said, “this is the son of Stefan Loristan, and he comes to bear the Sign. My son,” to Marco, “speak!”

Then Marco understood what he wished, and also what he felt. He felt it himself, that magnificent uplifting gladness, as he spoke, holding his black head high and lifting his right hand.

“The Lamp is Lighted, brothers!” he cried. “The Lamp is Lighted!”

Then The Rat, who stood apart, watching, thought that the strange world within the cavern had gone mad! Wild smothered cries broke forth, men caught each other in passionate embrace, they fell upon their knees, they clutched one another sobbing, they wrung each other’s hands, they leaped into the air. It was as if they could not bear the joy of hearing that the end of their waiting had come at last. They rushed upon Marco, and fell at his feet. The Rat saw big peasants kissing his shoes, his hands, every scrap of his clothing they could seize. The wild circle swayed and closed upon him until The Rat was afraid. He did not know that, overpowered by this frenzy of emotion, his own excitement was making him shake from head to foot like a leaf, and that tears were streaming down his cheeks. The swaying crowd hid Marco from him, and he began to fight his way towards him because his excitement increased with fear. The ecstasy-frenzied crowd of men seemed for the moment to have almost ceased to be sane. Marco was only a boy. They did not know how fiercely they were pressing upon him and keeping away the very air.

“Don’t kill him! Don’t kill him!” yelled The Rat, struggling forward. “Stand back, you fools! I’m his aide-de-camp! Let me pass!”

And though no one understood his English, one or two suddenly remembered they had seen him enter with the priest and so gave way. But just then the old priest lifted his hand above the crowd, and spoke in a voice of stern command.

“Stand back, my children!” he cried. “Madness is not the homage you must bring to the son of Stefan Loristan. Obey! Obey!” His voice had a power in it that penetrated even the wildest herdsmen. The frenzied mass swayed back and left space about Marco, whose face The Rat could at last see. It was very white with emotion, and in his eyes there was a look which was like awe.

The Rat pushed forward until he stood beside him. He did not know that he almost sobbed as he spoke.

“I’m your aide-de-camp,” he said. “I’m going to stand here! Your father sent me! I’m under orders! I thought they’d crush you to death.”

He glared at the circle about them as if, instead of worshippers distraught with adoration, they had been enemies. The old priest seeing him, touched Marco’s arm.

“Tell him he need not fear,” he said. “It was only for the first few moments. The passion of their souls drove them wild. They are your slaves.”

“Those at the back might have pushed the front ones on until they trampled you under foot in spite of themselves!” The Rat persisted.

“No,” said Marco. “They would have stopped if I had spoken.”

“Why didn’t you speak then?” snapped The Rat.

“All they felt was for Samavia, and for my father,” Marco said, “and for the Sign. I felt as they did.”

The Rat was somewhat softened. It was true, after all. How could he have tried to quell the outbursts of their worship of Loristan—of the country he was saving for them—of the Sign which called them to freedom? He could not.

Then followed a strange and picturesque ceremonial. The priest went about among the encircling crowd and spoke to one man after another—sometimes to a group. A larger circle was formed. As the pale old man moved about, The Rat felt as if some religious ceremony were going to be performed. Watching it from first to last, he was thrilled to the core.

At the end of the cavern a block of stone had been cut out to look like an altar. It was covered with white, and against the wall above it hung a large picture veiled by a curtain. From the roof there swung before it an ancient lamp of metal suspended by chains. In front of the altar was a sort of stone dais. There the priest asked Marco to stand, with his aide-de-camp on the lower level in attendance. A knot of the biggest herdsmen went out and returned. Each carried a huge sword which had perhaps been of the earliest made in the dark days gone by. The bearers formed themselves into a line on either side of Marco. They raised their swords and formed a pointed arch above his head and a passage twelve men long. When the points first clashed together The Rat struck himself hard upon his breast. His exultation was too keen to endure. He gazed at Marco standing still—in that curiously splendid way in which both he and his father could stand still—and wondered how he could do it. He looked as if he were prepared for any strange thing which could happen to him—because he was “under orders.” The Rat knew that he was doing whatsoever he did merely for his father’s sake. It was as if he felt that he was representing his father, though he was a mere boy; and that because of this, boy as he was, he must bear himself nobly and remain outwardly undisturbed.

At the end of the arch of swords, the old priest stood and gave a sign to one man after another. When the sign was given to a man he walked under the arch to the dais, and there knelt and, lifting Marco’s hand to his lips, kissed it with passionate fervor. Then he returned to the place he had left. One after another passed up the aisle of swords, one after another knelt, one after the other kissed the brown young hand, rose and went away. Sometimes The Rat heard a few words which sounded almost like a murmured prayer, sometimes he heard a sob as a shaggy head bent, again and again he saw eyes wet with tears. Once or twice Marco spoke a few Samavian words, and the face of the man spoken to flamed with joy. The Rat had time to see, as Marco had seen, that many of the faces were not those of peasants. Some of them were clear cut and subtle and of the type of scholars or nobles. It took a long time for them all to kneel and kiss the lad’s hand, but no man omitted the ceremony; and when at last it was at an end, a strange silence filled the cavern. They stood and gazed at each other with burning eyes.

The priest moved to Marco’s side, and stood near the altar. He leaned forward and took in his hand a cord which hung from the veiled picture—he drew it and the curtain fell apart. There seemed to stand gazing at them from between its folds a tall kingly youth with deep eyes in which the stars of God were stilly shining, and with a smile wonderful to behold. Around the heavy locks of his black hair the long dead painter of missals had set a faint glow of light like a halo.

“Son of Stefan Loristan,” the old priest said, in a shaken voice, “it is the Lost Prince! It is Ivor!”

Then every man in the room fell on his knees. Even the men who had upheld the archway of swords dropped their weapons with a crash and knelt also. He was their saint—this boy! Dead for five hundred years, he was their saint still.

“Ivor! Ivor!” the voices broke into a heavy murmur. “Ivor! Ivor!” as if they chanted a litany.

Marco started forward, staring at the picture, his breath caught in his throat, his lips apart.

“But—but—” he stammered, “but if my father were as young as he is—he would be like him!”

“When you are as old as he is, you will be like him—you!” said the priest. And he let the curtain fall.

The Rat stood staring with wide eyes from Marco to the picture and from the picture to Marco. And he breathed faster and faster and gnawed his finger ends. But he did not utter a word. He could not have done it, if he tried.

Then Marco stepped down from the dais as if he were in a dream, and the old man followed him. The men with swords sprang to their feet and made their archway again with a new clash of steel. The old man and the boy passed under it together. Now every man’s eyes were fixed on Marco. At the heavy door by which he had entered, he stopped and turned to meet their glances. He looked very young and thin and pale, but suddenly his father’s smile was lighted in his face. He said a few words in Samavian clearly and gravely, saluted, and passed out.

“What did you say to them?” gasped The Rat, stumbling after him as the door closed behind them and shut in the murmur of impassioned sound.

“There was only one thing to say,” was the answer. “They are men—I am only a boy. I thanked them for my father, and told them he would never—never forget.”

XXVIII

“EXTRA! EXTRA! EXTRA!”

It was raining in London—pouring. It had been raining for two weeks, more or less, generally more. When the train from Dover drew in at Charing Cross, the weather seemed suddenly to have considered that it had so far been too lenient and must express itself much more vigorously. So it had gathered together its resources and poured them forth in a deluge which surprised even Londoners.

The rain so beat against and streamed down the windows of the third-class carriage in which Marco and The Rat sat that they could not see through them.

They had made their homeward journey much more rapidly than they had made the one on which they had been outward bound. It had of course taken them some time to tramp back to the frontier, but there had been no reason for stopping anywhere after they had once reached the railroads. They had been tired sometimes, but they had slept heavily on the wooden seats of the railway carriages. Their one desire was to get home. No. 7 Philibert Place rose before them in its noisy dinginess as the one desirable spot on earth. To Marco it held his father. And it was Loristan alone that The Rat saw when he thought of it. Loristan as he would look when he saw him come into the room with Marco, and stand up and salute, and say: “I have brought him back, sir. He has carried out every single order you gave him—every single one. So have I.” So he had. He had been sent as his companion and attendant, and he had been faithful in every thought. If Marco would have allowed him, he would have waited upon him like a servant, and have been proud of the service. But Marco would never let him forget that they were only two boys and that one was of no more importance than the other. He had secretly even felt this attitude to be a sort of grievance. It would have been more like a game if one of them had been the mere servitor of the other, and if that other had blustered a little, and issued commands, and demanded sacrifices. If the faithful vassal could have been wounded or cast into a dungeon for his young commander’s sake, the adventure would have been more complete. But though their journey had been full of wonders and rich with beauties, though the memory of it hung in The Rat’s mind like a background of tapestry embroidered in all the hues of the earth with all the splendors of it, there had been no dungeons and no wounds. After the adventure in Munich their unimportant boyishness had not even been observed by such perils as might have threatened them. As The Rat had said, they had “blown like grains of dust” through Europe and had been as nothing. And this was what Loristan had planned, this was what his grave thought had wrought out. If they had been men, they would not have been so safe.

From the time they had left the old priest on the hillside to begin their journey back to the frontier, they both had been given to long silences as they tramped side by side or lay on the moss in the forests. Now that their work was done, a sort of reaction had set in. There were no more plans to be made and no more uncertainties to contemplate. They were on their way back to No. 7 Philibert Place—Marco to his father, The Rat to the man he worshipped. Each of them was thinking of many things. Marco was full of longing to see his father’s face and hear his voice again. He wanted to feel the pressure of his hand on his shoulder—to be sure that he was real and not a dream. This last was because during this homeward journey everything that had happened often seemed to be a dream. It had all been so wonderful—the climber standing looking down at them the morning they awakened on the Gaisburg; the mountaineer shoemaker measuring his foot in the small shop; the old, old woman and her noble lord; the Prince with his face turned upward as he stood on the balcony looking at the moon; the old priest kneeling and weeping for joy; the great cavern with the yellow light upon the crowd of passionate faces; the curtain which fell apart and showed the still eyes and the black hair with the halo about it! Now that they were left behind, they all seemed like things he had dreamed. But he had not dreamed them; he was going back to tell his father about them. And how good it would be to feel his hand on his shoulder!

The Rat gnawed his finger ends a great deal. His thoughts were more wild and feverish than Marco’s. They leaped forward in spite of him. It was no use to pull himself up and tell himself that he was a fool. Now that all was over, he had time to be as great a fool as he was inclined to be. But how he longed to reach London and stand face to face with Loristan! The sign was given. The Lamp was lighted. What would happen next? His crutches were under his arms before the train drew up.

“We’re there! We’re there!” he cried restlessly to Marco. They had no luggage to delay them. They took their bags and followed the crowd along the platform. The rain was rattling like bullets against the high glassed roof. People turned to look at Marco, seeing the glow of exultant eagerness in his face. They thought he must be some boy coming home for the holidays and going to make a visit at a place he delighted in. The rain was dancing on the pavements when they reached the entrance.

“A cab won’t cost much,” Marco said, “and it will take us quickly.”

They called one and got into it. Each of them had flushed cheeks, and Marco’s eyes looked as if he were gazing at something a long way off—gazing at it, and wondering.

“We’ve come back!” said The Rat, in an unsteady voice. “We’ve been—and we’ve come back!” Then suddenly turning to look at Marco, “Does it ever seem to you as if, perhaps, it—it wasn’t true?”

“Yes,” Marco answered, “but it was true. And it’s done.” Then he added after a second or so of silence, just what The Rat had said to himself, “What next?” He said it very low.

The way to Philibert Place was not long. When they turned into the roaring, untidy road, where the busses and drays and carts struggled past each other with their loads, and the tired-faced people hurried in crowds along the pavement, they looked at them all feeling that they had left their dream far behind indeed. But they were at home.

It was a good thing to see Lazarus open the door and stand waiting before they had time to get out of the cab. Cabs stopped so seldom before houses in Philibert Place that the inmates were always prompt to open their doors. When Lazarus had seen this one stop at the broken iron gate, he had known whom it brought. He had kept an eye on the windows faithfully for many a day—even when he knew that it was too soon, even if all was well, for any travelers to return.

He bore himself with an air more than usually military and his salute when Marco crossed the threshold was formal stateliness itself. But his greeting burst from his heart.

“God be thanked!” he said in his deep growl of joy. “God be thanked!”

When Marco put forth his hand, he bent his grizzled head and kissed it devoutly.

“God be thanked!” he said again.

“My father?” Marco began, “my father is out?” If he had been in the house, he knew he would not have stayed in the back sitting-room.

“Sir,” said Lazarus, “will you come with me into his room? You, too, sir,” to The Rat. He had never said “sir” to him before.

He opened the door of the familiar room, and the boys entered. The room was empty.

Marco did not speak; neither did The Rat. They both stood still in the middle of the shabby carpet and looked up at the old soldier. Both had suddenly the same feeling that the earth had dropped from beneath their feet. Lazarus saw it and spoke fast and with tremor. He was almost as agitated as they were.

“He left me at your service—at your command”—he began.

“Left you?” said Marco.

“He left us, all three, under orders—to wait,” said Lazarus. “The Master has gone.”

The Rat felt something hot rush into his eyes. He brushed it away that he might look at Marco’s face. The shock had changed it very much. Its glowing eager joy had died out, it had turned paler and his brows were drawn together. For a few seconds he did not speak at all, and, when he did speak, The Rat knew that his voice was steady only because he willed that it should be so.

“If he has gone,” he said, “it is because he had a strong reason. It was because he also was under orders.”

“He said that you would know that,” Lazarus answered. “He was called in such haste that he had not a moment in which to do more than write a few words. He left them for you on his desk there.”

Marco walked over to the desk and opened the envelope which was lying there. There were only a few lines on the sheet of paper inside and they had evidently been written in the greatest haste. They were these:

“The Life of my life—for Samavia.”

“He was called—to Samavia,” Marco said, and the thought sent his blood rushing through his veins. “He has gone to Samavia!”

Lazarus drew his hand roughly across his eyes and his voice shook and sounded hoarse.

“There has been great disaffection in the camps of the Maranovitch,” he said. “The remnant of the army has gone mad. Sir, silence is still the order, but who knows—who knows? God alone.”

He had not finished speaking before he turned his head as if listening to sounds in the road. They were the kind of sounds which had broken up The Squad, and sent it rushing down the passage into the street to seize on a newspaper. There was to be heard a commotion of newsboys shouting riotously some startling piece of news which had called out an “Extra.”

The Rat heard it first and dashed to the front door. As he opened it a newsboy running by shouted at the topmost power of his lungs the news he had to sell: “Assassination of King Michael Maranovitch by his own soldiers! Assassination of the Maranovitch! Extra! Extra! Extra!”

When The Rat returned with a newspaper, Lazarus interposed between him and Marco with great and respectful ceremony. “Sir,” he said to Marco, “I am at your command, but the Master left me with an order which I was to repeat to you. He requested you not to read the newspapers until he himself could see you again.”

Both boys fell back.

“Not read the papers!” they exclaimed together.

Lazarus had never before been quite so reverential and ceremonious.

“Your pardon, sir,” he said. “I may read them at your orders, and report such things as it is well that you should know. There have been dark tales told and there may be darker ones. He asked that you would not read for yourself. If you meet again—when you meet again”—he corrected himself hastily—“when you meet again, he says you will understand. I am your servant. I will read and answer all such questions as I can.”

The Rat handed him the paper and they returned to the back room together.

“You shall tell us what he would wish us to hear,” Marco said.

The news was soon told. The story was not a long one as exact details had not yet reached London. It was briefly that the head of the Maranovitch party had been put to death by infuriated soldiers of his own army. It was an army drawn chiefly from a peasantry which did not love its leaders, or wish to fight, and suffering and brutal treatment had at last roused it to furious revolt.

“What next?” said Marco.

“If I were a Samavian—” began The Rat and then he stopped.

Lazarus stood biting his lips, but staring stonily at the carpet. Not The Rat alone but Marco also noted a grim change in him. It was grim because it suggested that he was holding himself under an iron control. It was as if while tortured by anxiety he had sworn not to allow himself to look anxious and the resolve set his jaw hard and carved new lines in his rugged face. Each boy thought this in secret, but did not wish to put it into words. If he was anxious, he could only be so for one reason, and each realized what the reason must be. Loristan had gone to Samavia—to the torn and bleeding country filled with riot and danger. If he had gone, it could only have been because its danger called him and he went to face it at its worst. Lazarus had been left behind to watch over them. Silence was still the order, and what he knew he could not tell them, and perhaps he knew little more than that a great life might be lost.

Because his master was absent, the old soldier seemed to feel that he must comfort himself with a greater ceremonial reverence than he had ever shown before. He held himself within call, and at Marco’s orders, as it had been his custom to hold himself with regard to Loristan. The ceremonious service even extended itself to The Rat, who appeared to have taken a new place in his mind. He also seemed now to be a person to be waited upon and replied to with dignity and formal respect.

When the evening meal was served, Lazarus drew out Loristan’s chair at the head of the table and stood behind it with a majestic air.

“Sir,” he said to Marco, “the Master requested that you take his seat at the table until—while he is not with you.”

Marco took the seat in silence.

At two o’clock in the morning, when the roaring road was still, the light from the street lamp, shining into the small bedroom, fell on two pale boy faces. The Rat sat up on his sofa bed in the old way with his hands clasped round his knees. Marco lay flat on his hard pillow. Neither of them had been to sleep and yet they had not talked a great deal. Each had secretly guessed a good deal of what the other did not say.

“There is one thing we must remember,” Marco had said, early in the night. “We must not be afraid.”

“No,” answered The Rat, almost fiercely, “we must not be afraid.”

“We are tired; we came back expecting to be able to tell it all to him. We have always been looking forward to that. We never thought once that he might be gone. And he was gone. Did you feel as if—” he turned towards the sofa, “as if something had struck you on the chest?”

“Yes,” The Rat answered heavily. “Yes.”

“We weren’t ready,” said Marco. “He had never gone before; but we ought to have known he might some day be—called. He went because he was called. He told us to wait. We don’t know what we are waiting for, but we know that we must not be afraid. To let ourselves be afraid would be breaking the Law.”

“The Law!” groaned The Rat, dropping his head on his hands, “I’d forgotten about it.”

“Let us remember it,” said Marco. “This is the time. ‘Hate not. Fear not!’” He repeated the last words again and again. “Fear not! Fear not,” he said. “Nothing can harm him.”

The Rat lifted his head, and looked at the bed sideways.

“Did you think—” he said slowly—“did you ever think that perhaps he knew where the descendant of the Lost Prince was?”

Marco answered even more slowly.

“If any one knew—surely he might. He has known so much,” he said.

“Listen to this!” broke forth The Rat. “I believe he has gone to tell the people. If he does—if he could show them—all the country would run mad with joy. It wouldn’t be only the Secret Party. All Samavia would rise and follow any flag he chose to raise. They’ve prayed for the Lost Prince for five hundred years, and if they believed they’d got him once more, they’d fight like madmen for him. But there would not be any one to fight. They’d all want the same thing! If they could see the man with Ivor’s blood in his veins, they’d feel he had come back to them—risen from the dead. They’d believe it!”

He beat his fists together in his frenzy of excitement. “It’s the time! It’s the time!” he cried. “No man could let such a chance go by! He must tell them—he must. That must be what he’s gone for. He knows—he knows—he’s always known!” And he threw himself back on his sofa and flung his arms over his face, lying there panting.

“If it is the time,” said Marco in a low, strained voice—“if it is, and he knows—he will tell them.” And he threw his arms up over his own face and lay quite still.

Neither of them said another word, and the street lamp shone in on them as if it were waiting for something to happen. But nothing happened. In time they were asleep.

XXIX

‘TWIXT NIGHT AND MORNING

After this, they waited. They did not know what they waited for, nor could they guess even vaguely how the waiting would end. All that Lazarus could tell them he told. He would have been willing to stand respectfully for hours relating to Marco the story of how the period of their absence had passed for his Master and himself. He told how Loristan had spoken each day of his son, how he had often been pale with anxiousness, how in the evenings he had walked to and fro in his room, deep in thought, as he looked down unseeingly at the carpet.

“He permitted me to talk of you, sir,” Lazarus said. “I saw that he wished to hear your name often. I reminded him of the times when you had been so young that most children of your age would have been in the hands of nurses, and yet you were strong and silent and sturdy and traveled with us as if you were not a child at all—never crying when you were tired and were not properly fed. As if you understood—as if you understood,” he added, proudly. “If, through the power of God a creature can be a man at six years old, you were that one. Many a dark day I have looked into your solemn, watching eyes, and have been half afraid; because that a child should answer one’s gaze so gravely seemed almost an unearthly thing.”

“The chief thing I remember of those days,” said Marco, “is that he was with me, and that whenever I was hungry or tired, I knew he must be, too.”

The feeling that they were “waiting” was so intense that it filled the days with strangeness. When the postman’s knock was heard at the door, each of them endeavored not to start. A letter might some day come which would tell them—they did not know what. But no letters came. When they went out into the streets, they found themselves hurrying on their way back in spite of themselves. Something might have happened. Lazarus read the papers faithfully, and in the evening told Marco and The Rat all the news it was “well that they should hear.” But the disorders of Samavia had ceased to occupy much space. They had become an old story, and after the excitement of the assassination of Michael Maranovitch had died out, there seemed to be a lull in events. Michael’s son had not dared to try to take his father’s place, and there were rumors that he also had been killed. The head of the Iarovitch had declared himself king but had not been crowned because of disorders in his own party. The country seemed existing in a nightmare of suffering, famine and suspense.

“Samavia is ‘waiting’ too,” The Rat broke forth one night as they talked together, “but it won’t wait long—it can’t. If I were a Samavian and in Samavia—”

“My father is a Samavian and he is in Samavia,” Marco’s grave young voice interposed.

The Rat flushed red as he realized what he had said. “What a fool I am!” he groaned. “I—I beg your pardon—sir.” He stood up when he said the last words and added the “sir” as if he suddenly realized that there was a distance between them which was something akin to the distance between youth and maturity—but yet was not the same.

“You are a good Samavian but—you forget,” was Marco’s answer.

Lazarus’ intense grimness increased with each day that passed. The ceremonious respectfulness of his manner toward Marco increased also. It seemed as if the more anxious he felt the more formal and stately his bearing became. It was as though he braced his own courage by doing the smallest things life in the back sitting-room required as if they were of the dignity of services performed in a much larger place and under much more imposing circumstances. The Rat found himself feeling almost as if he were an equerry in a court, and that dignity and ceremony were necessary on his own part. He began to experience a sense of being somehow a person of rank, for whom doors were opened grandly and who had vassals at his command. The watchful obedience of fifty vassals embodied itself in the manner of Lazarus.

“I am glad,” The Rat said once, reflectively, “that, after all my father was once—different. It makes it easier to learn things perhaps. If he had not talked to me about people who—well, who had never seen places like Bone Court—this might have been harder for me to understand.”

When at last they managed to call The Squad together, and went to spend a morning at the Barracks behind the churchyard, that body of armed men stared at their commander in great and amazed uncertainty. They felt that something had happened to him. They did not know what had happened, but it was some experience which had made him mysteriously different. He did not look like Marco, but in some extraordinary way he seemed more akin to him. They only knew that some necessity in Loristan’s affairs had taken the two away from London and the Game. Now they had come back, and they seemed older.

At first, The Squad felt awkward and shuffled its feet uncomfortably. After the first greetings it did not know exactly what to say. It was Marco who saved the situation.

“Drill us first,” he said to The Rat, “then we can talk about the Game.”

“’Tention!” shouted The Rat, magnificently. And then they forgot everything else and sprang into line. After the drill was ended, and they sat in a circle on the broken flags, the Game became more resplendent than it had ever been.

“I’ve had time to read and work out new things,” The Rat said. “Reading is like traveling.”

Marco himself sat and listened, enthralled by the adroitness of the imagination he displayed. Without revealing a single dangerous fact he built up, of their journeyings and experiences, a totally new structure of adventures which would have fired the whole being of any group of lads. It was safe to describe places and people, and he so described them that The Squad squirmed in its delight at feeling itself marching in a procession attending the Emperor in Vienna; standing in line before palaces; climbing, with knapsacks strapped tight, up precipitous mountain roads; defending mountain-fortresses; and storming Samavian castles.

The Squad glowed and exulted. The Rat glowed and exulted himself. Marco watched his sharp-featured, burning-eyed face with wonder and admiration. This strange power of making things alive was, he knew, what his father would call “genius.”

“Let’s take the oath of ’legiance again,” shouted Cad, when the Game was over for the morning.

“The papers never said nothin’ more about the Lost Prince, but we are all for him yet! Let’s take it!” So they stood in line again, Marco at the head, and renewed their oath.

“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 grow twelve men—for Samavia.

“God be thanked!”

It was more solemn than it had been the first time. The Squad felt it tremendously. Both Cad and Ben were conscious that thrills ran down their spines into their boots. When Marco and The Rat left them, they first stood at salute and then broke out into a ringing cheer.

On their way home, The Rat asked Marco a question.

“Did you see Mrs. Beedle standing at the top of the basement steps and looking after us when we went out this morning?”

Mrs. Beedle was the landlady of the lodgings at No. 7 Philibert Place. She was a mysterious and dusty female, who lived in the “cellar kitchen” part of the house and was seldom seen by her lodgers.

“Yes,” answered Marco, “I have seen her two or three times lately, and I do not think I ever saw her before. My father has never seen her, though Lazarus says she used to watch him round corners. Why is she suddenly so curious about us?”

“I’d like to know,” said The Rat. “I’ve been trying to work it out. Ever since we came back, she’s been peeping round the door of the kitchen stairs, or over balustrades, or through the cellar-kitchen windows. I believe she wants to speak to you, and knows Lazarus won’t let her if he catches her at it. When Lazarus is about, she always darts back.”

“What does she want to say?” said Marco.

“I’d like to know,” said The Rat again.

When they reached No. 7 Philibert Place, they found out, because when the door opened they saw at the top of cellar-kitchen stairs at the end of the passage, the mysterious Mrs. Beedle, in her dusty black dress and with a dusty black cap on, evidently having that minute mounted from her subterranean hiding-place. She had come up the steps so quickly that Lazarus had not yet seen her.

“Young Master Loristan!” she called out authoritatively. Lazarus wheeled about fiercely.

“Silence!” he commanded. “How dare you address the young Master?”

She snapped her fingers at him, and marched forward folding her arms tightly. “You mind your own business,” she said. “It’s young Master Loristan I’m speaking to, not his servant. It’s time he was talked to about this.”

“Silence, woman!” shouted Lazarus.

“Let her speak,” said Marco. “I want to hear. What is it you wish to say, Madam? My father is not here.”

“That’s just what I want to find out about,” put in the woman. “When is he coming back?”

“I do not know,” answered Marco.

“That’s it,” said Mrs. Beedle. “You’re old enough to understand that two big lads and a big fellow like that can’t have food and lodgin’s for nothing. You may say you don’t live high—and you don’t—but lodgin’s are lodgin’s and rent is rent. If your father’s coming back and you can tell me when, I mayn’t be obliged to let the rooms over your heads; but I know too much about foreigners to let bills run when they are out of sight. Your father’s out of sight. He,” jerking her head towards Lazarus, “paid me for last week. How do I know he will pay me for this week!”

“The money is ready,” roared Lazarus.

The Rat longed to burst forth. He knew what people in Bone Court said to a woman like that; he knew the exact words and phrases. But they were not words and phrases an aide-de-camp might deliver himself of in the presence of his superior officer; they were not words and phrases an equerry uses at court. He dare not allow himself to burst forth. He stood with flaming eyes and a flaming face, and bit his lips till they bled. He wanted to strike with his crutches. The son of Stefan Loristan! The Bearer of the Sign! There sprang up before his furious eyes the picture of the luridly lighted cavern and the frenzied crowd of men kneeling at this same boy’s feet, kissing them, kissing his hands, his garments, the very earth he stood upon, worshipping him, while above the altar the kingly young face looked on with the nimbus of light like a halo above it. If he dared speak his mind now, he felt he could have endured it better. But being an aide-de-camp he could not.

“Do you want the money now?” asked Marco. “It is only the beginning of the week and we do not owe it to you until the week is over. Is it that you want to have it now?”

Lazarus had become deadly pale. He looked huge in his fury, and he looked dangerous.

“Young Master,” he said slowly, in a voice as deadly as his pallor, and he actually spoke low, “this woman—”

Mrs. Beedle drew back towards the cellar-kitchen steps.

“There’s police outside,” she shrilled. “Young Master Loristan, order him to stand back.”

“No one will hurt you,” said Marco. “If you have the money here, Lazarus, please give it to me.”

Lazarus literally ground his teeth. But he drew himself up and saluted with ceremony. He put his hand in his breast pocket and produced an old leather wallet. There were but a few coins in it. He pointed to a gold one.

“I obey you, sir—since I must—” he said, breathing hard. “That one will pay her for the week.”

Marco took out the sovereign and held it out to the woman.

“You hear what he says,” he said. “At the end of this week if there is not enough to pay for the next, we will go.”

Lazarus looked so like a hyena, only held back from springing by chains of steel, that the dusty Mrs. Beedle was afraid to take the money.

“If you say that I shall not lose it, I’ll wait until the week’s ended,” she said. “You’re nothing but a lad, but you’re like your father. You’ve got a way that a body can trust. If he was here and said he hadn’t the money but he’d have it in time, I’d wait if it was for a month. He’d pay it if he said he would. But he’s gone; and two boys and a fellow like that one don’t seem much to depend on. But I’ll trust you.”

“Be good enough to take it,” said Marco. And he put the coin in her hand and turned into the back sitting-room as if he did not see her.

The Rat and Lazarus followed him.

“Is there so little money left?” said Marco. “We have always had very little. When we had less than usual, we lived in poorer places and were hungry if it was necessary. We know how to go hungry. One does not die of it.”

The big eyes under Lazarus’ beetling brows filled with tears.

“No, sir,” he said, “one does not die of hunger. But the insult—the insult! That is not endurable.”

“She would not have spoken if my father had been here,” Marco said. “And it is true that boys like us have no money. Is there enough to pay for another week?”

“Yes, sir,” answered Lazarus, swallowing hard as if he had a lump in his throat, “perhaps enough for two—if we eat but little. If—if the Master would accept money from those who would give it, he would alway have had enough. But how could such a one as he? How could he? When he went away, he thought—he thought that—” but there he stopped himself suddenly.

“Never mind,” said Marco. “Never mind. We will go away the day we can pay no more.”

“I can go out and sell newspapers,” said The Rat’s sharp voice.

“I’ve done it before. Crutches help you to sell them. The platform would sell ’em faster still. I’ll go out on the platform.”

“I can sell newspapers, too,” said Marco.

Lazarus uttered an exclamation like a groan.

“Sir,” he cried, “no, no! Am I not here to go out and look for work? I can carry loads. I can run errands.”

“We will all three begin to see what we can do,” Marco said.

Then—exactly as had happened on the day of their return from their journey—there arose in the road outside the sound of newsboys shouting. This time the outcry seemed even more excited than before. The boys were running and yelling and there seemed more of them than usual. And above all other words was heard “Samavia! Samavia!” But today The Rat did not rush to the door at the first cry. He stood still—for several seconds they all three stood still—listening. Afterwards each one remembered and told the others that he had stood still because some strange, strong feeling held him waiting as if to hear some great thing.

* * * *

It was Lazarus who went out of the room first and The Rat and Marco followed him.

One of the upstairs lodgers had run down in haste and opened the door to buy newspapers and ask questions. The newsboys were wild with excitement and danced about as they shouted. The piece of news they were yelling had evidently a popular quality.

The lodger bought two papers and was handing out coppers to a lad who was talking loud and fast.

“Here’s a go!” he was saying. “A Secret Party’s risen up and taken Samavia! ’Twixt night and mornin’ they done it! That there Lost Prince descendant ’as turned up, an’ they’ve crowned him—’twixt night and mornin’ they done it! Clapt ’is crown on ’is ’ead, so’s they’d lose no time.” And off he bolted, shouting, “’Cendant of Lost Prince! ’Cendant of Lost Prince made King of Samavia!”

It was then that Lazarus, forgetting even ceremony, bolted also. He bolted back to the sitting-room, rushed in, and the door fell to behind him.

Marco and The Rat found it shut when, having secured a newspaper, they went down the passage. At the closed door, Marco stopped. He did not turn the handle. From the inside of the room there came the sound of big convulsive sobs and passionate Samavian words of prayer and worshipping gratitude.

“Let us wait,” Marco said, trembling a little. “He will not want any one to see him. Let us wait.”

His black pits of eyes looked immense, and he stood at his tallest, but he was trembling slightly from head to foot. The Rat had begun to shake, as if from an ague. His face was scarcely human in its fierce unboyish emotion.

“Marco! Marco!” his whisper was a cry. “That was what he went for—because he knew!”

“Yes,” answered Marco, “that was what he went for.” And his voice was unsteady, as his body was.

Presently the sobs inside the room choked themselves back suddenly. Lazarus had remembered. They had guessed he had been leaning against the wall during his outburst. Now it was evident that he stood upright, probably shocked at the forgetfulness of his frenzy.

So Marco turned the handle of the door and went into the room. He shut the door behind him, and they all three stood together.

When the Samavian gives way to his emotions, he is emotional indeed. Lazarus looked as if a storm had swept over him. He had choked back his sobs, but tears still swept down his cheeks.

“Sir,” he said hoarsely, “your pardon! It was as if a convulsion seized me. I forgot everything—even my duty. Pardon, pardon!” And there on the worn carpet of the dingy back sitting-room in the Marylebone Road, he actually went on one knee and kissed the boy’s hand with adoration.

“You mustn’t ask pardon,” said Marco. “You have waited so long, good friend. You have given your life as my father has. You have known all the suffering a boy has not lived long enough to understand. Your big heart—your faithful heart—” his voice broke and he stood and looked at him with an appeal which seemed to ask him to remember his boyhood and understand the rest.

“Don’t kneel,” he said next. “You mustn’t kneel.” And Lazarus, kissing his hand again, rose to his feet.

“Now—we shall hear!” said Marco. “Now the waiting will soon be over.”

“Yes, sir. Now, we shall receive commands!” Lazarus answered.

The Rat held out the newspapers.

“May we read them yet?” he asked.

“Until further orders, sir,” said Lazarus hurriedly and apologetically—“until further orders, it is still better that I should read them first.”

XXX

THE GAME IS AT AN END

So long as the history of Europe is written and read, the unparalleled story of the Rising of the Secret Party in Samavia will stand out as one of its most startling and romantic records. Every detail connected with the astonishing episode, from beginning to end, was romantic even when it was most productive of realistic results. When it is related, it always begins with the story of the tall and kingly Samavian youth who walked out of the palace in the early morning sunshine singing the herdsmen’s song of beauty of old days. Then comes the outbreak of the ruined and revolting populace; then the legend of the morning on the mountain side, and the old shepherd coming out of his cave and finding the apparently dead body of the beautiful young hunter. Then the secret nursing in the cavern; then the jolting cart piled with sheepskins crossing the frontier, and ending its journey at the barred entrance of the monastery and leaving its mysterious burden behind. And then the bitter hate and struggle of dynasties, and the handful of shepherds and herdsmen meeting in their cavern and binding themselves and their unborn sons and sons’ sons by an oath never to be broken. Then the passing of generations and the slaughter of peoples and the changing of kings,—and always that oath remembered, and the Forgers of the Sword, at their secret work, hidden in forests and caves. Then the strange story of the uncrowned kings who, wandering in other lands, lived and died in silence and seclusion, often laboring with their hands for their daily bread, but never forgetting that they must be kings, and ready,—even though Samavia never called. Perhaps the whole story would fill too many volumes to admit of it ever being told fully.

But history makes the growing of the Secret Party clear,—though it seems almost to cease to be history, in spite of its efforts to be brief and speak only of dull facts, when it is forced to deal with the Bearing of the Sign by two mere boys, who, being blown as unremarked as any two grains of dust across Europe, lit the Lamp whose flame so flared up to the high heavens that as if from the earth itself there sprang forth Samavians by the thousands ready to feed it—Iarovitch and Maranovitch swept aside forever and only Samavians remaining to cry aloud in ardent praise and worship of the God who had brought back to them their Lost Prince. The battle-cry of his name had ended every battle. Swords fell from hands because swords were not needed. The Iarovitch fled in terror and dismay; the Maranovitch were nowhere to be found. Between night and morning, as the newsboy had said, the standard of Ivor was raised and waved from palace and citadel alike. From mountain, forest and plain, from city, village and town, its followers flocked to swear allegiance; broken and wounded legions staggered along the roads to join and kneel to it; women and children followed, weeping with joy and chanting songs of praise. The Powers held out their scepters to the lately prostrate and ignored country. Train-loads of food and supplies of all things needed began to cross the frontier; the aid of nations was bestowed. Samavia, at peace to till its land, to raise its flocks, to mine its ores, would be able to pay all back. Samavia in past centuries had been rich enough to make great loans, and had stored such harvests as warring countries had been glad to call upon. The story of the crowning of the King had been the wildest of all—the multitude of ecstatic people, famished, in rags, and many of them weak with wounds, kneeling at his feet, praying, as their one salvation and security, that he would go attended by them to their bombarded and broken cathedral, and at its high altar let the crown be placed upon his head, so that even those who perhaps must die of their past sufferings would at least have paid their poor homage to the King Ivor who would rule their children and bring back to Samavia her honor and her peace.

“Ivor! Ivor!” they chanted like a prayer,—“Ivor! Ivor!” in their houses, by the roadside, in the streets.

“The story of the Coronation in the shattered Cathedral, whose roof had been torn to fragments by bombs,” said an important London paper, “reads like a legend of the Middle Ages. But, upon the whole, there is in Samavia’s national character, something of the mediaeval, still.”

Lazarus, having bought and read in his top floor room every newspaper recording the details which had reached London, returned to report almost verbatim, standing erect before Marco, the eyes under his shaggy brows sometimes flaming with exultation, sometimes filled with a rush of tears. He could not be made to sit down. His whole big body seemed to have become rigid with magnificence. Meeting Mrs. Beedle in the passage, he strode by her with an air so thunderous that she turned and scuttled back to her cellar kitchen, almost falling down the stone steps in her nervous terror. In such a mood, he was not a person to face without something like awe.

In the middle of the night, The Rat suddenly spoke to Marco as if he knew that he was awake and would hear him.

“He has given all his life to Samavia!” he said. “When you traveled from country to country, and lived in holes and corners, it was because by doing it he could escape spies, and see the people who must be made to understand. No one else could have made them listen. An emperor would have begun to listen when he had seen his face and heard his voice. And he could be silent, and wait for the right time to speak. He could keep still when other men could not. He could keep his face still—and his hands—and his eyes. Now all Samavia knows what he has done, and that he has been the greatest patriot in the world. We both saw what Samavians were like that night in the cavern. They will go mad with joy when they see his face!”

“They have seen it now,” said Marco, in a low voice from his bed.

Then there was a long silence, though it was not quite silence because The Rat’s breathing was so quick and hard.

“He—must have been at that coronation!” he said at last. “The King—what will the King do to—repay him?”

Marco did not answer. His breathing could be heard also. His mind was picturing that same coronation—the shattered, roofless cathedral, the ruins of the ancient and magnificent high altar, the multitude of kneeling, famine-scourged people, the battle-worn, wounded and bandaged soldiery! And the King! And his father! Where had his father stood when the King was crowned? Surely, he had stood at the King’s right hand, and the people had adored and acclaimed them equally!

“King Ivor!” he murmured as if he were in a dream. “King Ivor!”

The Rat started up on his elbow.

“You will see him,” he cried out. “He’s not a dream any longer. The Game is not a game now—and it is ended—it is won! It was real—he was real! Marco, I don’t believe you hear.”

“Yes, I do,” answered Marco, “but it is almost more a dream than when it was one.”

“The greatest patriot in the world is like a king himself!” raved The Rat. “If there is no bigger honor to give him, he will be made a prince—and Commander-in-Chief—and Prime Minister! Can’t you hear those Samavians shouting, and singing, and praying? You’ll see it all! Do you remember the mountain climber who was going to save the shoes he made for the Bearer of the Sign? He said a great day might come when one could show them to the people. It’s come! He’ll show them! I know how they’ll take it!” His voice suddenly dropped—as if it dropped into a pit. “You’ll see it all. But I shall not.”

Then Marco awoke from his dream and lifted his head. “Why not?” he demanded. It sounded like a demand.

“Because I know better than to expect it!” The Rat groaned. “You’ve taken me a long way, but you can’t take me to the palace of a king. I’m not such a fool as to think that, even if your father—”

He broke off because Marco did more than lift his head. He sat upright.

“You bore the Sign as much as I did,” he said. “We bore it together.”

“Who would have listened to me?” cried The Rat. “You were the son of Stefan Loristan.”

“You were the friend of his son,” answered Marco. “You went at the command of Stefan Loristan. You were the army of the son of Stefan Loristan. That I have told you. Where I go, you will go. We will say no more of this—not one word.”

And he lay down again in the silence of a prince of the blood. And The Rat knew that he meant what he said, and that Stefan Loristan also would mean it. And because he was a boy, he began to wonder what Mrs. Beedle would do when she heard what had happened—what had been happening all the time a tall, shabby “foreigner” had lived in her dingy back sitting-room, and been closely watched lest he should go away without paying his rent, as shabby foreigners sometimes did. The Rat saw himself managing to poise himself very erect on his crutches while he told her that the shabby foreigner was—well, was at least the friend of a King, and had given him his crown—and would be made a prince and a Commander-in-Chief—and a Prime Minister—because there was no higher rank or honor to give him. And his son—whom she had insulted—was Samavia’s idol because he had borne the Sign. And also that if she were in Samavia, and Marco chose to do it he could batter her wretched lodging-house to the ground and put her in a prison—“and serve her jolly well right!”

The next day passed, and the next; and then there came a letter. It was from Loristan, and Marco turned pale when Lazarus handed it to him. Lazarus and The Rat went out of the room at once, and left him to read it alone. It was evidently not a long letter, because it was not many minutes before Marco called them again into the room.

“In a few days, messengers—friends of my father’s—will come to take us to Samavia. You and I and Lazarus are to go,” he said to The Rat.

“God be thanked!” said Lazarus. “God be thanked!”

Before the messengers came, it was the end of the week. Lazarus had packed their few belongings, and on Saturday Mrs. Beedle was to be seen hovering at the top of the cellar steps, when Marco and The Rat left the back sitting-room to go out.

“You needn’t glare at me!” she said to Lazarus, who stood glowering at the door which he had opened for them. “Young Master Loristan, I want to know if you’ve heard when your father is coming back?”

“He will not come back,” said Marco.

“He won’t, won’t he? Well, how about next week’s rent?” said Mrs. Beedle. “Your man’s been packing up, I notice. He’s not got much to carry away, but it won’t pass through that front door until I’ve got what’s owing me. People that can pack easy think they can get away easy, and they’ll bear watching. The week’s up today.”

Lazarus wheeled and faced her with a furious gesture. “Get back to your cellar, woman,” he commanded. “Get back under ground and stay there. Look at what is stopping before your miserable gate.”

A carriage was stopping—a very perfect carriage of dark brown. The coachman and footman wore dark brown and gold liveries, and the footman had leaped down and opened the door with respectful alacrity. “They are friends of the Master’s come to pay their respects to his son,” said Lazarus. “Are their eyes to be offended by the sight of you?”

“Your money is safe,” said Marco. “You had better leave us.”

Mrs. Beedle gave a sharp glance at the two gentlemen who had entered the broken gate. They were of an order which did not belong to Philibert Place. They looked as if the carriage and the dark brown and gold liveries were every-day affairs to them.

“At all events, they’re two grown men, and not two boys without a penny,” she said. “If they’re your father’s friends, they’ll tell me whether my rent’s safe or not.”

The two visitors were upon the threshold. They were both men of a certain self-contained dignity of type; and when Lazarus opened wide the door, they stepped into the shabby entrance hall as if they did not see it. They looked past its dinginess, and past Lazarus, and The Rat, and Mrs. Beedle—through them, as it were,—at Marco.

He advanced towards them at once.

“You come from my father!” he said, and gave his hand first to the elder man, then to the younger.

“Yes, we come from your father. I am Baron Rastka—and this is the Count Vorversk,” said the elder man, bowing.

“If they’re barons and counts, and friends of your father’s, they are well-to-do enough to be responsible for you,” said Mrs. Beedle, rather fiercely, because she was somewhat over-awed and resented the fact. “It’s a matter of next week’s rent, gentlemen. I want to know where it’s coming from.”

The elder man looked at her with a swift cold glance. He did not speak to her, but to Lazarus. “What is she doing here?” he demanded.

Marco answered him. “She is afraid we cannot pay our rent,” he said. “It is of great importance to her that she should be sure.”

“Take her away,” said the gentleman to Lazarus. He did not even glance at her. He drew something from his coat-pocket and handed it to the old soldier. “Take her away,” he repeated. And because it seemed as if she were not any longer a person at all, Mrs. Beedle actually shuffled down the passage to the cellar-kitchen steps. Lazarus did not leave her until he, too, had descended into the cellar kitchen, where he stood and towered above her like an infuriated giant.

“Tomorrow he will be on his way to Samavia, miserable woman!” he said. “Before he goes, it would be well for you to implore his pardon.”

But Mrs. Beedle’s point of view was not his. She had recovered some of her breath.

“I don’t know where Samavia is,” she raged, as she struggled to set her dusty, black cap straight. “I’ll warrant it’s one of these little foreign countries you can scarcely see on the map—and not a decent English town in it! He can go as soon as he likes, so long as he pays his rent before he does it. Samavia, indeed! You talk as if he was Buckingham Palace!”

XXXI

“THE SON OF STEFAN LORISTAN”

When a party composed of two boys attended by a big soldierly man-servant and accompanied by two distinguished-looking, elderly men, of a marked foreign type, appeared on the platform of Charing Cross Station they attracted a good deal of attention. In fact, the good looks and strong, well-carried body of the handsome lad with the thick black hair would have caused eyes to turn towards him even if he had not seemed to be regarded as so special a charge by those who were with him. But in a country where people are accustomed to seeing a certain manner and certain forms observed in the case of persons—however young—who are set apart by the fortune of rank and distinction, and where the populace also rather enjoys the sight of such demeanor, it was inevitable that more than one quick-sighted looker-on should comment on the fact that this was not an ordinary group of individuals.

“See that fine, big lad over there!” said a workman, whose head, with a pipe in its mouth, stuck out of a third-class smoking carriage window. “He’s some sort of a young swell, I’ll lay a shillin’! Take a look at him,” to his mate inside.

The mate took a look. The pair were of the decent, polytechnic-educated type, and were shrewd at observation.

“Yes, he’s some sort of young swell,” he summed him up. “But he’s not English by a long chalk. He must be a young Turk, or Russian, sent over to be educated. His suite looks like it. All but the ferret-faced chap on crutches. Wonder what he is!”

A good-natured looking guard was passing, and the first man hailed him.

“Have we got any swells traveling with us this morning?” he asked, jerking his head towards the group. “That looks like it. Any one leaving Windsor or Sandringham to cross from Dover today?”

The man looked at the group curiously for a moment and then shook his head.

“They do look like something or other,” he answered, “but no one knows anything about them. Everybody’s safe in Buckingham Palace and Marlborough House this week. No one either going or coming.”

No observer, it is true, could have mistaken Lazarus for an ordinary attendant escorting an ordinary charge. If silence had not still been strictly the order, he could not have restrained himself. As it was, he bore himself like a grenadier, and stood by Marco as if across his dead body alone could any one approach the lad.

“Until we reach Melzarr,” he had said with passion to the two gentlemen,—“until I can stand before my Master and behold him embrace his son—behold him—I implore that I may not lose sight of him night or day. On my knees, I implore that I may travel, armed, at his side. I am but his servant, and have no right to occupy a place in the same carriage. But put me anywhere. I will be deaf, dumb, blind to all but himself. Only permit me to be near enough to give my life if it is needed. Let me say to my Master, ‘I never left him.’”

“We will find a place for you,” the elder man said, “and if you are so anxious, you may sleep across his threshold when we spend the night at a hotel.”

“I will not sleep!” said Lazarus. “I will watch. Suppose there should be demons of Maranovitch loose and infuriated in Europe? Who knows!”

“The Maranovitch and Iarovitch who have not already sworn allegiance to King Ivor are dead on battlefields. The remainder are now Fedorovitch and praising God for their King,” was the answer Baron Rastka made him.

But Lazarus kept his guard unbroken. When he occupied the next compartment to the one in which Marco traveled, he stood in the corridor throughout the journey. When they descended at any point to change trains, he followed close at the boy’s heels, his fierce eyes on every side at once and his hand on the weapon hidden in his broad leather belt. When they stopped to rest in some city, he planted himself in a chair by the bedroom door of his charge, and if he slept he was not aware that nature had betrayed him into doing so.

If the journey made by the young Bearers of the Sign had been a strange one, this was strange by its very contrast. Throughout that pilgrimage, two uncared-for waifs in worn clothes had traveled from one place to another, sometimes in third- or fourth-class continental railroad carriages, sometimes in jolting diligences, sometimes in peasants’ carts, sometimes on foot by side roads and mountain paths, and forest ways. Now, two well-dressed boys in the charge of two men of the class whose orders are obeyed, journeyed in compartments reserved for them, their traveling appurtenances supplying every comfort that luxury could provide.

The Rat had not known that there were people who traveled in such a manner; that wants could be so perfectly foreseen; that railroad officials, porters at stations, the staff of restaurants, could be by magic transformed into active and eager servants. To lean against the upholstered back of a railway carriage and in luxurious ease look through the window at passing beauties, and then to find books at your elbow and excellent meals appearing at regular hours, these unknown perfections made it necessary for him at times to pull himself together and give all his energies to believing that he was quite awake. Awake he was, and with much on his mind “to work out,”—so much, indeed, that on the first day of the journey he had decided to give up the struggle, and wait until fate made clear to him such things as he was to be allowed to understand of the mystery of Stefan Loristan.

What he realized most clearly was that the fact that the son of Stefan Loristan was being escorted in private state to the country his father had given his life’s work to, was never for a moment forgotten. The Baron Rastka and Count Vorversk were of the dignity and courteous reserve which marks men of distinction. Marco was not a mere boy to them, he was the son of Stefan Loristan; and they were Samavians. They watched over him, not as Lazarus did, but with a gravity and forethought which somehow seemed to encircle him with a rampart. Without any air of subservience, they constituted themselves his attendants. His comfort, his pleasure, even his entertainment, were their private care. The Rat felt sure they intended that, if possible, he should enjoy his journey, and that he should not be fatigued by it. They conversed with him as The Rat had not known that men ever conversed with boys,—until he had met Loristan. It was plain that they knew what he would be most interested in, and that they were aware he was as familiar with the history of Samavia as they were themselves. When he showed a disposition to hear of events which had occurred, they were as prompt to follow his lead as they would have been to follow the lead of a man. That, The Rat argued with himself, was because Marco had lived so intimately with his father that his life had been more like a man’s than a boy’s and had trained him in mature thinking. He was very quiet during the journey, and The Rat knew he was thinking all the time.

The night before they reached Melzarr, they slept at a town some hours distant from the capital. They arrived at midnight and went to a quiet hotel.

“Tomorrow,” said Marco, when The Rat had left him for the night, “tomorrow, we shall see him! God be thanked!”

“God be thanked!” said The Rat, also. And each saluted the other before they parted.

In the morning, Lazarus came into the bedroom with an air so solemn that it seemed as if the garments he carried in his hands were part of some religious ceremony.

“I am at your command, sir,” he said. “And I bring you your uniform.”

He carried, in fact, a richly decorated Samavian uniform, and the first thing Marco had seen when he entered was that Lazarus himself was in uniform also. His was the uniform of an officer of the King’s Body Guard.

“The Master,” he said, “asks that you wear this on your entrance to Melzarr. I have a uniform, also, for your aide-de-camp.”

When Rastka and Vorversk appeared, they were in uniforms also. It was a uniform which had a touch of the Orient in its picturesque splendor. A short fur-bordered mantle hung by a jeweled chain from the shoulders, and there was much magnificent embroidery of color and gold.

“Sir, we must drive quickly to the station,” Baron Rastka said to Marco. “These people are excitable and patriotic, and His Majesty wishes us to remain incognito, and avoid all chance of public demonstration until we reach the capital.” They passed rather hurriedly through the hotel to the carriage which awaited them. The Rat saw that something unusual was happening in the place. Servants were scurrying round corners, and guests were coming out of their rooms and even hanging over the balustrades.

As Marco got into his carriage, he caught sight of a boy about his own age who was peeping from behind a bush. Suddenly he darted away, and they all saw him tearing down the street towards the station as fast as his legs would carry him.

But the horses were faster than he was. The party reached the station, and was escorted quickly to its place in a special saloon-carriage which awaited it. As the train made its way out of the station, Marco saw the boy who had run before them rush on to the platform, waving his arms and shouting something with wild delight. The people who were standing about turned to look at him, and the next instant they had all torn off their caps and thrown them up in the air and were shouting also. But it was not possible to hear what they said.

“We were only just in time,” said Vorversk, and Baron Rastka nodded.

The train went swiftly, and stopped only once before they reached Melzarr. This was at a small station, on the platform of which stood peasants with big baskets of garlanded flowers and evergreens. They put them on the train, and soon both Marco and The Rat saw that something unusual was taking place. At one time, a man standing on the narrow outside platform of the carriage was plainly seen to be securing garlands and handing up flags to men who worked on the roof.

“They are doing something with Samavian flags and a lot of flowers and green things!” cried The Rat, in excitement.

“Sir, they are decorating the outside of the carriage,” Vorversk said. “The villagers on the line obtained permission from His Majesty. The son of Stefan Loristan could not be allowed to pass their homes without their doing homage.”

“I understand,” said Marco, his heart thumping hard against his uniform. “It is for my father’s sake.”

At last, embowered, garlanded, and hung with waving banners, the train drew in at the chief station at Melzarr.

“Sir,” said Rastka, as they were entering, “will you stand up that the people may see you? Those on the outskirts of the crowd will have the merest glimpse, but they will never forget.”

Marco stood up. The others grouped themselves behind him. There arose a roar of voices, which ended almost in a shriek of joy which was like the shriek of a tempest. Then there burst forth the blare of brazen instruments playing the National Hymn of Samavia, and mad voices joined in it.

If Marco had not been a strong boy, and long trained in self-control, what he saw and heard might have been almost too much to be borne. When the train had come to a full stop, and the door was thrown open, even Rastka’s dignified voice was unsteady as he said, “Sir, lead the way. It is for us to follow.”

And Marco, erect in the doorway, stood for a moment, looking out upon the roaring, acclaiming, weeping, singing and swaying multitude—and saluted just as he had saluted The Squad, looking just as much a boy, just as much a man, just as much a thrilling young human being.

Then, at the sight of him standing so, it seemed as if the crowd went mad—as the Forgers of the Sword had seemed to go mad on the night in the cavern. The tumult rose and rose, the crowd rocked, and leapt, and, in its frenzy of emotion, threatened to crush itself to death. But for the lines of soldiers, there would have seemed no chance for any one to pass through it alive.

“I am the son of Stefan Loristan,” Marco said to himself, in order to hold himself steady. “I am on my way to my father.”

Afterward, he was moving through the line of guarding soldiers to the entrance, where two great state-carriages stood; and there, outside, waited even a huger and more frenzied crowd than that left behind. He saluted there again, and again, and again, on all sides. It was what they had seen the Emperor do in Vienna. He was not an Emperor, but he was the son of Stefan Loristan who had brought back the King.

“You must salute, too,” he said to The Rat, when they got into the state carriage. “Perhaps my father has told them. It seems as if they knew you.”

The Rat had been placed beside him on the carriage seat. He was inwardly shuddering with a rapture of exultation which was almost anguish. The people were looking at him—shouting at him—surely it seemed like it when he looked at the faces nearest in the crowd. Perhaps Loristan—

“Listen!” said Marco suddenly, as the carriage rolled on its way. “They are shouting to us in Samavian, ‘The Bearers of the Sign!’ That is what they are saying now. ‘The Bearers of the Sign.’”

They were being taken to the Palace. That Baron Rastka and Count Vorversk had explained in the train. His Majesty wished to receive them. Stefan Loristan was there also.

The city had once been noble and majestic. It was somewhat Oriental, as its uniforms and national costumes were. There were domed and pillared structures of white stone and marble, there were great arches, and city gates, and churches. But many of them were half in ruins through war, and neglect, and decay. They passed the half-unroofed cathedral, standing in the sunshine in its great square, still in all its disaster one of the most beautiful structures in Europe. In the exultant crowd were still to be seen haggard faces, men with bandaged limbs and heads or hobbling on sticks and crutches. The richly colored native costumes were most of them worn to rags. But their wearers had the faces of creatures plucked from despair to be lifted to heaven.

“Ivor! Ivor!” they cried; “Ivor! Ivor!” and sobbed with rapture.

The Palace was as wonderful in its way as the white cathedral. The immensely wide steps of marble were guarded by soldiers. The huge square in which it stood was filled with people whom the soldiers held in check.

“I am his son,” Marco said to himself, as he descended from the state carriage and began to walk up the steps which seemed so enormously wide that they appeared almost like a street. Up he mounted, step by step, The Rat following him. And as he turned from side to side, to salute those who made deep obeisance as he passed, he began to realize that he had seen their faces before.

“These who are guarding the steps,” he said, quickly under his breath to The Rat, “are the Forgers of the Sword!”

There were rich uniforms everywhere when he entered the palace, and people who bowed almost to the ground as he passed. He was very young to be confronted with such an adoring adulation and royal ceremony; but he hoped it would not last too long, and that after he had knelt to the King and kissed his hand, he would see his father and hear his voice. Just to hear his voice again, and feel his hand on his shoulder!

Through the vaulted corridors, to the wide-opened doors of a magnificent room he was led at last. The end of it seemed a long way off as he entered. There were many richly dressed people who stood in line as he passed up toward the canopied dais. He felt that he had grown pale with the strain of excitement, and he had begun to feel that he must be walking in a dream, as on each side people bowed low and curtsied to the ground.

He realized vaguely that the King himself was standing, awaiting his approach. But as he advanced, each step bearing him nearer to the throne, the light and color about him, the strangeness and magnificence, the wildly joyous acclamation of the populace outside the palace, made him feel rather dazzled, and he did not clearly see any one single face or thing.

“His Majesty awaits you,” said a voice behind him which seemed to be Baron Rastka’s. “Are you faint, sir? You look pale.”

He drew himself together, and lifted his eyes. For one full moment, after he had so lifted them, he stood quite still and straight, looking into the deep beauty of the royal face. Then he knelt and kissed the hands held out to him—kissed them both with a passion of boy love and worship.

The King had the eyes he had longed to see—the King’s hands were those he had longed to feel again upon his shoulder—the King was his father! the “Stefan Loristan” who had been the last of those who had waited and labored for Samavia through five hundred years, and who had lived and died kings, though none of them till now had worn a crown!

His father was the King!

It was not that night, nor the next, nor for many nights that the telling of the story was completed. The people knew that their King and his son were rarely separated from each other; that the Prince’s suite of apartments were connected by a private passage with his father’s. The two were bound together by an affection of singular strength and meaning, and their love for their people added to their feeling for each other. In the history of what their past had been, there was a romance which swelled the emotional Samavian heart near to bursting. By mountain fires, in huts, under the stars, in fields and in forests, all that was known of their story was told and retold a thousand times, with sobs of joy and prayer breaking in upon the tale.

But none knew it as it was told in a certain quiet but stately room in the palace, where the man once known only as “Stefan Loristan,” but whom history would call the first King Ivor of Samavia, told his share of it to the boy whom Samavians had a strange and superstitious worship for, because he seemed so surely their Lost Prince restored in body and soul—almost the kingly lad in the ancient portrait—some of them half believed when he stood in the sunshine, with the halo about his head.

It was a wonderful and intense story, that of the long wanderings and the close hiding of the dangerous secret. Among all those who had known that a man who was an impassioned patriot was laboring for Samavia, and using all the power of a great mind and the delicate ingenuity of a great genius to gain friends and favor for his unhappy country, there had been but one who had known that Stefan Loristan had a claim to the Samavian throne. He had made no claim, he had sought—not a crown—but the final freedom of the nation for which his love had been a religion.

“Not the crown!” he said to the two young Bearers of the Sign as they sat at his feet like schoolboys—“not a throne. ‘The Life of my life—for Samavia.’ That was what I worked for—what we have all worked for. If there had risen a wiser man in Samavia’s time of need, it would not have been for me to remind them of their Lost Prince. I could have stood aside. But no man arose. The crucial moment came—and the one man who knew the secret, revealed it. Then—Samavia called, and I answered.”

He put his hand on the thick, black hair of his boy’s head.

“There was a thing we never spoke of together,” he said. “I believed always that your mother died of her bitter fears for me and the unending strain of them. She was very young and loving, and knew that there was no day when we parted that we were sure of seeing each other alive again. When she died, she begged me to promise that your boyhood and youth should not be burdened by the knowledge she had found it so terrible to bear. I should have kept the secret from you, even if she had not so implored me. I had never meant that you should know the truth until you were a man. If I had died, a certain document would have been sent to you which would have left my task in your hands and made my plans clear. You would have known then that you also were a Prince Ivor, who must take up his country’s burden and be ready when Samavia called. I tried to help you to train yourself for any task. You never failed me.”

“Your Majesty,” said The Rat, “I began to work it out, and think it must be true that night when we were with the old woman on the top of the mountain. It was the way she looked at—at His Highness.”

“Say ‘Marco,’” threw in Prince Ivor. “It’s easier. He was my army, Father.”

Stefan Loristan’s grave eyes melted.

“Say ‘Marco,’” he said. “You were his army—and more—when we both needed one. It was you who invented the Game!”

“Thanks, Your Majesty,” said The Rat, reddening scarlet. “You do me great honor! But he would never let me wait on him when we were traveling. He said we were nothing but two boys. I suppose that’s why it’s hard to remember, at first. But my mind went on working until sometimes I was afraid I might let something out at the wrong time. When we went down into the cavern, and I saw the Forgers of the Sword go mad over him—I knew it must be true. But I didn’t dare to speak. I knew you meant us to wait; so I waited.”

“You are a faithful friend,” said the King, “and you have always obeyed orders!”

A great moon was sailing in the sky that night—just such a moon as had sailed among the torn rifts of storm clouds when the Prince at Vienna had come out upon the balcony and the boyish voice had startled him from the darkness of the garden below. The clearer light of this night’s splendor drew them out on a balcony also—a broad balcony of white marble which looked like snow. The pure radiance fell upon all they saw spread before them—the lovely but half-ruined city, the great palace square with its broken statues and arches, the splendid ghost of the unroofed cathedral whose High Altar was bare to the sky.

They stood and looked at it. There was a stillness in which all the world might have ceased breathing.

“What next?” said Prince Ivor, at last speaking quietly and low. “What next, Father?”

“Great things which will come, one by one,” said the King, “if we hold ourselves ready.”

Prince Ivor turned his face from the lovely, white, broken city, and put his brown hand on his father’s arm.

“Upon the ledge that night—” he said, “Father, you remember—?” The King was looking far away, but he bent his head:

“Yes. That will come, too,” he said. “Can you repeat it?”

“Yes,” said Ivor, “and so can the aide-de-camp. We’ve said it a hundred times. We believe it’s true. ‘If the descendant of the Lost Prince is brought back to rule in Samavia, he will teach his people the Law of the One, from his throne. He will teach his son, and that son will teach his son, and he will teach his. And through such as these, the whole world will learn the Order and the Law.’”