The Lost Prince, Frances Hodgson Burnett [interesting books to read for teens TXT] 📗

to stop you from giving him the Sign. And then it all seemed foolishness—and the next second all the things you had told me rushed back to me at once—and I remembered what I had been thinking ever since—and I said—`Perhaps it’s the Law beginning to work,’ and the palms of my hands got moist.”

Marco was very quiet. He was looking at the farthest and highest peaks and wondering about many things.

“It was the expression of his face that was different,” he said. “And his eyes. They are rather smaller than the right man’s are. The light in the shop was poor, and it was not until the last time he bent over me that I found out what I had not seen before. His eyes are gray—the other ones are brown.”

“Did you see that!” The Rat exclaimed. “Then we’re sure! We’re safe!”

“We’re not safe till we’ve found the right man,” Marco said. “Where is he? Where is he? Where is he?”

He said the words dreamily and quietly, as if he were lost in thought—but also rather as if he expected an answer. And he still looked at the far-off peaks. The Rat, after watching him a moment or so, began to look at them also. They were like a loadstone to him too. There was something stilling about them, and when your eyes had rested upon them a few moments they did not want to move away.

“There must be a ledge up there somewhere,” he said at last.

“Let’s go up and look for it and sit there and think and think— about finding the right man.”

There seemed nothing fantastic in this to Marco. To go into some quiet place and sit and think about the thing he wanted to remember or to find out was an old way of his. To be quiet was always the best thing, his father had taught him. It was like listening to something which could speak without words.

“There is a little train which goes up the Gaisberg,” he said. “When you are at the top, a world of mountains spreads around you. Lazarus went once and told me. And we can lie out on the grass all night. Let us go, Aide-de-camp.”

So they went, each one thinking the same thought, and each boy-mind holding its own vision. Marco was the calmer of the two, because his belief that there was always help to be found was an accustomed one and had ceased to seem to partake of the supernatural. He believed quite simply that it was the working of a law, not the breaking of one, which gave answer and led him in his quests. The Rat, who had known nothing of laws other than those administered by police-courts, was at once awed and fascinated by the suggestion of crossing some borderland of the Unknown. The law of the One had baffled and overthrown him, with its sweeping away of the enmities of passions which created wars and called for armies. But the Law of Earthly Living seemed to offer practical benefits if you could hold on to yourself enough to work it.

“You wouldn’t get everything for nothing, as far as I can make out,” he had said to Marco. “You’d have to sweep all the rubbish out of your mind—sweep it as if you did it with a broom—and then keep on thinking straight and believing you were going to get things—and working for them—and they’d come.”

Then he had laughed a short ugly laugh because he recalled something.

“There was something in the Bible that my father used to jeer about—something about a man getting what he prayed for if he believed it,” he said.

“Oh, yes, it’s there,” said Marco. “That if a man pray believing he shall receive what he asks it shall be given him. All the books say something like it. It’s been said so often it makes you believe it.”

“He didn’t believe it, and I didn’t,” said The Rat.

“Nobody does—really,” answered Marco, as he had done once before. “It’s because we don’t know.”

They went up the Gaisberg in the little train, which pushed and dragged and panted slowly upward with them. It took them with it stubbornly and gradually higher and higher until it had left Salzburg and the Citadel below and had reached the world of mountains which rose and spread and lifted great heads behind each other and beside each other and beyond each other until there seemed no other land on earth but that on mountain sides and backs and shoulders and crowns. And also one felt the absurdity of living upon flat ground, where life must be an insignificant thing.

There were only a few sightseers in the small carriages, and they were going to look at the view from the summit. They were not in search of a ledge.

The Rat and Marco were. When the little train stopped at the top, they got out with the rest. They wandered about with them over the short grass on the treeless summit and looked out from this viewpoint and the other. The Rat grew more and more silent, and his silence was not merely a matter of speechlessness but of expression. He LOOKED silent and as if he were no longer aware of the earth. They left the sightseers at last and wandered away by themselves. They found a ledge where they could sit or lie and where even the world of mountains seemed below them. They had brought some simple food with them, and they laid it behind a jutting bit of rock. When the sightseers boarded the laboring little train again and were dragged back down the mountain, their night of vigil would begin.

That was what it was to be. A night of stillness on the heights, where they could wait and watch and hold themselves ready to hear any thought which spoke to them.

The Rat was so thrilled that he would not have been surprised if he had heard a voice from the place of the stars. But Marco only believed that in this great stillness and beauty, if he held his boy-soul quiet enough, he should find himself at last thinking of something that would lead him to the place which held what it was best that he should find. The people returned to the train and it set out upon its way down the steepness.

They heard it laboring on its way, as though it was forced to make as much effort to hold itself back as it had made to drag itself upward.

Then they were alone, and it was a loneness such as an eagle might feel when it held itself poised high in the curve of blue. And they sat and watched. They saw the sun go down and, shade by shade, deepen and make radiant and then draw away with it the last touches of color—rose-gold, rose-purple, and rose-gray.

One mountain-top after another held its blush a few moments and lost it. It took long to gather them all but at length they were gone and the marvel of night fell.

The breath of the forests below was sweet about them, and soundlessness enclosed them which was of unearthly peace. The stars began to show themselves, and presently the two who waited found their faces turned upward to the sky and they both were speaking in whispers.

“The stars look large here,” The Rat said.

“Yes,” answered Marco. “We are not as high as the Buddhist was, but it seems like the top of the world.”

“There is a light on the side of the mountain yonder which is not a star,” The Rat whispered.

“It is a light in a hut where the guides take the climbers to rest and to spend the night,” answered Marco.

“It is so still,” The Rat whispered again after a silence, and Marco whispered back:

“It is so still.”

They had eaten their meal of black bread and cheese after the setting of the sun, and now they lay down on their backs and looked up until the first few stars had multiplied themselves into myriads. They began a little low talk, but the soundlessness was stronger than themselves.

“How am I going to hold on to that second law?” The Rat said restlessly. “ `Let pass through thy mind only the image thou wouldst see become a truth.’ The things that are passing through my mind are not the things I want to come true. What if we don’t find him —don’t find the right one, I mean!”

“Lie still—still—and look up at the stars,” whispered Marco. “They give you a SURE feeling.”

There was something in the curious serenity of him which calmed even his aide-de-camp. The Rat lay still and looked—and looked—and thought. And what he thought of was the desire of his heart. The soundlessness enwrapped him and there was no world left. That there was a spark of light in the mountain-climbers’ rest-hut was a thing forgotten.

They were only two boys, and they had begun their journey on the earliest train and had been walking about all day and thinking of great and anxious things.

“It is so still,” The Rat whispered again at last.

“It is so still,” whispered Marco.

And the mountains rising behind each other and beside each other and beyond each other in the night, and also the myriads of stars which had so multiplied themselves, looking down knew that they were asleep—as sleep the human things which do not watch forever.

“Some one is smoking,” Marco found himself saying in a dream. After which he awakened and found that the smoke was not part of a dream at all. It came from the pipe of a young man who had an alpenstock and who looked as if he had climbed to see the sun rise. He wore the clothes of a climber and a green hat with a tuft at the back. He looked down at the two boys, surprised.

“Good day,” he said. “Did you sleep here so that you could see the sun get up?”

“Yes,” answered Marco.

“Were you cold?”

“We slept too soundly to know. And we brought our thick coats.”

“I slept halfway down the mountains,” said the smoker. “I am

a guide in these days, but I have not been one long enough to miss a sunrise it is no work to reach. My father and brother think I am mad about such things. They would rather stay in their beds. Oh! he is awake, is he?” turning toward The Rat, who had risen on one elbow and was staring at him. “What is the matter? You look as if you were afraid of me.”

Marco did not wait for The Rat to recover his breath and speak.

“I know why he looks at you so,” he answered for him. “He is startled. Yesterday we went to a hair-dresser’s shop down below there, and we saw a man who was almost exactly like you—only —” he added, looking up, “his eyes were gray and yours are brown.”

“He was my twin brother,” said the guide, puffing at his pipe cheerfully. “My father thought he could make hair-dressers of us both, and I tried it for four years. But I always wanted to be climbing the mountains and there were not holidays enough. So I cut my hair, and washed the pomade out of it, and broke away. I don’t look like a hair-dresser now, do I?”

He did not. Not at all. But Marco knew him. He was the man. There was no one on the mountain-top but themselves, and the sun was just showing a rim of gold above the farthest and highest giant’s shoulders. One need not be afraid to do anything, since there was no one to see or hear.