The Lost Prince (31 page)

‘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 coloured 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 realise 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 realised 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 colour 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 laboured for Samavia through 500 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 labouring for Samavia, and using all the power of a great mind and the delicate ingenuity of a great genius to gain friends and favour 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 honour! But he would never let me wait on him when we were travelling. 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 splendour 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.”’

biographical note

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) was born in Cheetham, Manchester, the third of five children. Her family struggled financially following the death of her father, eventually moving to Tennessee.

It was in the United States that Hodgson Burnett began writing stories to support her family. By the time of her marriage to Swan Burnett in 1872, her work was being published regularly in literary magazines. She began writing her first full-length novel in the same year and gave birth to the first of two sons.

Her first book for children,
Little Lord Fauntleroy
, was a runaway success when it was serialising in St Nicholas magazine in 1885 and 1886. Readers eager for the next instalment bought related merchandise and dressed their children in velvet suits like the eponymous hero. Hodgson Burnett later wrote two other enduring classics of children’s literature,
A Little Princess
(1905) and
The Secret
Garden
(1911). Although these are the books for which she is best remembered today, she was a popular writer of historical fiction in her lifetime, beginning with
A Lady of Quality
(1896) which was the second highest selling book in the United States in 1896.

The death of her elder son in 1890 led to a period of mourning and depression for Hodgson Burnett, but
she persevered with her writing and plunged herself into charity work. In 1898 she divorced her husband and later remarried although this marriage too ended in divorce.

Despite many extended stays in England, Hodgson Burnett lived most of her life in the United States and became a citizen in 1905. She continued to write into her old age, producing many of her most famous works towards the end of her life. She died in New York in 1924.