The Complete Works of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Frances Hodgson Burnett

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      “She said she meant to take me home with her and would pretend I was her son who had come here without permission,” he answered. “She believes I know something I do not.” He made a hesitating but grateful bow. “The third act, sir—I must not keep you. Thank you! Thank you!”

      The Chancellor moved toward the entrance door of the balcony seats, but he did it with his hand on Marco’s shoulder.

      “See that he gets home safely,” he said to the younger of the two officers. “Send a messenger with him. He’s young to be attacked by creatures of that kind.”

      Polite young officers naturally obey the commands of Chancellors and such dignitaries. This one found without trouble a young private who marched with Marco through the deserted streets to his lodgings. He was a stolid young Bavarian peasant and seemed to have no curiosity or even any interest in the reason for the command given him. He was in fact thinking of his sweetheart who lived near Konigsee and who had skated with him on the frozen lake last winter. He scarcely gave a glance to the schoolboy he was to escort, he neither knew nor wondered why.

      The Rat had fallen asleep over his papers and lay with his head on his folded arms on the table. But he was awakened by Marco’s coming into the room and sat up blinking his eyes in the effort to get them open.

      “Did you see him? Did you get near enough?” he drowsed.

      “Yes,” Marco answered. “I got near enough.”

      The Rat sat upright suddenly.

      “It’s not been easy,” he exclaimed. “I’m sure something happened—something went wrong.”

      “Something nearly went wrong—VERY nearly,” answered Marco. But as he spoke he took the sketch of the Chancellor out of the slit in his sleeve and tore it and burned it with a match. “But I did get near enough. And that’s TWO.”

      They talked long, before they went to sleep that night. The Rat grew pale as he listened to the story of the woman in violet.

      “I ought to have gone with you!” he said. “I see now. An aide-de-camp must always be in attendance. It would have been harder for her to manage two than one. I must always be near to watch, even if I am not close by you. If you had not come back—if you had not come back!” He struck his clenched hands together fiercely. “What should I have done!”

      When Marco turned toward him from the table near which he was standing, he looked like his father.

      “You would have gone on with the Game just as far as you could,” he said. “You could not leave it. You remember the places, and the faces, and the Sign. There is some money; and when it was all gone, you could have begged, as we used to pretend we should. We have not had to do it yet; and it was best to save it for country places and villages. But you could have done it if you were obliged to. The Game would have to go on.”

      The Rat caught at his thin chest as if he had been struck breathless.

      “Without you?” he gasped. “Without you?”

      “Yes,” said Marco. “And we must think of it, and plan in case anything like that should happen.”

      He stopped himself quite suddenly, and sat down, looking straight before him, as if at some far away thing he saw.

      “Nothing will happen,” he said. “Nothing can.”

      “What are you thinking of?” The Rat gulped, because his breath had not quite come back. “Why will nothing happen?”

      “Because—” the boy spoke in an almost matter-of-fact tone—in quite an unexalted tone at all events, “you see I can always make a strong call, as I did tonight.”

      “Did you shout?” The Rat asked. “I didn’t know you shouted.”

      “I didn’t. I said nothing aloud. But I—the myself that is in me,” Marco touched himself on the breast, “called out, ‘Help! Help!’ with all its strength. And help came.”

      The Rat regarded him dubiously.

      “What did it call to?” he asked.

      “To the Power—to the Strength-place—to the Thought that does things. The Buddhist hermit, who told my father about it, called it ‘The Thought that thought the World.’”

      A reluctant suspicion betrayed itself in The Rat’s eyes.

      “Do you mean you prayed?” he inquired, with a slight touch of disfavor.

      Marco’s eyes remained fixed upon him in vague thoughtfulness for a moment or so of pause.

      “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Perhaps it’s the same thing—when you need something so much that you cry out loud for it. But it’s not words, it’s a strong thing without a name. I called like that when I was shut in the wine-cellar. I remembered some of the things the old Buddhist told my father.”

      The Rat moved restlessly.

      “The help came that time,” he admitted. “How did it come tonight?”

      “In that thought which flashed into my mind almost the next second. It came like lightning. All at once I knew if I ran to the Chancellor and said the woman was a spy, it would startle him into listening to me; and that then I could give him the Sign; and that when I gave him the Sign, he would know I was speaking the truth and would protect me.”

      “It was a splendid thought!” The Rat said. “And it was quick. But it was you who thought of it.”

      “All thinking is part of the Big Thought,” said Marco slowly. “It KNOWS—It KNOWS. And the outside part of us somehow broke the chain that linked us to It. And we are always trying to mend the chain, without knowing it. That is what our thinking is—trying to mend the chain. But we shall find out how to do it sometime. The old Buddhist told my father so—just as the sun was rising from behind a high peak of the Himalayas.” Then he added hastily, “I am only telling you what my father told me, and he only told me what the old hermit told him.”

      “Does your father believe what he told him?” The Rat’s bewilderment had become an eager and restless thing.

      “Yes, he believes it. He always thought something like it, himself. That is why he is so calm and knows so well how to wait.”

      “Is THAT it!” breathed The Rat. “Is that why? Has—has he mended the chain?” And there was awe in his voice, because of this one man to whom he felt any achievement was possible.

      “I believe he has,” said Marco. “Don’t you think so yourself?”

      “He has done something,” The Rat said.

      He seemed to be thinking things over before he spoke again—and then even more slowly than Marco.

      “If he could mend the chain,” he said almost in a whisper, “he could find out where the descendant of the Lost Prince is. He would know what to do for Samavia!”

      He ended the words with a start, and his whole СКАЧАТЬ