‘Then I must sit – and forget,’ she said.
She passed her hand over her face as though she were sweeping away the sudden puzzled trouble in her expression. Then she sat down, as if she had obliged herself to become again the old peasant she had been when they entered.
‘All the way up the mountain you wondered why an old woman should be given the Sign,’ she said. ‘You asked each other how she could be of use.’
Neither Marco nor The Rat said anything.
‘When I was young and fresh,’ she went on. ‘I went to a castle over the frontier to be foster-mother to a child who was born a great noble – one who was near the throne. He loved me and I loved him. He was a strong child and he grew up a great hunter and climber. When he was not ten years old, my man taught him to climb. He always loved these mountains better than his own. He comes to see me as if he were only a young mountaineer. He sleeps in the room there,’ with a gesture over her shoulder into the darkness. ‘He has great power and, if he chooses to do a thing, he will do it – just as he will attack the biggest bear or climb the most dangerous peak. He is one who can bring things about. It is very safe to talk in this room.’
Then all was quite clear. Marco and The Rat understood.
No more was said about the Sign. It had been given and that was enough. The old woman told them that they must sleep in one of her bedrooms. The next morning one of her neighbours was going down to the valley with a cart and he would help them on their way. The Rat knew that she was thinking of his crutches and he became restless.
‘Tell her,’ he said to Marco, ‘how I have trained myself until I can do what anyone else can. And tell her I am growing stronger every day. Tell her I’ll show her what I can do. Your father wouldn’t have let me come as your aide if I hadn’t proved to him that I wasn’t a cripple. Tell her. She thinks I’m no use.’
Marco explained and the old woman listened attentively. When The Rat got up and swung himself about up and down the steep path near her house she seemed relieved. His extraordinary dexterity and firm swiftness evidently amazed her and gave her a confidence she had not felt at first.
‘If he has taught himself to be like that just for love of your father, he will go to the end,’ she said. ‘It is more than one could believe, that a pair of crutches could do such things.’
The Rat was pacified and could afterwards give himself up to watching her as closely as he wished to. He was soon ‘working out’ certain things in his mind. What he watched was her way of watching Marco. It was as if she were fascinated and could not keep her eyes from him. She told them stories about the mountains and the strangers who came to climb with guides or to hunt. She told them about the storms, which sometimes seemed about to put an end to the little world among the crags. She described the winter when the snow buried them and the strong ones were forced to dig out the weak and some lived for days under the masses of soft whiteness, glad to keep their cows or goats in their rooms that they might share the warmth of their bodies. The villagers were forced to be good neighbours to each other, for the man who was not ready to dig out a hidden chimney or buried door today might be left to freeze and starve in his snow tomb next week. Through the worst part of the winter no creature from the world below could make way to them to find out whether they were all dead or alive.
While she talked, she watched Marco as if she were always asking herself some question about him. The Rat was sure that she liked him and greatly admired his strong body and good looks. It was not necessary for him to carry himself slouchingly in her presence and he looked glowing and noble. There was a sort of reverence in her manner when she spoke to him. She reminded him of Lazarus more than once. When she gave them their evening meal, she insisted on waiting on him with a certain respectful ceremony. She would not sit at table with him, and The Rat began to realise that she felt that he himself should be standing to serve him.
‘She thinks I ought to stand behind your chair as Lazarus stands behind your father’s,’ he said to Marco. ‘Perhaps an aide ought to do it. Shall I? I believe it would please her.’
‘A Bearer of the Sign is not a royal person,’ answered Marco. ‘My father would not like it – and I should not. We are only two boys.’
It was very wonderful when, after their supper was over, they all three sat together before the fire.
The red glow of the bed of wood-coal and the orange yellow of the flame from the big logs filled the room with warm light, which made a mellow background for the figure of the old woman as she sat in her low chair and told them more and more enthralling stories.
Her eagle eyes glowed and her long neck held her head splendidly high as she described great feats of courage and endurance or almost superhuman daring in aiding those in awesome peril, and, when she glowed most in the telling, they always knew that the hero of the adventure had been her foster-child who was the baby born a great noble and near the throne. To her, he was the most splendid and adorable of human beings. Almost an emperor, but so warm and tender of heart that he never forgot the long-past days when she had held him on her knee and told him tales of chamois- and bear-hunting, and of the mountain-tops in mid-winter. He was her sun-god.
‘Yes! Yes!’ she said. ‘“Good Mother,” he calls me. And I bake him a cake on the hearth, as I did when he was ten years old and my man was teaching him to climb. And when he chooses that a thing shall be done – done it is! He is a great lord.’
The flames had died down and only the big bed of red coal made the room glow, and they were thinking of going to bed when the old woman started very suddenly, turning her head as if to listen.
Marco and The Rat heard nothing, but they saw that she did and they sat so still that each held his breath. So there was utter stillness for a few moments. Utter stillness.
Then they did hear something – a clear silver sound, piercing the pure mountain air.
The old woman sprang upright with the fire of delight in her eyes.
‘It is his silver horn!’ she cried out striking her hands together. ‘It is his own call to me when he is coming. He has been hunting somewhere and wants to sleep in his good bed here. Help me to put on more faggots,’ to The Rat, ‘so that he will see the flame of them through the open door as he comes.’
‘Shall we be in the way?’ said Marco. ‘We can go at once.’
She was going towards the door to open it and she stopped a moment and turned.
‘No, no!’ she said. ‘He must see your face. He will want to see it. I want him to see – how young you are.’
She threw the door wide open and they heard the silver horn send out its gay 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.
‘Goodnight, 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.
chapter twenty-four
‘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 honour 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 splendour 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 labour 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 realised 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 favourite 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 scru
tiny 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 four singular days. They were singular days because they were full of tantalizing incidents. Nothing seemed easier than to hear talk of, and see the Emperor’s favourite, but nothing was more impossible than to get near to him. He seemed rather a favourite with the populace, and the common people of the shop-keeping or labouring classes were given to talking freely of him – of where he was going and what he was doing. Tonight he would be sure to be at this great house or that, at this ball or that banquet. There was no difficulty in discovering that he would be sure to go to the opera, or the theatre, or to drive to Schonbrunn with his imperial master. Marco and The Rat heard casual speech of him again and again, and from one part of the city to the other they followed and waited for him. But it was like chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. He was evidently too brilliant and important a person to be allowed to move about alone. There were always people with him who seemed absorbed in his languid cynical talk. Marco thought that he never seemed to care much for his companions, though they on their part always seemed highly entertained by what he was saying. It was noticeable that they laughed a great deal, though he himself scarcely even smiled.
The Lost Prince Page 22
