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

call again. The brushwood and faggots The Rat had thrown on the coals crackled and sparkled and roared into fine flames, which cast their light into the road and threw out in fine relief the old figure which stood on the threshold and looked so tall.

And in but a few minutes her great lord came to her. And in his green hunting-suit with its green hat and eagle’s feather he was as splendid as she had said he was. He was big and royal-looking and laughing and he bent and kissed her as if he had been her own son.

“Yes, good Mother,” they heard him say. “I want my warm bed and one of your good suppers. I sent the others to the Gasthaus.”

He came into the redly glowing room and his head almost touched the blackened rafters. Then he saw the two boys.

“Who are these, good Mother?” he asked.

She lifted his hand and kissed it.

“They are the Bearers of the Sign,” she said rather softly. “ `The Lamp is lighted.’ ”

Then his whole look changed. His laughing face became quite grave and for a moment looked even anxious. Marco knew it was because he was startled to find them only boys. He made a step forward to look at them more closely.

“The Lamp is lighted! And you two bear the Sign!” he exclaimed. Marco stood out in the fire glow that he might see him well. He saluted with respect.

“My name is Marco Loristan, Highness,” he said. “And my father sent me.”

The change which came upon his face then was even greater than at first. For a second, Marco even felt that there was a flash of alarm in it. But almost at once that passed.

“Loristan is a great man and a great patriot,” he said. “If he sent you, it is because he knows you are the one safe messenger. He has worked too long for Samavia not to know what he does.”

Marco saluted again. He knew what it was right to say next.

“If we have your Highness’s permission to retire,” he said, “we will leave you and go to bed. We go down the mountain at sunrise.”

“Where next?” asked the hunter, looking at him with curious intentness.

“To Vienna, Highness,” Marco answered.

His questioner held out his hand, still with the intent interest in his eyes.

“Good night, fine lad,” he said. “Samavia has need to vaunt itself on its Sign-bearer. God go with you.”

He stood and watched him as he went toward the room in which he and his aide-de-camp were to sleep. The Rat followed him closely. At the little back door the old, old woman stood, having opened it for them. As Marco passed and bade her good night, he saw that she again made the strange obeisance, bending the knee as he went by.

XXIV

“HOW SHALL WE FIND HIM?”

In Vienna they came upon a pageant. In celebration of a century-past victory the Emperor drove in state and ceremony to attend at the great cathedral and to do honor to the ancient banners and laurel-wreathed statue of a long-dead soldier-prince. The broad pavements of the huge chief thoroughfare were crowded with a cheering populace watching the martial pomp and splendor as it passed by with marching feet, prancing horses, and glitter of scabbard and chain, which all seemed somehow part of music in triumphant bursts.

The Rat was enormously thrilled by the magnificence of the imperial place. Its immense spaces, the squares and gardens, reigned over by statues of emperors, and warriors, and queens made him feel that all things on earth were possible. The palaces and stately piles of architecture, whose surmounting equestrian bronzes ramped high in the air clear cut and beautiful against the sky, seemed to sweep out of his world all atmosphere but that of splendid cities down whose broad avenues emperors rode with waving banners, tramping, jangling soldiery before and behind, and golden trumpets blaring forth. It seemed as if it must always be like this—that lances and cavalry and emperors would never cease to ride by. “I should like to stay here a long time,” he said almost as if he were in a dream. “I should like to see it all.”

He leaned on his crutches in the crowd and watched the glitter of the passing pageant. Now and then he glanced at Marco, who watched also with a steady eye which, The Rat saw, nothing would escape: How absorbed he always was in the Game! How impossible it was for him to forget it or to remember it only as a boy would! Often it seemed that he was not a boy at all. And the Game, The Rat knew in these days, was a game no more but a thing of deep and deadly earnest—a thing which touched kings and thrones, and concerned the ruling and swaying of great countries. And they—two lads pushed about by the crowd as they stood and stared at the soldiers—carried with them that which was even now lighting the Lamp. The blood in The Rat’s veins ran quickly and made him feel hot as he remembered certain thoughts which had forced themselves into his mind during the past weeks. As his brain had the trick of “working things out,” it had, during the last fortnight at least, been following a wonderful even if rather fantastic and feverish fancy. A mere trifle had set it at work, but, its labor once begun, things which might have once seemed to be trifles appeared so no longer. When Marco was asleep, The Rat lay awake through thrilled and sometimes almost breathless midnight hours, looking backward and recalling every detail of their lives since they had known each other. Sometimes it seemed to him that almost everything he remembered—the Game from first to last above all—had pointed to but one thing. And then again he would all at once feel that he was a fool and had better keep his head steady. Marco, he knew, had no wild fancies. He had learned too much and his mind was too well balanced. He did not try to “work out things.” He only thought of what he was under orders to do.

“But,” said The Rat more than once in these midnight hours, “if it ever comes to a draw whether he is to be saved or I am, he is the one that must come to no harm. Killing can’t take long— and his father sent me with him.”

This thought passed through his mind as the tramping feet went by. As a sudden splendid burst of approaching music broke upon his ear, a queer look twisted his face. He realized the contrast between this day and that first morning behind the churchyard, when he had sat on his platform among the Squad and looked up and saw Marco in the arch at the end of the passage. And because he had been good-looking and had held himself so well, he had thrown a stone at him. Yes—blind gutter-bred fool that he’d been:—his first greeting to Marco had been a stone, just because he was what he was. As they stood here in the crowd in this far-off foreign city, it did not seem as if it could be true that it was he who had done it.

He managed to work himself closer to Marco’s side. “Isn’t it splendid?” he said, “I wish I was an emperor myself. I’d have these fellows out like this every day.” He said it only because he wanted to say something, to speak, as a reason for getting closer to him. He wanted to be near enough to touch him and feel that they were really together and that the whole thing was not a sort of magnificent dream from which he might awaken to find himself lying on his heap of rags in his corner of the room in Bone Court.

The crowd swayed forward in its eagerness to see the principal feature of the pageant—the Emperor in his carriage. The Rat swayed forward with the rest to look as it passed.

A handsome white-haired and mustached personage in splendid uniform decorated with jeweled orders and with a cascade of emerald-green plumes nodding in his military hat gravely saluted the shouting people on either side. By him sat a man uniformed, decorated, and emerald-plumed also, but many years younger.

Marco’s arm touched The Rat’s almost at the same moment that his own touched Marco. Under the nodding plumes each saw the rather tired and cynical pale face, a sketch of which was hidden in the slit in Marco’s sleeve.

“Is the one who sits with the Emperor an Archduke?” Marco asked the man nearest to him in the crowd. The man answered amiably enough. No, he was not, but he was a certain Prince, a descendant of the one who was the hero of the day. He was a great favorite of the Emperor’s and was also a great personage, whose palace contained pictures celebrated throughout Europe.

“He pretends it is only pictures he cares for,” he went on, shrugging his shoulders and speaking to his wife, who had begun to listen, “but he is a clever one, who amuses himself with things he professes not to concern himself about—big things. It’s his way to look bored, and interested in nothing, but it’s said he’s a wizard for knowing dangerous secrets.”

“Does he live at the Hofburg with the Emperor?” asked the woman, craning her neck to look after the imperial carriage.

“No, but he’s often there. The Emperor is lonely and bored too, no doubt, and this one has ways of making him forget his troubles. It’s been told me that now and then the two dress themselves roughly, like common men, and go out into the city to see what it’s like to rub shoulders with the rest of the world. I daresay it’s true. I should like to try it myself once in a while, if I had to sit on a throne and wear a crown.”

The two boys followed the celebration to its end. They managed to get near enough to see the entrance to the church where the service was held and to get a view of the ceremonies at the banner-draped and laurel-wreathed statue. They saw the man with the pale face several times, but he was always so enclosed that it was not possible to get within yards of him. It happened once, however, that he looked through a temporary break in the crowding

people and saw a dark strong-featured and remarkably intent boy’s face, whose vivid scrutiny of him caught his eye. There was something in the fixedness of its attention which caused him to look at it curiously for a few seconds, and Marco met his gaze squarely.

“Look at me! Look at me!” the boy was saying to him mentally. “I have a message for you. A message!”

The tired eyes in the pale face rested on him with a certain growing light of interest and curiosity, but the crowding people moved and the temporary break closed up, so that the two could see each other no more. Marco and The Rat were pushed backward by those taller and stronger than themselves until they were on the outskirts of the crowd.

“Let us go to the Hofburg,” said Marco. “They will come back there, and we shall see him again even if we can’t get near.”

To the Hofburg they made their way through the less crowded streets, and there they waited as near to the great palace as they could get. They were there when, the ceremonies at an end, the imperial carriages returned, but, though they saw their man again, they were at some distance from him and he did not see them.

Then followed