The Lost Prince

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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."

[Illustration: He was the man who had spoken to him in Samavian.]

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 extraordinary
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.

"Wasn't I like a rat?" he demanded, when he suddenly stopped.

"You made yourself like one on purpose," Marco answered. "You do it for
fun."