The Lost Prince (12 page)
Authors: Frances Hodgson Burnett
‘What’s he found out?’
‘Oh!’ Marco answered, quite casually, ‘just that you can’t set savage thoughts loose in the world, any more than you can let loose savage beasts with hydrophobia. They spread a sort of rabies, and they always tear and worry you first of all.’
‘What do you mean?’ The Rat gasped out.
‘It’s like this,’ said Marco, lying flat and cool on his hard pillow and looking at the reflection of the street lamp on the ceiling. ‘That day I turned into your Barracks, without knowing that you’d think I was spying, it made you feel savage, and you threw the stone at me. If it had made me feel savage and I’d rushed in and fought, what would have happened to all of us?’
The Rat’s spirit of generalship gave the answer.
‘I should have called on the Squad to charge with fixed bayonets. They’d have half killed you. You’re a strong chap, and you’d have hurt a lot of them.’
A note of terror broke into his voice. ‘What a fool I
should have been!’ he cried out. ‘I should never have come here! I should never have known
him
!’ Even by the light of the street lamp Marco could see him begin to look almost ghastly.
‘The Squad could easily have half killed me,’ Marco added. ‘They could have quite killed me, if they had wanted to do it. And who would have got any good out of it? It would only have been a street-lads’ row – with the police and prison at the end of it.’
‘But because you’d lived with him,’ The Rat pondered, ‘you walked in as if you didn’t mind, and just asked why we did it, and looked like a stronger chap than any of us – and different – different. I wondered what was the matter with you, you were so cool and steady. I know now. It was because you were like him. He’d taught you. He’s like a wizard.’
‘He knows things that wizards think they know, but he knows them better,’ Marco said. ‘He says they’re not queer and unnatural. They’re just simple laws of nature. You have to be either on one side or the other, like an army. You choose your side. You either build up or tear down. You either keep in the light where you can see, or you stand in the dark and fight everything that comes near you, because you can’t see and you think it’s an enemy. No, you wouldn’t have been jealous if you’d been I and I’d been you.’
‘And you’re
not
?’ The Rat’s sharp voice was almost hollow. ‘You’ll swear you’re not?’
‘I’m not,’ said Marco.
The Rat’s excitement even increased a shade as he poured forth his confession.
‘I was afraid,’ he said. ‘I’ve been afraid every day since I came here. I’ll tell you straight out. It seemed just natural that you and Lazarus wouldn’t stand me, just as I wouldn’t have stood you. It seemed just natural that you’d work together to throw me out. I knew how I should have worked myself. Marco – I said I’d tell you straight out – I’m jealous of you. I’m jealous of Lazarus. It makes me wild when I see you both knowing all about him, and fit and ready to do anything he wants done. I’m not ready and I’m not fit.’
‘You’d do anything he wanted done, whether you were fit and ready or not,’ said Marco. ‘He knows that.’
‘Does he? Do you think he does?’ cried The Rat. ‘I wish he’d try me. I wish he would.’
Marco turned over on his bed and rose up on his elbow so that he faced The Rat on his sofa.
‘Let us
wait
,’ he said in a whisper. ‘Let us
wait
.’
There was a pause, and then The Rat whispered also.
‘For what?’
‘For him to find out that we’re fit to be tried. Don’t you see what fools we should be if we spent our time in being jealous, either of us. We’re only two boys. Suppose he saw we were only two silly fools. When you are jealous of me or of Lazarus, just go and sit down in a still place and think of
him
. Don’t think about yourself or about us. He’s so quiet that to think about him makes you quiet yourself. When things go wrong or when I’m lonely, he’s taught me to sit down and make myself think of things I like – pictures, books, monuments, splendid places. It pushes the other things out and sets your mind going properly. He doesn’t know I nearly
always think of him. He’s the best thought himself. You try it. You’re not really jealous. You only
think
you are. You’ll find that out if you always stop yourself in time. Anyone can be such a fool if he lets himself. And he can always stop it if he makes up his mind. I’m not jealous. You must let that thought alone. You’re not jealous yourself. Kick that thought into the street.’
The Rat caught his breath and threw his arms up over his eyes. ‘Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!’ he said; ‘if I’d lived near him always as you have. If I just had.’
‘We’re both living near him now,’ said Marco. ‘And here’s something to think of,’ leaning more forward on his elbow. ‘The kings who were being made ready for Samavia have waited all these years;
we
can make ourselves ready and wait so that, if just two boys are wanted to do something – just two boys – we can step out of the ranks when the call comes and say “Here!” Now let’s lie down and think of it until we go to sleep.’
The Squad was not forgotten. It found that Loristan himself would have regarded neglect as a breach of military duty.
‘You must remember your men,’ he said, two or three days after The Rat became a member of his household. ‘You must keep up their drill. Marco tells me it was very smart. Don’t let them get slack.’
‘His men!’ The Rat felt what he could not have put into words.
He knew he had worked, and that the Squad had worked, in their hidden holes and corners. Only hidden holes and corners had been possible for them because they had existed in spite of the protest of their world and the vigilance of its policemen. They had tried many refuges before they found the Barracks. No one but resented the existence of a troop of noisy vagabonds. But somehow this man knew that there had evolved from it something more than mere noisy play, that he, The Rat, had
meant
order and discipline.
‘His men!’ It made him feel as if he had had the Victoria Cross fastened on his coat. He had brain
enough to see many things, and he knew that it was in this way that Loristan was finding him his ‘place’. He knew how.
When they went to the Barracks, the Squad greeted them with a tumultuous welcome which expressed a great sense of relief. Privately the members had been filled with fears which they had talked over together in deep gloom. Marco’s father, they decided, was too big a swell to let the two come back after he had seen the sort the Squad was made up of. He might be poor just now, toffs sometimes lost their money for a bit, but you could see what he was, and fathers like him weren’t going to let their sons make friends with ‘such as us’. He’d stop the drill and the ‘Secret Society’ game. That’s what he’d do!
But The Rat came swinging in on his second-hand crutches looking as if he had been made a general, and Marco came with him; and the drill the Squad was put through was stricter and finer than any drill they had ever known.
‘I wish my father could have seen that,’ Marco said to The Rat.
The Rat turned red and white and then red again, but he said not a single word. The mere thought was like a flash of fire passing through him. But no fellow could hope for a thing as big as that. The Secret Party, in its subterranean cavern, surrounded by its piled arms, sat down to read the morning paper.
The war news was bad to read. The Maranovitch held the day for the moment, and while they suffered and wrought cruelties in the capital city, the Iarovitch
suffered and wrought cruelties in the country outside. So fierce and dark was the record that Europe stood aghast.
The Rat folded his paper when he had finished, and sat biting his nails. Having done this for a few minutes, he began to speak in his dramatic and hollow Secret Party whisper.
‘The hour has come,’ he said to his followers. ‘The messengers must go forth. They know nothing of what they go for; they only know that they must obey. If they were caught and tortured, they could betray nothing because they know nothing but that, at certain places, they must utter a certain word. They carry no papers. All commands they must learn by heart. When the sign is given, the Secret Party will know what to do – where to meet and where to attack.’
He drew plans of the battle on the flagstones, and he sketched an imaginary route which the two messengers were to follow. But his knowledge of the map of Europe was not worth much, and he turned to Marco.
‘You know more about geography than I do. You know more about everything,’ he said. ‘I only know Italy is at the bottom and Russia is at one side and England’s at the other. How would the Secret Messengers go to Samavia? Can you draw the countries they’d have to pass through?’
Because any schoolboy who knew the map could have done the same thing, Marco drew them. He also knew the stations the Secret Two would arrive at and leave by when they entered a city, the streets they would walk through and the very uniforms they would see; but of these things he said nothing. The reality his knowledge gave to the game was, however, a thrilling thing.
He wished he could have been free to explain to The Rat the things he knew. Together they could have worked out so many details of travel and possible adventure that it would have been almost as if they had set out on their journey in fact.
As it was, the mere sketching of the route fired The Rat’s imagination. He forged ahead with the story of adventure, and filled it with such mysterious purport and design that the Squad at times gasped for breath. In his glowing version the Secret Two entered cities by midnight and sang and begged at palace gates where kings driving outward paused to listen and were given the Sign.
‘Though it would not always be kings,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it would be the poorest people. Sometimes they might seem to be beggars like ourselves, when they were only Secret Ones disguised. A great lord might wear poor clothes and pretend to be a workman, and we should only know him by the signs we had learned by heart. When we were sent to Samavia, we should be obliged to creep in through some back part of the country where no fighting was being done and where no one would attack. Their generals are not clever enough to protect the parts which are joined to friendly countries, and they have not forces enough. Two boys could find a way in if they thought it out.’
He became possessed by the idea of thinking it out on the spot. He drew his rough map of Samavia on the flagstones with his chalk.
‘Look here,’ he said to Marco, who, with the elated and thrilled Squad, bent over it in a close circle of heads. ‘Beltrazo is here and Carnolitz is here – and here is Jiardasia. Beltrazo and Jiardasia are friendly,
though they don’t take sides. All the fighting is going on in the country about Melzarr. There is no reason why they should prevent single travellers from coming in across the frontiers of friendly neighbours. They’re not fighting with the countries outside, they are fighting with themselves.’ He paused a moment and thought.
‘The article in that magazine said something about a huge forest on the eastern frontier. That’s here. We could wander into a forest and stay there until we’d planned all we wanted to do. Even the people who had seen us would forget about us. What we have to do is to make people feel as if we were nothing – nothing.’
They were in the very midst of it, crowded together, leaning over, stretching necks and breathing quickly with excitement, when Marco lifted his head. Some mysterious impulse made him do it in spite of himself.
‘There’s my father!’ he said.
The chalk dropped, everything dropped, even Samavia. The Rat was up and on his crutches as if some magic force had swung him there. How he gave the command, or if he gave it at all, not even he himself knew. But the Squad stood at salute.
Loristan was standing at the opening of the archway as Marco had stood that first day. He raised his right hand in return salute and came forward.
‘I was passing the end of the street and remembered the Barracks was here,’ he explained. ‘I thought I should like to look at your men, Captain.’
He smiled, but it was not a smile which made his words really a joke. He looked down at the chalk map drawn on the flagstones.
‘You know that map well,’ he said. ‘Even I can see that it is Samavia. What is the Secret Party doing?’
‘The messengers are trying to find a way in,’ answered Marco.
‘We can get in there,’ said The Rat, pointing with a crutch. ‘There’s a forest where we could hide and find out things.’
‘Reconnoitre,’ said Loristan, looking down. ‘Yes. Two stray boys could be very safe in a forest. It’s a good game.’
That he should be there! That he should, in his own wonderful way, have given them such a thing as this. That he should have cared enough even to look up the Barracks, was what The Rat was thinking. A batch of ragamuffins they were and nothing else, and he standing looking at them with his fine smile. There was something about him which made him seem even splendid. The Rat’s heart thumped with startled joy.
‘Father,’ said Marco, ‘will you watch The Rat drill us? I want you to see how well it is done.’
‘Captain, will you do me that honour?’ Loristan said to The Rat, and to even these words he gave the right tone, neither jesting nor too serious. Because it was so right a tone, The Rat’s pulses beat only with exultation. This god of his had looked at his maps, he had talked of his plans, he had come to see the soldiers who were his work! The Rat began his drill as if he had been reviewing an army.
What Loristan saw done was wonderful in its mechanical exactness.
The Squad moved like the perfect parts of a perfect machine. That they could so do it in such space, and
that they should have accomplished such precision, was an extraordinary testimonial to the military efficiency and curious qualities of this one hunchbacked,
vagabond
officer.
‘That is magnificent!’ the spectator said, when it was over. ‘It could not be better done. Allow me to congratulate you.’
He shook The Rat’s hand as if it had been a man’s, and, after he had shaken it, he put his own hand lightly on the boy’s shoulder and let it rest there as he talked a few minutes to them all.
He kept his talk within the game, and his clear comprehension of it added a flavour which even the dullest member of the Squad was elated by. Sometimes you couldn’t understand toffs when they made a shy at being friendly, but you could understand him, and he stirred up your spirits. He didn’t make jokes with you, either, as if a chap had to be kept grinning. After the few minutes were over, he went away. Then they sat down again in their circle and talked about him, because they could talk and think about nothing else. They stared at Marco furtively, feeling as if he were a creature of another world because he had lived with this man. They stared at The Rat in a new way also. The
wonderful-looking
hand had rested on his shoulder, and he had been told that what he had done was magnificent.
‘When you said you wished your father could have seen the drill,’ said The Rat, ‘you took my breath away. I’d never have had the cheek to think of it myself – and I’d never have dared to let you ask him, even if you wanted to do it. And he came himself! It struck me dumb.’
‘If he came,’ said Marco, ‘it was because he wanted to see it.’
When they had finished talking, it was time for Marco and The Rat to go on their way. Loristan had given The Rat an errand. At a certain hour he was to present himself at a certain shop and receive a package.
‘Let him do it alone,’ Loristan said to Marco. ‘He will be better pleased. His desire is to feel that he is trusted to do things alone.’
So they parted at a street corner, Marco to walk back to No. 7 Philibert Place, The Rat to execute his commission. Marco turned into one of the better streets, through which he often passed on his way home. It was not a fashionable quarter, but it contained some respectable houses in whose windows here and there were to be seen neat cards bearing the word ‘Apartments’, which meant that the owner of the house would let to lodgers his drawing room or sitting room suite.
As Marco walked up the street, he saw someone come out of the door of one of the houses and walk quickly and lightly down the pavement. It was a young woman wearing an elegant though quiet dress, and a hat which looked as if it had been bought in Paris or Vienna. She had, in fact, a slightly foreign air, and it was this, indeed, which made Marco look at her long enough to see that she was also a graceful and lovely person. He wondered what her nationality was. Even at some yards’ distance he could see that she had long dark eyes and a curved mouth which seemed to be smiling to itself. He thought she might be Spanish or Italian.
He was trying to decide which of the two countries she belonged to, as she drew near to him, but quite suddenly the curved mouth ceased smiling as her foot seemed to catch in a break in the pavement, and she so lost her balance that she would have fallen if he had not leaped forward and caught her.
She was light and slender, and he was a strong lad and managed to steady her. An expression of sharp momentary anguish crossed her face.