Chapter III. The Legend of the Lost Prince

The Lost Prince

by Francis Hodgson Burnett

As he walked through the streets, he was thinking of one of these
stories. It was one he had heard first when he was very young, and
it had so seized upon his imagination that he had asked often for it.
It was, indeed, a part of the long-past history of Samavia, and he
had loved it for that reason. Lazarus had often told it to him,
sometimes adding much detail, but he had always liked best his
father's version, which seemed a thrilling and living thing. On
their journey from Russia, during an hour when they had been forced
to wait in a cold wayside station and had found the time long,
Loristan had discussed it with him. He always found some such way of
making hard and comfortless hours easier to live through.

"Fine, big lad--for a foreigner," Marco heard a man say to his
companion as he passed them this morning. "Looks like a Pole or a
Russian."

It was this which had led his thoughts back to the story of the
Lost Prince. He knew that most of the people who looked at him and
called him a "foreigner" had not even heard of Samavia. Those who
chanced to recall its existence knew of it only as a small fierce
country, so placed upon the map that the larger countries which were
its neighbors felt they must control and keep it in order, and
therefore made incursions into it, and fought its people and each
other for possession. But it had not been always so. It was an old,
old country, and hundreds of years ago it had been as celebrated for
its peaceful happiness and wealth as for its beauty. It was often
said that it was one of the most beautiful places in the world. A
favorite Samavian legend was that it had been the site of the Garden
of Eden. In those past centuries, its people had been of such great
stature, physical beauty, and strength, that they had been like a
race of noble giants. They were in those days a pastoral people,
whose rich crops and splendid flocks and herds were the envy of less
fertile countries. Among the shepherds and herdsmen there were poets
who sang their own songs when they piped among their sheep upon the
mountain sides and in the flower-thick valleys. Their songs had been
about patriotism and bravery, and faithfulness to their chieftains
and their country. The simple courtesy of the poorest peasant was as
stately as the manner of a noble. But that, as Loristan had said
with a tired smile, had been before they had had time to outlive and
forget the Garden of Eden. Five hundred years ago, there had
succeeded to the throne a king who was bad and weak. His father had
lived to be ninety years old, and his son had grown tired of waiting
in Samavia for his crown. He had gone out into the world, and
visited other countries and their courts. When he returned and
became king, he lived as no Samavian king had lived before. He was
an extravagant, vicious man of furious temper and bitter jealousies.
He was jealous of the larger courts and countries he had seen, and
tried

to introduce their customs and their ambitions. He ended by
introducing their worst faults and vices. There arose political
quarrels and savage new factions. Money was squandered until poverty
began for the first time to stare the country in the face. The big
Samavians, after their first stupefaction, broke forth into furious
rage. There were mobs and riots, then bloody battles. Since it was
the king who had worked this wrong, they would have none of him.
They would depose him and make his son king in his place. It was at
this part of the story that Marco was always most deeply interested.
The young prince was totally unlike his father. He was a true royal
Samavian. He was bigger and stronger for his age than any man in the
country, and he was as handsome as a young Viking god. More than
this, he had a lion's heart, and before he was sixteen, the shepherds
and herdsmen had already begun to make songs about his young valor,
and his kingly courtesy, and generous kindness. Not only the
shepherds and herdsmen sang them, but the people in the streets. The
king, his father, had always been jealous of him, even when he was
only a beautiful, stately child whom the people roared with joy to
see as he rode through the streets. When he returned from his
journeyings and found him a splendid youth, he detested him. When
the people began to clamor and demand that he himself should
abdicate, he became insane with rage, and committed such cruelties
that the people ran mad themselves. One day they stormed the palace,
killed and overpowered the guards, and, rushing into the royal
apartments, burst in upon the king as he shuddered green with terror
and fury in his private room. He was king no more, and must leave
the country, they vowed, as they closed round him with bared weapons
and shook them in his face. Where was the prince? They must see him
and tell him their ultimatum. It was he whom they wanted for a king.
They trusted him and would obey him. They began to shout aloud his
name, calling him in a sort of chant in unison, "Prince Ivor--Prince
Ivor--Prince Ivor!" But no answer came. The people of the palace
had hidden themselves, and the place was utterly silent.

The king, despite his terror, could not help but sneer.

"Call him again," he said. "He is afraid to come out of his
hole!"

A savage fellow from the mountain fastnesses struck him on the
mouth.

"He afraid!" he shouted. "If he does not come, it is because
thou hast killed him--and thou art a dead man!"

This set them aflame with hotter burning. They broke away,
leaving three on guard, and ran about the empty palace rooms shouting
the prince's name. But there was no answer. They sought him in a
frenzy, bursting open doors and flinging down every obstacle in their
way. A page, found hidden in a closet, owned that he had seen His
Royal Highness pass through a corridor early in the morning. He had
been softly singing to himself one of the shepherd's songs.

And in this strange way out of the history of Samavia, five
hundred years before Marco's day, the young prince had walked--
singing softly to himself the old song of Samavia's beauty and
happiness. For he was never seen again.

In every nook and cranny, high and low, they sought for him,
believing that the king himself had made him prisoner in some secret
place, or had privately had him killed. The fury of the people grew
to frenzy. There were new risings, and every few days the palace was
attacked and searched again. But no trace of the prince was found.
He had vanished as a star vanishes when it drops from its place in
the sky. During a riot in the palace, when a last fruitless search
was made, the king himself was killed. A powerful noble who headed
one of the uprisings made himself king in his place. From that time,
the once splendid little kingdom was like a bone fought for by dogs.
Its pastoral peace was forgotten. It was torn and worried and shaken
by stronger countries. It tore and worried itself with internal
fights. It assassinated kings and created new ones. No man was sure
in his youth what ruler his maturity would live under, or whether his
children would die in useless fights, or through stress of poverty
and cruel, useless laws. There were no more shepherds and herdsmen
who were poets, but on the mountain sides and in the valleys
sometimes some of the old songs were sung. Those most beloved were
songs about a Lost Prince whose name had been Ivor. If he had been
king, he would have saved Samavia, the verses said, and all brave
hearts believed that he would still return. In the modern cities,
one of the jocular cynical sayings was, "Yes, that will happen when
Prince Ivor comes again."

In his more childish days, Marco had been bitterly troubled by
the unsolved mystery. Where had he gone--the Lost Prince? Had he
been killed, or had he been hidden away in a dungeon? But he was so
big and brave, he would have broken out of any dungeon. The boy had
invented for himself a dozen endings to the story.

"Did no one ever find his sword or his cap--or hear anything or
guess anything about him ever--ever--ever?" he would say restlessly
again and again.

One winter's night, as they sat together before a small fire in
a cold room in a cold city in Austria, he had been so eager and asked
so many searching questions, that his father gave him an answer he
had never given him before, and which was a sort of ending to the
story, though not a satisfying one:

"Everybody guessed as you are guessing. A few very old
shepherds in the mountains who like to believe ancient histories
relate a story which most people consider a kind of legend. It is
that almost a hundred years after the prince was lost, an old
shepherd told a story his long-dead father had confided to him in
secret just before he died. The father had said that, going out in
the early morning on the mountain side, he had found in the forest
what he at first thought to be the dead body of a beautiful, boyish,
young huntsman. Some enemy had plainly attacked him from behind and
believed he had killed him. He was, however, not quite dead, and the
shepherd dragged him into a cave where he himself often took refuge
from storms with his flocks. Since there was such riot and disorder
in the city, he was afraid to speak of what he had found; and, by the
time he discovered that he was harboring the prince, the king had
already been killed, and an even worse man had taken possession of
his throne, and ruled Samavia with a blood-stained, iron hand. To
the terrified and simple peasant the safest thing seemed to get the
wounded youth out of the country before there was any chance of his
being discovered and murdered outright, as he would surely be. The
cave in which he was hidden was not far from the frontier, and while
he was still so weak that he was hardly conscious of what befell him,
he was smuggled across it in a cart loaded with sheepskins, and left
with some kind monks who did not know his rank or name. The shepherd
went back to his flocks and his mountains, and lived and died among
them, always in terror of the changing rulers and their savage
battles with each other. The mountaineers said among themselves, as
the generations succeeded each other, that the Lost Prince must have
died young, because otherwise he would have come back to his country
and tried to restore its good, bygone days."

"Yes, he would have come," Marco said.

"He would have come if he had seen that he could help his
people," Loristan answered, as if he were not reflecting on a story
which was probably only a kind of legend. "But he was very young,
and Samavia was in the hands of the new dynasty, and filled with his
enemies. He could not have crossed the frontier without an army.
Still, I think he died young."

It was of this story that Marco was thinking as he walked, and
perhaps the thoughts that filled his mind expressed themselves in his
face in some way which attracted attention. As he was nearing
Buckingham Palace, a distinguished-looking well-dressed man with
clever eyes caught sight of him, and, after looking at him keenly,
slackened his pace as he approached him from the opposite direction.
An observer might have thought he saw something which puzzled and
surprised him. Marco didn't see him at all, and still moved forward,
thinking of the shepherds and the prince. The well- dressed man
began to walk still more slowly. When he was quite close to Marco,
he stopped and spoke to him--in the Samavian language.

"What is your name?" he asked.

Marco's training from his earliest childhood had been an extra-
ordinary thing. His love for his father had made it simple and
natural to him, and he had never questioned the reason for it. As he
had been taught to keep silence, he had been taught to control the
expression of his face and the sound of his voice, and, above all,
never to allow himself to look startled. But for this he might have
started at the extraordinary sound of the Samavian words suddenly
uttered in a London street by an English gentleman. He might even
have answered the question in Samavian himself. But he did not. He
courteously lifted his cap and replied in English:

"Excuse me?"

The gentleman's clever eyes scrutinized him keenly. Then he
also spoke in English.

"Perhaps you do not understand? I asked your name because you
are very like a Samavian I know," he said.

"I am Marco Loristan," the boy answered him.

The man looked straight into his eyes and smiled.

"That is not the name," he said. "I beg your pardon, my
boy."

He was about to go on, and had indeed taken a couple of steps
away, when he paused and turned to him again.

"You may tell your father that you are a very well-trained lad.
I wanted to find out for myself." And he went on.

Marco felt that his heart beat a little quickly. This was one
of several incidents which had happened during the last three years,
and made him feel that he was living among things so mysterious that
their very mystery hinted at danger. But he himself had never before
seemed involved in them. Why should it matter that he was
well-behaved? Then he remembered something. The man had not said
"well-behaved," he had said "well-trained." Well-trained in what
way? He felt his forehead prickle slightly as he thought of the
smiling, keen look which set itself so straight upon him. Had he
spoken to him in Samavian for an experiment, to see if he would be
startled into forgetting that he had been trained to seem to know
only the language of the country he was temporarily living in? But
he had not forgotten. He had remembered well, and was thankful that
he had betrayed nothing. "Even exiles may be Samavian soldiers. I
am one. You must be one," his father had said on that day long ago
when he had made him take his oath. Perhaps remembering his training
was being a soldier. Never had Samavia needed help as she needed it
to-day. Two years before, a rival claimant to the throne had
assassinated the then reigning king and his sons, and since then,
bloody war and tumult had raged. The new king was a powerful man,
and had a great following of the worst and most self-seeking of the
people. Neighboring countries had interfered for their own welfare's
sake, and the newspapers had been full of stories of savage fighting
and atrocities, and of starving peasants.

Marco had late one evening entered their lodgings to find
Loristan walking to and fro like a lion in a cage, a paper crushed
and torn in his hands, and his eyes blazing. He had been reading of
cruelties wrought upon innocent peasants and women and children.
Lazarus was standing staring at him with huge tears running down his
cheeks. When Marco opened the door, the old soldier strode over to
him, turned him about, and led him out of the room.

"Pardon, sir, pardon!" he sobbed. "No one must see him, not
even you. He suffers so horribly."

He stood by a chair in Marco's own small bedroom, where he half
pushed, half led him. He bent his grizzled head, and wept like a
beaten child.

"Dear God of those who are in pain, assuredly it is now the time
to give back to us our Lost Prince!" he said, and Marco knew the
words were a prayer, and wondered at the frenzied intensity of it,
because it seemed so wild a thing to pray for the return of a youth
who had died five hundred years before.

When he reached the palace, he was still thinking of the man who
had spoken to him. He was thinking of him even as he looked at the
majestic gray stone building and counted the number of its stories
and windows. He walked round it that he might make a note in his
memory of its size and form and its entrances, and guess at the size
of its gardens. This he did because it was part of his game, and
part of his strange training.

When he came back to the front, he saw that in the great
entrance court within the high iron railings an elegant but quiet-
looking closed carriage was drawing up before the doorway. Marco
stood and watched with interest to see who would come out and enter
it. He knew that kings and emperors who were not on parade looked
merely like well-dressed private gentlemen, and often chose to go out
as simply and quietly as other men. So he thought that, perhaps, if
he waited, he might see one of those well-known faces which represent
the highest rank and power in a monarchical country, and which in
times gone by had also represented the power over human life and
death and liberty.

"I should like to be able to tell my father that I have seen the
King and know his face, as I know the faces of the czar and the two
emperors."

There was a little movement among the tall men-servants in the
royal scarlet liveries, and an elderly man descended the steps
attended by another who walked behind him. He entered the carriage,
the other man followed him, the door was closed, and the carriage
drove through the entrance gates, where the sentries saluted.

Marco was near enough to see distinctly. The two men were
talking as if interested. The face of the one farthest from him was
the face he had often seen in shop-windows and newspapers. The boy
made his quick, formal salute. It was the King; and, as he smiled
and acknowledged his greeting, he spoke to his companion.

"That fine lad salutes as if he belonged to the army," was what
he said, though Marco could not hear him.

His companion leaned forward to look through the window. When
he caught sight of Marco, a singular expression crossed his face.

"He does belong to an army, sir," he answered, "though he does
not know it. His name is Marco Loristan."

Then Marco saw him plainly for the first time. He was the man
with the keen eyes who had spoken to him in Samavian.