Chapter XXIV. "How Shall We Find Him?"

The Lost Prince

by Francis Hodgson Burnett

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 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 favorite, but
nothing was more impossible than to get near to him. He seemed
rather a favorite with the populace, and the common people of the
shopkeeping or laboring classes were given to talking freely of
him--of where he was going and what he was doing. To-night 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.

"He's one of those chaps with the trick of saying witty things
as if he didn't see the fun in them himself," The Rat summed him up.
"Chaps like that are always cleverer than the other kind."

"He's too high in favor and too rich not to be followed about,"
they heard a man in a shop say one day, "but he gets tired of it.
Sometimes, when he's too bored to stand it any longer, he gives it
out that he's gone into the mountains somewhere, and all the time
he's shut up alone with his pictures in his own palace."

That very night The Rat came in to their attic looking pale and
disappointed. He had been out to buy some food after a long and
arduous day in which they had covered much ground, had seen their man
three times, and each time under circumstances which made him more
inaccessible than ever. They had come back to their poor quarters
both tired and ravenously hungry.

The Rat threw his purchase on to the table and himself into a
chair.

"He's gone to Budapest," he said. "now how shall we find
him?"

Marco was rather pale also, and for a moment he looked paler.
The day had been a hard one, and in their haste to reach places at a
long distance from each other they had forgotten their need of
food.

They sat silent for a few moments because there seemed to be
nothing to say. "We are too tired and hungry to be able to think
well," Marco said at last. "Let us eat our supper and then go to
sleep. Until we've had a rest, we must `let go.' "

"Yes. There's no good in talking when you're tired," The Rat
answered a trifle gloomily. "You don't reason straight. We must
`let go.' "

Their meal was simple but they ate well and without words.

Even when they had finished and undressed for the night, they
said very little.

"Where do our thoughts go when we are asleep," The Rat inquired
casually after he was stretched out in the darkness. "They must go
somewhere. Let's send them to find out what to do next."

"It's not as still as it was on the Gaisberg. You can hear the
city roaring," said Marco drowsily from his dark corner. "We must
make a ledge--for ourselves."

Sleep made it for them--deep, restful, healthy sleep. If they
had been more resentful of their ill luck and lost labor, it would
have come less easily and have been less natural. In their talks of
strange things they had learned that one great secret of strength and
unflagging courage is to know how to "let go"--to cease thinking over
an anxiety until the right moment comes. It was their habit to "let
go" for hours sometimes, and wander about looking at places and
things--galleries, museums, palaces, giving themselves up with boyish
pleasure and eagerness to all they saw. Marco was too intimate with
the things worth seeing, and The Rat too curious and feverishly
wide-awake to allow of their missing much.

The Rat's image of the world had grown until it seemed to know
no boundaries which could hold its wealth of wonders. He wanted to
go on and on and see them all.

When Marco opened his eyes in the morning, he found The Rat
lying looking at him. Then they both sat up in bed at the same
time.

"I believe we are both thinking the same thing," Marco said.

They frequently discovered that they were thinking the same
things.

"So do I," answered The Rat. "It shows how tired we were that
we didn't think of it last night."

"Yes, we are thinking the same thing," said Marco. "We have
both remembered what we heard about his shutting himself up alone
with his pictures and making people believe he had gone away."

"He's in his palace now," The Rat announced.

"Do you feel sure of that, too?" asked Marco. "Did you wake up
and feel sure of it the first thing?"

"Yes," answered The Rat. "As sure as if I'd heard him say it
himself."

"So did I," said Marco.

"That's what our thoughts brought back to us," said The Rat,
"when we `let go' and sent them off last night." He sat up hugging
his knees and looking straight before him for some time after this,
and Marco did not interrupt his meditations.

The day was a brilliant one, and, though their attic had only
one window, the sun shone in through it as they ate their breakfast.
After it, they leaned on the window's ledge and talked about the
Prince's garden. They talked about it because it was a place open to
the public and they had walked round it more than once. The palace,
which was not a large one, stood in the midst of it. The Prince was
good-natured enough to allow quiet and well-behaved people to saunter
through. It was not a fashionable promenade but a pleasant retreat
for people who sometimes took their work or books and sat on the
seats placed here and there among the shrubs and flowers.

"When we were there the first time, I noticed two things," Marco
said. "There is a stone balcony which juts out from the side of the
palace which looks on the Fountain Garden. That day there were
chairs on it as if the Prince and his visitors sometimes sat there.
Near it, there was a very large evergreen shrub and I saw that there
was a hollow place inside it. If some one wanted to stay in the
gardens all night to watch the windows when they were lighted and see
if any one came out alone upon the balcony, he could hide himself in
the hollow place and stay there until the morning."

"Is there room for two inside the shrub?" The Rat asked.

"No. I must go alone," said Marco.