Lazarus was waiting for him in the passage. The Rat held back a little.
‘Perhaps they’d rather not eat their breakfast with me,’ he hesitated. ‘I’m not – I’m not the kind they are. I could swallow the coffee out here and carry the bread away with me. And you could thank him for me. I’d want him to know I thanked him.’
Lazarus also had a steady eye. The Rat realised that he was looking him over as if he were summing him up.
‘You may not be the kind they are, but you may be of a kind the Master sees good in. If he did not see something, he would not ask you to sit at his table. You are to come with me.’
The Squad had seen good in The Rat, but no one else had. Policemen had moved him on whenever they set eyes on him, the wretched women of the slums had regarded him as they regarded his darting, thieving namesake; loafing or busy men had seen in him a young nuisance to be kicked or pushed out of the way. The Squad had not called ‘good’ what they saw in him. They would have yelled with laughter if they had heard anyone else call it so. ‘Goodness’ was not considered an attraction in their world.
The Rat grinned a little and wondered what was meant, as he followed Lazarus into the back sitting room.
It was as dingy and gloomy as it had looked the night before, but by the daylight The Rat saw how rigidly neat it was, how well swept and free from any speck of dust, how the poor windows had been cleaned and polished, and how everything was set in order. The coarse linen cloth on the table was fresh and spotless, so was the cheap crockery, the spoons shone with brightness.
Loristan was standing on the hearth and Marco was near him. They were waiting for their vagabond guest as if he had been a gentleman.
The Rat hesitated and shuffled at the door for a moment, and then it suddenly occurred to him to stand as straight as he could and salute. When he found himself in the presence of Loristan, he felt as if he ought to do something, but he did not know what.
Loristan’s recognition of his gesture and his expression as he moved forward lifted from The Rat’s shoulders a load which he himself had not known lay there. Somehow he felt as if something new had happened to him, as if he were not mere ‘vermin’, after all, as if he need not be on the defensive – even as if he need not feel so much in the dark, and like a thing there was no place in the world for. The mere straight and far-seeing look of this man’s eyes seemed to make a place somewhere for what he looked at. And yet what he said was quite simple.
‘This is well,’ he said. ‘You have rested. We will have some food, and then we will talk together.’ He made a slight gesture in the direction of the chair at the right hand of his own place.
The Rat hesitated again. What a swell he was! With that wave of the hand he made you feel as if you were a fellow like himself, and he was doing you some honour.
‘I’m not –’ The Rat broke off and jerked his head toward Marco. ‘He knows –’ he ended, ‘I’ve never sat at a table like this before.’
‘There is not much on it.’ Loristan made the slight gesture toward the right-hand seat again and smiled. ‘Let us sit down.’
The Rat obeyed him and the meal began. There were only bread and coffee and a little butter before them. But Lazarus presented the cups and plates on a small japanned tray as if it were a golden salver. When he was not serving, he stood upright behind his master’s chair, as though he wore royal livery of scarlet and gold. To the boy who had gnawed a bone or munched a crust wheresoever he found them, and with no thought but of the appeasing of his own wolfish hunger, to watch the two with whom he sat eat their simple food was a new thing. He knew nothing of the everyday decencies of civilized people. The Rat liked to look at them, and he found himself trying to hold his cup as Loristan did, and to sit and move as Marco was sitting and moving – taking his bread or butter, when it was held at his side by Lazarus, as if it were a simple thing to be waited upon. Marco had had things handed to him all his life, and it did not make him feel awkward. The Rat knew that his own father had once lived like this. He himself would have been at ease if chance had treated him fairly. It made him scowl to think of it. But in a few minutes Loristan began to talk about the copy of the map of Samavia. Then The Rat forgot everything else and was ill at ease no more. He did not know that Loristan was leading him on to explain his theories about the country and the people and the war. He found himself telling all that he had read, or overheard, or thought as he lay awake in his garret. He had thought out a great many things in a way not at all like a boy’s. His strangely concentrated and over-mature mind had been full of military schemes which Loristan listened to with curiosity and also with amazement. He had become extraordinarily clever in one direction because he had fixed all his mental powers on one thing. It seemed scarcely natural that an untaught vagabond lad should know so much and reason so clearly. It was at least extraordinarily interesting. There had been no skirmish, no attack, no battle which he had not led and fought in his own imagination, and he had made scores of rough queer plans of all that had been or should have been done. Lazarus listened as attentively as his master, and once Marco saw him exchange a startled, rapid glance with Loristan. It was at a moment when The Rat was sketching with his finger on the cloth an attack which ought to have been made but was not. And Marco knew at once that the quickly exchanged look meant ‘He is right! If it had been done, there would have been victory instead of disaster!’
It was a wonderful meal, though it was only of bread and coffee. The Rat knew he should never be able to forget it.
Afterward, Loristan told him of what he had done the night before. He had seen the parish authorities and all had been done which a city government provides in the case of a pauper’s death.
His father would be buried in the usual manner. ‘We will follow him,’ Loristan said in the end. ‘You and I and Marco and Lazarus.’
The Rat’s mouth fell open.
‘You – and Marco – and Lazarus!’ he exclaimed, staring. ‘And me! Why should any of us go? I don’t want to. He wouldn’t have followed me if I’d been the one.’
Loristan remained silent for a few moments.
‘When a life has counted for nothing, the end of it is a lonely thing,’ he said at last. ‘If it has forgotten all respect for itself, pity is all that one has left to give. One would like to give something to anything so lonely.’ He said the last brief sentence after a pause.
‘Let us go,’ Marco said suddenly; and he caught The Rat’s hand.
The Rat’s own movement was sudden. He slipped from his crutches to a chair, and sat and gazed at the worn carpet as if he were not looking at it at all, but at something a long way off. After a while he looked up at Loristan.
‘Do you know what I thought of, all at once?’ he said in a shaky voice. ‘I thought of that “Lost Prince” one. He only lived once. Perhaps he didn’t live a long time. Nobody knows. But it’s five hundred years ago, and, just because he was the kind he was, everyone that remembers him thinks of something fine. It’s queer, but it does you good just to hear his name. And if he has been training kings for Samavia all these centuries – they may have been poor and nobody may have known about them, but they’ve been kings. That’s what he did – just by being alive a few years. When I think of him and then think of – the other – there’s such an awful difference that – yes – I’m sorry. For the first time. I’m his son and I can’t care about him; but he’s too lonely – I want to go.’
So it was that when the forlorn derelict was carried to the graveyard where nameless burdens on the city were given to the earth, a curious funeral procession followed him. There were two tall and soldierly looking men and two boys, one of whom walked on crutches, and behind them were ten other boys who walked two by two. These ten were a queer, ragged lot; but they had respectfully sober faces, held their heads and their shoulders well, and walked with a remarkably regular marching step.
It was the Squad; but they had left their ‘rifles’ at home.
chapter eleven
‘come with me’
When they came back from the graveyard, The Rat was silent all the way. He was thinking of what had happened and of what lay before him. He was, in fact, thinking chiefly that nothing lay before him – nothing. The certainty of that gave his sharp, lined face new lines and sharpness which made it look pinched and hard.
He had nothing before but a corner in a bare garret in which he could find little more than a leaking roof over his head – when he was not turned out into the street. But, if policemen asked him where he lived, he could say he lived in Bone Court with his father. Now he couldn’t say it.
He got along very well on his crutches, but he was rather tired when they reached the turn in the street which led in the direction of his old haunts. At any rate, they were haunts he knew, and he belonged to them more than he belonged elsewhere. The Squad stopped at this particular corner because it led to such homes as they possessed. They stopped in a body and looked at The Rat, and The Rat stopped also. He swung himself to Loristan’s side, touching his hand to his forehead.
‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘Line and salute, you chaps!’ And the Squad stood in line and raised their hands also. ‘Thank you, sir. Thank you, Marco. Goodbye.’
‘Where are you going?’ Loristan asked.
‘I don’t know yet,’ The Rat answered, biting his lips.
He and Loristan looked at each other a few moments in silence. Both of them were thinking very hard. In The Rat’s eyes there was a kind of desperate adoration. He did not know what he should do when this man turned and walked away from him. It would be as if the sun itself had dropped out of the heavens – and The Rat had not thought of what the sun meant before.
But Loristan did not turn and walk away. He looked deep into the lad’s eyes as if he were searching to find some certainty. Then he said in a low voice, ‘You know how poor I am.’
‘I – I don’t care!’ said The Rat. ‘You – you’re like a king to me. I’d stand up and be shot to bits if you told me to do it.’
‘I am so poor that I am not sure I can give you enough dry bread to eat – always. Marco and Lazarus and I are often hungry. Sometimes you might have nothing to sleep on but the floor. But I can find a place for you if I take you with me,’ said Loristan. ‘Do you know what I mean by a place?’
‘Yes, I do,’ answered The Rat. ‘It’s what I’ve never had before – sir.’
What he knew was that it meant some bit of space, out of all the world, where he would have a sort of right to stand, howsoever poor and bare it might be.
‘I’m not used to beds or to food enough,’ he said. But he did not dare to insist too much on that ‘place’. It seemed too great a thing to be true.
Loristan took his arm.
‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘We won’t part. I believe you are to be trusted.’
The Rat turned quite white in a sort of anguish of joy. He had never cared for any one in his life. He had been a sort of young Cain, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him. And during the last twelve hours he had plunged into a tumultuous ocean of boyish hero-worship. This man seemed like a sort of god to him. What he had said and done the day before, in what had been really The Rat’s hours of extremity, after that appalling night – the way he had looked into his face and understood it all, the talk at the table when he had listened to him seriously, comprehending and actually respecting his plans and rough maps; his silent companionship as they followed the pauper hearse together – these things were enough to make the lad longingly ready to be any sort of servant or slave to him if he might see and be spoken to by him even once or twice a day.
The Squad wore a look of dismay for a moment, and Loristan saw it.
‘I am going to take your captain with me,’ he said. ‘But he will come back to Barracks. So will Marco.’
‘Will yer go on with the game?’ asked Cad, as eager spokesman. ‘We want to go on being the “Secret Party”.’
‘Yes, I’ll go on,’ The Rat answered. ‘I won’t give it up. There’s a lot in the papers today.’
So they were pacified and went on their way, and Loristan and Lazarus and Marco and The Rat went on theirs also.
‘Queer thing is,’ The Rat thought as they walked together, ‘I’m a bit afraid to speak to him unless he speaks to me first. Never felt that way before with anyone.’
He had jeered at policemen and had impudently chaffed ‘swells’, but he felt a sort of secret awe of this man, and actually liked the feeling.
‘It’s as if I was a private and he was commander-in-chief,’ he thought. ‘That’s it.’
Loristan talked to him as they went. He was simple enough in his statements of the situation. There was an old sofa in Marco’s bedroom. It was narrow and hard, as Marco’s bed itself was, but The Rat could sleep upon it. They would share what food they had. There were newspapers and magazines to be read. There were papers and pencils to draw new maps and plans of battles. There was even an old map of Samavia of Marco’s which the two boys could study together as an aid to their game. The Rat’s eyes began to have points of fire in them.
‘If I could see the papers every morning, I could fight the battles on paper by night,’ he said, quite panting at the incredible vision of splendour. Were all the kingdoms of the earth going to be given to him? Was he going to sleep without a drunken father near him?
Was he going to have a chance to wash himself and to sit at a table and hear people say ‘Thank you’, and ‘I beg pardon’, as if they were using the most ordinary fashion of speech? His own father, before he had sunk into the depths, had lived and spoken in this way.
‘When I have time, we will see who can draw up the best plans,’ Loristan said.
‘Do you mean that you’ll look at mine then – when you have time?’ asked The Rat, hesitatingly. ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’
‘Yes,’ answered Loristan, ‘I’ll look at them, and we’ll talk them over.’
As they went on, he told him that he and Marco could do many things together. They could go to museums and galleries, and Marco could show him what he himself was familiar with.
‘My father said you wouldn’t let him come back to Barracks when you found out about it,’ The Rat said, hesitating again and growing hot because he remembered so many ugly past days. ‘But – but I swear I won’t do him any harm, sir. I won’t!’
‘When I said I believed you could be trusted, I meant several things,’ Loristan answered him. ‘That was one of them. You’re a new recruit. You and Marco are both under a commanding officer.’ He said the words because he knew they would elate him and stir his blood.
chapter twelve
‘only two boys’
The words did elate him, and his blood was stirred by them every time they returned to his mind. He remembered them through the days and nights that followed. He sometimes, indeed, awakened from his deep sleep on the hard and narrow sofa in Marco’s room, and found that he was saying them half aloud to himself. The hardness of the sofa did not prevent his resting as he had never rested before in his life. By contrast with the past he had known, this poor existence was comfort which verged on luxury. He got into the battered tin bath every morning, he sat at the clean table, and could look at Loristan and speak to him and hear his voice. His chief trouble was that he could hardly keep his eyes off him, and he was a little afraid he might be annoyed. But he could not bear to lose a look or a movement.
At the end of the second day, he found his way, at some trouble, to Lazarus’s small back room at the top of the house.
‘Will you let me come in and talk a bit?’ he said.
When he went in, he was obliged to sit on the top of Lazarus’s wooden box because there was nothing else for him.
‘I want to ask you,’ he plunged into his talk at once, ‘do you think he minds me looking at him so much? I can’t help it – but if he hates it – well – I’ll try and keep my eyes on the table.’
‘The Master is used t
o being looked at,’ Lazarus made answer. ‘But it would be well to ask himself. He likes open speech.’
‘I want to find out everything he likes and everything he doesn’t like,’ The Rat said. ‘I want – isn’t there anything – anything you’d let me do for him? It wouldn’t matter what it was. And he needn’t know you are not doing it. I know you wouldn’t be willing to give up anything particular. But you wait on him night and day. Couldn’t you give up something to me?’
Lazarus pierced him with keen eyes. He did not answer for several seconds.
The Lost Prince Page 10