The Lost Prince Read online

  ‘What can such a poor-looking pair of lads be going to Paris for?’ someone asked his companion.

  ‘Not for pleasure, certainly; perhaps to get work,’ was the casual answer.

  In the evening they reached Paris, and Marco led the way to a small cafe in a side-street where they got some cheap food. In the same side-street they found a bed they could share for the night in a tiny room over a baker’s shop.

  The Rat was too much excited to be ready to go to bed early. He begged Marco to guide him about the brilliant streets. They went slowly along the broad Avenue des Champs Elysées under the lights glittering among the horse-chestnut trees. The Rat’s sharp eyes took it all in – the light of the cafes among the embowering trees, the many carriages rolling by, the people who loitered and laughed or sat at little tables drinking wine and listening to music, the broad stream of life which flowed on to the Arc de Triomphe and back again.

  ‘It’s brighter and clearer than London,’ he said to Marco. ‘The people look as if they were having more fun than they do in England.’

  The Place de la Concorde spreading its stately spaces – a world of illumination, movement, and majestic beauty – held him as though by a fascination. He wanted to stand and stare at it, first from one point of view and then from another. It was bigger and more wonderful than he had been able to picture it when Marco had described it to him and told him of the part it had played in the days of the French Revolution when the guillotine had stood in it and the tumbrils had emptied themselves at the foot of its steps.

  He stood near the Obelisk a long time without speaking.

  ‘I can see it all happening,’ he said at last, and he pulled Marco away.

  Before they returned home, they found their way to a large house which stood in a courtyard. In the iron work of the handsome gates which shut it in was wrought a gilded coronet. The gates were closed and the house was not brightly lighted.

  They walked past it and round it without speaking, but, when they neared the entrance for the second time, The Rat said in a low tone:

  ‘She is five feet seven, has black hair, a nose with a high bridge, her eyebrows are black and almost meet across it, she has a pale olive skin and holds her head proudly.’

  ‘That is the one,’ Marco answered.

  They were a week in Paris and each day passed this big house. There were certain hours when great ladies were more likely to go out and come in than they were at others. Marco knew this, and they managed to be within sight of the house or to pass it at these hours. For two days they saw no sign of the person they wished to see, but one morning the gates were thrown open and they saw flowers and palms being taken in.

  ‘She has been away and is coming back,’ said Marco. The next day they passed three times – once at the hour when fashionable women drive out to do their shopping, once at the time when afternoon visiting is most likely to begin, and once when the streets were brilliant with lights and the carriages had begun to roll by to dinner parties and theatres.

  Then, as they stood at a little distance from the iron gates, a carriage drove through them and stopped before the big open door which was thrown open by two tall footmen in splendid livery.

  ‘She is coming out,’ said The Rat.

  They would be able to see her plainly when she came, because the lights over the entrance were so bright.

  Marco slipped from under his coat sleeve a carefully made sketch.

  He looked at it and The Rat looked at it.

  A footman stood erect on each side of the open door. The footman who sat with the coachman had got down and was waiting by the carriage. Marco and The Rat glanced again with furtive haste at the sketch. A handsome woman appeared upon the threshold. She paused and gave some order to the footman who stood on the right. Then she came out in the full light and got into the carriage which drove out of the courtyard and quite near the place where the two boys waited.

  When it was gone, Marco drew a long breath as he tore the sketch into very small pieces indeed. He did not throw them away but put them into his pocket.

  The Rat drew a long breath also.

  ‘Yes,’ he said positively.

  ‘Yes,’ said Marco.

  When they were safely shut up in their room over the baker’s shop, they discussed the chances of their being able to pass her in such a way as would seem accidental. Two common boys could not enter the courtyard. There was a back entrance for trades people and messengers. When she drove, she would always enter her carriage from the same place. Unless she sometimes walked, they could not approach her. What should be done? The thing was difficult. After they had talked some time, The Rat sat and gnawed his nails.

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon,’ he broke out at last, ‘we’ll watch and see if her carriage drives in for her – then, when she comes to the door, I’ll go in and begin to beg. The servant will think I’m a foreigner and don’t know what I’m doing. You can come after me to tell me to come away, because you know better than I do that I shall be ordered out. She may be a good-natured woman and listen to us – and you might get near her.’

  ‘We might try it,’ Marco answered. ‘It might work. We will try it.’

  The Rat never failed to treat him as his leader. He had begged Loristan to let him come with Marco as his servant, and his servant he had been more than willing to be. When Loristan had said he should be his aide-de-camp, he had felt his trust lifted to a military dignity which uplifted him with it. As his aide-de-camp he must serve him, watch him, obey his lightest wish, make everything easy for him. Sometimes, Marco was troubled by the way in which he insisted on serving him, this queer, once dictatorial and cantankerous lad who had begun by throwing stones at him.

  ‘You must not wait on me,’ he said to him. ‘I must wait upon myself.’

  The Rat rather flushed.

  ‘He told me that he would let me come with you as your aide-de camp,’ he said. ‘It – it’s part of the game. It makes things easier if we keep up the game.’

  It would have attracted attention if they had spent too much time in the vicinity of the big house. So it happened that the next afternoon the great lady evidently drove out at an hour when they were not watching for her. They were on their way to try if they could carry out their plan, when, as they walked together along the Rue Royale, The Rat suddenly touched Marco’s elbow.

  ‘The carriage stands before the shop with lace in the windows,’ he whispered hurriedly.

  Marco saw and recognised it at once. The owner had evidently gone into the shop to buy something. This was a better chance than they had hoped for, and, when they approached the carriage itself, they saw that there was another point in their favour. Inside were no less than three beautiful little Pekingese spaniels that looked exactly alike. They were all trying to look out of the window and were pushing against each other. They were so perfect and so pretty that few people passed by without looking at them. What better excuse could two boys have for lingering about a place?

  They stopped and, standing a little distance away, began to look at and discuss them and laugh at their excited little antics. Through the shop window Marco caught a glimpse of the great lady.

  ‘She does not look much interested. She won’t stay long,’ he whispered, and added aloud, ‘that little one is the master. See how he pushes the others aside! He is stronger than the other two, though he is so small.’

  ‘He can snap, too,’ said The Rat.

  ‘She is coming now,’ warned Marco, and then laughed aloud as if at the Pekingese, which, catching sight of their mistress at the shop door, began to leap and yelp for joy.

  Their mistress herself smiled, and was smiling as Marco drew near her.

  ‘May we look at them, Madame?’ he said in French, and, as she made an amiable gesture of acquiescence and moved toward the carriage with him, he spoke a few words, very low but very distinctly, in Russian.

  ‘The Lamp is lighted,’ he said.

  The Rat was looking at her keenly, b
ut he did not see her face change at all. What he noticed most throughout their journey was that each person to whom they gave the Sign had complete control over his or her countenance, if there were bystanders, and never betrayed by any change of expression that the words meant anything unusual.

  The great lady merely went on smiling, and spoke only of the dogs, allowing Marco and himself to look at them through the window of the carriage as the footman opened the door for her to enter.

  ‘They are beautiful little creatures,’ Marco said, lifting his cap, and, as the footman turned away, he uttered his few Russian words once more and moved off without even glancing at the lady again.

  ‘That is one!’ he said to The Rat that night before they went to sleep, and with a match he burned the scraps of the sketch he had torn and put into his pocket.

  chapter twenty

  marco goes to the opera

  Their next journey was to Munich, but the night before they left Paris an unexpected thing happened.

  To reach the narrow staircase which led to their bedroom it was necessary to pass through the baker’s shop itself.

  The baker’s wife was a friendly woman who liked the two boy lodgers who were so quiet and gave no trouble. More than once she had given them a hot roll or so or a freshly baked little tartlet with fruit in the centre. When Marco came in this evening, she greeted him with a nod and handed him a small parcel as he passed through.

  ‘This was left for you this afternoon,’ she said. ‘I see you are making purchases for your journey. My man and I are very sorry you are going.’

  ‘Thank you, Madame. We also are sorry,’ Marco answered, taking the parcel. ‘They are not large purchases, you see.’

  But neither he nor The Rat had bought anything at all, though the ordinary looking little package was plainly addressed to him and bore the name of one of the big cheap shops. It felt as if it contained something soft.

  When he reached their bedroom, The Rat was gazing out of the window watching every living thing which passed in the street below. He who had never seen anything but London was absorbed by the spell of Paris and was learning it by heart.

  ‘Something has been sent to us. Look at this,’ said Marco.

  The Rat was at his side at once. ‘What is it? Where did it come from?’

  They opened the package and at first sight saw only several pairs of quite common woollen socks. As Marco took up the sock in the middle of the parcel, he felt that there was something inside it – something laid flat and carefully. He put his hand in and drew out a number of five-franc notes – not new ones, because new ones would have betrayed themselves by crackling. These were old enough to be soft. But there were enough of them to amount to a substantial sum.

  ‘It is in small notes because poor boys would have only small ones. No one will be surprised when we change these,’ The Rat said.

  Each of them believed the package had been sent by the great lady, but it had been done so carefully that not the slightest clue was furnished.

  To The Rat, part of the deep excitement of ‘the Game’ was the working out of the plans and methods of each person concerned. He could not have slept without working out some scheme which might have been used in this case. It thrilled him to contemplate the difficulties the great lady might have found herself obliged to overcome.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, after thinking it over for some time, ‘she went to a big common shop dressed as if she were an ordinary woman and bought the socks and pretended she was going to carry them home herself. She would do that so that she could take them into some corner and slip the money in. Then, as she wanted to have them sent from the shop, perhaps she bought some other things and asked the people to deliver the packages to different places. The socks were sent to us and the other things to someone else. She would go to a shop where no one knew her and no one would expect to see her and she would wear clothes which looked neither rich nor too poor.’

  He created the whole episode with all its details and explained them to Marco. It fascinated him for the entire evening and he felt relieved after it and slept well.

  Even before they had left London, certain newspapers had swept out of existence the story of the descendant of the Lost Prince. This had been done by derision and light handling – by treating it as a romantic legend.

  At first, The Rat had resented this bitterly, but one day at a meal, when he had been producing arguments to prove that the story must be a true one, Loristan somehow checked him by his own silence.

  ‘If there is such a man,’ he said after a pause, ‘it is well for him that his existence should not be believed in – for some time at least.’

  The Rat came to a dead stop. He felt hot for a moment and then felt cold. He saw a new idea all at once. He had been making a mistake in tactics.

  No more was said but, when they were alone afterwards, he poured himself forth to Marco.

  ‘I was a fool!’ he cried out. ‘Why couldn’t I see it for myself! Shall I tell you what I believe has been done? There is someone who has influence in England and who is a friend to Samavia. They’ve got the newspapers to make fun of the story so that it won’t be believed. If it was believed, both the Iarovitch and the Maranovitch would be on the lookout, and the Secret Party would lose their chances. What a fool I was not to think of it! There’s someone watching and working here who is a friend to Samavia.’

  ‘But there is someone in Samavia who has begun to suspect that it might be true,’ Marco answered. ‘If there were not, I should not have been shut in the cellar. Someone thought my father knew something. The spies had orders to find out what it was.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. That’s true, too!’ The Rat answered anxiously. ‘We shall have to be very careful.’

  In the lining of the sleeve of Marco’s coat there was a slit into which he could slip any small thing he wished to conceal and also wished to be able to reach without trouble. In this he had carried the sketch of the lady which he had torn up in Paris. When they walked in the streets of Munich, the morning after their arrival, he carried still another sketch. It was the one picturing the genial-looking old aristocrat with the sly smile.

  One of the things they had learned about this one was that his chief characteristic was his passion for music. He was a patron of musicians and he spent much time in Munich because he loved its musical atmosphere and the earnestness of its opera-goers.

  ‘The military band plays in the Feldherrn-halle at midday. When something very good is being played, sometimes people stop their carriages so that they can listen. We will go there,’ said Marco.

  ‘It’s a chance,’ said The Rat. ‘We mustn’t lose anything like a chance.’

  The day was brilliant and sunny, the people passing through the streets looked comfortable and homely, the mixture of old streets and modern ones, of ancient corners and shops and houses of the day was picturesque and cheerful. The Rat swinging through the crowd on his crutches was full of interest and exhilaration. He had begun to grow, and the change in his face and expression which had begun in London had become more noticeable. He had been given his ‘place’, and a work to do which entitled him to hold it.

  No one could have suspected them of carrying a strange and vital secret with them as they strolled along together. They seemed only two ordinary boys who looked in at shop windows and talked over their contents, and who loitered with upturned faces in the Marien-Platz before the ornate Gothic Rathaus to hear the eleven o’clock chimes play and see the painted figures of the King and Queen watch from their balcony the passing before them of the automatic tournament procession with its trumpeters and tilting knights. When the show was over and the automatic cock broke forth into his lusty farewell crow, they laughed just as any other boys would have laughed. Sometimes it would have been easy for The Rat to forget that there was anything graver in the world than the new places and new wonders he was seeing, as if he were a wandering minstrel in a story.

  But in Samavia bloody battles were being
fought, and bloody plans were being wrought out, and in anguished anxiety the Secret Party and the Forgers of the Sword waited breathlessly for the Sign for which they had waited so long. And inside the lining of Marco’s coat was hidden the sketched face, as the two unnoticed lads made their way to the Feldherrn-halle to hear the band play and see who might chance to be among the audience.

  Because the day was sunny, and also because the band was playing a specially fine programme, the crowd in the square was larger than usual. Several vehicles had stopped, and among them were one or two which were not merely hired cabs but were the carriages of private persons.

  One of them had evidently arrived early, as it was drawn up in a good position when the boys reached the corner. It was a big open carriage and a grand one, luxuriously upholstered in green. The footman and coachman wore green and silver liveries and seemed to know that people were looking at them and their master.

  He was a stout, genial-looking old aristocrat with a sly smile, though, as he listened to the music, it almost forgot to be sly. In the carriage with him were a young officer and a little boy, and they also listened attentively. Standing near the carriage door were several people who were plainly friends or acquaintances, as they occasionally spoke to him. Marco touched The Rat’s coat sleeve as the two boys approached.

  ‘It would not be easy to get near him,’ he said. ‘Let us go and stand as close to the carriage as we can get without pushing. Perhaps we may hear someone say something about where he is going after the music is over.’

  Yes, there was no mistaking him. He was the right man. Each of them knew by heart the creases on his stout face and the sweep of his grey moustache. But there was nothing noticeable in a boy looking for a moment at a piece of paper, and Marco sauntered a few steps to a bit of space left bare by the crowd and took a last glance at his sketch. His rule was to make sure at the final moment. The music was very good and the group about the carriage was evidently enthusiastic. There was talk and praise and comment, and the old aristocrat nodded his head repeatedly in applause.