The Lost Prince (11 page)

It was a wonderful meal, though it was only of bread and coffee. The Rat knew he should never be able to forget it.

Afterward, Loristan told him of what he had done the night before. He had seen the parish authorities and all had been done which a city government provides in the case of a pauper’s death.

His father would be buried in the usual manner. ‘We will follow him,’ Loristan said in the end. ‘You and I and Marco and Lazarus.’

The Rat’s mouth fell open.

‘You – and Marco – and Lazarus!’ he exclaimed, staring. ‘And me! Why should any of us go? I don’t want to. He wouldn’t have followed me if I’d been the one.’

Loristan remained silent for a few moments.

‘When a life has counted for nothing, the end of it is a lonely thing,’ he said at last. ‘If it has forgotten all respect for itself, pity is all that one has left to give. One would like to give
something
to anything so lonely.’ He said the last brief sentence after a pause.

‘Let us go,’ Marco said suddenly; and he caught The Rat’s hand.

The Rat’s own movement was sudden. He slipped from his crutches to a chair, and sat and gazed at the worn carpet as if he were not looking at it at all, but at something a long way off. After a while he looked up at Loristan.

‘Do you know what I thought of, all at once?’ he said in a shaky voice. ‘I thought of that “Lost Prince” one. He only lived once. Perhaps he didn’t live a long time. Nobody knows. But it’s five hundred years ago, and, just because he was the kind he was, everyone that remembers him thinks of something fine. It’s queer, but it does you good just to hear his name. And if he has been training kings for Samavia all these centuries – they may have been poor and nobody may have known about them, but they’ve been
kings
. That’s what
he
did – just by being alive a few years. When I think of him and then think of – the other – there’s such an awful difference that – yes – I’m sorry. For the first time. I’m his son and I can’t care about him; but he’s too lonely – I want to go.’

So it was that when the forlorn derelict was carried to the graveyard where nameless burdens on the city were given to the earth, a curious funeral procession followed him. There were two tall and soldierly looking men and two boys, one of whom walked on crutches, and behind them were ten other boys who walked two by two. These ten were a queer, ragged lot; but they had respectfully sober faces, held their heads and their shoulders well, and walked with a remarkably regular marching step.

It was the Squad; but they had left their ‘rifles’ at home.

chapter eleven

‘come with me’

When they came back from the graveyard, The Rat was silent all the way. He was thinking of what had happened and of what lay before him. He was, in fact, thinking chiefly that nothing lay before him – nothing. The certainty of that gave his sharp, lined face new lines and sharpness which made it look pinched and hard.

He had nothing before but a corner in a bare garret in which he could find little more than a leaking roof over his head – when he was not turned out into the street. But, if policemen asked him where he lived, he could say he lived in Bone Court with his father. Now he couldn’t say it.

He got along very well on his crutches, but he was rather tired when they reached the turn in the street which led in the direction of his old haunts. At any rate, they were haunts he knew, and he belonged to them more than he belonged elsewhere. The Squad stopped at this particular corner because it led to such homes as they possessed. They stopped in a body and looked at The Rat, and The Rat stopped also. He swung himself to Loristan’s side, touching his hand to his forehead.

‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘Line and salute, you chaps!’ And the Squad stood in line and raised their hands also.
‘Thank you, sir. Thank you, Marco. Goodbye.’

‘Where are you going?’ Loristan asked.

‘I don’t know yet,’ The Rat answered, biting his lips.

He and Loristan looked at each other a few moments in silence. Both of them were thinking very hard. In The Rat’s eyes there was a kind of desperate adoration. He did not know what he should do when this man turned and walked away from him. It would be as if the sun itself had dropped out of the heavens – and The Rat had not thought of what the sun meant before.

But Loristan did not turn and walk away. He looked deep into the lad’s eyes as if he were searching to find some certainty. Then he said in a low voice, ‘You know how poor I am.’

‘I – I don’t care!’ said The Rat. ‘You – you’re like a king to me. I’d stand up and be shot to bits if you told me to do it.’

‘I am so poor that I am not sure I can give you enough dry bread to eat – always. Marco and Lazarus and I are often hungry. Sometimes you might have nothing to sleep on but the floor. But I can find a
place
for you if I take you with me,’ said Loristan. ‘Do you know what I mean by a
place
?’

‘Yes, I do,’ answered The Rat. ‘It’s what I’ve never had before – sir.’

What he knew was that it meant some bit of space, out of all the world, where he would have a sort of right to stand, howsoever poor and bare it might be.

‘I’m not used to beds or to food enough,’ he said. But he did not dare to insist too much on that ‘place’. It seemed too great a thing to be true.

Loristan took his arm.

‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘We won’t part. I believe you are to be trusted.’

The Rat turned quite white in a sort of anguish of joy. He had never cared for any one in his life. He had been a sort of young Cain, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him. And during the last twelve hours he had plunged into a tumultuous ocean of boyish hero-worship. This man seemed like a sort of god to him. What he had said and done the day before, in what had been really The Rat’s hours of extremity, after that appalling night – the way he had looked into his face and understood it all, the talk at the table when he had listened to him seriously, comprehending and actually respecting his plans and rough maps; his silent companionship as they followed the pauper hearse together – these things were enough to make the lad longingly ready to be any sort of servant or slave to him if he might see and be spoken to by him even once or twice a day.

The Squad wore a look of dismay for a moment, and Loristan saw it.

‘I am going to take your captain with me,’ he said. ‘But he will come back to Barracks. So will Marco.’

‘Will yer go on with the game?’ asked Cad, as eager spokesman. ‘We want to go on being the “Secret Party”.’

‘Yes, I’ll go on,’ The Rat answered. ‘I won’t give it up. There’s a lot in the papers today.’

So they were pacified and went on their way, and Loristan and Lazarus and Marco and The Rat went on theirs also.

‘Queer thing is,’ The Rat thought as they walked together, ‘I’m a bit afraid to speak to him unless he speaks to me first. Never felt that way before with anyone.’

He had jeered at policemen and had impudently chaffed ‘swells’, but he felt a sort of secret awe of this man, and actually liked the feeling.

‘It’s as if I was a private and he was commander-in-chief,’ he thought. ‘That’s it.’

Loristan talked to him as they went. He was simple enough in his statements of the situation. There was an old sofa in Marco’s bedroom. It was narrow and hard, as Marco’s bed itself was, but The Rat could sleep upon it. They would share what food they had. There were newspapers and magazines to be read. There were papers and pencils to draw new maps and plans of battles. There was even an old map of Samavia of Marco’s which the two boys could study together as an aid to their game. The Rat’s eyes began to have points of fire in them.

‘If I could see the papers every morning, I could fight the battles on paper by night,’ he said, quite panting at the incredible vision of splendour. Were all the kingdoms of the earth going to be given to him? Was he going to sleep without a drunken father near him?

Was he going to have a chance to wash himself and to sit at a table and hear people say ‘Thank you’, and ‘I beg pardon’, as if they were using the most ordinary fashion of speech? His own father, before he had sunk into the depths, had lived and spoken in this way.

‘When I have time, we will see who can draw up the best plans,’ Loristan said.

‘Do you mean that you’ll look at mine then – when you have time?’ asked The Rat, hesitatingly. ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’

‘Yes,’ answered Loristan, ‘I’ll look at them, and we’ll talk them over.’

As they went on, he told him that he and Marco could do many things together. They could go to museums and galleries, and Marco could show him what he himself was familiar with.

‘My father said you wouldn’t let him come back to Barracks when you found out about it,’ The Rat said, hesitating again and growing hot because he remembered so many ugly past days. ‘But – but I swear I won’t do him any harm, sir. I won’t!’

‘When I said I believed you could be trusted, I meant several things,’ Loristan answered him. ‘That was one of them. You’re a new recruit. You and Marco are both under a commanding officer.’ He said the words because he knew they would elate him and stir his blood.

chapter twelve

‘only two boys’

The words did elate him, and his blood was stirred by them every time they returned to his mind. He remembered them through the days and nights that followed. He sometimes, indeed, awakened from his deep sleep on the hard and narrow sofa in Marco’s room, and found that he was saying them half aloud to himself. The hardness of the sofa did not prevent his resting as he had never rested before in his life. By contrast with the past he had known, this poor existence was comfort which verged on luxury. He got into the battered tin bath every morning, he sat at the clean table, and could look at Loristan and speak to him and hear his voice. His chief trouble was that he could hardly keep his eyes off him, and he was a little afraid he might be annoyed. But he could not bear to lose a look or a movement.

At the end of the second day, he found his way, at some trouble, to Lazarus’s small back room at the top of the house.

‘Will you let me come in and talk a bit?’ he said.

When he went in, he was obliged to sit on the top of Lazarus’s wooden box because there was nothing else for him.

‘I want to ask you,’ he plunged into his talk at once, ‘do you think he minds me looking at him so much? I can’t help it – but if he hates it – well – I’ll try and keep my eyes on the table.’

‘The Master is used to being looked at,’ Lazarus made answer. ‘But it would be well to ask himself. He likes open speech.’

‘I want to find out everything he likes and everything he doesn’t like,’ The Rat said. ‘I want – isn’t there anything – anything you’d let me do for him? It wouldn’t matter what it was. And he needn’t know you are not doing it. I know you wouldn’t be willing to give up anything particular. But you wait on him night and day. Couldn’t you give up something to me?’

Lazarus pierced him with keen eyes. He did not answer for several seconds.

‘Now and then,’ he said gruffly at last, ‘I’ll let you brush his boots. But not every day – perhaps once a week.’

‘When will you let me have my first turn?’ The Rat asked.

Lazarus reflected. His shaggy eyebrows drew themselves down over his eyes as if this were a question of state.

‘Next Saturday,’ he conceded. ‘Not before. I’ll tell him when you brush them.’

‘You needn’t,’ said The Rat. ‘It’s not that I want him to know. I want to know myself that I’m doing something for him. I’ll find out things that I can do without interfering with you. I’ll think them out.’

‘Anything anyone else did for him would be interfering with me,’ said Lazarus.

It was The Rat’s turn to reflect now, and his face twisted itself into new lines and wrinkles.

‘I’ll tell you before I do anything,’ he said, after he had thought it over. ‘You served him first.’

‘I have served him ever since he was born,’ said Lazarus.

‘He’s – he’s yours,’ said The Rat, still thinking deeply.

‘I am his,’ was Lazarus’s stern answer. ‘I am his – and the young Master’s.’

‘That’s it,’ The Rat said. Then a squeak of a half-laugh broke from him. ‘I’ve never been anybody’s,’ he added.

His sharp eyes caught a passing look on Lazarus’s face. Such a queer, disturbed, sudden look. Could he be rather sorry for him?

Perhaps the look meant something like that.

‘If you stay near him long enough – and it needn’t be long – you will be his too. Everybody is.’

The Rat sat up as straight as he could. ‘When it comes to that,’ he blurted out, ‘I’m his now, in my way. I was his two minutes after he looked at me with his queer, handsome eyes. They’re queer because they get you, and you want to follow him. I’m going to follow.’

That night Lazarus recounted to his master the story of the scene. He simply repeated word for word what had been said, and Loristan listened gravely.

‘We have not had time to learn much of him yet,’ he commented. ‘But that is a faithful soul, I think.’

A few days later, Marco missed The Rat soon after their breakfast hour. He had gone out without saying anything to the household. He did not return for several hours, and when he came back he looked tired. In the
afternoon he fell asleep on his sofa in Marco’s room and slept heavily. No one asked him any questions as he volunteered no explanation. The next day he went out again in the same mysterious manner, and the next and the next. For an entire week he went out and returned with the tired look; but he did not explain until one morning, as he lay on his sofa before getting up, he said to Marco:

‘I’m practicing walking with my crutches. I don’t want to go about like a rat any more. I mean to be as near like other people as I can. I walk farther every morning. I began with two miles. If I practise every day, my crutches will be like legs.’

‘Shall I walk with you?’ asked Marco.

‘Wouldn’t you mind walking with a cripple?’

‘Don’t call yourself that,’ said Marco. ‘We can talk together, and try to remember everything we see as we go along.’

‘I want to learn to remember things. I’d like to train myself in that way too,’ The Rat answered. ‘I’d give anything to know some of the things your father taught you. I’ve got a good memory. I remember a lot of things I don’t want to remember. Will you go this morning?’

That morning they went, and Loristan was told the reason for their walk. But though he knew one reason, he did not know all about it. When The Rat was allowed his ‘turn’ of the boot-brushing, he told more to Lazarus.

‘What I want to do,’ he said, ‘is not only walk as fast as other people do, but faster. Acrobats train themselves to do anything. It’s training that does it. There might come a time when he might need someone to go on an
errand quickly, and I’m going to be ready. I’m going to train myself until he needn’t think of me as if I were only a cripple who can’t do things and has to be taken care of. I want him to know that I’m really as strong as Marco, and where Marco can go I can go.’

‘He’ was what he always said, and Lazarus always understood without explanation.

‘“The Master” is your name for him,’ he had explained at the beginning. ‘And I can’t call him just “Mister” Loristan. It sounds like cheek. If he was called “General” or “Colonel” I could stand it – though it wouldn’t be quite right. Someday I shall find a name. When I speak to him, I say “Sir.”’

The walks were taken every day, and each day were longer. Marco found himself silently watching The Rat with amazement at his determination and endurance. He knew that he must not speak of what he could not fail to see as they walked. He must not tell him that he looked tired and pale and sometimes desperately fatigued. He had inherited from his father the tact which sees what people do not wish to be reminded of. He knew that for some reason of his own The Rat had determined to do this thing at any cost to himself. Sometimes his face grew white and worn and he breathed hard, but he never rested more than a few minutes, and never turned back or shortened a walk they had planned.

‘Tell me something about Samavia, something to remember,’ he would say, when he looked his worst. ‘When I begin to try to remember, I forget – other things.’

So, as they went on their way, they talked, and The Rat committed things to memory. He was quick at it, and grew quicker every day. They invented a game of remembering faces they passed. Both would learn them by heart, and on their return home Marco would draw them. They went to the museums and galleries and learned things there, making from memory lists and descriptions which at night they showed to Loristan, when he was not too busy to talk to them.

As the days passed, Marco saw that The Rat was gaining strength. This exhilarated him greatly. They often went to Hampstead Heath and walked in the wind and sun. There The Rat would go through curious exercises which he believed would develop his muscles. He began to look less tired during and after his journey. There were even fewer wrinkles on his face, and his sharp eyes looked less fierce. The talks between the two boys were long and curious. Marco soon realised that The Rat wanted to learn – learn – learn.

‘Your father can talk to you almost as if you were twenty years old,’ he said once. ‘He knows you can understand what he’s saying. If he were to talk to me, he’d always have to remember that I was only a rat that had lived in gutters and seen nothing else.’

They were talking in their room, as they nearly always did after they went to bed and the street lamp shone in and lighted their bare little room. They often sat up clasping their knees, Marco on his poor bed, The Rat on his hard sofa, but neither of them conscious either of the poorness or hardness, because to each one the long unknown sense of companionship was such a satisfying
thing. Neither of them had ever talked intimately to another boy, and now they were together day and night. They revealed their thoughts to each other; they told each other things it had never before occurred to either to think of telling anyone. In fact, they found out about themselves, as they talked, things they had not quite known before. Marco had gradually discovered that the admiration The Rat had for his father was an impassioned and curious feeling which possessed him entirely. It seemed to Marco that it was beginning to be like a sort of religion. He evidently thought of him every moment. So when he spoke of Loristan’s knowing him to be only a rat of the gutter, Marco felt he himself was fortunate in remembering something he could say.

‘My father said yesterday that you had a big brain and a strong will,’ he answered from his bed. ‘He said that you had a wonderful memory which only needed exercising. He said it after he looked over the list you made of the things you had seen in the Tower.’

The Rat shuffled on his sofa and clasped his knees tighter.

‘Did he? Did he?’ he said.

He rested his chin upon his knees for a few minutes and stared straight before him. Then he turned to the bed.

‘Marco,’ he said, in a rather hoarse voice, a queer voice; ‘are you jealous?’

‘Jealous,’ said Marco; ‘why?’

‘I mean, have you ever been jealous? Do you know what it is like?’

‘I don’t think I do,’ answered Marco, staring a little.

‘Are you ever jealous of Lazarus because he’s always with your father – because he’s with him oftener than you are – and knows about his work – and can do things for him you can’t? I mean, are you jealous of – your father?’

Marco loosed his arms from his knees and lay down flat on his pillow.

‘No, I’m not. The more people love and serve him, the better,’ he said. ‘The only thing I care for is – is him. I just care for
him
. Lazarus does too. Don’t you?’

The Rat was greatly excited internally. He had been thinking of this thing a great deal. The thought had sometimes terrified him. He might as well have it out now if he could. If he could get at the truth, everything would be easier. But would Marco really tell him?

‘Don’t you mind?’ he said, still hoarse and eager – ‘don’t you mind how much I care for him? Could it ever make you feel savage? Could it ever set you thinking I was nothing but – what I am – and that it was cheek of me to push myself in and fasten on to a gentleman who only took me up for charity? Here’s the living truth,’ he ended in an outburst; ‘if I were you and you were me, that’s what I should be thinking. I know it is. I couldn’t help it. I should see every low thing there was in you, in your manners and your voice and your looks. I should see nothing but the contrast between you and me and between you and him. I should be so jealous that I should just rage. I should
hate
you – and I should
despise
you!’

He had wrought himself up to such a passion of feeling that he set Marco thinking that what he was hearing
meant strange and strong emotions such as he himself had never experienced. The Rat had been thinking over all this in secret for some time, it was evident. Marco lay still a few minutes and thought it over. Then he found something to say, just as he had found something before.

‘You might, if you were with other people who thought in the same way,’ he said, ‘and if you hadn’t found out that it is such a mistake to think in that way, that it’s even stupid. But, you see, if you were I, you would have lived with my father, and he’d have told you what he knows – what he’s been finding out all his life.’