The Complete Works of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Frances Hodgson Burnett

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СКАЧАТЬ and then,” he said gruffly at last, “I’ll let you brush his boots. But not every day—perhaps once a week.”

      “When will you let me have my first turn?” The Rat asked.

      Lazarus reflected. His shaggy eyebrows drew themselves down over his eyes as if this were a question of state.

      “Next Saturday,” he conceded. “Not before. I’ll tell him when you brush them.”

      “You needn’t,” said The Rat. “It’s not that I want him to know. I want to know myself that I’m doing something for him. I’ll find out things that I can do without interfering with you. I’ll think them out.”

      “Anything any one else did for him would be interfering with me,” said Lazarus.

      It was The Rat’s turn to reflect now, and his face twisted itself into new lines and wrinkles.

      “I’ll tell you before I do anything,” he said, after he had thought it over. “You served him first.”

      “I have served him ever since he was born,” said Lazarus.

      “He’s—he’s yours,” said The Rat, still thinking deeply.

      “I am his,” was Lazarus’s stern answer. “I am his—and the young Master’s.”

      “That’s it,” The Rat said. Then a squeak of a half-laugh broke from him. “I’ve never been anybody’s,” he added.

      His sharp eyes caught a passing look on Lazarus’s face. Such a queer, disturbed, sudden look. Could he be rather sorry for him?

      Perhaps the look meant something like that.

      “If you stay near him long enough—and it needn’t be long—you will be his too. Everybody is.”

      The Rat sat up as straight as he could. “When it comes to that,” he blurted out, “I’m his now, in my way. I was his two minutes after he looked at me with his queer, handsome eyes. They’re queer because they get you, and you want to follow him. I’m going to follow.”

      That night Lazarus recounted to his master the story of the scene. He simply repeated word for word what had been said, and Loristan listened gravely.

      “We have not had time to learn much of him yet,” he commented. “But that is a faithful soul, I think.”

      A few days later, Marco missed The Rat soon after their breakfast hour. He had gone out without saying anything to the household. He did not return for several hours, and when he came back he looked tired. In the afternoon he fell asleep on his sofa in Marco’s room and slept heavily. No one asked him any questions as he volunteered no explanation. The next day he went out again in the same mysterious manner, and the next and the next. For an entire week he went out and returned with the tired look; but he did not explain until one morning, as he lay on his sofa before getting up, he said to Marco:

      “I’m practicing walking with my crutches. I don’t want to go about like a rat any more. I mean to be as near like other people as I can. I walk farther every morning. I began with two miles. If I practice every day, my crutches will be like legs.”

      “Shall I walk with you?” asked Marco.

      “Wouldn’t you mind walking with a cripple?”

      “Don’t call yourself that,” said Marco. “We can talk together, and try to remember everything we see as we go along.”

      “I want to learn to remember things. I’d like to train myself in that way too,” The Rat answered. “I’d give anything to know some of the things your father taught you. I’ve got a good memory. I remember a lot of things I don’t want to remember. Will you go this morning?”

      That morning they went, and Loristan was told the reason for their walk. But though he knew one reason, he did not know all about it. When The Rat was allowed his “turn” of the boot-brushing, he told more to Lazarus.

      “What I want to do,” he said, “is not only walk as fast as other people do, but faster. Acrobats train themselves to do anything. It’s training that does it. There might come a time when he might need some one to go on an errand quickly, and I’m going to be ready. I’m going to train myself until he needn’t think of me as if I were only a cripple who can’t do things and has to be taken care of. I want him to know that I’m really as strong as Marco, and where Marco can go I can go.”

      “He” was what he always said, and Lazarus always understood without explanation.

      “‘The Master’ is your name for him,” he had explained at the beginning. “And I can’t call him just ‘Mister’ Loristan. It sounds like cheek. If he was called ‘General’ or ‘Colonel’ I could stand it—though it wouldn’t be quite right. Some day I shall find a name. When I speak to him, I say ‘Sir.’”

      The walks were taken every day, and each day were longer. Marco found himself silently watching The Rat with amazement at his determination and endurance. He knew that he must not speak of what he could not fail to see as they walked. He must not tell him that he looked tired and pale and sometimes desperately fatigued. He had inherited from his father the tact which sees what people do not wish to be reminded of. He knew that for some reason of his own The Rat had determined to do this thing at any cost to himself. Sometimes his face grew white and worn and he breathed hard, but he never rested more than a few minutes, and never turned back or shortened a walk they had planned.

      “Tell me something about Samavia, something to remember,” he would say, when he looked his worst. “When I begin to try to remember, I forget—other things.”

      So, as they went on their way, they talked, and The Rat committed things to memory. He was quick at it, and grew quicker every day. They invented a game of remembering faces they passed. Both would learn them by heart, and on their return home Marco would draw them. They went to the museums and galleries and learned things there, making from memory lists and descriptions which at night they showed to Loristan, when he was not too busy to talk to them.

      As the days passed, Marco saw that The Rat was gaining strength. This exhilarated him greatly. They often went to Hampstead Heath and walked in the wind and sun. There The Rat would go through curious exercises which he believed would develop his muscles. He began to look less tired during and after his journey. There were even fewer wrinkles on his face, and his sharp eyes looked less fierce. The talks between the two boys were long and curious. Marco soon realized that The Rat wanted to learn—learn—learn.

      “Your father can talk to you almost as if you were twenty years old,” he said once. “He knows you can understand what he’s saying. If he were to talk to me, he’d always have to remember that I was only a rat that had lived in gutters and seen nothing else.”

      They were talking in their room, as they nearly always did after they went to bed and the street lamp shone in and lighted their bare little room. They often sat up clasping their knees, Marco on his poor bed, The Rat on his hard sofa, but neither of them conscious either of the poorness or hardness, because to each one the long unknown sense of companionship was such a satisfying thing. Neither of them had ever talked intimately to another boy, and now they were together day and night. They revealed their thoughts to each other; they told each other things it had never before occurred to either СКАЧАТЬ