What The Rat thought when Loristan began to speak to him, Marco
wondered. Suddenly he stood in an unknown world, and it was Loristan who
made it so because its poverty and shabbiness had no power to touch him.
He looked at the boy with calm and clear eyes, he asked him practical
questions gently, and it was plain that he understood many things
without asking questions at all. Marco thought that perhaps he had, at
some time, seen drunken men die, in his life in strange places. He
seemed to know the terribleness of the night through which The Rat had
passed. He made him sit down, and he ordered Lazarus to bring him some
hot coffee and simple food.
"Haven't had a bite since yesterday," The Rat said, still staring at
him. "How did you know I hadn't?"
"You have not had time," Loristan answered.
Afterward he made him lie down on the sofa.
"Look at my clothes," said The Rat.
"Lie down and sleep," Loristan replied, putting his hand on his shoulder
and gently forcing him toward the sofa. "You will sleep a long time. You
must tell me how to find the place where your father died, and I will
see that the proper authorities are notified."
"What are you doing it for?" The Rat asked, and then he added, "sir."
"Because I am a man and you are a boy. And this is a terrible thing,"
Loristan answered him.
He went away without saying more, and The Rat lay on the sofa staring at
the wall and thinking about it until he fell asleep. But, before this
happened, Marco had quietly left him alone. So, as Loristan had told him
he would, he slept deeply and long; in fact, he slept through all the
night.
* * * * *
When he awakened it was morning, and Lazarus was standing by the side of
the sofa looking down at him.
"You will want to make yourself clean," he said. "It must be done."
"Clean!" said The Rat, with his squeaky laugh. "I couldn't keep clean
when I had a room to live in, and now where am I to wash myself?" He sat
up and looked about him.
"Give me my crutches," he said. "I've got to go. They've let me sleep
here all night. They didn't turn me into the street. I don't know why
they didn't. Marco's father--he's the right sort. He looks like a
swell."
"The Master," said Lazarus, with a rigid manner, "the Master is a great
gentleman. He would turn no tired creature into the street. He and his
son are poor, but they are of those who give. He desires to see and talk
to you again. You are to have bread and coffee with him and the young
Master. But it is I who tell you that you cannot sit at table with them
until you are clean. Come with me," and he handed him his crutches.
His manner was authoritative, but it was the manner of a soldier; his
somewhat stiff and erect movements were those of a soldier, also, and
The Rat liked them because they made him feel as if he were in barracks.
He did not know what was going to happen, but he got up and followed him
on his crutches.
Lazarus took him to a closet under the stairs where a battered tin bath
was already full of hot water, which the old soldier himself had brought
in pails. There were soap and coarse, clean towels on a wooden chair,
and also there was a much worn but clean suit of clothes.
"Put these on when you have bathed," Lazarus ordered, pointing to them.
"They belong to the young Master and will be large for you, but they
will be better than your own." And then he went out of the closet and
shut the door.
It was a new experience for The Rat. So long as he remembered, he had
washed his face and hands--when he had washed them at all--at an iron
tap set in the wall of a back street or court in some slum. His father
and himself had long ago sunk into the world where to wash one's self is
not a part of every-day life. They had lived amid dirt and foulness, and
when his father had been in a maudlin state, he had sometimes cried and
talked of the long-past days when he had shaved every morning and put on
a clean shirt.
To stand even in the most battered of tin baths full of clean hot water
and to splash and scrub with a big piece of flannel and plenty of soap
was a marvelous thing. The Rat's tired body responded to the novelty
with a curious feeling of freshness and comfort.
"I dare say swells do this every day," he muttered. "I'd do it myself if
I was a swell. Soldiers have to keep themselves so clean they shine."
When, after making the most of his soap and water, he came out of the
closet under the stairs, he was as fresh as Marco himself; and, though
his clothes had been built for a more stalwart body, his recognition of
their cleanliness filled him with pleasure. He wondered if by any effort
he could keep himself clean when he went out into the world again and
had to sleep in any hole the police did not order him out of.
He wanted to see Marco again, but he wanted more to see the tall man
with the soft dark eyes and that queer look of being a swell in spite of
his shabby clothes and the dingy place he lived in. There was something
about him which made you keep on looking at him, and wanting to know
what he was thinking of, and why you felt as if you'd take orders from
him as you'd take orders from your general, if you were a soldier. He
looked, somehow, like a soldier, but as if he were something more--as
if people had taken orders from him all his life, and always would take
orders from him. And yet he had that quiet voice and those fine, easy
movements, and he was not a soldier at all, but only a poor man who
wrote things for papers which did not pay him well enough to give him
and his son a comfortable living. Through all the time of his seclusion
with the battered bath and the soap and water, The Rat thought of him,
and longed to have another look at him and hear him speak again. He did
not see any reason why he should have let him sleep on his sofa or why
he should give him a breakfast before he turned him out to face the
world. It was first-rate of him to do it. The Rat felt that when he was
turned out, after he had had the coffee, he should want to hang about
the neighborhood just on the chance of seeing him pass by sometimes. He
did not know what he was going to do. The parish officials would by this
time have taken his dead father, and he would not see him again. He did
not want to see him again. He had never seemed like a father. They had
never cared anything for each other. He had only been a wretched outcast
whose best hours had been when he had drunk too much to be violent and
brutal. Perhaps, The Rat thought, he would be driven to going about on
his platform on the pavements and begging, as his father had tried to
force him to do. Could he sell newspapers? What could a crippled lad do
unless he begged or sold papers?
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 realized 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 any one 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 honor.
"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 every-day 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, every one 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.