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Henry Lawson - "Over the Sliprails"

Andrew Lang - "New Collected Rhymes"

Jules Verne - "De la Terre … la Lune"

Richard Harding Davis - "The Lion and the Unicorn"

The Lost Prince

F >> Francis Hodgson Burnett >> The Lost Prince






III

THE LEGEND OF THE LOST PRINCE

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

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

It was this which had led his thoughts back to the story of the
Lost Prince. He knew that most of the people who looked at him
and called him a ``foreigner'' had not even heard of Samavia.
Those who chanced to recall its existence knew of it only as a
small fierce country, so placed upon the map that the larger
countries which were its neighbors felt they must control and
keep it in order, and therefore made incursions into it, and
fought its people and each other for possession. But it had not
been always so. It was an old, old country, and hundreds of
years ago it had been as celebrated for its peaceful happiness
and wealth as for its beauty. It was often said that it was one
of the most beautiful places in the world. A favorite Samavian
legend was that it had been the site of the Garden of Eden. In
those past centuries, its people had been of such great stature,
physical beauty, and strength, that they had been like a race of
noble giants. They were in those days a pastoral people, whose
rich crops and splendid flocks and herds were the envy of less
fertile countries. Among the shepherds and herdsmen there were
poets who sang their own songs when they piped among their sheep
upon the mountain sides and in the flower-thick valleys. Their
songs had been about patriotism and bravery, and faithfulness to
their chieftains and their country. The simple courtesy of the
poorest peasant was as stately as the manner of a noble. But
that, as Loristan had said with a tired smile, had been before
they had had time to outlive and forget the Garden of Eden. Five
hundred years ago, there had succeeded to the throne a king who
was bad and weak. His father had lived to be ninety years old,
and his son had grown tired of waiting in Samavia for his crown.
He had gone out into the world, and visited other countries and
their courts. When he returned and became king, he lived as no
Samavian king had lived before. He was an extravagant, vicious
man of furious temper and bitter jealousies. He was jealous of
the larger courts and countries he had seen, and tried

to introduce their customs and their ambitions. He ended by
introducing their worst faults and vices. There arose political
quarrels and savage new factions. Money was squandered until
poverty began for the first time to stare the country in the
face. The big Samavians, after their first stupefaction, broke
forth into furious rage. There were mobs and riots, then bloody
battles. Since it was the king who had worked this wrong, they
would have none of him. They would depose him and make his son
king in his place. It was at this part of the story that Marco
was always most deeply interested. The young prince was totally
unlike his father. He was a true royal Samavian. He was bigger
and stronger for his age than any man in the country, and he was
as handsome as a young Viking god. More than this, he had a
lion's heart, and before he was sixteen, the shepherds and
herdsmen had already begun to make songs about his young valor,
and his kingly courtesy, and generous kindness. Not only the
shepherds and herdsmen sang them, but the people in the streets.
The king, his father, had always been jealous of him, even when
he was only a beautiful, stately child whom the people roared
with joy to see as he rode through the streets. When he returned
from his journeyings and found him a splendid youth, he detested
him. When the people began to clamor and demand that he himself
should abdicate, he became insane with rage, and committed such
cruelties that the people ran mad themselves. One day they
stormed the palace, killed and overpowered the guards, and,
rushing into the royal apartments, burst in upon the king as he
shuddered green with terror and fury in his private room. He was
king no more, and must leave the country, they vowed, as they
closed round him with bared weapons and shook them in his face.
Where was the prince? They must see him and tell him their
ultimatum. It was he whom they wanted for a king. They trusted
him and would obey him. They began to shout aloud his name,
calling him in a sort of chant in unison, ``Prince Ivor--Prince
Ivor--Prince Ivor!'' But no answer came. The people of the
palace had hidden themselves, and the place was utterly silent.

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

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

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

``He afraid!'' he shouted. ``If he does not come, it is because
thou hast killed him--and thou art a dead man!''

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

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

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

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

``Did no one ever find his sword or his cap--or hear anything or
guess anything about him ever--ever--ever?'' he would say
restlessly again and again.

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

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

``Yes, he would have come,'' Marco said.

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

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

``What is your name?'' he asked.

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

``Excuse me?''

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

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

``I am Marco Loristan,'' the boy answered him.

The man looked straight into his eyes and smiled.

``That is not the name,'' he said. ``I beg your pardon, my
boy.''

He was about to go on, and had indeed taken a couple of steps
away, when he paused and turned to him again.

``You may tell your father that you are a very well-trained lad.
I wanted to find out for myself.'' And he went on.

Marco felt that his heart beat a little quickly. This was one of
several incidents which had happened during the last three years,
and made him feel that he was living among things so mysterious
that their very mystery hinted at danger. But he himself had
never before seemed involved in them. Why should it matter that
he was well-behaved? Then he remembered something. The man had
not said ``well-behaved,'' he had said ``well-TRAINED.''
Well-trained in what way? He felt his forehead prickle slightly
as he thought of the smiling, keen look which set itself so
straight upon him. Had he spoken to him in Samavian for an
experiment, to see if he would be startled into forgetting that
he had been trained to seem to know only the language of the
country he was temporarily living in? But he had not forgotten.
He had remembered well, and was thankful that he had betrayed
nothing. ``Even exiles may be Samavian soldiers. I am one. You
must be one,'' his father had said on that day long ago when he
had made him take his oath. Perhaps remembering his training was
being a soldier. Never had Samavia needed help as she needed it
to-day. Two years before, a rival claimant to the throne had
assassinated the then reigning king and his sons, and since then,
bloody war and tumult had raged. The new king was a powerful
man, and had a great following of the worst and most self-seeking
of the people. Neighboring countries had interfered for their
own welfare's sake, and the newspapers had been full of stories
of savage fighting and atrocities, and of starving peasants.

Marco had late one evening entered their lodgings to find
Loristan walking to and fro like a lion in a cage, a paper
crushed and torn in his hands, and his eyes blazing. He had been
reading of cruelties wrought upon innocent peasants and women and
children. Lazarus was standing staring at him with huge tears
running down his cheeks. When Marco opened the door, the old
soldier strode over to him, turned him about, and led him out of
the room.

``Pardon, sir, pardon!'' he sobbed. ``No one must see him, not
even you. He suffers so horribly.''

He stood by a chair in Marco's own small bedroom, where he half
pushed, half led him. He bent his grizzled head, and wept like a
beaten child.

``Dear God of those who are in pain, assuredly it is now the time
to give back to us our Lost Prince!'' he said, and Marco knew the
words were a prayer, and wondered at the frenzied intensity of
it, because it seemed so wild a thing to pray for the return of a
youth who had died five hundred years before.

When he reached the palace, he was still thinking of the man who
had spoken to him. He was thinking of him even as he looked at
the majestic gray stone building and counted the number of its
stories and windows. He walked round it that he might make a
note in his memory of its size and form and its entrances, and
guess at the size of its gardens. This he did because it was
part of his game, and part of his strange training.

When he came back to the front, he saw that in the great entrance
court within the high iron railings an elegant but quiet- looking
closed carriage was drawing up before the doorway. Marco stood
and watched with interest to see who would come out and enter it.
He knew that kings and emperors who were not on parade looked
merely like well-dressed private gentlemen, and often chose to go
out as simply and quietly as other men. So he thought that,
perhaps, if he waited, he might see one of those well-known faces
which represent the highest rank and power in a monarchical
country, and which in times gone by had also represented the
power over human life and death and liberty.

``I should like to be able to tell my father that I have seen the
King and know his face, as I know the faces of the czar and the
two emperors.''

There was a little movement among the tall men-servants in the
royal scarlet liveries, and an elderly man descended the steps
attended by another who walked behind him. He entered the
carriage, the other man followed him, the door was closed, and
the carriage drove through the entrance gates, where the sentries
saluted.

Marco was near enough to see distinctly. The two men were
talking as if interested. The face of the one farthest from him
was the face he had often seen in shop-windows and newspapers.
The boy made his quick, formal salute. It was the King; and, as
he smiled and acknowledged his greeting, he spoke to his
companion.

``That fine lad salutes as if he belonged to the army,'' was what
he said, though Marco could not hear him.

His companion leaned forward to look through the window. When he
caught sight of Marco, a singular expression crossed his face.

``He does belong to an army, sir,'' he answered, ``though he does
not know it. His name is Marco Loristan.''

Then Marco saw him plainly for the first time. He was the man
with the keen eyes who had spoken to him in Samavian.



IV

THE RAT

Marco would have wondered very much if he had heard the words,
but, as he did not hear them, he turned toward home wondering at
something else. A man who was in intimate attendance on a king
must be a person of importance. He no doubt knew many things not
only of his own ruler's country, but of the countries of other
kings. But so few had really known anything of poor little
Samavia until the newspapers had begun to tell them of the
horrors of its war--and who but a Samavian could speak its
language? It would be an interesting thing to tell his
father--that a man who knew the King had spoken to him in
Samavian, and had sent that curious message.

Later he found himself passing a side street and looked up it.
It was so narrow, and on either side of it were such old, tall,
and sloping-walled houses that it attracted his attention. It
looked as if a bit of old London had been left to stand while
newer places grew up and hid it from view. This was the kind of
street he liked to pass through for curiosity's sake. He knew
many of them in the old quarters of many cities. He had lived in
some of them. He could find his way home from the other end of
it. Another thing than its queerness attracted him. He heard a
clamor of boys' voices, and he wanted to see what they were
doing. Sometimes, when he had reached a new place and had had
that lonely feeling, he had followed some boyish clamor of play
or wrangling, and had found a temporary friend or so.

Half-way to the street's end there was an arched brick passage.
The sound of the voices came from there--one of them high, and
thinner and shriller than the rest. Marco tramped up to the arch
and looked down through the passage. It opened on to a gray
flagged space, shut in by the railings of a black, deserted, and
ancient graveyard behind a venerable church which turned its face
toward some other street. The boys were not playing, but
listening to one of their number who was reading to them from a
newspaper.

Marco walked down the passage and listened also, standing in the
dark arched outlet at its end and watching the boy who read. He
was a strange little creature with a big forehead, and deep eyes
which were curiously sharp. But this was not all. He had a
hunch back, his legs seemed small and crooked. He sat with them
crossed before him on a rough wooden platform set on low wheels,
on which he evidently pushed himself about. Near him were a
number of sticks stacked together as if they were rifles. One of
the first things that Marco noticed was that he had a savage
little face marked with lines as if he had been angry all his
life.

``Hold your tongues, you fools!'' he shrilled out to some boys
who interrupted him. ``Don't you want to know anything, you
ignorant swine?''

He was as ill-dressed as the rest of them, but he did not speak
in the Cockney dialect. If he was of the riffraff of the
streets, as his companions were, he was somehow different.

Then he, by chance, saw Marco, who was standing in the arched end
of the passage.

``What are you doing there listening?'' he shouted, and at once
stooped to pick up a stone and threw it at him. The stone hit
Marco's shoulder, but it did not hurt him much. What he did not
like was that another lad should want to throw something at him
before they had even exchanged boy-signs. He also did not like
the fact that two other boys promptly took the matter up by
bending down to pick up stones also.

He walked forward straight into the group and stopped close to
the hunchback.

``What did you do that for?'' he asked, in his rather deep young
voice.

He was big and strong-looking enough to suggest that he was not a
boy it would be easy to dispose of, but it was not that which
made the group stand still a moment to stare at him. It was
something in himself--half of it a kind of impartial lack of
anything like irritation at the stone-throwing. It was as if it
had not mattered to him in the least. It had not made him feel
angry or insulted. He was only rather curious about it. Because
he was clean, and his hair and his shabby clothes were brushed,
the first impression given by his appearance as he stood in the
archway was that he was a young ``toff'' poking his nose where it
was not wanted; but, as he drew near, they saw that the
well-brushed clothes were worn, and there were patches on his
shoes.

``What did you do that for?'' he asked, and he asked it merely as
if he wanted to find out the reason.

``I'm not going to have you swells dropping in to my club as if
it was your own,'' said the hunchback.

``I'm not a swell, and I didn't know it was a club,'' Marco
answered. ``I heard boys, and I thought I'd come and look. When
I heard you reading about Samavia, I wanted to hear.''

He looked at the reader with his silent-expressioned eyes.

``You needn't have thrown a stone,'' he added. ``They don't do
it at men's clubs. I'll go away.''

He turned about as if he were going, but, before he had taken
three steps, the hunchback hailed him unceremoniously.

``Hi!'' he called out. ``Hi, you!''

``What do you want?'' said Marco.

``I bet you don't know where Samavia is, or what they're fighting
about.'' The hunchback threw the words at him.

``Yes, I do. It's north of Beltrazo and east of Jiardasia, and
they are fighting because one party has assassinated King Maran,
and the other will not let them crown Nicola Iarovitch. And why
should they? He's a brigand, and hasn't a drop of royal blood in
him.''

``Oh!'' reluctantly admitted the hunchback. ``You do know that
much, do you? Come back here.''

Marco turned back, while the boys still stared. It was as if two
leaders or generals were meeting for the first time, and the
rabble, looking on, wondered what would come of their encounter.

``The Samavians of the Iarovitch party are a bad lot and want
only bad things,'' said Marco, speaking first. ``They care
nothing for Samavia. They only care for money and the power to
make laws which will serve them and crush everybody else. They
know Nicola is a weak man, and that, if they can crown him king,
they can make him do what they like.''

The fact that he spoke first, and that, though he spoke in a
steady boyish voice without swagger, he somehow seemed to take it
for granted that they would listen, made his place for him at
once. Boys are impressionable creatures, and they know a leader
when they see him. The hunchback fixed glittering eyes on him.
The rabble began to murmur.

``Rat! Rat!'' several voices cried at once in good strong
Cockney. ``Arst 'im some more, Rat!''

``Is that what they call you?'' Marco asked the hunchback.

``It's what I called myself,'' he answered resentfully. `` `The
Rat.' Look at me! Crawling round on the ground like this! Look
at me!''

He made a gesture ordering his followers to move aside, and began
to push himself rapidly, with queer darts this side and that
round the inclosure. He bent his head and body, and twisted his
face, and made strange animal-like movements. He even uttered
sharp squeaks as he rushed here and there--as a rat might have
done when it was being hunted. He did it as if he were
displaying an accomplishment, and his followers' laughter was
applause.

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