The Lost Prince Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 beenhidden 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 harbouring the prince, the king had already been killed, and an even worse man had taken possession of his throne, and ruled Samavia with a bloodstained, ironhand. 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 fromthe 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 extraordinary